I am a freelance and development editor. I also work as a critic - book reviewer, evaluating and reading manuscripts for publishing houses and clients. The genres that I am interested in are - fiction (all kinds); children's and YA literature; non-fiction, including biographies and academic, especially related to gender studies.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Preview: authors reveal the secrets of their craft, The Guardian
Preview: authors reveal the secrets of their craft
How do you set about writing a novel? What inspires a poem? Pencil or computer? Pain or pleasure? In a preview from tomorrow's Guardian Review, listen to Ian McEwan, Howard Jacobson, Ian Rankin, Hilary Mantel and Beryl Bainbridge, and enter our competition to identify the mystery writer
'I always felt something of an outsider' ... Ian McEwan on the writing life. Photograph by Alfred Eriss/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Ian McEwan: Ancestors, distant relatives and the past really were not part of my sense of family as I grew up. Something of my father's exile from Scotland – self-exile really – and then exile from Great Britain, has rubbed off on me and probably affected the way I write. When I started writing, I didn't feel that I was quite part of the English literary world or its systems of class or whatever – I always felt something of an outsider in it. That's faded over the years, but I think it has made quite an impression on me, this sense of not being deeply connected to all the branches and roots of family. I could make a narrative of my writing which goes something like this: that I began as a kind of existential writer, much more interested in casting characters almost, as it were, outside of history and outside of identifiable places, and as the years have gone by I've become perhaps a more traditional writer, or at least a writer much more aware – consciously, expressively aware – of the traditions of the English novel, the treasures that are laid up for us by the great 19th-century expositors of character and psychology. And so the gap between my early short stories and a novel like Atonement, with its country house – a novel that looks partly back over its shoulder towards Jane Austen, but also back towards the hallowed traditions of Agatha Christie and crime novels, in that you set up a scene, you have a stranger arrive and everything follows from that. So there's an enormous gap fromAtonement to the earliest short stories with their very dispossessed, alienated characters who are living in a city with no name, often in a time that's not fixed.
Howard Jacobson: I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to be a writer, and specifically a novelist; I can't remember ever wanting to be anything else. I never wanted to be a sportsman, I never wanted to be a musician. I never had the slightest bit of interest in music; we were too clever in my school to be interested in pop music. So when other boys had pictures of footballers on their walls or they had pictures of musicians on their walls, I swear to you, I had a picture of George Eliot, I had a picture of Jane Austen; I had a picture of Ben Jonson, a copy of Sargent's portrait of Henry James which was in the National Portrait Gallery . . . I only ever wanted to be a writer and I only ever valued writers. And it hasn't changed; I only ever value writers.
Hilary Mantel: Where do you pull your characters from? You have to create them out of your own self; where else could they possibly come from? To create the protagonist of a book you really have to be prepared to live through them, and for me the process is physical as well as mental: I don't quite know how to put this, but I am so intensely engaged with my characters that their physicality passes into mine, and I've only just discovered the joys of working with a really healthy central character. When I started writing Wolf Hall, my novel about Thomas Cromwell, I got extremely strong. My health suddenly improved and I felt as if the boundaries of my being had become firmer. Cromwell is physically a short, broad, squat, strong man, and what I've always thought about him is that he was probably very hard to knock over. This is important because he had been a soldier, he had led a very adventurous youth, and I thought, well, if I'd only known what a tonic it would be, I'd have started writing this book years ago! It is just amazing what imagination can do – what it can cause to happen in the real world, and every day I'm proving and exploring how strong the products of one's mind can be.
Ian Rankin: I'm really not in control at all of what I'm writing. It's almost as though before I start writing there's a shape sitting there that I've not seen yet, and when I start to write the novel the shape will reveal itself to me, the novel will decide which way it wants to go. Does it want to follow this character or that character, is this minor character really interesting and worth blowing up into a full-scale character or is this major character unnecessary and needs to be done away with? Maybe the shape is sitting in my subconscious, buried way deep down. It's like a high-wire act, because you've no idea when you start the book if you can finish it or not; will it have a satisfactory denouement? A writer like James Ellroy, for example, will do a two to three-hundred page synopsis of the book before he starts writing it because he needs to know everything that's going to happen in the book. I don't need to know everything that's going to happen; I'm much happier playing the detective; ie, the first draft is me getting to know the characters and their motives and everything else, so I start the book knowing almost as little as Rebus does, or whoever the cop or main character happens to be. I think that keeps the suspense level up, because if I don't know where the story is going probably the reader doesn't know either. So I'm not giving stuff away because there's nothing for me to give away; there are no red herrings at the start. I don't like all that kind of stuff like red herrings, a sense of holding back necessary information from the reader, which Agatha Christie did brilliantly throughout her career. To me that's the least interesting part of the crime genre.
Beryl Bainbridge: I don't write for readers; I don't think many writers do – I don't think any. They say they do, don't they? But . . . well, I only write for myself, and when somebody says: "Oh, your book has given me so much pleasure," I just think, "How peculiar". I don't know what to say. Of course I don't say that; I smile and say "How nice" – but I think I'd have written books whether they were published or not. I just liked writing.
I am a freelance and development editor. I also work as a critic - book reviewer, evaluating and reading manuscripts for publishing houses and clients. The genres that I am interested in are - fiction (all kinds); children's and YA literature; non-fiction, including biographies and academic, especially related to gender studies.
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