I would like to be as honest as I can about how I start a book, but the more honest I am, the more it will seem that I’m not really telling you anything. I’ve written seven novels and am writing another now. How they begin really is a mystery to me. Usually, when I’m asked, what I would say, which is half true, is that it’s always something small. A novel is a very big undertaking, but I don’t have a big idea. Even the phrase ‘having an idea for a novel’ is a rather bogus one for me. It grows somehow mysteriously from some small beginning, which even I can’t necessarily remember.
What happens is that you are glad that it’s beginning, even if it proves to be the wrong thing. You are so glad that it’s started that you don’t really care how it began or how it will continue. I will get to a point where I feel inside it is brewing. Then you feel two things in conflict: you just want to get on and write, but you can’t afford to do that because you must have some sort of shape. So you look for the framework so you can continue to write, while another part of you knows that you are only going to discover some things by the writing anyway. You’re in a weird double bind where neither thing guarantees the other. It’s a crazy situation, but I accept the illogicality of it. I’m sure there are many writers who just sense there’s a novel there, and make a plan and then write it, but I can’t do that.
My biggest fear all the time is to lose the real inspiration. If you sit and think carefully and systematically about something, your fear is that such thinking will cancel out the real emotion. I’m guided very strongly by instinct, intuition and feeling, which don’t fit into rational schemes. I’ve found this to be the case the more I have written. On the other hand, I don’t think you can separate form and content, and both things are as important as each other to me, and together they make the thing itself. I do care about shape and form and have that real artistic ambition and instinct that I want to make something well-shaped. But I also care about content very much. Novels don’t happen to me very often, I don’t write them easily or quickly, and that’s really because strong content doesn’t come along very often. So it matters that if I’m going to write something which may take me years, I’ve found the strong content that will propel it.
My working day is very early. I can be at work as early as five thirty in the morning. That’s how it’s been for a long time. I need, I relish, I’ve got into the habit of this early part of the day, when I have the feeling that the rest of the world is asleep, but I am alert and am not going to be interrupted. If you get going in those early hours you are launched and safe. The theory is that I work up till midday, and will have done a real day’s work, and the rest of the day is open. It seldom goes according to this plan, but that’s the idea and the early morning thing is peculiarly important. It’s almost like getting up early to go hunting: the feeling that it will happen in these special hours. Often it doesn’t, but that’s in the nature of writing. Of course if you have a late night, you are tired, but at best there’s a real excitement. I make myself a pot of coffee and take it up to the room where I work. It’s dark outside, everything is quiet and I feel a nice, intense, concentrated feeling and I get on—I don’t think I could do that if I started work at nine or ten in the morning.
I do a hell of a lot of rewriting, both as I write and at later stages, so a book tends to take about three years or longer—more, if you count it from when you have the first notion to when you have the final manuscript. And sometimes I don’t just rewrite: I reject completely and start again. My finished books are not in straight chronological sequence—anyone reading any of my novels would see straight away that I move around in time—but I do the moving around even as I write. I make some decisions afterwards about rearranging the order here or there, but I would more or less write it in the order in which the reader reads it, embracing all the leaps in time as I go along. For example, Last Orders jumps around not just in time but from one character’s narrative to another’s, and conceivably someone could take it all apart and wonder if I might have had a completely different structure at first where I followed one character all the way through. But no, I somehow knew when it should be Ray or Vince, and when it should be in the present or the past. I had an intuition about it and that’s very much how I write.
This condition of shifting time is a natural habitat for me and one I think we all exist in, because it’s the habitat of memory. Memory is not sequential. We’re all formed by our past, and even as we walk about in the present we are the creatures of time. I’ve almost always written in the first person, and one thing that gives you is immediate access to a character’s memory as it exercises itself. That would be a much more laborious thing to do in the third person, where you would constantly have to flag it, saying something like, ‘As X walked along the street he was remembering that time …’, which is all rather tedious and stagey, whereas I can just go directly to it.
Men tend to predominate in my books, and in one way you could say that’s not so surprising, since I am a man—I would feel comfortable writing from a man’s point of view. On the other hand, I don’t really see it as such a big divide. The big challenge in writing is to write a character, to get from yourself to this other being, and whether they’re male or female is, in a way, secondary. I’m writing something now which could work out as about fifty per cent male and fifty per cent female. I’ve found that the way I do it is not to think male or female. When they are delivering their inner thoughts, are they actually so different? I think it would be a great mistake for a male writer writing a female character, or the other way round, to be constantly tapping themselves on the shoulder and saying, ‘Remember you are writing a woman here. Now what would a woman think?’ That would be artificial and needlessly self-conscious.
