Tom Perrotta on Becoming a Writer | Big Think

Tom Perrotta on Becoming a Writer

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Tom Perrotta recounts a childhood immersed in books.

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Thomas R. Perrotta:

Thomas R. Perrotta is an American novelist and screenwriter best known for his novels Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), both of which were made into critically acclaimed, Golden Globe-nominated films. Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film version of Little Children with Todd Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Perrotta: A lot of it was just, you know, the transcendental experience that I had reading, you know. I remember reading “The Lord of the Rings” in about 8th grade and just finding that and experience just a level of engagement and intensity in that experience that, you know, the rest of my life didn’t really match up to that. But I always also had that impulse, if I liked something or was excited by something, I wanted to do it. You know, I never was that comfortable in the role of fan, and I knew a lot of people who were, you know, like there are people I knew who just were fanatical baseball fans, and it really enriched their lives to kind of go to a lot of games, know more about statistics than everybody else, whereas if I, you know, if I liked baseball, I wanted to play baseball. And certainly that happened to me with rock and roll, when I was about 12, 13, you know, I started listening to Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith and David Bowie and, you know, really, to me, that was a center of my high school experience was just music and trying to make music, which is something that I had very little talent for, though I knew a lot of talented musicians. I could play a little bit, but not well. At the same time, I was reading really intensely and starting to think about writing, and when I picked up a pen and tried to write a story, I had a feeling that was completely different from the feeling I had holding a guitar and feeling like, you know, this is not my native language. You know, I don’t know how to do this. If somebody showed me I could kind of, you know, I could make my fingers do what they told me to do but I couldn’t intuitively feel the music. But when I started to write stories I immediately felt I know how to do this. I know where you’d go now. I knew when to start. I knew when to stop. You know, it came relatively easily, and I would say that that feeling of I know how to do this, that kind of… It’s the first thing that I really loved in life that I felt like I could do at the level I wanted to do, and I did discover that in high school. So by the time I got to college I was very clear with everyone. I knew that… “Well, what do you want to do?” “I want to be a writer.” So, I guess that is relatively early, but I’d be surprised if a lot of other writers didn’t say the same thing.

Question: Is a literary childhood an essential to become a writer?

Perrotta: I read as a kid, and my mother certainly encouraged it but they weren’t educated people. They were working class people. So, you know, and I often meet writers who have similar stories, you know. I remember in high school going to the librarian and asking for “The Magic Mountain.” I discovered Thomas Mann and the librarian kept telling me that I must be mistaken, that I didn’t want to read “The Magic Mountain” because, you know, nobody in this high school probably ever had taken “The Magic Mountain” out of the library. But I said, no, no, I’ve been reading Thomas Mann. I read “Death In Venice.” I read, you know, “Mario and the Magician,” the seven short novels. I thought they were great and I want to read “The Magic Mountain,” and I… So, I mean, it seems funny now, but I certainly didn’t have a particularly literally childhood. What I had, I had some very good English teachers in a sort of, you know, perfectly average public high school in New Jersey, but once they knew that I liked to read, they certainly had suggestion, you know. I had a teacher probably in 11th grade who said, “Oh, you’ve got to read Raymond Chandler,” and then, you know, I went on a binge of reading hard-boiled detective fiction back then. I still feel the influence that that had on my writing, you know. I think I found Chandler so stunningly good and I found that writing so bold and funny and colorful, and I still think it was a kind of ideal for a [pro style] and,

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