I’m writing this as I fly over Siberia, on the way home after my visit to Japan as a guest of the Nippon Foundation for the inaugural Tokyo International Literary Festival. Despite working for the British Centre for Literary Translation, my knowledge of Japanese is limited, to say the least. After a couple of days I’d learned:

ume – plum blossom

sakura – cherry blossom

arigato – thank you, a feeble attempt at reciprocating the legendary Japanese politeness

kissa – an old style coffee house with red tins of Caravan coffee and bakelite phones, offering a rare glimpse of the history of the city

I picked up a few more words during my visit, but these first four words summed up for me the themes of the festival and of my stay in Japan: history and memory, destruction and rebirth, gardens and literature, travel, cultural differences, and notions of home.

History and memory

Walking around the Koishikawa Korakuen Botanical Gardens in search of plum blossom, I was struck by the signs explaining that these old teahouses and shrines were in fact replicas, rebuilt either after the Great Kanto earthquake in September 1923 or the firebombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. I couldn’t help but agree with Junot Díaz’s comment that Tokyo is a vulnerable city.

This first festival comes almost exactly two years after the latest disaster to strike Japan, the 11th March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. In our welcome packs, we received a poignant reminder in the form of the anthology March Was Made of Yarn, containing pieces by a number of writers taking part in the festival, raising ideas we continued to discuss throughout the weekend.

In Japan disasters take place in the past and in the future, according to Mieko Kawakami; even now, after the earthquake, we’re still living in a pre-disaster age. When a writer responds to disaster, she is bringing both memory of what happened and imagination of what will happen. This theme was echoed by a 22-year old Japanese man in the audience, asking who asked how someone his age can keep alive historical memory for future generations. Junot Díaz said that he learned most about contemporary Japan, and its history, from the work of Naoki Urasawa. In Naoki’s manga, the characters are affected by both World War II and the Cold War. Díaz spoke of the need for contemporary writers to bridge the generation gap by including that history in their work, connecting the chain to carry on the memory. It’s important we try to live – like Naoki’s character Kenji – in three dimensions: past, present and future.

Hideo Furukawa is living and writing in both past and future. Most people come to Tokyo in search of both work and identity, he said. Hideo himself grew up in Fukushima until he was 18, then came to Tokyo, and after 25 years in the city felt like a Tokyoite. But after March 11th, he remembered his old self in Fukushima, and now finds himself writing in two dialects, reflecting his two different homes.

As David Peace wasn’t in Tokyo at the time of the March 11th earthquake, and tsunami he found it difficult to write about the event directly; rather, his story in the anthology is a fictionalised version of another writer’s response to a comparable event – the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s response to the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923. Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy is set in the aftermath of World War II. He is interested in how the city has rebuilt itself twice in the 20th century, retracing old Tokyo through historical maps. Tokyo is not a museum, Peace said. You can’t see the history unless you look deep into its alleyways, or read novels by writers such as Akutagawa, Natsume Sōseki and Dazai Osamu. The city isn’t signposted, so it’s hard to find places mentioned in these novels, or the bars where Dazai drank, but it’s always worth it when you do.

Jonathan Safran Foer compared a walk through a Japanese garden to the reader’s journey through a physical book. The reader doesn’t see everything at the outset, as the contents are concealed by the cover. Foer described reading as a journey of discovery, revelation and surprise; expectations are affirmed or undermined as the reader moves through the pages of the book. Nicole Krauss compared the design of Japanese gardens – off centre, full of empty spaces – to the spaces, silences and imperfections in a novel, which also create beauty. However, Natsuki Ikezawa talked about how Japan is losing its beauty of silence and emptiness; nowadays the country only seems quiet to people coming from noisier places. He spoke of his need to rediscover Japanese features and integrate them into his own work.

Walking around Koishikawa Korakuen, I wasn’t the only visitor to be drawn by the plum blossom as well as the sight of the gardeners rebuilding sections of the garden, digging ponds and creating hills, preparing for spring.

The journey of translation

A parallel and equally fascinating journey through Japan takes place through literature, but if your Japanese is as limited as mine, you can only hear voices from Japan once they are available in English translation. Generally Anglophone writers have a much greater chance of being translated than Japanese writers, but those Japanese voices that do make it into English tend to be distinct.

Lexy Bloom talked about how she decides what to commission for translation. With any literature, whatever its origin, she is looking for great stories told in a different yet beautiful way. In Japanese writing Bloom is struck by the unusual metaphors. In the title story of March Was Made of Yarn by Mieko Kawakami, the opening is an everyday scene of a couple in a hotel, resting. But the story drifts from the real to the fantastical as the pregnant wife dozes off and dreams that everything is made of yarn, a strongly physical image, puzzling, ultimately – but in a good way.

A couple of years ago, at the Worlds festival in Norwich, Alfred Birnbaum explained why English-language readers sometimes find it difficult to fully appreciate Japanese literature, as there are significant differences in literary sensibility between Japan and the UK. Japanese writing is sensual rather than dealing in ideas and concepts; it has an emotional logic and doesn’t need to be conclusive. Writers favour poetic nuance over precision; what is left out is just as important. As a result, good writing in Japanese doesn’t always sound quite so good in English; it can come across as vague, inconclusive and inarticulate, while English writing translated into Japanese can seem forced, petty, harsh and cold.

Despite these differences, if the translator can get the voice right, the rest will follow, according to Michael Emmerich, who emphasized the need to create a relationship of trust with the reader. When tenses are deliberately misused by the author, it’s accepted as literary style, whereas in translation the reader may suspect that the translator has made a mistake. But if the voice in English is still strong, it’ll carry over any irregularities in the original. Emmerich demonstrated his own flair for distinctive metaphors when asked to differentiate between literary style and voice. According to him, the novel is a runway, and literary style the airplane; when that plane takes off is when you get the voice. Yet that voice isn’t composed of individual words, but is connected to the author by yarn, and stays with the reader long after they’ve finished the book, like the smell of smoke on clothes after a night out in Tokyo.

But what happens to the translator? Should he or she become invisible to the reader’s eye? Koji Toko describes the process of translation as going into zero, achieving a Zen-like state where the self vanishes, allowing the translator to follow another style, beat and music, the breath of the translator’s body exhaling and inhaling at the same time as that of the author. Emmerich disagreed. A poor translation is one through which you can see the original text, he pointed out, whereas a good translation is one in which not the translator but the author – and his or her original text – is transparent.

Travelling with a foreigner’s eyes

Usually Mitsuyo Kakuta thinks that the Japanese way of thinking and behaving is normal. Everyone else is different, and quite possibly wrong. When she goes to other countries, however, she starts to wonder whether it’s she who has things the wrong way round. Yet she becomes even more Japanese when she travels.

