TimeOut London
June 5th, 2006
Is there anything unique about the way I write? Well, I feel so incredibly ill-disciplined, and I have a kind of paranoia that all other writers are very disciplined. I don’t write at any set times; I just write when it takes me. When things are going well I’ll go for 12 hours, but when things are going badly I’ll just look out the window. I think the basic rule is that if nothing’s coming then nothing’s coming. It’s really hard to force stuff for me – it’s that Hemingway thing. Now, he used to write standing up, but I think that was because of his haemorrhoids, so I can understand that. Not that I’m a sufferer; it’s one of the few afflictions I’ve been spared. So far.
When things are going badly, I sometimes flit between the book and email. Which is deadly, but I’ve more or less stopped that. I noticed for a while that I was going into my study and dedicating far too much care to my angry letters to the electricity company: ‘The Collected Letters to Scottish Power’. I should return to that opus one day.
I know a lot of writers listen to music when they write and I do too, but it has to be ambient or something like that. If you have something you really like on, the music can add a soundtrack to what you’ve just written and you can think it’s much more interesting or dramatic or moving that it is.
Could I conceivably have a day job? Not any more. I’m too fat and spoiled, I’m afraid. The first novel I wrote was completely done between night shifts working on the railways in Scotland. I stopped going out and just worked on the book. But the shifts were quite good discipline because you knew you only had those hours. Once they stopped and the luxury of time arrived, I’m sure my work ethic crumbled quite a bit. Fiction feeds off the life you’ve led or are leading. I think that’s why so many novels in England used to be, or still are, dull.
A lot of writers would just come down from Oxbridge and land a good office job – not digging roads or anything – so for many years there was a kind of predictable sheen on every writer’s life experience. American literature comes out so rich because there are so many different lived experiences out there, so many cultures. Even in the 1950s you had your Cheevers and Updikes – urbane New York – alongside the Beats, living a completely different kind of life. And writing about it in a way that, at the time in Britain, was almost inconceivable.
The romance of being a writer diminshes. It was more romantic when I started out ten years ago. And that romance itself is rather limited; it’s a space in your own mind. It hits suddenly one day in the pub – say, by yourself on a Tuesday with a pint of Guinness. You go, ‘Ah, for my next novel, what I might do is…’, and you look at yourself and go, ‘Wow, Warner. You’re in the pub going, “For my next novel…” ’ And that’s quite romantic. Or you’re in a café and some friend introduces you as ‘Alan, the writer’. Boom. But I don’t think of myself as a writer. I think of myself as a reader. Or a skiver.
Alan Warner’s new novel ‘The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven’ is published by Cape
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