Read This Tough Love Interview With Harper Lee About The Secret To Good Writing

Overnight Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird and the controversial Go Set A Watchman, passed away at her home in Alabama at 89-years-old.

Tributes to the Pulitzer Prize winner have been dominating social media for the past few hours, including a Facebook post by President Barack Obama praising Lee for “changing America for the better”.

Harper Lee notoriously shied away from the press after the 1960s (she even declined to be interviewed by Oprah, one of the few mortals to successfully resist the omnipresent O) but the few times she was interviewed, were absolutely brilliant.

Last night NPR dug up an interview Lee did with New York radio station WQXR in 1964, in which she discusses the film adaptation of Mockingbird (she says of Gregory Peck “the minute I saw him I knew everything was going to be all right because he was Atticus”) and why stories set in small towns are so captivating. But the best part of the conversation is when Lee lays down some straight talk about what she perceived as the “lack of craftsmanship” in American writing at the time.

You should read the whole interview, but here are some choice excerpts:

It comes right down to this-the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea. It takes time and patience and effort to turn out a work of art, and few people seem willing to go all the way…

I see a great deal of sloppiness and I deplore it. I suppose the reason I’m so down on it is because I see tendencies in myself to be sloppy, to be satisfied with something that’s not quite good enough. I think writers today are too easily pleased with their work. This is sad. 

Lee then goes on to praise the writing of her childhood pal Truman Capote (who was the inspiration for Dil in Mockingbird and with whom Lee worked with behind the scenes for In Cold Blood) as the best writer in America.

But hey, we can’t all be Truman Capote. Harper Lee knew that! That’s why she also had some advice for young writers just starting out: don’t go to university to study writing because it’s a waste of time, and only write in order to exorcise your “divine discontent” and not to please others.

“Hope for the best and expect nothing. Then you won’t be disappointed,” she said. “You must come to terms with yourself about your writing. You must not write ‘for’ something; you must not write with definite hopes of reward… People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don’t know what they’re doing. They’re in the category of those who write; they are not writers.”

Well, that’s that then. R.I.P Harper Lee. We will miss your straight talk.