In Japan, the relationship to words and verbal expression is very different to other countries, Birnbaum had also explained. Verbal communication is a last resort. When she was abroad, Mitsuyo was struck by how much people talk. The Japanese express themselves by thinking, a silent, staring telepathy. To make matters worse, most people in other countries don’t speak Japanese, so even if she does talk, no-one will understand her. Still she travels as, in her experience, people will always help her out. As she comes from an island nation, like many Japanese Mitsuyo has to overcome certain fears in order to travel. While she is in Japan, Mitsuyo is a rock surrounded by water and can see her limits, but when she travels, she moves away from her limits into shock and newness.

Travelling, talking, reading – these are the ways we learn about other people, other ways of doing things. But what are the ethics of outsiders or foreigners writing about a country they’re not from – an issue in my mind as I write this blog after one brief visit to Japan. Junot Díaz and Natsuki Ikezawa agreed that such writing and sharing is an attempt at communion, at communication. Even if the writer gets things wrong, at least it’s opened up the dialogue between self and other.

Journeying to a new place helps you see yourself, and your own place, differently; on returning home, Pico Iyer walks around and looks at those familiar surroundings with a foreigner’s eyes. Still over Siberia (Japan is a long way away), I’m wondering what I will see when I return to Norwich.

Kate Griffin

www.kategriffin.org

March 2013

Biogs for all the writers mentioned in this piece, as well as details of the festival itself, can be found on the Tokyo International Literary Festival website at www.tokyolitfest.com

UEA graduate Nathan Hamilton is the editor of a new anthology showcasing a new generation of British poets, Dear World & Everyone In It: new poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe Books). Current MA in Creative Writing student Colette Sensier asks him about the allure and the process of editing a defining anthology.

1) Was a book-length anthology of the Rialto Young Poets always in the works? How did you go about the decision to create Dear World & Everyone In It?

I’d always fancied putting together an anthology in order to try to describe some aspects about contemporary UK poetry I thought might help a general understanding of How Things Are. The decision to do the Bloodaxe anthology came about after Neil Astley [publisher of Bloodaxe] approached me. He’d read the features in The Rialto and this led him to believe — rightly or wrongly — that I might have a ‘finger on the pulse’ of a contemporary scene (whether checking for life or amphetamine-d over-stimulation, I’m not sure). So The Rialto feature seemed the right place to start in terms of making the book happen.

2) What kind of work do you tend to admire, and what would you like to see less of? What were your criteria for selecting poets for inclusion in Dear World & Everyone In It?

This is potentially an impossibly complex question. But to answer it pragmatically, but very generally, I react badly to more self-expressive, personally effusive stuff, or work that seems too emulative of others, for some reason. And I tend to respond better to work that enacts the drama of self and language in a recognisably modern world, or work that seems more aware of its context, or reflexive, for some other or the same reason. The reasons why this might be so I explore or dramatise in the introduction to
the anthology.

3) What were your favourite and least favourite parts of the experience of curating Dear World & Everyone In It?

The building of the manuscript was great fun. Working through the poems that people had sent me and picking out the ones I responded to most; working out what should go where and how it should all be arranged to bring out certain aspects or to play different styles off each other constructively – this was the most fun part. It felt a bit like how I’d imagine being a conductor of an orchestra might feel. But, no, more behind the scenes than that; perhaps more a music producer. Or maybe just an Editor. The least fun was probably managing hundreds of emails and balancing the work with other parts of life.

4) There have been a few young British poets’ anthologies recently out from Salt, Oxfam and Barbican young poets – what distinguishes Dear World & Everyone In It?

The intention was that this would be an anthology that represented a wider sample of work than previously and tried to assemble its conclusions or paint its picture from that wider sample or palette (depending on which metaphor you’d like to follow in that sentence). I also hope it seems more aware, like some of the work I tend to admire, of its own context; the selection might be more ludic, and again more reflexive, as I feel that better renders the contemporary moment. I was also interested in shaking up the public debate about poetry a little.

5) Bloodaxe describes Dear World & Everyone In It as avoiding ‘older, oppositional attitudes’ to poetry – how would you characterise these and why were you keen to avoid them? How might it compare to other recent UK anthologies?

Well, again, this could be very complex, but it refers to the habit of categorising things and separating them into binaries in order to aid understanding of the world; old/new; young/old; mainstream/innovative; product/process; this/that. It is possible to present things, or comprehend or enjoy things, in more fluid and playful ways; to be less hung up on trying to describe or categorise or package everything. So I suppose I’m thinking more like Donald Hall than Robert Conquest. Again, I explore more of this in the introduction. I’d say it compares in the way a naughty cousin might at Christmas: there’s a nice big family meal laid out and everyone is tucking in and getting sloshed on wine but this cousin, in a manner that simultaneously entertains, confuses, and annoys, starts insisting on a food fight, or keeps making jokes about the spoons or folding the napkins up into funny shapes.

6) Any words on the current state of the younger end of the UK poetry scene?

Skinny, boozy, insecure, exploited, reflexive, commingling, over-stimulated, smooth, amaze, under-paid, hacked, greeny-orange, promiscuous, consumed, attention, like, deficit, curious, political, wide-eyed, apolitical, driven, detached, networked, collaborative, trashy, carnival, metro, lmfao, beleaguered, beliebers.

Dear World & Everyone In It: new poetry in the UK is published by Bloodaxe Books (£12).

Lee Child: I’m a total editor as I go along- that is my actual method. Regarding my writing process: I start at around lunchtime, and I begin by re-reading what I did the day before, combing-back and smoothing out, and then carrying on. When I reach the end, that’s the end. I never read it again, and I never do a second draft as each part has already been very carefully and consistently edited as I go along.

Colette Sensier: Does that mean you dedicate a lot of time to planning your plot before you start writing?

LC: No, I never plan anything. I want the same excitement I would get as a reader. I don’t want to know what happens. If I plotted it all out and planned it I would have told myself the whole story already and be ready to move on. There would be much less excitement for me in the writing process and the plot would come out flat and wooden to the reader.

Kim Sherwood: In your last few books, Reacher is making his way to Virginia- time is quite compressed. Two books later he’s not there yet. Is that constraint because you’re slowing down the character’s adventures to kind of keep him in his forties?

LC: That was a part of it. When I started out, I had no idea the series would still be running 20 years later. I made Reacher 36 years old in the first book, for 2 main reasons: firstly that I recall feeling that my mental and physical capabilities were at their composite peak in my mid-thirties. Secondly, as an affectionate homage to Dick Francis. Technically Francis didn’t write a series with the same character, but had the same hero in different guises, who was always 36.

Regarding the compression of time- I think it’s because the world is speeding up. Entertainment has sped up to such a great extent. Subconsciously or consciously we speed up as well.

Kim Sherwood: The Jack Reacher books explore a lot about the character’s mythology and past in the army, particularly in The Affair. What was it like formulating these origins?

