Robert Harris
The moment I heard how McAra died I should have walked away. I can see that
now. I should have said, “Rick, I’m sorry, this isn’t for me, I don’t like
the sound of it,” finished my drink and left. But he was such a good
storyteller, Rick – I often thought he should have been the writer and I the
literary agent – that once he’d started talking there was never any question
I wouldn’t listen, and by the time he had finished, I was hooked.
–– The Ghost by Robert Harris Hutchinson, £18.99
Writing is a vocation. I would do it even if I weren’t paid to do it: the
impulse is built into the fabric of who I am. The longer I go on the more
aware I am that most writing is done in the subconscious, and the trick is
to learn how to harness that. I write much better in the morning so I try
and discipline myself to stop after four or five hours and then to do
something completely different. Hopefully, the next morning any problems
have been solved and the flow resumes.
It’s very different from journalism but there’s one similarity: there’s no
justice in it, and long weeks of preparation and careful note-taking is no
substitute for having a couple of good ideas.
I like to write my novels with an almost frighteningly tight deadline because
I believe that a deadline forces your imagination into a higher state: you
see things quicker; there’s a kind of adrenalin, I think, that forces you to
be much sharper; you see the world much more clearly if you’re in a panic.
In the end, a large part of the business of writing a novel is simply
extracting the words from your head. It’s a physical labour that stretches
over four or five months and with a deadline you simply have to do it.
Journalism requires you to take a subject head-on, whereas novel writing is
essentially about concealing, and being more elusive.
The Ghost was an idea I had more than ten years ago and has been fermenting in
my mind ever since. It immediately suggested a triangle of characters: the
ghost, a former world leader, and the former leader’s wife. It certainly
wasn’t the case that I looked at Blair and thought: how can I write a novel
about him? I drew on my own experiences and brought them to bear on an idea
I’d had long ago.
Enigma was my hardest time as a writer. I was blocked for the best part of a
year. It was my second novel and I didn’t really know what I was doing: the
subject matter was intractable and I didn’t have technique to fall back on.
Eventually I realised I’d written the opening nine months earlier and I went
back to that and managed to make it work. Never throw anything away, is my
advice, and it’s usually a good idea to know the ending of your book before
you start: you wouldn’t embark on telling a joke without knowing the
punch-line, would you? But precisely how you get from the opening to that
ending is best left hazy: that way it becomes enjoyable for you each day to
get up and discover what’s going to happen.
Douglas Coupland
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age – regardless
of how they look on the outside – pretty much constantly dreams of being
able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are any
more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third,
Ann-Margret, the cast members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle
astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.
–– The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland Bloomsbury, £10.99
Oh boy. My relationship with writing is so tangled up with visual art it’s
hard to extricate each from the other. I began writing by approaching words
as something you see on a page, as opposed to something that goes to the
language part of your brain: some cutting out of pop art and text art. Then
came a moment of, oh, you can string them together and have your cake and
eat it too.
I can’t imagine not doing it: probably the only disciplined aspect of my life.
I do it every day. I once read an interview with Jodie Foster and she said
that the only time she ever displays emotion is when the aperture of the
camera is open and she’s being filmed. I thought that makes pretty good
sense. I do – with novels – create this system of doors and windows where I
can open myself up at least briefly once or twice a day and a book is a form
of protracted trance. Even if you’re not doing it, maybe 20, 25 per cent of
your brain is churning away on it.
It’s a way of creating a certain sensation in my brain that I can’t seem to
find anywhere else. It’s very hard to finish a book, not skills-wise but
emotionally. You do go through a postpartum depression for a week or two.
The trance is over, it’s like the hypnotist stabs a finger and suddenly
you’re staring out at the real world again and it’s pretty scary.
I suppose if there was a drug that gave you the same feeling, I’d get addicted
to it. At the same time there is this mystic dimension thatI discovered when
I was writing Generation X. I had this old Volkswagen and I was living in
the desert. I was driving around because there’s nothing else to do and I’d
be thinking about a situation and it would come at me and come at me and it
was like a religious experience, not quite out of body but it was something
distinct, special and rare and I could only ever get there through writing.
