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Comment from the book world in April 2017

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April 2017

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‘Women with children writing’

24 April 2017

‘I refuse to be bullied by the idea that you have to have mental peace to write. I have no mental peace but I have written despite that. It's been from about the mid-Seventies that we've had this phenomenon of women with children writing. There's 2,000 years of that not being true, like literally never true. You can find four exceptions, maybe, including A S Byatt. Really, it's a revolution...

The one thing I feel is really depressing is this idea that writing needs this absolute concentration, months alone.

That's what men were telling their wives while they sat up there... Dickens had 10 children. He wasn't thinking about them. Nor was Tolstoy, for sure. They were writing all day long. Women are thinking about them. The writing is different. I don't think it's worse, it's different.'

Zadie Smith, author of Swing Time, NW and White Teeth, in the Evening Standard

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'The sense of being outside'

17 April 2017

‘For three years after writing Girl, I didn't write at all. I thought I should try to be a productive member of society. But then I moved back to Ireland and had to decide whether or not I was a writer. And I realised I'm not equipped to be anything else. I saw that even if I was going to be a failed writer, that was probably the best I was going to manage and I made my peace with it - as much as you can...

Writing about sex is very difficult. I did not set out to write lots of sex scenes - they kept recurring and I realised they were intrinsic to the story of the relationship. And yet, I wanted it to be the opposite of pornography - even literary sex can be pornography. In this novel, it was the characters' way to speak to each other about what they could not verbalise.'

I feel completely Irish and that informs so much of who I am and how I write. But exile is more comfortable, the sense of being outside more useful to my writing...'

Eimear McBride, author of The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, in the Observer

 

 

Writing for YA and the breakthrough - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

10 April 2017

'I actually say I write books about adults or about young people. I think it's an important distinction. But in the young people's books I've never tried to use simpler language, simpler stories or simpler themes. I've written the book I would normally write, but with a young person at the centre of it.

Most writers for young people these days aren't thinking about children as being little kids. They're tackling serious subjects, writing about issues that are really faced by young people today, and that's what they want to read. Young people want their reading experiences to reflect their own lives...

It gave me freedom to write and t gave me an audience. It was my fifth novel and I'd been struggling to find an audience, particularly on an international level. I know I'll never write a book that reaches as many as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - that's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But that book was a great gift at the right time in my life.'

John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Heart's Invisible Furies, in the Observer

Writing 'in a very narrow vein'

3 April 2017

‘My experience of becoming a writer... I was a little too late to the game. I wrote when I was younger but I could never get anything to really cohere, so for me the big revelation, before my first book (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 1996) was that I had to really restrict myself. I had to really constrain myself and write in a very narrow vein - comic, very contemporary, maybe a little futuristic. It was an internal constraint that I put on myself: not to go in certain directions; not to be too what I would call ‘modernist', not to be too lyrical...

On Lincoln in the Bardo

‘I felt like the main thing a reader should feel is disorientated by what they find in that death realm. If we do have any experience after life it would be really surprising if it was just like what we had read about...

As I was writing it I could feel my own potential grief - you know, I think I'm so smart writing about these dead people, but no one is going to get out of the net. I'm at the age now when some people who are very dear to me have gone over the cliff. I really loved that person and I won't see him again. That's it, that's the way life is. It's obvious, but it was amazing to dwell on that.'

George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December, which won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014, in the Bookseller.