LC: It was a little intense. I liked doing the prequels, as an exercise in going backward. When you go back in time you have to make a more naïve version of the same character- and that interested me. It is probably easier to write a character that progressively ages than duck back 20 years and do a younger version- I really enjoyed that challenge.

JS: How do you create such great suspense in your novels?

Creating suspense is astonishingly much simpler than we are led to believe. The question posed of how to create suspense, already leads you down the wrong path. It has the same interrogatory shape as “How do you bake a cake?” as if suspense is a thing to be made.

We all know in theory how to bake a cake- with good ingredients, mixed well and put in the oven, with the right temperature and timing. This focus on ingredients and process translates to characters and situations- but that is a bit of blind alley.

It comes from the fact that the question has the wrong form. It is not “how do you bake a cake?”, but rather, “how do you make your family hungry?”

The answer is: you make them wait four hours for dinner. And that is how you create suspense. You somehow ask or imply a question, and do no answer it. You do this in a macro and micro sense- from plot to even the shape of a sentence.

Asking questions and not answering them leaves readers in suspense. People just want to know the answer to a question- it doesn’t matter what the question is. They love to know the answer.

Matthew McGuinness: Back in the gestation period of Jack Reacher and before the books- what kind of writing were you doing? Who were you showing your work to and getting feedback from?

LC: I wasn’t really doing much writing; I was working mostly in television. The first line of Killing Floor- “I was arrested in Eno’s Diner”- is the first line of fiction I ever wrote.

A couple of times, once in the bus, and once at the Tea House in central Erbil, just by the citadel, singing would start up. On the bus two of the young women began it and others joined in, singing, clapping along or snapping fingers in time to it. At the Tea House one man started a haunting air, then a woman took it up, then another man, then the woman again. They sang impromptu. It was, I learned on asking, a love song. People joined in clapping. The whole place was suddenly beautiful, burning with life. It was celebratory. It came alive.

And again, on the last night, after the Reel Iraq readings, after an interval and an awkward spell of roughly tuned chamber music, followed by another interval, a group of dancers came on. The tunes were familiar as were the dances. The hall was far from packed, and even barer by this time, but there was clapping and dancing in the aisles. It was spontaneous. The hall was rather forbidding, but the dancing in the aisles might have been anywhere in the street, in a tea house or in a bazaar.

The music of a place is where its intimacy and identity open up. At this point the sense of community is at its most receptive, and anyone from anywhere becomes emotionally a part of it. Music and dancing are beautiful infections. We all have bodies that like to move in beloved patterns.

Erbil may have money pouring into it, it may have constructed an international-standard airport – which, as Gulanar Ali wrote, was of great symbolic importance because, for once, aeroplanes were not associated with bullets and bombs but were ways of connecting this much damaged place to the outside world – it may even have raised a few hotels, but it is essentially poor. It is not so much a city of a million as an enormous township hugging the ground, a gathering of urbanised villages. It is a wounded place that needs time to heal. Maybe it will get the time but that is not assured. It is poor, half-finished. In the shadowless rain that haunted our three days, it felt almost spectral.

*

The mind is always looking to comprehend some key part of its circumstance and condition.There were people at the festival who had undergone suffering and tragedy of the kind we only read about. They don’t speak about it directly. It’s in the voice, the posture, the eyes which are sometimes guarded, at other times warm and pleased that we are there to see them, not as victims of troubles but for the deeply civilised people they are. The music is a sign of that.

As is the poetry, though language has walls that music can transcend. There are many languages in a single place. That is not simply a matter of Kurdish and Arabic, but of the varieties of language common to any culture: the language of the street, the language of formal beauty, the language of thought with all its own metalanguages, the language of meetings, introductions and goodbyes, the coded languages of community, family and friendship, the language of this or that person with their own personal history of usage.

Even so, poetry and story can touch others though in translation, or indeed without translation, as gesture, rhythm, performance. We feel our way through other people’s codes. We want to understand what the other is saying, not as a series of rational statements, but as a way of being and feeling in the world.

Festivals are necessarily formal. The hall we started in heightened the sense of formality and it took a little time to feel relatively relaxed in it. The hotel was a good hotel with good rooms and good food, but hotels are hotels, varying only in degree. There is staff you rarely see. You return and the room is tidy, the bed made. You glide up lifts. You return to the buffet. You sit with those you know or have met. The language barrier is always hard work. I exchanged books with the writer Hameed Al-Rubayee. We won’t be able to read each other. The exchange is a gesture to say: I think we would like each other’s minds so let this be a token of that.

For me the highlight was the session I was offered to take at the end. It was good to be able to run something at what I thought of as an open pace, with students present. I liked the students. I liked to see them smile. I liked their courage in writing to a given pattern. I liked it when they asked questions. There should always be questions. I make no assumptions about them, their home lives, their histories. Their home lives, judging by dress and looks, were probably traditional in ways that they might sometimes love, at other times resent. That is their affair, but since we are all people with a love of music, poetry and stories, we can present ourselves in ways that seem natural to us. These are our other selves, those curious instinctive selves we discover at points of singing, stories, poetry and dancing.

Who are some living writers you admire the most and why?

Javier Marías, who is able to see the contemporary with an eye that reveals it for what it is.  He can see, philosophically and anatomically, the layered narratives of the present, and where they come from, and where they’re likely to lead. (And in English translation at least, his novels have released a whole new peripatetic English prose structure, so if I’m talking Marias I have to couple him with his English translator here, Margaret Jull Costa.)  Toni Morrison, for always, with everything she writes, pushing the novel to a new shape and purpose, and always in conversation with the form’s own history as well as human history.

In 2003, you posited that the purpose of cultural consumption rested on whether “we come to art to be comforted or reskinned”- this ‘reskinning’ literary philosophy- has it changed in any ways, 10 years on, and what do you want your readers to feel first and foremost?

I think – and I’ve always believed – that the only responsibility the writer has is to the story.   All a writer can do is work with language to get the story right.  Full stop.  & I’ve always believed that what readers feel is readers’ own business.

But art, regardless of things like philosophy and responsibility,  goes its own way and will move us, shred us, heal us again, hold us, comfort us, madden us, shock us into pieces, piece us back together or leave us to do it ourselves, renew our senses, renew what matters to us, challenge our thinking and feeling processes, and most of all remind us at all levels what it is to be alive.

What comes easiest for you in the writing process and what takes the most work? 

Nothing comes easy, ever, and I much prefer working on the edit.  Which is probably why I edit all the time, from the first phrase onward; also this allows a text to produce itself by a fusion of open instinct and close editing.

You have an incredible command of voice. What is your best tip for invoking these distinctive voices?

My tip – really simple – is to listen.  Voice tells you everything about itself, in itself – word, rhythm, syntax, what’s said, what’s not said.

