Category Archives: On Writing

Growing up

When you’re a child, people tell you the most important thing is to be good and not get in trouble. If they’re feeling expansive, they mumble something about homework. As far as everyone tells you, those are the two important things in life: morality and homework. They also tell you to enjoy it while it lasts! That’s when you know they are crazy. Quite naturally, you are waiting out your childhood until that glorious day when you can get in your car, drive to the casino, order a beer, win thousands of pounds and then have sex. Because, based on all the evidence, that is what adulthood is like.

And then you get to adulthood, and it turns out there were quite a lot of things no one mentioned because they didn’t want to worry you. For instance: you have to get a job that will almost definitely be a variation on data entry. And: summer holidays aren’t a thing. Or: your mum is desperately unwell. Or: the family home is being repossessed. All the other adults chuckle and pat you on the back. Congratulations! Everything is depressing! Isn’t it funny how we didn’t tell you? Also, you are being made redundant.

I wondered what would happen to a character who didn’t quietly accept his lot in life – who kept hold of some of that childish optimism most of us leave behind. Someone whose job allowed them to meet people from all walks of life, who saw beauty everywhere and who really tried to be good, not just in principle, but all the time. What would happen if you dropped him in the middle of twenty-first century London? What if his boss was racist? What if his live-in landlord was an agoraphobic philosopher who still didn’t know about the internet? (I will admit, that last one wasn’t strictly necessary, but I have had some very weird landlords, and that’s exactly the sort of thing that never makes it into books.)

Mainly, I wrote Glass to explore how we can still be good people in a world that requires us to compromise, because, for me, that is what it really means to grow up.

First published on the W H Smith blog for Fresh Talent, Spring 2016. 

Writing Tips

1. Do you find it important to have some kind of schedule for writing – a structure or routine?

I try to write a little and often, so my only routine is that I always have something I can write on. I have notebooks by my bed, in my bag and in my coat, apps that sync with my laptop so I can write on my phone, pens secreted in all my jeans so I can write on the back of receipts and on napkins. I write in the little gaps that open up before or after sleep. It is good to keep at least one friend who is chronically late to meet you.

2. Is what you write about based mainly on your own experiences or mostly invention?

Good writing has to be based on careful observation of the world around you – what the critic James Wood calls ‘serious noticing’. I don’t think anyone would be interested to read about my life, which has been pretty unexceptional, so for me crafting a good story is about using tiny bricks of real experience, memory and emotion to build something interesting and unfamiliar.

3. Where do you find is the most advantageous place to work?

My favourite places to write are where there is a little white noise. I find the silence of libraries too conspicuous – I spend the whole time waiting for someone to cough. The best places are trains, or cafes where everyone is speaking a language I don’t understand.

4. Do you test out your work on family and friends, or just your editor?

I show work in progress to some of my family and friends in the way that a cat drops a mouse at the back door, but I only ask for editorial guidance from my editor and agent, and a couple of other friends who write themselves.

5. If you were to give an aspiring author one piece of advice for getting their work published, what would it be?

Make it as good as you possibly can, because a novel is a cumulative achievement. Editing is not a compromise, it is the only way to bring the text closer to the perfect version in your head.

First published by the Reading Agency, alongside tips from the other writers on the Desmond Elliott Prize longlist: Carys Bray, Jessie Burton, Claire Fuller, Jonathan Gibbs, James Hannah, Emma Healey, Paul Kingsnorth, Laline Paull and Simon Wroe.

The Philosopher and the Window Cleaner

In my first novel, Glass, my main character strikes up a friendship with his live-in landlord, a man known only as the Steppenwolf. The Steppenwolf is a recluse, who shuts himself away in a cork lined room most days, in the hopes of writing a book which contains all life. He is a philosopher; my main character is a window cleaner.

It might not seem like the most realistic part of the novel, but it is actually inspired by a real life friendship between Marcel Proust and his maid, Céleste Albaret. In the last eight years of his life, Proust never left Paris, preferring instead to shut himself away and work on his great novel, In Search of Lost Time. Céleste was his chauffeur’s wife, and turned out to be the only person who could keep up with Proust’s endless requests. From the moment he woke up at around 4pm, she did everything for him: delivered parcels and flowers, took dictation, changed his linen, prepared his foot bath, disinfected his incoming mail. At his request, she would put lime blossoms and a bottle of Evian by his bed every night. In the eight years she served him, he didn’t drink a single drop.

She recalls in her memoirs, Monsieur Proust, that his room was ‘kept hermetically sealed and daylight never entered.’ He would rarely leave the house, and seemed not to need anyone but Céleste. ‘He had enough in his memory not to need the actual presence of people,’ she writes.

In fact, Prince Antoine Bibesco, one of Proust’s greatest admirers, once wrote that Proust had only really loved two people in the world – his mother and Céleste. They would stay up talking until dawn, and she would indulge him by talking about his writing (she preferred sewing lace). ‘You know, Céleste,’ he told her once, ‘I want my work to be a sort of cathedral in literature. That is why it is never finished… There is always some decoration to add, or a stained-glass window or a capital or another chapel to be opened up.’ That was his aim: to write a book that would last centuries.

In the last seven weeks of Proust’s life, Céleste didn’t sleep in her own bed; she barely slept at all. She cared for him constantly as he worked to finish his novel. In the end he was too weak to continue and entrusted the last amendments to her. With her help, the last volume could finally be finished.

In the week after Proust died, Céleste passed a window display of his books, arranged in threes. She suddenly remembered a passage he’d finished years before, in which the writer Bergotte dies: ‘They buried him, but all night before his funeral, in the lighted windows, his books, set out in threes, kept watch like angels with outspread wings, as if they were, for him who was no more, a symbol of the resurrection.’

First published on the Serpent’s Tail blog.