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I write for a reader, any reader – just one – who is willing to participate on a creative level in the experience of my book. I do not plan my novels, and I think if I ever did I would lose interest in finishing them. Nor do I ever alter the order in which the narrative unfolds. Otherwise, how would I keep track of what my reader knows and doesn’t know? I don’t care about plot. Instead, the aim is to transmogrify experience. What drives me is the music of the sentence. It’s all about a shared energy with the reader. That’s what fires me up.
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It’s a thrill to build up a story and to inhabit characters. I’m alone and not alone – in touch with layers of life I’m not able to savour when I’m living it.
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During the day. I love reverie. It’s underrated. As T.E. Lawrence put it: ‘The dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream, to make it possible. This I did.’
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To find cogency, peace, quiet, and joy; to practise radical attention to the world, to be an activist through words, and to forge solidarity through imagination.
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I wish we had critics reviewing books who weren’t writers or academics but who were simply passionate readers involved in various walks of life. At present, criticism seems a mixed bag. Some reviewers are terrific, others seem to merely describe rather than come to grips adequately with what they are reviewing.
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Many of my dreams have to do with the sea. Sometimes they concern Antarctica, an exciting prelude to going into the interior with other people.
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Why do you write?
It is the one ambition I’ve ever had. Some bleak days I think that my desire to write is no more than an unshakeable habit. On other days I think that writing allows me to have and make other worlds. All the difficulty of writing is in service to this freedom. Also, the habit of writing renews experience: it makes me notice things with a new distance and curiosity, and wonder how they might work in writing; it means that I always have something to think about on the train.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Yes, but my most vivid dreams are nightmares. They make me glad to wake. I miss the dreams of flying that I had when I was growing up.
... (read more)Why do you write?
It’s not really a choice, but a necessity. Usually, it is the pressure of an idea or an emotional state that only seems to be satisfactorily released as words on a page. Sometimes, if there is a choice involved, it is in choosing not to write.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Yes. A lot of my work originates in dream. Glissando began as a transcription of a dream I had longer ago than I care to admit.
... (read more)Why do you write?
To stop time, to figure it all out.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Yes. And prone to sleep talking and singing and, absurdly, trumpet fanfares. As a child I had a recurring dream of flying crocodiles, concluding with the subtitle ‘Christian Television Association’.
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A Confederacy of Dunces always makes me laugh. The book I’ve read the most number of times is a collection of essays about animals and insects called The Red Hourglass, by Gordon Grice.
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