When do you know a story is finished? (in relation to the composition and editing process)

When it stops niggling at you. (It may never.)  Though I always bear in mind a Bernard Malamud short story about a painter who wakes up in the middle of the night convinced he’s got to add to something he thought he’d finished, and who gets up, adds to it, goes back to bed pleased – and when he wakes up again in the morning he’s ruined his work.  So, general rule – it takes time.  Give yourself and your work breathing space, go away from it and come back to it with fresh eyes and ears. Don’t be hasty.

What is the best advice you could give to new or struggling writers about writing for a living and the publishing world?

Nobody else can or will write the book that you can write.  Keep going.

What has fascinated you the most lately? (this could be anything)

If I tell you it’ll give away the structure of my next book and the core of a story I’m about to write. Forgive me for not saying.

By Emma MacLusky

Timberlake Wertenbaker is the UNESCO City of Literature Fellow at UEA. She has been giving masterclasses, lectures and informal seminars to staff and students of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. Emma MacLusky, a drama student, interviews Timberlake about her long career as a playwright and translator.

Timberlake Wertenbaker, a British playwright, translator and professor, inspired Norwich University of East Anglia’s theatre, creative writing and translation students when she recently shared her approach to writing and experiences in the industry.

Wertenbaker admitted that a love for writing runs in her family, and that her talent was encouraged from the age of ten. She has always had an affinity and awareness of language; brought up in the Basque Country, she understood from an early age that language was political.  Keen to travel and develop her skills in a different culture, she spent a year in Greece at the beginning of her career, teaching languages. There she mingled with actors and directors, and this is where she began writing plays seriously before moving to London. In London lived in a theatrical house, with budding actors and directors, and plenty of creative stimuli. Wertenbaker circulated short plays around London and was snapped up by the new writing and development programme at the then Soho Poly, now the Soho Theatre.

In 1983 Wertenbaker began writing for Shared Experience and the Royal Court from, winning awards throughout her career, such as the Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Our Country’s Good, Central Television Drama Award for The Love of the Nightingale, Critics Circle Theatre Awards for Best West End Play for Three Birds Alighting on a Field.

Her thematic range as a writer is impressive; from the history of convicts and penal colonies to the transformative potential of art, to immigration and asylum, Wertenbaker’s plays are ambitious in vision. She describes an idea as ‘a bit like a bone, you start chewing it, then you bury it and dig it up again later.’ Her early work examined themes of language, the right to speak and of the powers of silence. She was particularly influenced by her childhood home in Basque France, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where the regional language was being eradicated. A strong believer in a writer’s identity, and role as the writer, she was inspired by the plays of Eugene O’Neil and their free use American vernacular and characters on the margins of society..

Other important influences come from French theatre. Having grown up with a French education, she became interested in playwrights such as Alfred De Musset, a dramatist, poet and novelist who is best known for his La Confession d’un enfant du siecle, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre are other important influences.

Wertenbaker was also inspired by London playwrights such as Howard Brenton and Howard Barker, who were writing ‘great, big, epic and wild plays.’Shared Experience’s marriage of physical and text-based theatre gave her a whole new theatrical vocabulary, giving form to the hidden world of the psyche and imagination, exploring relationships between our inner lives and the world we inhabit.

Currently Wertenbaker is mulling over a new play, having finished two new plays in the summer. In a recent talk to Theatre, Creative Writing and Translation students, Wertenbaker urged students to write about what they want to write about, rather than following what seems to be fashionable.

Wertenbaker has a love for the coast and hopes to spend more time in Norwich. ‘All you need to create theatre is a room, imagination, energy and actors. And go to see shows, it’s terribly important.’

 Q: What are some works of art that have influenced you?

My favourite writers include John Irving, Philip Roth, Rose Tremain, Philip Hensher, Colm Toibin, John Banville… the list is endless. Kate Bush has been my favourite singer since I was a teenager. I never grow tired of her albums. My favourite is Aerial, closely followed by Hounds of Love, The Dreaming and 50 Words For Snow. Also, The Silver Sword, by Ian Serraillier. If I’d never read The Silver Sword, I’d never have written The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas. It was my first introduction, at the age of about ten or eleven, to the subject of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Q: Describe a bad writing day:

A bad writing day would be one where I have to be somewhere in the middle of the day, like at noon, so I can’t focus in the morning because I know I have to go out, or concentrate in the afternoon because I’ve already been somewhere else for two or three hours. That would be bad. Because I like my day to be free. And I don’t meet people for lunch. I can do things afterwards, but I don’t like my day being broken up. No lunches. Drinks in the evening are fine though.

Q: Do you let what others may think affect your writing process?

I have no interest whatsoever in what people think of me. The only thing I’m interested in is the book I’m writing. I’m well past the point of caring about anything else. I think it’s come with the freedom that I was lucky enough to get, where I can write what I want when I want. Obviously I want people to like my books, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to what the response is. I don’t read reviews, ever. I have no idea of sales figures, other than in general. A book comes out, I don’t follow its progress, I just sit down and start writing the next one.

Q: Do you think that’s a defence mechanism?

Maybe. I’m always working on the next book, that’s always my focus. I only write for myself. A shelf is on my desk at home, with a copy of each novel, the English language edition, and my life is working its way across that shelf. And I think when it gets to the end of the shelf– it’s about 40% there– the shelf looks like it will be my life. Each time another one gets up there. And that’s all I’m interested in.

Q: It’s interesting how some authors publish a few books, and some are more prolific.

I don’t do anything except write novels. I don’t write screenplays, I don’t write television. That’s the only thing I do. I’ve published quite a lot of short stories, but usually ony when they are commissioned. What I always try to do is have a few sitting on my computer that exist, and which I can adapt for different things. A lot of writers who achieve a little bit of success turn that into – I can now do this and this and this. And I don’t, I only write novels. I’ve published over 70 short stories but I’ve never published a collection.

Q: Do you have advice for young emerging writers?

I came here eight years ago to teach on the undergrad writing course. And nobody was reading books. The students who wanted to be writers were not reading.Readingis important, obviously. Writing is a very simple thing. You read and you write. It’s not much more complicated than that. You don’t wait for the muse to strike.

Q We hear you have a dog. How does your dog affect your writing practice?

I have a theory that whenever a writer gets a dog, if they’ve never previously had a dog, then dogs appear in their fiction from then on. And it happened with me. When I got my dog I was writing The Absolutist, and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel appears in that book [Boyne has a Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Zaccy]. And then in the next book, which is the children’s book Barnaby Brocket, a dog is hugely important in that book. So you start writing about dogs when you have a dog. In my office, he sits there by my feet. When I finish something, I read it out loud to hear how it sounds, and the first person to hear everything I write is my dog. He just wants to be with me or my partner Con. As long as he’s with us, he’s happy. He goes from room to room, he’ll just follow us.

interview by Chris Bigsby

CB: I have always thought of you as a comic writer. Am I wrong to think that?

