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Comment from the book world in June 2017

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Becoming a police suspect

26 June 2017

‘I gave them the plot of Knots and Crosses, not realising that it was very similar to a case they were investigating. They took me into an interview room, actually turned on a computer, took my details and entered them in the database. I went home and thought "that was a bit odd, they were interviewing me, I thought I was interviewing them" and my dad said "you silly bugger".

The real world is full of wild, outlandish coincidences that we can't use because fiction has to be realistic. There's nothing realistic about the world now, politics-wise, everything-wise. You couldn't make it up - it's a problem for fiction writers.'Ian Rankin, author of Rather be the evil, Knots and Crosses and many other novels, in the Sunday Telegraph.

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Writing bestselling horror fiction

19 June 2017

‘It's one of the genres that live across the tracks in the literary community, but what could I do? That's where I was drawn. I love D.H. Lawrence. And James Dickey's poetry, Émile Zola, Steinbeck ... Fitzgerald, not so much. Hemingway, not at all. Hemingway sucks, basically. If people like that, terrific. But if I set out to write that way, what would've come out would've been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me. And I have to say this: To a degree, I have elevated the horror genre...

It's more respected now. I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature. I'm not trying to be conceited or anything. Raymond Chandler elevated the detective genre. People who have done wonderful work really blur the line...

Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me...

Early in my career, The Village Voice did a caricature of me that hurts even today when I think about it. It was a picture of me eating money. I had this big, bloated face. It was this assumption that if fiction was selling a lot of copies, it was bad. If something is accessible to a lot of people, it's got to be dumb because most people are dumb. And that's elitist. I don't buy it.'

Stephen King, author of Carrie, Sleeping Beauty and many other novels in an interview in Rolling Stone 

Just do it

12 June 2017

'You learn the most from sitting down and doing the work, regularly, patiently, sometimes in hope, sometimes despairingly. When you have something that seems complete, show your work to people you trust to be honest but not malicious. Put it aside for six months and reread it. Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn't know until you set it down.

There are no "tips" for this process really; it's painstaking and intense and doesn't often feel pleasant. However, I think there are tips for how to sit your bum on the chair and do the work.

Stop reading so many articles on the internet about how to write. You're allowed one a week. Instead, spend that time actually writing.

Write for 15 minutes every day. Set a time in advance, set a timer. Try to write at the same time every day. Your subconscious will get used to the idea and will start to work like a reliable water spout.

Remind yourself, every day, that you're doing this to try to find something out about yourself, about the world, about words and how they fit together. Writing is investigation. Just keep seeking.'

Naomi Alderman, author of Disobedience and The Power, which has just won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017, in the Guardian

 

'No better kind of fiction'

5 June 2017

There is still a great deal of snobbery about crime and thriller writing. There are people who think a crime novel can't be proper literature, mainly because they are prejudiced against genre fiction and writing that is plot-based. Whether one ought to care about this, I'm not sure. Personally, I've always thought crime fiction is the best kind of literature. Done well and properly, there is no better kind of fiction. If other people can't see that, then I think that's a shame for them but I am not going to get angry about it. No one should condescend to Agatha Christie - she's a genius

I think the themes that I am interested in writing about are similar in my crime fiction and in my poetry. I want to write about people, the way they behave, their psychology, the whole gamut of relationships - romantic partnerships, family, friendships. Even formally, I think poetry and crime fiction have a lot in common. In a tightly plotted crime novel and a highly metrical poem, for instance, structure is crucially important. Every single element has to be in the right balance and proportion to everything else. I am a real structure freak and I think that's one of the reasons both poetry and crime fiction appeal to me.

Sophie Hannah, author of Did You See Melody? plus 18 other novels and 5 poetry collections in the Guardian