In 1999, Andrew O’Hagan’s first novel, Our Fathers, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Whitbread First Novel award. Since then, O’Hagan has written two more impressive and celebrated novels. Personality was published in 2003 and for this novel he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial prize. In 2006, O’Hagan published Be Near Me, which earned him the Los Angeles Times prize for fiction. In 2003 he was named one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta magazine and, in 2006, he won the E.M Forster award.

As well as writing novels, O’Hagan is an accomplished essayist (the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books) and he’s a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine.

O’Hagan is one of the busiest and most successful writers in the U.K. and he’s also one of the kindest. Although he’s rehearsing a play - based on his novel Be Near Me, promoting his latest book, The Atlantic Ocean: an Essay (2008), and writing his next book, he agreed to do this interview and to take some considerable time to do it well.


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Kurt Vonnegut once published a list of rules for writing fiction. This is what he said:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

He also said, ‘The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.’

What rules or principles would you add to, or subtract from, Vonnegut’s list?

He was very funny, Vonnegut, and part of his funniness was to do with the laughter of recognition. His rules for good writing are entirely bogus – he knew it, too – but they are not un-useful. Rules are just a bunch of things someone adorned into precepts while they were on the way to getting it wrong, but Vonnegut got it right now and then so we’d do well to listen. His points are quite sensible, especially about sentences moving character and action, but I’d take out the one about starting as close to the end as possible. That’s a bit un-Freudian for me, and it wouldn’t do for Proust: action can become dictatorial to a novelist, and I’m just as interested in inaction. I’m also interested in absence – from life, from the page – and I’d counsel against the tyranny of manifestation that can turn every paragraph some novelists write into a piece of colour for the New Yorker. The past is a force for some characters and is not just preamble: whole lives can be shaped by it, whole nations, by the unknown qualities the past brings to bear on a person’s story. I agree with Vonnegut that every character should want something, though – even if what they really want is to really have something to want, which is an Evelyn Waugh kind of problem.

Has anybody ever given you a particularly useful trick or constructive piece of advice about writing?

Yes, Norman Mailer once told me that being a novelist is like being an actor, drawing on similar intellectual energies. He said he thought he was a bit like Warren Beatty, which I thought a compliment to Warren Beatty. (Norman thought it was a compliment to himself, but I don’t think he was thinking about art.) At its most basic, fiction-writing is like acting in the following way: if one is required to write from the point of view of a 10-year-old boy, one has to learn to think like the boy, experience the world like him, sound like him, feel like him. When writers achieve this it’s everything. Even with the most minor characters, a maid delivering a cup of tea, you have to know how to feel the saucer in her fingers, or you’re no good.

When did you start writing?

My brothers were incredibly boyish and they liked football. I liked post office sets for Christmas and the first writing I did was to send very socially elaborate letters to my grandmothers and aunts. They were filled with the kind of stuff that would give my mother the horrors, which is perfect training for a novelist. They also had this thing in school called the ‘News Book’ – we wrote it every day, and mine was like a diary by Thomas Mann. I don’t mean the quality, naturally, I mean the horror. But if you mean professionally, I started to write when I was a student and realised I was more serious about it than anybody I’d ever met.

What caused you to realise you had talent?

The feeling it gave me. I could see that other student writers weren’t getting that – they didn’t in any sense seem inhabited by what they were writing. But I was engulfed by it and the rhythm of the stuff was different. I could also see that much of what I wrote wasn’t by anybody else: it had its own voice, as they say, and that was the case from quite early on. Talent is such a strange thing – it is not democratic, but you begin to know it when it’s there and others begin to tell you.

What was the first piece of writing you published?

I published an essay in the London Review of Books when I was in my early 20s that caused a bit of a fuss. It was about two ten year old boys who killed a toddler in Liverpool – the case was famous – but I saw the case differently from how it was being represented in the British press. Their world felt familiar to me and I followed the story into memory and particularity. They day the piece was published I got twenty calls from editors and publishers and agents.

What happened after you got those calls?

I went to lunch with Jon Riley, an editor at Picador. He took me to a restaurant called Kensington Place, which I used to walk past when I first came to London, wondering why everybody inside looked so pleased with themselves. But by the end of our lunch I was very pleased with myself, too, and even more pleased with him: I’d found an editor who seemed to think of writing much as I always dreamed an editor would. By that time I also had an agent, Derek Johns, who was calm and optimistic, just the qualities one wants in an agent. We signed a deal for The Missing and, later, when Jon moved to Faber, I moved with him and signed for two novels.

