Some statements on writing by Claude Royet-Journoud:

C.R-J.: Each of my books is composed of a number of sequences, five to ten pages in length. Each sequence starts out as four to five hundred pages of prose. That’s why it takes me about six years to produce a book! All of this is contained in large notebooks. I write prose texts on the right-hand pages from which I later extract certain elements. These are noted on the left-hand pages. The object of this effort is enter into the mental space proper to the act of writing. This stage can last a long time, until it “gels”. When the text finally takes form, it is distributed over several pages. It is essential to the narrative that the text circulates across facing pages as well as recto-verso; even the volume of the book itself is important. If you will, I always write from within the book, from the very start. Later, when I already have a few pages of text, a sketch, I begin to work on the language, neutralising the text. How? By tracking down and suppressing metaphor, assonance, alliteration - to see what narrative emerges -what appears, embodying this language within a language.

M.B. : A language which is flat, flattened . . .

C.R-J. : Of course. Moreover, it’s this “platitude” which seems to me to incite violence, which is certainly problematic and for which I am criticised unwittingly. The problem resides in literalness (not in metaphor) , the need to to measure language by its “minimal” units of meaning. For me, Eluard’s verse “The earth is blue like an orange” can be exhausted, it annihilates itself in an excess of meaning. Whereas Marcelin Pleynet’s “the far wall is a whitewashed wall” is and remains, by its very exactness, and evidently within its context, paradoxically indeterminate as to meaning and so will always “vehiculate” narrative. This might be experienced painfully.

(from http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/)

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C.R-J.: To write I need a very long period of work. There are people “inhabited” by language, that’s not the case with me. There’s never anything. I pass my time with this nothing and I’m stubborn and I insist on this nothing and so at first there is this work which is very bodily, which consists in writing a great quantity of prose without literary value. It’s only a way to cleanse myself, to create a vacuum, so that by the end of a certain number of hours per day, per week, per month of a constant effort, you begin to feel it happening, that the world is becoming legible. Because we pass the greater part of our time blind. It is not easy to attain this kind of legibility where suddenly a table is saying something, or a book, or a line...

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C.R-J.: Yes, there’s a time to rest, a time to work, etc—it’s very Biblical—but I am very jealous of my periods of silence, jealous in the sense that I don’t want to give them up. I attach a lot to those months that go by without writing, so much so that I have trouble freeing myself from them. I sense that they’re necessary, necessary to a shift in words, or to the displacement of vocabulary. These periods when I don’t write are indispensable to the book. I need several years for each book. It’s a rhythm I like. It integrates phases of intense work and at the same time periods of reserve, of absence from oneself.

(from http://www.durationpress.com/)