Which of your books was the most difficult to write? Could you perhaps describe a little about the difficulties you encountered?

They’re all difficult – just damn hard, trying to get it down and then keep it right and honour the best you’ve got in relation to the subject. But I had especial difficulty with Personality because it was a multi-voiced novel, each chapter given over to a different voice, and writing that book really caused me to grow up as a writer. Just controlling the levels of revelation and concealment in the voices was an overwhelming job of work and I learned a lot by doing it. In that way, writing is like most sports: you learn the secrets of technique by struggling to apply them. Your own style is, in a way, the sum of your negotiation with technique: you hear the pulse of your own sort of precision under the pressure of events. The thing all writers know is that you have to write some books in order to get to other books: after Personality, I felt two decades of work opening up to me.

Which of your books did you most enjoy writing?

The one I’m working on now, which is the standard answer, but bleakly honest in this case. It’s a sunny day when you wake up and realise you’re writing a book that nobody else could write and it’s your job to finish it. This one somehow has all the elements – all the proteins, all the signature – and settling down and forgetting that and just writing with full lungs is the purest form of pain and joy known to man.

What is it about this one that makes you say it has ‘all the proteins’? And what do you mean by that?

I mean the book has a sensibility that is happily married to the language that expresses it. The building blocks of the novel’s life are ample, they are fully active, they know how to partner each other and the life they constitute is new. That is not a judgement on its value as a book by the way, just a feeling on the part of its maker that the book is happening just as it ought to happen. It doesn’t mean other people will like it. In my view, a novel is not a novel until its character begins to seem almost pre-existent – the great books do not seem like conjurings from one person’s imagination so much as entities that have always existed in the world. There’s a certain solidity and a certain inevitability about their being. A lucky writer might only get that feeling three or four times in a whole career, and they often get it with books that initially seem unlike their other work. In actual fact, such books often bring their other work to a new point of development. I’m describing the progress of talent in a novelist: when you know you have something utterly specific and utterly fresh in your hands, you have to obey the ideas, obey the prose, forget your reputation, ignore your audience, and banish the critics: your job is to get on and build it. I believe a good novelist could write about anything – but that is only true so far as the novelist’s mentality allows it to be true.

What is your writing routine?

I write fiction and research all morning. Then by 1pm, that’s enough. I spend the afternoons working on essays or doing all the stuff that writers do – interviews, lectures, home decoration. In the evenings, if I’m home, I’ll continue with reading or with the non-fiction tasks and pick up fiction again in the morning.

What do you do when you procrastinate? Or, if you don’t procrastinate, what do you do when you’re taking a break?

One of the genuine advantages of having an essay-writing arm is that it gives both a direction and a purpose to your procrastination. If I’m not writing fiction, I have work to do as a writer, and that has become crucial to me. It means I may not be playing in the U.S. Open but I am down the court every day swinging my bat. But of course there are times when even that fails to happen, and on such days I go shopping for antiques or cook. I also watch box sets of American TV shows, which were surely invented for this very purpose.

What do you enjoy most about your life as a writer?

I enjoy the fun of trying to get it right, as William Maxwell once said.

4

  

Copyright 2008 Disclaimer