Have you ever had an important mentor or teacher? Somebody who helped you to become the writer you are?

I’ve been blessed by having very good editors, people who saw themselves as advocates of what I did and who kept me working. My editor at the London Review, Mary-Kay Wilmers, is the chief of these, but I also had Jon Riley and then Lee Brackstone at Faber & Faber, brilliantly attuned and serious. Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at the New York Review also drew me out: they gave me more than the time of day, which is all a writer can hope for when they’re trying to work.

Do you agree with the claim that good editing is a dying art?

It is a dying art in many publishers and on many newspapers, where emailed copy is often slung straight onto the page unedited. Publishing often seems like a culture of acquisition these days, where an editor feels more excited bagging an author than making their work sing and finding an audience for it. A good editor knows how to preserve your style and keep you correct, whilst the bad ones just want their authors to win prizes. You need to know the difference and be straight about your priorities: the work will desert you, and so, in time, will a bad editor, if you don’t know how to work as an artist and cleave to what is alive and progressive in the writing itself.

Do you know why you write?

Because it allows me to give vent to what I’ve got and because it pays the bills and makes the days work out well.

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.

I can’t imagine Maxwell saying that. Did he really say that?

Yes, he did. Someone edited a book of pieces from the New Yorker called The Fun of Getting it Right, and it was his coinage.

Do you avoid talking about your writing (before, during of after a work-in-progress) or do you find being interrogated (or interrogating yourself) useful?

You can lose a book if you talk it out too much. It’s fine to mention things and give indications, but not much more. It’s such a private job being a novelist that you can blow your energy very easily by treating it like gossip. Publicity and prizes and all that jazz are fun enough but they’re not your work: you have to go back into the room and know that what you’re doing has a preserved essence.

What do you mean by ‘preserved essence’?

I mean it has a secret about its nature, a secret that will drive you into creativity when you return to it again. I know novelists who have publicised their novels long before writing them, and so, when they got into the study, what they were writing was a kind of commentary on the book they’ve talked about. This is a disaster, exactly the sort of disaster that killed the talent of Truman Capote. I’m saying, therefore, that a good book’s essence must be a fulfilment of the author’s discretion.

Do bad reviews bother you?

I don’t read them. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that having a bunch of lovely reviews is nice but immaterial, and that having a bunch of duff reviews is not nice but immaterial. After a while, for good or for ill, people are reviewing your reputation as much as the book in front of them, and you just have to smile and get on with what you’re doing. I enjoy proper essays a great deal and will read them – even if it’s about me – knowing that at least the writer has gifts.

Have you ever been surprised by anything in a review?

Nope.

Are there things you haven’t yet done as a writer; things you’d still like to do?

Heaps of things. That’s why I keep working.

What kinds of things do you think you could never write (but wish you could)?

I could never write a really dirty book. I’m too Catholic. I’m not sure that I’d want to, either, but I see clichés not only in the words but in the spaces between the words and I couldn’t bear to write much about sex. It’s so verby.

When you have a bad writing day, what kinds of things might be the cause? When you are in a grim mood about your work and the limitations of your talent, what is the theme or quality of the thoughts you have?

A bad writing day is just a day of non-focus. I’m not a very anxious person, so I don’t feel I’m jumping off a cliff every time I sit down to write. But sometimes there are other things going on and you just can’t settle with your material. At these times, I will suddenly find myself looking for a new life. I persuade myself I would have been a good lawyer or a loving doctor. I take courses. I sign up with charitable organisations and do work for the needy. I scrub the flat from top to bottom and persuade myself that this is a creative act no different from writing books. I think about joining the Moonies. I decided to take more drugs. I think about getting cats. I write lists – oh my god, lists – of crucial projects much more amenable than the one I’m failing to engage with. I run for hundreds of miles in the gym and pretend that’s spiritual. I lie. I smoke. I dream. I cough. Days like that are just days like that and you have to bear them. As writers, we’re dependent on creating the mood that makes the work possible, and sometimes the world won’t quite allow that – or psychology won’t allow that. You just have to wait.

Thank you.

M.J.Hyland

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