SR: I have always thought so. It is one of the things that I think people forget to say about these books, because there is a very strong comic strain, sometimes black comedy. I think one of the things that people didn’t say very much about The Satanic Verses is that quite a lot of it was comic in its manner. It made me feel that comedy is what gets up people’s noses further than anything else. Maybe if the book hadn’t been so funny I would have been all right. I think the battle was between people who had a sense of humour and people who didn’t. It is not only comic. There is a point in this book where it becomes very tragic, but I think until that point it is quite funny.

CB: The other thing that strikes me, especially when I hear you read your work, is its rhythmic quality. Do you read aloud when you are writing? You were once an actor. Does that inform your work?

SR: It is very kind of you to say that I was once an actor. I was once a person who did some acting. I think the questions of rhythm and pace are very important. I don’t know if I read it aloud that much but I imagine it being read. I sit there going through it in my head for the rhythm because sometimes whether a particular bit of the story is told quickly or slowly can affect the way it is experienced by the reader.

I have often been fond of fooling around with the pace at which a story is told, which is something I learned from a short story by the great German novelist Heinrich von Kleist, who wrote a short story called The Earthquake in Chile. The story is four or five pages long. It has the most extraordinary amount of plot, a quite ludicrous amount of plot, and as a result the story hurtles along as if it was a speeded-up film. Every single thing that happened in the story was absolutely horrible. There is an earthquake and there is mayhem and calamity, and then there is more mayhem and more calamity. It is told at such an amazing break-neck pace that it becomes funny and you find yourself giggling at this hideous, atrocious sequence of events. Yet somehow it also fails to lose that note of atrocity underneath. I thought this really interesting. All he is doing is telling the story too fast. If he told exactly the same story in a hundred pages instead of five it would not have that comic note in it. There would only be the atrocity. So at that point I began to think that this was something to play with, the pace of the story. Sometimes accelerate it, sometimes slow it down, sometimes tell it in what seems to be the naturalistically correct pace, other times fool with the tempo. So I have always been interested in that.

CB: Your new book, Shalimar the Clown, also packs a great deal in, though not in four or five pages.

SR: Shalimar the Clown starts off as a murder story which reveals itself to be a love story which turns into a story of the betrayal of love which turns into a story of revenge which turns into a story of hatred which turns into a murder story. At the end I think it is in some danger of turning back into a love story. At the heart of it is the story of a place. It is the story of Kashmir, a place of great physical beauty but also a place where the closest thing to a harmonious culture that one can imagine was created and then, in recent times, destroyed. What happened in Kashmir was that the people were caught between the rock of India and the hard place of Pakistan, two countries which have fought over it with relatively little concern for what the people of Kashmir wanted. What they have said rather consistently, for almost sixty years now, is would you both please fuck off, but that is the option that nobody considers.

The love story takes place against that background. It is a story about two young people who are both members of a village troupe of travelling players. There is an old tradition of folk theatre in Kashmir going back hundreds of years. The Kashmiri word for these players literally translates as clown, hence Shalimar the Clown, although in fact they are by no means only clowns. They are not just actors. They are also gymnasts and tightrope walkers and magicians and singers and dancers. It is clearly a dying, or nearly dead, form these days. Shalimar the Clown is a clown on the tightrope, on the high wire, and he falls in love with the village troupe dancing girl who is called Boonyi. That goes well for a while, even though he is from a Muslim family and she is from a Hindu. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, the families think it is fine, but she begins to have second thoughts about it. So the problem doesn’t derive from the Montagues and Capulets but, so to speak, from Juliet who eventually makes the bad or rash move of running off with the American Ambassador. That unleashes the revenge tragedy which is the heart of the book.

CB: As you first describe it, Kashmir is a kind of paradise, and that was the Kashmir you knew, or you heard of, when you were growing up. In a sense, then, you are returning not only to Kashmir but to your own youth?

SR : Yes, it is true. My family originally came from Kashmir but had left before I was born. My grandparents moved south into India and settled, but it was made very clear to us, as we were growing up, that that was where we were from. If you ask Indians where they are from they will tell you about the region before they tell you about the country. They will say they are Bengalis before they say that they are Indian. They will say that they are Kashmiris before they say they are anything else. The region, and regionality, are very, very important. We were certainly brought up to think that that is who we were. We were Kashmiri people who were living, in my case, in Bombay and we would go to Kashmir as children every summer because Kashmir was India’s playground. It is where Indians went on holiday in the hot season to see such magic realist things as snow and to experience such magic realist things as cold. So, for me, it was this enchanted childhood space. But when I went on going there as a grown up I slowly watched its ruin. Now it is in very bad shape.

CB: There are, as you say, all kinds of pressures that are tearing Kashmir apart, most especially the tension between India and Pakistan both of which lay claim to it?

SR: Yes. When the partition took place between India and Pakistan it was based around the Punjab, in the west, and Bengal, in the east. States which had frontiers in common with those areas were allowed to choose which way they wanted to go. The problem of Kashmir was that it had a largely Muslim population with a Hindu ruler and there were only five million people, not a lot. It looks quite big on the map but almost all of it is mountains and impassable. The Hindu ruler completely panicked at the independence of India and would not make up his mind. He dithered in the most spectacular way. In the end the Pakistanis tried to force his hand by sending over the border irregular forces, not in uniform, tribal warriors probably containing large numbers of Pakistani army soldiers in plain clothes. This irregular army came across the border to invade Kashmir and the Maharajah reacted, as Maharajahs will, by running away. He left behind this difficult situation.

The Kashmiri political leaders of the time turned to the Indian army and asked it to come in to defend them against these marauding tribe. That took place in l947, the first battle for Kashmir. As a result Pakistan got hold of essentially the northern one third of the province and India held on to the southern two thirds of the province, including the main valley of Kashmir. Thus was created this thing which was in those days called the Ceasefire Line and is now called the Line of Control. So you have this partition valley. Ever since then you have these huge armies staring at each other across this Ceasefire Line.

There have been two further wars fought over it. Now both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. The last Kashmir dispute came very close to a nuclear exchange and yet the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn. Then it was further complicated, in the last fifteen years, by the arrival, in the Pakistan section, of Jihadist terror groups tolerated by, and in some cases set up and trained by, the Pakistanis in Al-Qaeda training camps. The Pakistani General responsible for this was President Musharraf. So that complicates it. Now you have terrorists coming across the border for whom Kashmiris are not Muslim enough and who get beaten up a lot so that they can be more Muslim than they are in the habit of being. So there you are: terrorists from Pakistan and the oppression of the Indian army, which came to protect but has stayed to harass and occupy and terrify people. It is a mess.

CB: Despite the centrality of Kashmir it seems a story of paradise lost, of lost innocence, on a much broader scale.

