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Comment from the book world in February 2015

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February 2015

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'I wanted to be a writer but I'd blown it.'

23 February 2015

‘I think my most stunning failure was that I managed to get a U in my English O level. I was devastated. I cried on my way home, because I thought the one thing I wanted to do, the one dream I'd always had, the one glimmer of hope I could hold on to, had been taken away from me. I wanted to be a writer but I'd blown it...

(After turning taxi driver and picking up the editor of Liverpool Confidential magazine, who said "Send me some tomorrow, I'll have a read.")

I went home and wrote a story, and it changed my life... And then I started to write a book. I created a British copper who'd lost it all, his wife, his kid, his house, his job, and his soul.'

Tony Schumacher, author of The Darkest Hour in the Observer magazine

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'What I really wanted was to be a novelist'

8 February 2015

‘When I wrote Before I go to Sleep, I was in a blissful state of being disconnected from anybody else - I wrote It with the hope I could finish it, first of all, and then with the hope that somebody else might like it. But I was writing Second Life knowing that I had editors all over the world that were eager for it. There was a sense of pressure in getting it right. But ultimately I realised I had to just write a book that I loved.

Always what I really wanted was to be a novelist and create fiction... I was approaching 40, and I thought, towards the end of my life, I'd much rather be looking back and thinking, I had a really good go at writing a novel and it didn't work, than look back on my life and think, well, I never really tried, did I?'

S J Watson, author of Before I go to Sleep and Second Life, in the Observer.

'Short stories meanwhile deserted me'

2 February 2015

'I began my writing career with short stories. I was happy to do so. Then, somewhat to my surprise, I wrote a novel, then another, and another. Short stories meanwhile deserted me - or perhaps I deserted them. I put it in that rather ashamed way because I have no sense of the short story being an inferior form only leading to novels. Both forms seem to me equally rich and viable. Much is made of their differences when actually they have a great deal in common. They are both prose fiction, they are both narrative, they both explore the human condition. A novel is a long story, a short story is a short one. I don't feel a different creature when writing one rather than the other...

It has been a joy to return, at long last, to the short story, the only difference being that with my recent stories I felt very quickly that they'd all contribute to some single whole (perhaps this was now the deserted novelist in me) indeed to a single book that came to have the title England and Other Stories, a title at once comprehensive and fraught with a sense of the elusive. A book that delivers its coherence from embracing an incoherent, shifting idea.

It has been a joy for many reasons, but perhaps chiefly because it has returned me to beginnings, to my beginnings, and to beginnings generally. How do you begin? What makes you begin? These are questions so big for writers that they are felt more like tinglings in the blood. There are 25 beginnings in this book. It has taken me back afresh to that sense of the enticingly ungraspable that perhaps makes all writers begin, that makes them writers in the first place. It is like being once again that travel-weary youth on the night ferry, coming into Dover at dawn and seeing before me that weird, spectral country that was nonetheless mine.'

Graham Swift, author of Last Orders and England and Other Stories in the Independent on Sunday