Category Archives: Non-fiction

Why Write Novels?

Writing is like drinking beer: at first you don’t like it but it feels grown up; then you enjoy it, but you’re not very good at it; last of all, you stop enjoying it, but by that point it’s the thing you’re best at, so you decide to stick with it.

I can’t say when or why I started writing. The truth is that I have always done it. I wrote before I had any interest in why I wrote or what its purpose might be. I felt instinctively that words were the only way to arrange a thought, and arranging my thoughts became a kind of game. It is a compulsion, which, since I am doing it anyway, I may as well use to understand and resolve the world around me. At a certain point I decided that I wanted to write for other people, to tell them stories, arrange their thoughts. When I did that, writing became a little less about me, but there is still a paradox at the heart of it: I have to think I am writing something that is worth other people’s time.

It is like the paradox of the Buddhist monk: you have to be selfish enough to choose the path of selflessness, to renounce your responsibilities to your family, to beg food of others. Your goal is to shrink your ego so far that it disappears altogether. If you can do that, you will finally be able to look clearly at the world around you, and see things as they truly are, without attachment. As Christopher Isherwood famously put it, ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ Why did you choose this path? Well, a little part of you secretly believes that you might be really good at this selflessness, and with a little bit of practice, you could destroy the competition to become the most selfless person in the world. The only way to become a good writer is to throw away that part of you, the part that is proud and hates being edited, that feels stung by a bad review, or even pleased with a good one, the part of you that wanted to become a writer in the first place.

When writers write about writing, there is a common idea that they are doing so for posterity. Some of us have a romantic idea of writing as a kind of continuance, a way of persisting in the world after you die. Books become the children of a mind, living on in the world after their parent is gone. My novel is lodged with the copyright libraries, my name on record. Yet there are 14 million books in the British Library. How many of them have you read? Are they preserved for the readers, or for the writers? A library like this is a vast mausoleum of thoughts, the older names fading from view like weathered headstones. And it is an uncomfortable admission for a writer, but many ideas fade more quickly than people do. I recently ordered up a book published in 1976, and it still had the return card lodged in the front from its previous borrower in 1988.

So if I accept that my writing is not about me – that the part tied up with my ego is not going to last very well whichever way you look at it – it becomes about the story itself and what it can do in the present. This is where I think novels get interesting, because novels are not like other media. What they offer us is unique and peculiar. It is not threatened by TV and film and the internet. Perhaps, in time, it will be threatened by games and virtual reality, but we’re not there yet.

Because a novel makes humans out of us. Like other media, the novel shows us people who don’t share our life experience, but it goes further: it forces us to imagine what it is like to be them. Reading novels, I imagine what it must be like to be someone else: young, old, an outsider, deaf, gay, female, religious. Novels help me to see – and not just see, but feel – how different life is across decades or on the other side of the world. And spanning all that difference, we are united by our shared needs for love, purpose, dignity and food.

Everybody loves food. I used to work in an office where free fruit got delivered every week to keep us healthy so we could come to work. There was tonnes of the stuff – definitely enough to go around. But every Monday morning, people rushed in, grabbing kiwis and bananas, grapes and plums, stockpiling it on their desks. Each precious pile was probably worth about a pound. Anyone who wasn’t on the ball found themselves outside the fruit melee, clutching nothing, or worse, stuck with those weird brown grapes at the bottom of the punnet. As soon as it was over, for the rest of the week, my colleagues were friendly, generous and kind.

Why does this tragedy of the commons happen? Perhaps we are not selfish, but we worry that other people will be, and we don’t want to end up being the one nice person in a pit of thieves. Perhaps we feel that some others are not like us, can’t understand us, don’t have the same needs as we do or, perhaps, in less generous moments, that our concerns are really more important. Perhaps we are generous within a circle of trusted others, which shrinks according to our fears about resources. Once there is enough for us, we can think about our family, then our town, our region or country, Europe, all people. Conversely, every time we exclude people, our world becomes simpler, safer, smaller, more secure. It’s certainly tempting.

But then you read a novel. It doesn’t have a headline, it doesn’t shout loud, but it stays with you in your bag and by your bed, insistent and persuasive. In the shouting match of modern media, the novel is a fireside chat, a weekend away in the country. Under its influence, you start to look at what’s in front of you for what seems like the first time in a month. You remember that you live in a world that spins at the end of every day to face the stars, a planet with a vast, crashing sea, a carpet of plants, creatures with wings and scales and webs and tentacles. The novel puts its hand on your shoulder and whispers, you are alive. And when you see those you love, you find yourself talking to them about things that have been bothering you for a while, listening to their dreams for the future, and when you get back into bed, the novel whispers, here you are.

A novel is pretty much the only chance that I get to speak to a stranger without interruption for ten hours. To arrange a few thoughts with them. It’s a fantastical, terrifying opportunity. What would you say? Perhaps you are afraid they will walk away, so you focus on holding their attention. Perhaps you want to make a point about politics or society. That’s your prerogative. Maybe your priority is to show them that, if things always seem to go wrong, at least they get better in the end. For me, I think the most important thing is to reach out, to lend my hand like Larkin’s old toad. If I could impress one thought on a stranger, I would tell them that all of us feel at times like we are struggling through life alone, but even in experiencing that feeling, we’re not alone.

