"I think that the hunger to rank and measure authors as if by an objective standard is a very distracting and difficult thing in a writer's life."
Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey's first novel, The Wilderness, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the 2009 AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize. She was recently named by The Culture Show as one of the 12 Best New British Novelists. When she's writing she does so methodically, tenaciously and slowly.
Where are you right now?
At home, in my living room.
Where do you write?
Here, or sometimes at the public library.
How do you write?
Methodically, tenaciously and slowly.
What keeps you writing?
How to express it? Writing gives my life a basic sense of purpose. Or maybe it helps me find purpose in other things.
Who do you write for?
I'm not sure it works like that for me; do we always do things for people (including ourselves), or do we sometimes just do them? I think I write for the sake of writing, and the book itself becomes its own reason to carry on.
Do you discuss your work with anyone?
I might discuss an idea in the abstract, and to very few people. I might do that quite a lot in the early stages. But as for the words on the page, I don't tend to share them or talk about them at all until the end when I'll hand it over to willing readers - more and more I see writing as an absolutely solitary thing to do.
How do you know if your work is good?
I know when it's as good as it can be; a bell chimes, and until it chimes I keep going. As for whether this makes it good as such, I honestly have no useful measure for my own work. I know when it's done, but that's as much as I can say.
Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?
No, I have a very holey mind; it's through the writing that characters and stories come to my mind, and not the other way round.
Which book do you wish you'd written?
Every time I read a book by Graham Greene or Jose Saramago I feel bit annoyed that it should be their names on the front and not mine.
What is your literary guilty pleasure?
All my literary guilt comes in the form of books I haven't yet read and feel I should have. There's nothing I read that I feel guilty about.
Which writer made you want to write?
I'm not sure I could really say, it seems a gradual process of intoxication. Reading philosophy certainly made me want to write - I always felt that fiction could handle philosophy's big questions in new ways. And for some reason, Graham Swift's Waterland and AS Byatt's Still Life stand out as influential - two books I read at around the same time, the time I was first harbouring ideas of writing a novel. They impressed me as pieces of writing as well as pieces of reading; I remember thinking, I wonder if I could ever do something like that?
Who's the most exciting author writing today?
I take issue with the idea of the word 'most' here - it so often seems to be about the best, the most, the biggest, the newest, the saddest, the funniest. I think that the hunger to rank and measure authors as if by an objective standard is a very distracting and difficult thing in a writer's life. But (rant over) if I think about the many writers I love reading now, David Foster Wallace comes up again and again. I know that he isn't still writing today, but that's a mere technicality.
If you weren't writing you'd be...?
. . . having less trouble getting a mortgage.
What next?
This is the question I ask myself.
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All Is Song by Samantha Harvey is published by Jonathan Cape.
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Thursday, 12 January, 2012
In How I write
- Samantha Harvey
- Padgett Powell
- Thomas E. Kennedy
- Alexander Maksik
- Jo Baker
- Hari Kunzru
- Chris Adrian
- Jane Harris
- Manju Kapur
- David Baddiel
- Justin Cartwright
- E. C. Osondu
- Paul Bailey
- David Means
- Colm Tóibín
- Tim Butcher
- Tim Parks
- Cristos Tsiolkas
- David Mitchell
- Sadie Jones
- Amy Bloom
- John Burnside
- Geoff Dyer
- David Malouf
- Janice Galloway
- Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio
- Alaa Al Aswany
- Nick Laird
- T. C. Boyle
- Nicolas Fargues
- Zoe Heller
- Shalom Auslander
- James Salter
- Ali Smith
- James Frey
- Linn Ullmann
- Julian Barnes
- Joe Dunthorne
- Richard Milward
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