Everyone in my personal life thinks that certain characters are based on them
and while that may be partially true it may be just a gesture or a tick. You
take that and you have characters and at the end they’ve morphed into other
people. Without writing you never really discover access to the fluidity of
existence, not just emotional states but personalities in and out of each
other. Once you get a book up and running you’re sitting there, the
characters are running the show, you’re being dictated to. Oh God, that’s so
satisfying. Nothing else puts me in that sacred spot.
Pat Barker
They’d been drawing for over half an hour. There was no sound except for the
slurring of pencils on Michelet paper or the barely perceptible squeak of
charcoal. At the centre of the circle of students, close to the dais, a
stove cast a barred red light on to the floor. The smell of burning coke
mingled with other smells: sweat, hot cloth, cigar and tobacco smoke. Now
and again you could hear the soft pop of lips inhaling and another plume of
blue smoke would rise to join the pall that hung over the whole room.
–– Life Class by Pat Barker Hamish Hamilton, £16.99
In an odd kind of a way you write for the characters. The idea of an audience
certainly doesn’t come into it. Sometimes I will be thinking about something
in quite abstract terms but as soon as I start trying to write I often find
it’s splitting into fiction and people are starting to talk and discuss the
issue rather than expressing directly what I feel about it.
I wish there was a rational way of writing novels but I’m really not sure
there is. Even if I start off with a synopsis it’s rapidly abandoned as the
characters start to develop. I do think characters take over and it’s
desirable that they should. You see it in writers like Wilkie Collins who
routinely created heroines whom he was frightened of. He creates them but he
can’t stand them, that is the fascinating relationship between the writer
and the character. You create the characters out of parts of yourself that
perhaps you’re not easy with. And the empathy gives you insights which might
be at variance with what you would say of your political or social opinion.
For me the final draft is like firing the pot in the kiln, and although that’s
difficult and exhausting and I don’t really think about anything else, that
is the most fun. The first draft can be enormous fun when it’s flowing along
and you’re getting to know the people and you suddenly see something that
you haven’t seen before, but it can also be like a dog turning round and
round in its basket, unable to settle down. It can become very circular at
times.
I think that a lot of things that are supposed to be not unconscious, like the
shape of a book, actually are in the unconscious mind. When I’m working very
hard I sometimes have this extraordinary, very tiresome experience of
dreaming. In the dream I am typing the dream and it is to me a signal that I
ought to lay off for a few days because you wake up absolutely exhausted. I
had a dream last night that was full of the most marvellous things and I
remembered thinking in the dream, I’ve got to grab a notebook and write all
this down. Of course, when I woke up all I could remember was that it had
something to do with fish.
Esther Freud
“I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned my friend Caroline,” Lambert said as a
thick white plate of kedgeree arrived at the table and was set down on the
linen cloth in front of Lara, “but I had a letter this morning, and...” He
paused to acknowledge the arrival of his chops. “It seems she’s not at all
well.”
–– Love Falls by Esther Freud Bloomsbury, £12.99
When I’m writing, I feel so different at the end of a day, it’s like I’ve got
something out of my system. It’s how I imagine people feel who meditate. I
just feel I’ve done what I was meant to do. I feel calm and if I don’t write
I feel very frustrated. It’s like this wonderful puzzle that you set
yourself that you just can’t wait to get back to.
When I finish a book I often feel quite bereft and I wonder how people can
bear to live life just on one level because I’m so used to having this other
story going on in my head. Then after a bit it’s wonderful, and I feel much
more present and I think, how could I bear to live it on two levels? How
complicated and exhausting. But then after a bit I can’t bear one level any
more, I go back. It doesn’t feel like an escape, it feels like something
added.
