MH: There is a master’s degree here at The Centre for New Writing in Creative Writing. Can you teach someone to write?

DBC: Oh, definitely. I don’t know if you can teach them to write something good, but you can definitely show them how to do the mechanics of it. It’s surprising how much technique there is in it.

It has two sides to it. The pure creative side, which I always treat in the first draft 'hell-for-leather' without worrying about structure or anything: just write complete crap and then sift through it for the good stuff and build on them and build on them. So I suppose in a way I do the whole thing backwards: I put the architecture on afterwards, and that’s the practical element.

There is an aspect of carpentry to the way you put together a scene and sequel and all those devices used to keep the reader with you in a novel, which I think is an absolute duty. Certainly that can be taught, but whether the things you put in there are any good - well, I can’t say. If you weren’t taught the carpentry, you would have to, by yourself, learn as you went along.

MH: And that’s how you put it together, a mass of creative viscera that you learn to put to bones?

DBC: Yeah, absolutely. It took three drafts, the first one [2003 Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little], but this was helped a little bit because I wanted it very commercial anyway. It was going to be in this TV movie format, so the structure was a little bit worked out for me: I knew it would have cliff-hangers and hooks and all the rest of it. But I did the voice and much of the writing in one burst - about five weeks it took for the first draft - and then, the second draft, I started to have to knock it into order and I put this storyline in but it was complete crap. And then the third one nailed it. And that’s still how I do it, backwards in a way.

I feel there is a body of spirit in you that needs to come into literature and that doesn’t want touching, by any form of technique whatsoever. Put down exactly what comes, put down things you would be afraid to have published in a huge mass - all the midnight oil stuff, the 4.00 in the morning can’t sleep stuff. Then, in a different frame of mind, go through it with ideas for form; and take out the really good stuff.

I have it in a Word document and I literally go through it all and tag sentences and paragraphs and lift them into another document with a table in it, and I would index all the ideas, all the parts of the book, and when I built the structure of it up I was able to pick it out and say 'that will go there, that will go here'. And then I put the thing back together like the brickwork of a house.

MH: That sounds very much like what I have read of Nabokov’s process. I know his unfinished novel [The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments] was recently published with index cards so that your reading of the book could in some way reflect the way he was trying to put it together.

DBC: And that’s it. If you believe you’re creative it’s too easy to imagine that whatever you put down on paper is by nature interesting, but really 90 per cent of the work of the book is in editing it and organising the thing. And what I was really heartened to see once I started structuring the thing is that the spirit of what you're trying to write is not killed or dampened by the process but is actually brought out, like setting a gem.

And that must be, of course, part of what the students of creative writing learn here: this process of setting and re-setting. It’s the creative bit they can’t teach but they can teach you the structure of the thing. That is just slog work, like any other job.

MH: Back to the coal face...

DBC: It really is just like that. It’s just onerous, just a horrible grind. But you can get your rocks off in a first draft - you can create the excitement and see something sparkling in all the mud, and there will be mud. I probably write double the words in a first draft that end up in a finished work, that’s how much shit is in there.

And that’s the way I have to do it. If I sat down and thought about structuring sentences and getting everything in the right order I’d never finish anything, I’d still be on the first page. I still do have a bit of a problem with that, but once you learn accept that you’ll be writing crap and embarrassing yourself for around nine months to a year you’ll find stuff within that that you can run with and expand on. Then you can take those bits out, clean them up and build them into something.

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