SR: Yes. Kashmir is Kashmir but it also plays a metaphorical role in the story. I do think we live in an age beyond innocence. It is hard to have a wide-eyed view of the world as beautiful. Those things that we thought were beautiful in the world have in many senses been despoiled, and I am not just talking about places but also ideas. It is very difficult, therefore, not to write about this moment in the history of the world as a tragedy. It feels like a tragedy. But my inclination being what it is, I try and disguise the tragedy as a comedy and that works for most of the book, but then there is a moment when the tragedy bursts out of the comedy because it is as if the story is saying to you, ‘Okay, it is not funny any more,’ because you get to a point which is beyond comedy and I hope that what that does is to increase the shock of that moment. If you have been living in a world which might be full of horrible things but they are described to you as black comedy, then that is palatable in a certain way, but if at a certain point the smile is wiped off your face it becomes slightly stark. I hope that that increases the shock at what happened.

CB: Yes, as it does for Shalimar the Clown who begins as an innocent, as a performer, and ends up as a murderer, or, indeed, your American ambassador who starts fighting against fascism and turns into something quite different.

SR: I am always interested in characters who change a lot. I have always been attracted to write about characters who don’t stay the same all their lives but who shift. I think it is partly because what we know about human personality these days, as opposed to what Jane Austen knew or what Dickens knew, is that human personality is not homogeneous. It is actually very mutable. Even without anything awful happening to us we are very different in very different circumstances. We can be very different when we are young to how we are when we are old. We can be different with our loved ones to the way we are with our fellow workers. We can be different with people of our own race than we are with people of another race. We are a shifting bunch of responses and selves, some of which contradict each other. So it has always interested me to explore that. How much can a personality shift?

In the case of Shalimar the Clown, who starts out as this rather sweet boy about whom people say that he wouldn’t hurt a fly, that change is obviously very great and it became a challenge to show that that was possible, that in a single human life it is truthful to say that such a change can take place. I remembered, when I was writing the book, that years ago I had met the film maker Bernardo Bertolucci the day before he was flying to China to make what became The Last Emperor. I asked him what the movie was about and he said it is about this boy who is told he is God. He is not told that he is like God or God’s representative, he is told he is God and he is brought up believing himself to be God. But at the other end of his life he works as a gardener in the palace in which he was formerly God and he says that he is happy and content with the change. And what Bertolucci said was that he was interested in whether a human being could change that much. Was that brainwashing or was it a genuine shift in consciousness? And I remember thinking that that was a really interesting subject. In some ways that is not the film he made, because it got taken over by more epic dimensions, but I thought that that psychological subject was fascinating.

CB: In the case of Shalimar it is not ideology that changes him, it is a sexual betrayal.

SR: It is a sexual betrayal, but it is also to do with honour. Yes, I think the thing that triggers it is, as I said, the fact that his wife breaks his heart by running away with this man of great power and charisma. Everybody, except she, can tell that it is going to end in tears, and so it does, but before it does it doesn’t just break his heart. It damages him in, if you like, his manhood. There is a scene in the novel which I think of as one of the key scenes. After she has gone off he meets his mother on a village pathway and bursts into this tirade about how she is lucky she is not a man because a man has to suffer this, and has to put up with that, has to respond to this or his honour is destroyed. A man must do this and cannot do that. It is as if he is trying to put back together his sense of himself, his un-emasculated sense of himself as a man, and I think it is something to do with that, not just with the fact that she runs off. It is something to do with that honour issue that makes him pick up the gun. But it is not ideology, you are right.

Writers in Conversation Volume 4

CB: And there is a connection between the personal and the public. In fact they are not quite opposite. They bleed into one another.

SR: Yes. Those of us who are old enough to remember the sixties have always known this, that there is no frontier line between the personal and the political. I think nowadays less than ever. Jane Austen could write about the private lives of her people without needing to refer to the public stage. Now I think that gap is so small, and the public world impinges on our private life so often and so directly and in so many ways, that for a novelist it is hard to leave it out. It is not because one wants to write political novels, but because it is a part of the explanation of what happens to people in their lives and it seems to me a wrong decision to ignore that. It doesn’t even have to be violence or terrorism. If, let’s say, you live in a country with a weak economy and some currency speculator attacks the currency and the currency collapses, you may very well, as a consequence of that, lose your job because your firm collapses and you are fired. The thing that has made that happen is an action by a person whose name you don’t know performing that action in a room whose existence you are unaware off, and yet it changes your life. This has great implications for the idea of character being destiny, and probably at the root of the novel is the idea that character is destiny.

At the very foundation of the novel as a form is the idea that people determine the things that happen to them and the life they lead. And now it seems to me there are many ways, very dramatic ways, in which that is not true. To an extent it was always not true. There were always wars and accidents, and so on, but sometimes character can be shaped by destiny rather than the other way around. But that question – the question of the relationship between the individual and history, the question of the individual and the society in which he lives, which is after all an old novelistic question – seems to me has an extra edge right now because of the world we live in.

CB: That came home to me very powerfully in the book. You used the word frontier before. This novel moves from France to Kashmir to Los Angeles. It moves in time, and as it does all those frontiers dissolve in some way. You can’t stand outside this system and be disconnected from it and, as you say, that in turn raises the question of whether we are the victims of history or whether we are the motor force of history.

SR: Saleem, in Midnight’s Children, asks himself this question about whether we are masters or victims of our time and I guess I have been worrying away at it ever since. I now think that this question of interconnectedness is again a new thing. Human history hasn’t in the past been quite as interconnected as for various reasons it now is. The subject of the shrinking planet is not one that I invented. It is partly because of economic globalisation, partly because of mass migration, partly because of new information technologies, partly because of things like globalised terrorism. We suddenly live in a world in which one bit of it smashes into another all the time. In our cities we see the stories of many other parts of the world jostling with each other. The realistic novel is the novel which tries to take into account this interconnectedness and to understand what it means to live in such a world. Alsace is in the novel partly because Max, the American ambassador, comes from there, but also because in a strange way it balances Kashmir. Alsace, in a way, is Europe’s Kashmir, another place where people have fought over a frontier and where France and Germany have battled backwards and forwards, most recently and tragically in the Nazi period.

CB: And why did you give Max the name he has?

