By the time he was twenty-five, Joël Dicker had already written six novels that no one had published, published a novel that no one had read, and was writing the novel that everyone would read and that would transform him from unknown to bestselling author: The truth about the Harry Quebert case. But he, as Monsieur de La Palice said, didn’t know this thing about success yet. And one question tortured him: will I ever be a writer? The doubts increased when he had a friend read the approximately six hundred pages of Quebert’s manuscript: «He took that swag – says Dicker between one presentation and another of his new bestseller – he read the whole story and said to me: “Well , it’s not bad, but it’s too damn long: if you don’t divide it into chapters, readers will die because they need to breathe. And you with them.” I had written six hundred pages without interruption. I understood that I had to do something.” Dicker understood what to do and made a bizarre decision, which we will talk about shortly, but not before saying that in the issue of Tuttolibri on newsstands tomorrow with The print you will find a long interview with the Swiss writer, all centered on writing, in particular his latest novel, A wild animal, published by La nave di Teseo, obviously at the top of the sales charts. But let’s go back to fourteen years ago. The twenty-five-year-old Dicker still didn’t know what to do with himself and that infinite and very heavy manuscript of 600 uninterrupted pages. «One of the things I tried to understand then was what a chapter should be. Why does a portion of history begin in one way and end, interrupting itself, in another? I needed to put something to break the narrative and that something had to be time, rhythm. I’m a drummer, I know how much rhythm is needed in a song. One two three! And the piece begins, giving the listener an indication of the rhythm to come. And so my chapters: they should have given readers a sense of the rhythm of the narrative.”
But it’s not enough. Dicker writes that plot that talks about the writing of a book and the characters that move around the story of that book, inside a book. So he thinks it might be a good idea, at twenty-five years old, to insert interludes between the chapters that dictate his rules for writing a novel. That is, a book, inside a book, inside a book. «Those mini-chapters – between the chapters – on writing say a lot about the way I write. I was wondering what I was going to do with my life. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but there isn’t a school to become a writer, it isn’t taught at university. So I decided to write down my ideas on writing by placing them in the middle of the book and constructing them so that they seemed like a conversation between the two protagonists, but in reality they could also be taken on their own and published separately. I decided to do it because I thought so much Harry Quebert would never have been published.” But then the brilliant publisher Bernard de Fallois understands how much the manuscript that passes through his hands is worth and decides to publish The truth about the Harry Quebert case. So what? “And so I thought a lot about whether I should throw away those chapters on writing. Because it might seem very arrogant, very presumptuous at twenty-five years old to intersperse the chapters of my novel with a sort of treatise on writing.” Fortunately Dicker doesn’t throw them away, the book sells millions of copies all over the world and the strength of this very young writer who puts down his manifesto, his declaration of literary intent, is immediately clear. All subsequent novels are bestsellers worldwide: The Baltimore book, The disappearance of Stephanie Mailer, The enigma of room 622, The Alaska Sanders case and also the first written, The last days of our fathers, which no one had noticed when it was first published and which became a new success. Over fifteen million copies sold worldwide, not bad for a boy who hasn’t turned forty yet. Now this new one A wild animalwhich in Italy alone has already exceeded one hundred thousand copies and which Dicker will be presenting at the Turin Book Fair on May 11th.
Among the rules that have made Dicker’s books successful are the ease of writing, the apparent lightness, a Calvinian lightness: «Lightness is a point of arrival. Writing is not easy at all, but in the end it’s a lot of fun. And fun makes all the effort, pain and difficulty of writing justifiable. I am also convinced that if reading is easy for the reader, then you have done a good job as a writer. It is very easy to write complicated, sophisticated sentences, with difficult terms, very constructed, but a lot of work goes into lightness and simplicity. It’s not easy to make difficult things seem simple.”
What is the moment when you feel like you move from the difficulty of writing to the fun of writing? «When I start writing I’m never sure of the characters, the story, the plot, where I’m going to end up. There’s a lot of stuff to sort through and it’s not the time for fun. But you know that if you work hard, the fun will come. At a certain point the knots untie, the characters fit together well, the plots fall into place and you recognize in that moment what all the work done was for. It is in that moment that I feel the full happiness of being a writer.”
