How do you write?
I write with a pen. If it doesn’t go through my system and straight onto the page I don’t quite believe it, so everything I’ve written in my life, I’ve written in longhand. My favourite pen is a fineliner, and I’ve never typed in my life, never used a computer. I’m not proud of that, mind. It’s just what I do.
Which aspects of writing do you think can be taught?
All you can do is encourage writing. I don’t think you can teach writing. I can understand why people teach plot, though I don’t know how good I would be at that. I tend to work it out as I go along, but it’s valid for people who want to write to have writers teach them. I’m just not going to be one of them. It depends on the writer, but I think somebody who really feels a powerful compulsion should watch out about taking too much advice from anybody. You don’t want to theorise it to death.
Writing is ultimately an inexplicable compulsion, and there may be valid ways to assist that process, but I wouldn’t know what they are, and I tend to believe in the power of writing that doesn’t need it, but maybe I’m wrong. When I taught creative writing classes, I didn’t tell people how to write. I encouraged them to write and to see that defying my advice was possibly as valuable as following it. Creativity is intelligent passion – passion with a jockey on its back. You must have the force to write, but you should also try to have the intelligence to direct that force. And eventually you have to be your own jockey.
Looking back now, do you know why Laidlaw’s marriage failed?
No. I’m not entirely sure. He never told me. It’s probably his intensity about his job. He’s so aware of the outside that he can’t quite focus on the inside. He can’t relax in his domesticity. The two coexist in a contradictory way, but I think there are other factors. He gets involved outside his marriage, but I don’t know if he’s due my flagellation, because he’s a troubled man, which I quite like about him. He’s so involved in the nature of things you can’t always trust him to relate to you directly, which makes him a detective version of a writer, relating his own experience to that of others. At least to that extent, he may be a wee bit like a writer.
Writing compromises normalcy. It makes it more difficult to fit comfortably into society. Writers may be good at kidding on, or maybe it’s just that the writers I love are always a bit outside. Could you imagine making Kafka comfortable? Nah. The difficulty is not that you’re some amazing genius, but that what you’re trying to do is so bizarre, which is to live life and overtake it. It’s like disembowelling something and trying to make it live again, which is why serious writing is a troublesome thing to carry. It’s a gig my life could have been easier without, and, whether or not it’s screwed up my life, it’s certainly complicated it. Without being melodramatic, writing is like living a parallel existence. Just as your real life feeds into your fiction, your fiction feeds into your real life, so I don’t think writers move through life with the same smoothness as some nonwriters may do. Graham Greene claimed every writer must have a chip of ice in his heart, and he mentioned a painter who once confessed he couldn’t help but notice the way the light struck his wife’s head as she lay dying. There’s a bit of you that records as you experience, and that mild split personality can be a bit troublesome, as you’re not just living your life but looking on at it at the same time.
Do you have any literary regrets?
Some, inevitably. When I wrote Laidlaw, they said: “Do one of these a year and you’ll be a millionaire.” I thought: “But I don’t want to do one of these a year.” I didn’t want to get trapped because there were other things I wanted to try. That was in the 1970s. Occasionally, at two in the morning, I now think: “Aye, I wouldn’t mind the 1970s back. I could have made a right few quid.” But that’s a joke with myself. I don’t really regret that. That was how I felt then. I have this half-baked dream that before I die I’ll look at all my unfinished writing and make final decisions about what to bin and what to keep, but although I have maybe about 12 undeveloped ideas for novels, I can’t regret not having written them, because if I can find the energy, maybe the potential for writing them is still there. Although obviously the older I get, the less likely that becomes.
What do you wish you’d known when you started writing?
I think I know a lot of things now that I didn’t know then, but I don’t wish I’d known them then, because that’s the way I was then, and I respect that. Also, I don’t think that my knowledge now is so impressive that it would have made a great difference to my life. Most of what I think I know has gone into my words. It’s hard to be as innocent as I was then, but that innocence was a very valuable commodity and I hope some of it remains.
For the full 9000-word interview, please see The Crime Interviews Volume Two: Bestselling Authors Talk About Writing Crime Fiction by Len Wanner (published by Blasted Heath, 2012)
Strange Loyalties Page 30