SR: My view is that very few people remembered the name of Max Ophüls, the film maker, until I used him as the name of the character. I think I have done him an enormous favour, but actually I am slightly irritated with myself that I did it because now I am having to explain it a lot. The truthful reason is that I wasn’t planning to call him that but I wanted a Franco-German-Jewish name because of his background and I remember writing down in my notebook something like Max Ophüls. Then every time I tried to change the name the character would not accept it, didn’t like it, and insisted on being Max Ophuls. So, in the end, I thought okay, people are called all kinds of things and there is going to have to be another Max Ophuls. Then I went through a whole process of self-justification and I had many, many, justifications. For example, Max Ophüls, the film director, wasn’t called Max Ophüls. It wasn’t his name. That was a name he took. He was really called Max Oppenheimer, and I thought if he had used that as a stage name I could pinch it back. Then I thought, this is a novel about the betrayal of love and one of the film-makers greatest films is Lola Montez, which is a film about the betrayal of love. So that is another reason. Then I thought this is a novel in which everybody is miserable about their name. All the characters hate their names for various reasons. It is a kind of running gag in the book. Everybody wants to change their name except Max who is perfectly happy with his though it is not his name. Then Max, in the Resistance, is a forger, forging identities to help people escape the Nazis. The fact that he himself has stolen a name from somebody else seemed not inappropriate, so it just went on and on like this.

Actually, the clincher for me was remembering that in my young days in advertising I had once met a man who was a PR man for a mattress company whose name was William Shakespeare, and he was very proud of it and fierce about it. He would answer the phone, through gritted teeth I suspect, and say, ‘Hello, William Shakespeare here.’ He didn’t call himself Bill Shakespeare or Billy Shakespeare, he called himself William Shakespeare, and I thought if there can be two William Shakespeares, that’s it. None of those are the reason. The reason is that the name got stuck and I couldn’t change it.

CB: How do you respond to those critics who have called Shalimar the Clown a return to form?

SR: You can imagine how I feel about that. It is very odd to me this business of giving retrospective bad reviews to previous books, books that were perfectly well reviewed at the time. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, for instance, was a book which got, I would say, ninety per cent terrific reviews and now in many of the newspapers where it was highly praised people say that it was a terrible novel. Excuse me for not agreeing. In the case of Fury, people really seemed to not go for it, in the critical fraternity at least, but that is not my experience amongst ordinary readers as I travel around lecturing and reading. I very often get people coming up to me, particularly younger readers, saying that they think it is one of the absolute favourite books of mine that they have read. I also find that it is enormously well liked amongst other writers, even writers I don’t particularly know, like Joyce Carol Oates. It seems to be very well liked in the academy. People studying my work seem to have a good regard for it. So it seems to me that of the various categories that there are of people who read books, ordinary readers, academics, other writers and book critics, it seems to be just one out of four that don’t like it. That is aright.

I never thought that I lost form particularly. On the other hand it felt very unusual writing this book, to tell you the truth. When I wrote it I did things I had never done. I showed people the book while I was writing it, which I have never done before. The reason I had never done it before is that I have always been very insecure to show unfinished work because I have felt that work in progress is very, very, fragile, that if people just say slightly the wrong thing it can really knock you for six and it can be difficult to regain your sense of what you are doing. So I have always hugged it to myself until I felt that it was more or less done. This time I felt able to show the book, a hundred pages at a time, to four or five friends and publishers. I don’t know why I did it. I just did it because this time I didn’t mind doing it and I think it might have been because I felt okay about it. I felt that there was something that was quite solid there and I wasn’t scared that I was going to be deflected from my work by people not liking it. In fact people did like it, so I do think there was something unusual in the writing of this book. I can’t really pin it down better than that.

I don’t myself give my books marks out of ten so I don’t have a view about which of my books is better. I know that the writing process of this one felt unusually safe. It felt as if there were these four characters at the heart of the book that were strong and solid and that if I just paid attention to them properly the book would write itself. So I don’t know what that means, whether that means it is a return to form or a better book or what, but I did feel unusually on safe ground writing it.

But there is no accounting for people’s responses. It reminds me of one of the very first encounters with audiences I ever had, which was in New Delhi, at the university, just after Midnight’s Children came out. There was a young woman reader, extremely beautiful I may say, who put up her hand, and so I immediately chose her. She said, ‘You see, Mr. Rushdie, your novel, Midnight’s Children, is very long. Does it have a point?’ I said, ‘Does it have to have just one point?’ And she said, ‘Well, fundamentally, yes.’ I opened my mouth to answer and she said, ‘I know what you are going to say. You are going to say the whole novel from the first page to the last page, that’s your point.’ I said, ‘Actually, yes, something like that.’ She said, ‘Well it won’t do.’

So what can I say? What was fundamentally my point? One of the points is the question of the relationship between history and memory. When I started writing the book I probably had a more Proustian idea of what I was doing, which I later abandoned, because I had this desire to go beyond memory in search of lost time, to try and bring the past back as if it had not gone away, which is the project of Proust. At a certain point, though, I came to think that that really wasn’t what I was interested in and that actually the distorting power of memory and its relationship to the facts was much more interesting because the truth is that when we remember our lives we all remember them incorrectly. That difference between memory and event fades away, particularly in private life when other people are not there. The way we remember our parents, after they are dead, is just something that lives in our minds. We may be wrong about the way we remember them but that is what we have. And so I began to think a lot about that.

The novel is not an objective history. Midnight’s Children is about somebody remembering his life and the events that happen in his life. In some cases there are some quite deliberate errors of memory which he clings to. I remember, for instance, when I was planning the book I was thinking about the period in the sixties when India went to war with China briefly, and I remember thinking how frightened everybody had been when the Chinese army defeated the Indian army on the high Himalayan slopes. I remembered people talking about the probability of China invading north India and capturing Delhi and how we would all be in the new Chinese empire. I remember people saying that they had better go and get Teach Yourself Chinese books because you would need them soon. I remembered all this stuff. Then, when I was talking to my parents about it, my mother said, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about because you weren’t here.’ I said, ‘What do you mean I wasn’t here?’ And she said, ‘No, you were at boarding school in England when this happened.’ We looked at all the dates and she was quite right. It was school term and I was in Warwickshire, not in Bombay, and yet in spite of the fact that it was proved to me beyond any doubt that I had not been in India at the time my memory refused to give up the truth of what it had remembered.

I thought this was an interesting thing, that when we are faced with the choice between memory and fact we always prefer memory and I thought therefore that would become the policy of the book, that Saleem would tell his story as he remembered it and where his memory differed from the objective facts of the time, he would say, ‘To hell with that’ and prefer his memory. So it became a novel about the battle between memory and fact. In some places in the book that took on a political dimension because, of course, one of the things that has happened in India, as elsewhere, is that people of power tried to falsify the record and memory can then sometimes become a witness. To give just one example, in the struggle for Bangladesh the Pakistan army committed terrible atrocities. There was genocide, there was mass killing of intellectuals, for example, trades union offices set on fire with people inside etc. There was a whole list of atrocities. I am not merely making them up. They were a matter of record at the time. There is photographic evidence of this, reportage, eye witnesses, etc. and yet ever since then, l971, the official Pakistan line has been to deny that any of this ever happened and that it is an Indian conspiracy to say that it did. Then you find yourself in a position where you confront this with what you remember as having happened. What you are doing is setting your memory up against a version of history, against official history. That is one of the things I was trying to do. It was one of my “points.”

