"If I weren't writing I'd be a disappointed and unhappy man."
David Malouf
David Malouf is the author of Dream Stuff, The Great World and Remembering Babylon. Born and brought up in Brisbane, he lives in Sydney. His latest novel Ransom is published this month.
Where are you right now?
In Sydney, on the phone in my sitting room. Watching this FAX come in on the second phone beside me.
Where do you write?
In the room immediately above this one. It's a big room facing the street, with two French doors to a verandah, in a terraced house in an old inner-city street close to the university.
How do you write?
By hand, usually in the morning. I've never written on a typewriter so I've never moved on to the computer. Somehow the pace of writing by hand suits my mental processes, and the physical activity, the repetitive movement back and forth, also has something to do with it; rocks the mind in to the right sort of half-sleep. Later I type the draft up, correct it, make a new one, correct that, then pass it on to the professional who puts it on to a disc.
What keeps you writing?
A new idea or question crops up and nags away at me, a detail from some story I've heard or read in the paper, and I write to find why it won't let go, what it is in me that in some way connects with it and demands my attention. What gets dragged out of me, fairly quickly if it's the first draft of a poem, more slowly if it's a novel or a story, is some new piece of work.
Who do you write for?
As my last answer suggests, I write first for myself, but also for a reader who is like me; I tell myself that I'm not so odd that there aren't others out there who are puzzled or alarmed or concerned or amazed or moved by the things that touch me.
Do you discuss your work with anyone?
I don't talk about what I'm doing till I know what it is; that is, till it's done. Then I pass it on to a friend; the 'professional' I spoke of earlier, to be put on to a disc. He's worked on books of mine for more than 30 years. I listen carefully to his initial response and to the questions he comes up with as he gets to know the text in detail as he types it. After that I listen to the readers (agent, publisher, editor etc) that the book goes to next.
How do you know if your work is good?
Writers are mostly doubtful at first of what they've written: whether it is of interest to anyone but themselves, whether it 'works'. You hear back about this from readers. Whether it's good, and how good it is, is something else again. That remains a question, I think.
Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?
If I did I'd already be writing their story and dealing with my curiosity about them. I hope they are out there somewhere and will come plucking at my elbow and demanding to be listened to.
Which book do you wish you'd written?
This really means what other life do you wish you had lived, since most books come out of a particular world of experience discovered in daily living. Would I really want to have lived the life of Balzac or Melville or Emily Bronte so that I could be the author of Pere Goriot or Moby Dick or Wuthering Heights?
What is your literary guilty pleasure?
Anything to do with Hollywood and Hollywood movies of the 30's and 40's. Novels, memoirs, gossip, annuals, reviews, studies of the movies and their making. The guilt is only moderate.
Which writer made you want to write?
Dickens, when my mother read me a child's version of the early part of David Copperfield when I was five or six.
Who's the most exciting author writing today?
John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Ismail Kadare, Richard Ford, J.M. Coetzee...?
If you weren't writing you'd be...?
A disappointed and unhappy man. Maybe just a retired schoolmaster and hungry re-reader, as I am anyway.
What next?
If I knew, most of the interest and excitement would be gone. I expect to be surprised.
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Ransom is published by Chatto and Windus.
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Thursday, 19 November, 2009
In How I write
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