Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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The Cheltenham Literature Festival (4-14 October) has become a landmark in England's cultural world -- to which people flock for talks, interviews, lectures, story telling and debates by authors from all over the world. It is estimated that over 80,000 people attended this year's round. The festival is organised by the London Times and on the occasion the paper approached several leading writers to explain why they write and what urges them to put their thoughts to paper.

The newspaper published the results in their 9 October issue, and herewith I shall try to give a glimpse of what those writers said to Penny Wark:

Robert Harris, a novelist who has just published The Ghost, underlines the fact that writing is a vocation. "I would do it even if I weren't paid to do it;" he says; "the impulse is built into the fabric of who I am." He goes on to explain the difference between literary writing and journalism. Though the two are different, there is one similarity, that "there's no justice in it and long weeks of preparation and careful note-taking is no substitute for having a couple of good ideas".

Harris believes a writer should be tied down by a deadline which forces the imagination into a higher state and makes the writer see things quicker and more clearly. In the end, he goes on to say, "a large part of the business of writing a novel is simply extracting the words from your head".

Another novelist, Douglas Coupland, has a different approach to creative writing. His relationship with writing is rather visual. He began writing "by approaching words as something you see on a page, as opposed to something that goes through the language part of your brain: some cutting out of pop art and text art." A book to him is a form of a trance. "It's a way of creating a certain sensation in my brain that I can't seem to find anywhere else." It's very hard to finish a book, he goes on to say, "not skills-wise but emotionally. You do go through a postpartum depression for a week or two. Then the trance is over, it's like the hypnotist stabs a finger and suddenly you're staring out at the real world again and it's pretty scary." Do his novel characters correspond to real people he knows?

"Everyone in my personal life thinks that certain characters are based on them," he answers, "and while that may be partially true it may be just a gesture or a trick. You take that and you have characters and at the end they've morphed into other people." To him writing is a way to discover access to the fluidity of existence, "not just emotional states but personalities in and out of each other." Once you get a book up, he goes on to say, "you're sitting there, the characters are running the show, you're being dictated to."

Pat Barker, a novelist whose book Life Class has just been published, believes that a writer writes for the characters, and does not think of an audience. The characters talk and discuss issues, and it looks as if the writer is just watching. She does not believe that there is a rational way of writing a novel. Even when she starts with a synopsis "it's rapidly abandoned as the characters start to develop. I do think characters take over and it's desirable that they should. A writer can create characters whom he gets to hate." You create the characters out of parts of yourself that perhaps you're not easy with.

To her the final draft is like firing the pot in the kiln. The first draft "can be enormous fun when it's flowing along and you're getting to know the people and you suddenly see something you haven't seen before."

Esther Freud, author of Love Falls, believes that when she's writing she feels "so different at the end of the day, it's like I've got something out of my system." She compares this with the feeling of people who meditate. Her writing gives her the chance of living on two levels, the day to day one and that of the story going on in her head. She thinks that in her writing she is trying to get "to the heart of how people feel about things". She does not believe in working out an idea beforehand, she just goes "headlong into the atmosphere, then work it out as I go along."