Extract from Writers in Conversation Volume 4, Published in 2011 by Unthank Books.

Either way, the best stuff surely happens when the writer is held to ransom, and a good test of whether or not you’re writing the right thing is whether or not you could give it up even if you wanted to. It should be there when you close your eyes. If the finished article is going to be any good, and if you’re going to have the patience required to finish it properly, then it has to spring from an idea that grips you so firmly that you don’t have a choice in the matter. You don’t have your ideas – your ideas have you. It’s that oft-cited Nabokovian ‘throb’ – an irresistible pull towards somewhere you know, or feel, that there is gold.

It might help to think of yourself as a navigator. You’re finding your way around, just like the reader. The difference is that you’re the first one in, which means that you’re the one who has to write it all down. The talent is in how you listen. And this should be a comfort for at least two reasons. First, it means that you shouldn’t worry about losing ideas: if an idea wants you badly enough then it will keep coming back to bite. Second, it means you can improve. You’re not a god – you’re a hostage. If a negative reaction stings because you sense it might be justified, then you can berate yourself for nothing more than being a bad listener, and try to fail better next time around. (On the other hand, of course, if you are positively received, then remember that all you did was to be stubborn and to listen prudently, and don’t let it go to your head.)

One skill you can’t really do without, then, is that of being able to recognise a good idea. Assuming you are listening well, you will know soon enough if something isn’t going to fly. If you can’t shake it, and nothing can stop you wanting to get it down, and to worry away at it until it becomes something you can live with, then you have a dogged imagination, and it’s probably going to be okay. Then all you need are the guts to start again if it doesn’t come out right the first time. To escape the clichés of the imagination – the received ideas and the worn narrative ruts. To keep going until it’s good – or at least, until it isn’t bad.

The thrill of imaginative writing, whether your goal is to test the limits of language or to reach fine kernels of emotional truth, whether your lodestars are image and symbol or character and story, is that it is happening all the time. You walk around in the real world, interacting with it if necessary, while its counterpart is secretly nurtured. The constant, quiet machinery of this process affords a warm, clandestine thrill. And then there’s the exhilaration of smuggling from one world to the other: of seeing or hearing something that seems to have escaped from your imagination and must be repatriated with all speed.

You often read about writers having special notebooks or pens they like to use. For what it’s worth, my advice would be to fetishise the sentences, not the paper. Chew them over. Take off somewhere quiet to spy on them. Regard them in different lights, from different angles. Shine a torch on them in the middle of the night. Squint at them when you’re hung over. Scribble them on the backs of envelopes, then live with them for a while. Keep the original envelope in case that version was the best one (as it so often is).

And retain at all times your trust in the idea that is leading you, even if you can’t really define it. Take Kundera’s view that ‘if the novel is successful it must necessarily be wiser than its author’, and be reassured that you may not know the answer to the question, What am I writing about? until quite late in the process.

However early that question is answered, it should not be the starting point. You can always tell when it was, because the result, however well engineered, will have the dry whiff of contrivance. It will be writing that bellows what it is about, because it will result from the pursuit of what someone once thought was clever, and not from the stubborn refusal of an idea to go away. Think of the old explanation as to why a cathedral was less beautiful than the Alhambra – that while the former looks as if it is desperately struggling up towards the heavens, the latter seems to have been conferred on the world from above.

The dogged imagination, which is really just an attempt to describe elegantly a kind of stubborn, creative monomania, should keep you topped up with another crucial ingredient, which is confidence. You need to be able to ride out those moments when it feels like an obscure, minority pursuit, get over them, and see every thinking non-reader as an opportunity. Of course, if you have the kind of temperament I’m talking about, none of this will matter much to you, since you’ll have no choice but to do it anyway. Because as I said at the top, one statement you can trust is that you have to want to do it more than anything else in the world.

–

Extracted from Body of Work: 40 Years of Creative Writing at UEA (Full Circle, £28).

In the year I began the book, I was living in Dublin and suffering from breathing difficulties – a sense that I could not take a deep breath, could not fully open my lungs. I was sent to the hospital for tests. I blew into tubes. They X-rayed me. They put me in a capsule like an old-fashioned bubble car and tested me for allergies. I didn’t react. I was well.

Go home, they said, and try to relax. Had I been overdoing it recently?

I said I was trying to start a novel.

That’ll be it, they said. Half the city was trying to start a novel – a novel or a collection of poetry. In Dublin hospitals, breathing difficulty brought on by the birth pangs of creative enterprise is an acceptable and probably common diagnosis. But I’d started novels before (and finished them) and had felt fine. I wanted a second opinion and found a Chinese clinic where a professor from Beijing, a chain-smoker without the least command of English, drilled me with little pins – including one between my eyes – leaving me recumbent on the couch while he went into the corridor to top up his nicotine levels.

The clinic was makeshift: three cubicles with thin board walls that stopped a foot below the ceiling. Whether I liked it or not – and I liked it – I was privy to the confessions of my fellow patients, who, through the interpreter, told the professor the story of their bodies, their quest for wellness, their dark misgivings. It was an ideal situation for a novelist: pinned to a couch, listening to the secrets of strangers. It became half the reason for going there and reminded me of something I already knew, but often forget. That everywhere there are possibilities.

The pins seemed to help, the pins and the tea I had to brew twice a day, a bog-brown infusion of such astonishing bitterness I could only swallow it by lining my mouth with honey.

It wasn’t just me, though. There seemed to be an epidemic of breathlessness. Half my friends – not writers at all, but regular people, social workers, computer programmers, doctors for Christ’s sake – carried little inhalers in their pockets. Oxygen levels in the cities are slipping. Oxygen bars are opening in fashionable malls in America. And lack of oxygen (ischemia) is what kills us all.

I kept drinking the tea. I wrote about people who struggled for breath. I think I sometimes wrote whole paragraphs without breathing, as though swimming the length of a pool underwater.

Then I left Dublin, that rainy, melancholy city, and moved for a time to Paris, because if writing is about anxiety it is also about promises you make to yourself at the beginning of it all. To be a writer in Paris! There – the city of light – the book was lost and found again (every book has a point of crisis it must survive, a moment when it appears impossible).

The last quarter of Oxygen was written in England. I was temporarily homeless. I stayed with my parents in Bath and set up a little writing space, like a priest’s hole, at the end of the garage. I wrote among bunches of dried flowers, bags of golf clubs, boxes of wine. I was already overdue on the delivery. It was winter. There were patterns of frost on the window. One by one my characters arrived at their appointed places. On the last day I wrote for nine hours, pressed save, sat back and breathed in from my teeth to my toes.

Two and a half years sweating over a book! Elaborate cure.

Extracted from Body of Work: 40 Years of Creative Writing at UEA (Full Circle, £28).