Every novel is a confidence trick. It promises to show you how different we are. The blurb says: you don’t know what it’s like to be a detective in forties America, a Russian aristocrat in the Napoleonic wars, a wizard in a boarding school, a murderer with a psychology degree, a spy spying on spies, a traveller from an antique land. And it hooks you in because you think you don’t know what’s going to happen. But by the time you get halfway through, there is a subtle turn. You know this person. You recognise their conflicts, their choices. And it dawns on you. This isn’t a book about them at all. It is a book about you.

I sometimes read this piece as a talk at events and workshops. It is based on a blog post I wrote for the ‘Why I write’ series on the Faber Academy blog. 

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. 

The Pixar Guide to Wellbeing

On its release in America, Inside Out had the biggest opening weekend for any original film in box office history, sailing easily past Avatar’s $77m to an incredible $91m. It’s already Pixar’s eighth consecutive film to have taken over $500m worldwide, and we’ve only just had the opening weekend here in the UK, where it took £7.35m. If some were beginning to worry that the studio had gone the way of Disney, following five years of prequels, sequels and the critically mixed reception to their fairy tale, Brave, this new film has proven that Pixar is still capable of the funny, surprising and layered storytelling that made its name. But the secret ingredient of this film’s success? Sadness.

Inside Out follows 11-year-old Riley and the five emotions – joy, fear, anger, disgust and sadness – that live in the control room of her head. When Riley’s family moves away from her childhood home in Minnesota to San Francisco, she loses sight of the core memories that tell her who she is, prompting Joy and Sadness to go on a journey deep into her mind to get them back. The topography grates: having to catch the Train of Thought home because Honesty Island has crumbled sounds like the worst allegory since Pilgrim’s Progress, if you think about it too hard. But as Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder and president, wrote in his book Creativity Inc., ‘If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better,’ and in the hands of Pixar’s story artists, the landscape of Riley’s mind becomes the battleground for a new way of looking at wellbeing.

It’s one of Pixar’s funniest films, the jokes coming thick and fast throughout the film (‘There’s inductive reasoning, there’s déjà vu, there’s language processing, there’s déjà vu, there’s critical thinking, there’s déjà vu…’). Perhaps the best gag is watching the maintenance workers hoover up long term memories like phone numbers (‘We don’t need these! They’re in her phone’), leaving only the names of a couple of US presidents and the ditty to a chewing gum advert.

Riley’s main problems – growing up, and moving away from her childhood home – are identical to those of Pixar’s first feature film, Toy Story. In the latter, Andy’s fear and distress is played out by the toys, the whole story enacting the kind of imaginary play we might expect to see in a child’s psychological evaluation, with Woody and Buzz vying as male role models (the implication being that the family is downsizing following a divorce). When Inside Out treats the same topic, the adventure is the emotional journey itself: will Joy reign over Riley’s head once again?

Up to now, Joy has called the shots in Riley’s mental HQ, and she keeps life on track by being relentlessly positive, looking for the bright side in everything and telling the others to ‘think positive’. When Sadness starts to intrude on the controls, Joy’s response is to draw a chalk circle on the ground and tell her to stand inside it. But when things go really wrong for Riley, it’s not because Sadness has taken the helm and won’t let go. Instead, the colour drains out of the console, and it stops responding to any of the emotions. As sufferers of depression attest, the problem is not overwhelming feeling but the inability to feel.

Inside Out SadnessThis is where Sadness comes in. When we get a glimpse into Riley’s mother’s head at the dinner table, we can see her own Sadness is in charge of operations, and that’s why, even though yellow Joy is generally in charge of Riley’s HQ, she has Sadness’s blue hair and aura. Perhaps worried that Riley might take after her, Riley’s mother wants her to be a ‘happy girl’, but as things go from bad to worse, the pressure to be happy begins to seem like the real problem. Indeed, recent studies by social psychologist Dr Brock Bastian and others confirm that negativity is often our most useful companion when times are tough – it helps us anticipate problems, find solutions and empathise with others when things are going badly. It’s not negative emotions that are bad for us, but the suppression of them, especially when they are healthy, functional responses to difficult situations.

Pixar have never shied away from presenting everything that life can throw at you. Perhaps the most famous example is in the montage of Carl and Ellie’s life together at the start of Up, which, taken alone, stands as perhaps the greatest short film of all time, not just for its miracle of condensation, but for the emotional impact of their childlessness, which has reduced audiences of all ages to tears. (Careful viewers may even spot scenes from this sequence in the great bowling-ball alleys of Riley’s long term memory.) Equally, on the death of Riley’s imaginary friend, who sacrifices himself to save Joy, the cinema erupted with the sound of children crying, which is just as well because I think a number of the adults were sniffing too. The whole audience left the cinema elated.

In this latest film, Pixar are not just putting us through the mill. They’re showing us that, somewhat paradoxically, the way to be really happy is to experience a whole range of emotions. When Riley is born, there is only Joy, standing in front of a laughter button, but as Riley grows older, she is joined by Anger, Disgust, Fear and Sadness. When life gets really tough, Sadness is not the antagonist she first appears, but the unsung hero. That’s the real lesson: Joy might be fun to hang around, but wellbeing is a team effort.

Article first published by Prospect Magazine.