In a sense, there’s no point in writing a novel unless you are communicating and someone is going to read it, but I don’t think about that at the time. I just have immense faith and trust that a reader will be there. But the reader isn’t this person who’s inspecting what I do as I write and saying, ‘No, you should do it a different way or it won’t satisfy me.’ I just go by intuition, and I don’t think I’m very different from the reader. I happen to be the writer and I happen to have some talent, but I am just another human being.
When I’ve talked about writing in the past I’ve stressed the fact that my own life, my biography, is not the stuff of my fiction. I have said things like, ‘One writes fiction because one doesn’t want to write fact,’ and I do feel that you need to keep your subject matter at a distance from you, so that your imagination can take flight to it. That’s what’s exciting, getting from what you know into what you don’t know. I really do have a tremendous faith in writing as a leap into the unknown. But it’s a leap you take with the rope of the imagination to hang onto.
Some novelists, particularly in their early work, write fairly autobiographically and are taught to write what they know, and there is a logic to that. But my first novel, apart from its south London location, was not autobiographical. I frequently write about parents and children—being responsible for another generation—but I don’t have children, though I obviously had parents. I’d say that my early family life was quite happy and secure, which wouldn’t be true of the many families I’ve written about. Also, people tend to assume that because I’ve written about the Fens, where I’ve never lived, or eels, or the French Revolution, I do a great deal of research. In fact I don’t; I find that all rather tedious and try to get away with the minimum.
A thing that really does interest me and is a real area of my work is the question: should this thing be told or not? Maybe this is partly because, as a novelist, I’m a teller in a quite practical sense—always making decisions about what should be told at this point or later. But that’s all fairly technical. I’m more fascinated with how, in life, we all come up against knowledge which may or may not be shared or imparted; with how knowledge can be both an enlightening thing, but also sometimes dangerous and destructive. Secrets fascinate me
. We’re all embedded in secrets, in that none of us knows the whole story about where we are in relation to other people. I think I’ll always write about that.
Sometimes I’ve taken it to a sort of intellectual pitch. For instance, I wrote a novel called Ever After, where there’s quite a lot about the Darwinian moment in the nineteenth century when this enormous piece of knowledge, virtually held by one man, was released. That was a case of a scientific truth, needing to be told, which upset a great many people’s understanding of the world they lived in. But this sort of thing happens in much more intimate ways in personal life. It’s something which is curiously important to me and that, despite myself, I keep coming back to.
My instinct goes against the advice that writers are often given: ‘show, don’t tell’. In many cases you should show rather than tell, if that effectively means show rather than explain. But the word ‘tell’ is a great word. It means more than just the simple ‘I am now telling you this thing.’ We use it in so many ways. ‘I can tell,’ means something quite different from the business of relating something; it suggests knowing and understanding, a seeing into the situation. There are times when what you have to do is not show, which would be almost the easy, even the evasive thing, but find a way of telling.
There are moments in writing that are not unlike those occasions in life when you say to someone, who may be very close and it may be a very painful thing, ‘I’ve got to tell you something.’ Once you’ve said those words you know there’s no going round or going back. It’s not a question of showing, but of finding a way inside you of how best to impart what you have to impart. Finding the way to tell things goes with being human. Any serious act of telling brings out in you your ability to shape something so that it will communicate without its being a mere matter of informing or explaining, it will give something more than that. And of course that can sometimes depend on what you choose not to say; and that is the same with writing. It may sound a contradiction, but you can often better tell something by not telling it completely. I’m very aware that you must leave spaces for the reader’s mind to operate in, just as in some intimate disclosure you might leave a gap, a silence for your listener to make some vital connection.
Storytelling is a primitive thing going back long before books. People have a need to tell and hear stories: it’s human nature. But we live more and more in a world where we pretend we don’t need that—where it may be considered a bit naive and sentimental, compared to the culture of information and to the easy communicativeness technology seems to offer. So I think the novel needs more and more to hold its own against that sea of stuff around it. But I think it will always survive, because although it’s a sophisticated literary form it is, at bottom, just storytelling and people will always turn to it. I’m a storyteller working in the form of the novel—this wonderful, all-embracing, elastic form—but even as I work in it I often have a primitive, pre-verbal sense of how it should be employed, a kind of musical sense of storytelling. I will feel a story needs to move in a certain way or to have a certain rhythm and echo before I’ve necessarily found the right words or even the precise narrative situation.
I taught myself to write—I didn’t have any mentor or teacher. I began in earnest in my early twenties, but I had wanted for some time before then to be a writer. I grew up in the 1950s when the book, or the word, was what you did for entertainment. I read a lot and I listened to the radio, so I was very word-conscious. There was a time when I thought how nice it would be to be one of these people who made books and created these wonderful worlds which opened up as you opened the page. My thoughts were very crude and naive, but enthralled. I wanted to do this magic stuff that writers did. I would find it absolutely charming now to be presented with those books that I read when I was eight or nine. I’ve forgotten what they were. I would have got them from the library, and to pick them up again would take me back to the germ of it all.