It never occurs to me to have the thoughts I’m writing about in a
conversation, because I don’t think they’re particularly interesting to
anyone else. By writing them I can craft them into some kind of form.
Sometimes when I’m writing a book I find myself talking a lot about a
particular subject, but then I try and pretend that that’s nothing to do
with what I’m writing. I want that to be secret.
I think I’m just trying to get to the heart of how people feel about things.
Very rarely are they things I’m going through at the time though I’ve drawn
on so many of the relationships I’ve had with members of my family. To begin
with I drew very heavily on what it’s like to be a sister, and then the
absent relationship I had with my father, the mysterious not knowing and
then the knowing him.
I’m very bored by the idea of working it all out first so I just go headlong
into the atmosphere and then work it out as I go along. Things surprise me
and you want the suspense, you want to feel like the reader as well as the
writer finding out what’s happening. I always think of the words coming out
of my fingers. The story is hard work, the plot is difficult, but the words:
sometimes I almost take no credit for them, they’re just flying out. I can
hardly feel that I’ve written it myself. Sometimes. Not always.
Iain Banks
His name is Fielding Wopuld. Of those Wopulds, the games family, the people
with their name plastered all over the board of Empire! (still the UK’s
bestselling board game, by some margin). They’re behind a heap of other
stuff, too, of course, but that’s the famous one, the one people tend to
have heard of, whether it’s the original snail-play version featuring
cardboard, paper and plastic or its slick, attractively rendered and
award-winning electronic successor, currently riding high in the computer games charts.
–– The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks, Little
Brown, £17.99
I get my ideas from the same places as everyone else, from the interaction of
reality, life as you live it, and imagination. For writers, especially if
you’re working on a linear form like the novel, it’s a definite advantage to
be able to spot large scale patterns around you. That requires a degree of
being an outsider, you have to stand back from society and from families or
whatever it is you want to write about to be able to see those patterns.
I spend three, six, sometimes nine months working on notes and a plan so that
when I sit down to write it I know where I’m going. Often you imagine detail
beyond the notes, you’ve talked your way through scenes and if it’s a
dialogue, that’s in your head. Part of it’s created in real time but most of
it, the strategic structure, is there before I sit down to type it.
The most pure intellectual joy is looking at a page of ideas and seeing a link
– it’s like breaking through to a new level, you’ve suddenly added a
complexity that makes it much more than the sum of its parts. I have to
confess to a degree of trepidation to admit to being self-serving, but
sometimes I’m writing a dialogue scene and it’s meant to be funny and I make
myself laugh at an unexpected turn. It may just show extreme egocentricity
but that’s a very good feeling.
When you get something just right it’s coming out of all the different systems
inside your head working together. What you want is to be totally consumed
in what you’re doing, your whole mind is working to the same end, this is
the rational pattern spotting and pattern determining bits that are working
in harmony with the bits that are alive to emotional nuances, then you
probably are going to be able to create something that’s going to work on
all levels.
It’s not as pleasurable as it used to be. It took several novels for it to
dawn on me that it wasn’t a lark any more, it was my profession and there
were people out there, sales reps and my publisher, waiting for the next
book. In your own small way as a writer you have to make their lives viable.
Particularly, your fans are waiting, there’s that expectation. But I feel
very privileged to be able to do what I love doing and get paid for it. You
can’t ask for much more.
Rose Heiney
Everything takes ten years longer when you’re fat. Relationships must take
their time to run the sordid gauntlet of bloat; confidence must jump, at
length, through hoops of blubber and gunge. First impressions – for the
physically becoming, a fast-track to acceptance – are your worst enemy.
–– The Days of Judy B will be published early next year by
Short Books
It’s weird, when I’m not writing I get very miserable and think, what’s the
point of me, now? Obviously when I am writing I whinge about it incessantly.
Being on my own was the worst thing. So alone. Feeling like a weird hermit
person and worrying I’m too far gone ever to go back into society, an
unwashed horrible beast. I did go completely bonkers.
This was my first novel; I didn’t do any research. The words usually stemmed
from some small turn of phrase that I thought was amusing and then I’d write
a chapter and hope for the best. Very, very free form. I saw a vague shape
and point at which the story had to change direction with a suicide attempt
but I didn’t know what the story was up to that point, or what it was going
to be afterwards. It was ridiculous. Everyone was saying you have to plan
your novel and I thumped the table and said, why, why?
I started writing it immediately before my brother’s death and it was a very
different kind of novel from the one I finished. Obviously if you are
writing a novel in the immediate aftermath of your wedding it’s going to be
infused with happiness, and in the aftermath of a death it’s going to be
infused with the opposite. Because the beginning of each chapter is a parody
of chick-lit style I got stuck into the most negative aspects of being a
woman and being a person because I think I was trying to figure them out for
myself.
All of my motivations for writing it were pretty grumpy. I hate certain kinds
of newspaper columns, young, first person, female, lifestyle, not really
writing about anything – they upset and depress me. In the end I wrote it
because if you don’t finish this novel you have failed. Also the knowledge
of how brilliant it would be when I handed it in because I could have myself
back and stop having to wallow in everything that was bleak. It’s not quite
solipcism because it’s not your own navel you are gazing at, though of
course it is really, it’s just having to think yourself down and deep into
something that’s removed from the world around you. It’s scary to see the
dreadful reserve of yourself that you can tap into when you’re spending so
much time on your own, which actually is what the book’s about. I’m very
happy now it’s done.
Judith Kerr
I am absolutely miserable if I’m not working. I hate it. It’s having something
that’s in your head all the time that you can think about if you are lying
in bed at night. It works the same for drawing. You can rearrange a picture
in your head and the writing of course, it’s somewhere to go to. You’re
growing something.
I have to start with something solid. I think there are two kinds of ideas and
my husband and I were quite different in that way. When I was very little
there was a very nice lady who made my clothes. I was terribly impressed
with this because the way I thought she did it was that she took cotton
reels and somehow spun the thread into some cloth and then she cut it up and
stitched it together and made a dress. Then I discovered that she bought
fabric. I think I’m a buyer of fabrics, my novels were based on things that
happened, you take those things and cut them up and stitch them together and
embroider them and you make a story. Whereas my husband, Nigel Kneale who
wrote Quatermass, he was a cotton-reel man, he would take a thread of an
idea and from that he would spin all these characters and situations and he
would make this story from nothing.
It’s huge pleasure when it goes well. It’s awful when you think how can I ever
have thought I had any talent, when you’ve spent all day trying to make
something work and it just doesn’t come right. It’s satisfying in the end,
it’s much better than not doing it, and when it’s not there you miss it. I
haven’t done any work for quite a long time. My husband died and I had awful
papers to cope with and I was getting really depressed, apart from missing
him, and then a week or two ago I thought of a couple of things I’d been
vaguely turning over in my mind and I feel a different person because I’m
going to be able to do something and think about these things.
It’s somewhere else you can go from your life. To have some work that you
love, that’s really the thing, that you can think about even when you’re not
doing it. I suppose you can control it whereas you can’t control your life.
Twinkles, Arthur and Puss by Judith Kerr, HarperCollins, £12.99
I agree with Robert Harris that it is ‘usually a good idea to know the ending of your book before you start. But precisely how you get from the opening to that ending is best left hazy: that way it becomes enjoyable for you each day to get up and discover what’s going to happen.’
When writing my psychological, suspense novel, 'The De Clerambault Code', I too kept to no formal, detailed plot apart from knowing in advance the conclusion. On the contrary, each chapter developed sequentially in my imagination rather like moving from one room to the next in my mind.
Characterisation, theme, setting and dialogue all seemed to flow naturally from this process and fall into place rather like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. That novel was completed (and published) this Summer, I am glad to say, relatively painlessly and my next, ‘Soul Stealer’, hopefully by the same process next Spring!
Nora Johnson, London, UK