At that time it was not literary ambition, it was just wanting to write books. I do remember reading, as I got older, people like Rosemary Sutcliffe, who wrote historical novels I would get lost in. But I was able to stop and look at a paragraph and say to myself, ‘Gosh, that bit of description is wonderful. How do you do that? If only I could do that!’ I can remember having feelings like that which evolved into a desire to be a writer—a bit like wanting to be an engine driver. It never went away and started to move towards a serious intention. All the way through my teens I nursed this without really owning up to it. Then I went to university at Cambridge and other things got in the way, but when I left I sort of grabbed myself by the lapel and said, ‘Well, are you serious about it? Are you really going to be a writer? Because if you are, you must start to write properly.’
I am unquestionably proud of every book I’ve written. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want them to be seen by anyone else. With Last Orders something happened which made the language different. I think it was to do with trusting, more than I ever had done, so-called ordinary language—the language of people who you could say, wrongly, aren’t so articulate. I was using a sort of language of the street; not directly, in that it was not like a tape-recording, but I was using it and found it very liberating. I found all the apparent limitations of it not to be limitations at all. This language could be very eloquent, just as more articulate language can be a barrier. So I got interested in simpler words, simpler phrases, shorter and more economic sentences which might be more transparent and might get you more quickly to the things that matter.
That seemed to continue with The Light of Day, but I don’t know if it will be a continuing trend or not. I chose the passage at the end of The Light of Day for you to quote before this interview because it is, at this point, the last thing I wrote that’s published. There’s something nice about that. I always intended that the final words of the book should be its title. Another thing I did with this book, as with Last Orders, was to structure it around a single day. I don’t see myself doing that constantly as a formula either, but it was certainly very helpful as a discipline. In Last Orders there is a one-day journey and whatever else is going to happen, and a lot else does, I had to get the characters from London to Margate, so I had to think, ‘Well, they should be getting to Chatham about now,’ or whatever.
In The Light of Day George has shorter journeys to make through a certain geography on a certain day. Both novels had that discipline, although in both I was also dealing with other levels of time. However, I like the focus of a fairly short, defined period more than I used to. But I wouldn’t like to predict how my writing will go. I’m writing a novel at the moment which is first-person and more than one narrator. Who knows if one day I might produce a third-person novel? It’s a thing which I have always felt isn’t me, but it might be a good thing if it happened. You have to surprise yourself.
The thing I can say is that I am a novelist. It’s a long while since I have written any short stories, though I began with them and once thought I would never write anything else. Just occasionally I’ve produced something short, and I would always be happy to spend some time just doing stories again, but it doesn’t happen. One of the pleasures of writing a story is that you start and very soon it will be finished—it might even be finished today. That’s tremendously morale-boosting. But I think I have a mindset now that belongs to the novel. You know you are there for a long haul, which is quite daunting, but I like the feeling that once you have begun a novel, you have your job. You know that you will get up in the morning, in my case quite early, and you will continue this task which is all there for you to do. And it will be like that for a long while and then it will be finished. I like the feeling of being in something big and continuing.
I haven’t lost the sense of the magic of storytelling that I had when I read those books, now forgotten, as a child. Writing is my life. It is not all of my life by any means, but it is my life and my work in a way that not so many people can say. People do their jobs, but they wouldn’t necessarily say, ‘T
his is my life. This is me!’ And they wouldn’t say either, sadly, in most cases, ‘This is also what I love. It is the love of my life.’ By doing anything that you fundamentally love to do, you are going to suffer for it too, it’s going to be painful at times. Love is like that —it’s not just a wonderful thing, it’s demanding. But I do what I’ve always wanted to do. Often, on the bad days, I can think, ‘Am I really loving this?’ But I do love it and I hope that I write with love. And on the wonderful days, when it goes like it should go, when you know that what you’ve just written you will never have to change, it’s more than that. It makes you feel that everything is worthwhile. The possibility on any one day of having that feeling is by itself a perfect reason for doing it. It makes you feel in touch with life and the world; it makes you know why you are here.
Sunset on the Wandle: John England Nicholls, 1860–61.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
PÉRIGORD, 1533–92
In 2004 the Folio Society, preparing for its sixtieth anniversary, asked a number of people to choose one book they couldn’t be without. I chose Montaigne’s Essays. A little later the Society asked me if I’d like to write a short introduction to a special edition of the Essays they’d be bringing out. I’m no Montaigne scholar or expert, but it wasn’t difficult to accept such a flattering invitation about a writer I love. The clincher was that the Society would be using John Florio’s original English translation, one of the great works of Elizabethan prose. I spent a very happy part of 2005 rereading (the verb is properly used) Montaigne.