Interview from Write Away, 2005
Can you tell us about your role as a lecturer in creative writing?
I teach undergraduates and postgraduates, which means I am dealing with people who in some cases are coming to writing for the first time in the context of their English degrees. They are often obsessive readers who are there for that reason and want to try their hand at short fiction. For undergraduates it's about learning the tools and techniques and putting them together to create short pieces. Lots of creative writing teaching is about giving people the confidence to do it and showing them that their voice counts. Postgraduates are slightly different in that they are hopefully more practised. The course that I teach at Manchester is unusual in that students write a complete novel through the course. Courses are usually about starting peopleoff not about writing endings and this one is - potentially.
How do you mark something with a creative outcome? Can it be objective?
You devise rigorous marking criteria and make it transparent. If someone has achieved 67% you are saying that it is 67% as good as it could be, given the range of expertise, the techniques you've been taught and the material you've got. It's about marking things to the absolute standard. It's interesting that when you are assessing creative work like this, you read it in a different way - not as yourself. It's not about liking things, it's about appreciating them. In contrast, when I judged some writing prizes in the North East I got huge boxes of work, from novices through to really practised writers. In that instance I could read as myself and reward things that appealed to my taste. I was approaching it as writer and reader, but at work I'm an educator and looking beyond my own taste and prejudices.
Does the process get judged as well?
They complete other projects alongside writing the novel where they can talk more or less explicitly about the process. But even those documents are marked as finished products that stand on their own two feet.
Do you believe in innate talent or can anyone become a professional writer?
I do believe in talent. It's wrong to tell everyone that they can become a writer simply by wanting it. A characteristic of the culture of celebrity is the expectation that anyone can be famous without merit. However, I think people should be encouraged to explore their own voices and be confident in print or in dance or singing or whatever else they want to do. I also believe in technique, application and effort. I think there's a commonly held view that it is easier to write fiction than it is to create something in most other art forms, which stems from the fact that we speak prose. But if you heard a fantastic piece of violin music on Radio 4 and went to the record company and hummed the same piece, then asked for a record contract, you wouldn't get very far. It doesn't work like that; there is an awful lot to learn and to unlearn again.
Did you develop an interest in reading and writing when you were at school?
I'm interested in the books that I had when I was four and five - books that taught me to read by myself, like retellings of fairy tales. I started school slightly early, I was just over four and it was a week into the term. I remember walking into the classroom and seeing forty kids and two teachers and being led to the back of the class to acclimatise myself with the library section. I picked up a Babar book in English and read it while they said 'Just wait there with a book'. I was horrified at half past nine when they said, 'come and join the rest of the class now.'
I was slightly precocious. When it came to writing stories they were always a bit more odd or more developed than stories my classmates were writing, but also more frivolous. So I was told, 'You can't write like this because life isn't a comic strip.' This comment was actually written in a school report when I was ten.
In your experience, do girls and boys write different kinds of stories?
Girls write stories about feelings and boys perhaps won't, although I remember my sister at nine years being obsessed with Goosebumps and horror fiction. Her stories were about her friends and their feelings but they would always go to a haunted house and be involved in horror adventures. I think it's true that boys' stories will follow a generic shape and pick up on generic tropes that they've learnt from the outside world. Girls will write something closer to home perhaps.
You moved to Lancaster when you were eighteen but you are originally from the North East . Do you still have a connection with that part of the world?
My relationship with the North East is a nostalgic one. My Grandparents lived in South Shields, which is a place we would visit at the weekend. I grew up thirty miles south in Co Durham in the new town. To me the North East was all motorways. Now my brother and his wife live in South Shields and it's a nostalgic experience to go back because it's mostly untouched. You can look around the fairground, and the marine park, and the beach, and it's almost exactly the way it was thirty years ago, when I was tiny. I've been back to places maybe too often. I remember when I was twenty-two going back to a house in Darlington where I lived when I was five. A friend took me, and we just pulled up in the car for about five minutes. I had a very violent, emotional response - mourning, grief that there is no turning back.
In Strange Boy you write about the fear of being 'ordinary' and that's a theme that runs through your work…..
It would be interesting to look back at Strange Boy five years on, and see how explicit I was about the fear of being considered 'ordinary'. You are right; it is a big theme that runs right through my work - the championing of extraordinariness. Although I've decided recently I have an aversion to the word 'extraordinary'. It's become a lazy cultural shorthand for people don't want to give an opinion but want to make it something sound special, they just say, 'It's extraordinary.' I really enjoyed the writing about cross-generational relationships in Exchange. This doesn't get much attention in books written for teenagers or young adults….. I am really interested in crossgenerational issues - kids don't exist in isolation. My Grandparents and Aunties and Uncles were very important to me because we talked a lot with each other. It wasn't just telling stories; it was telling tales, presenting other people in a bad light or a good light - evil gossip, then realising that words were having an effect on people's lives. As a kid it seemed to me that's how the world was created and carried on. I was a very acute observer of older people, so they are necessarily in everything I write. I suppose most kids' books are about 'getting the adults away', and the kids take centre stage and move on in a world of their own. Exchange is not autobiographical in the same way that Strange Boy was. The relationship of the grandmother with her grandson is a little bit like the relationship between me and my Mum's Mum. She moved in with us for a while when I was a teenager because my Mum was ill. There are touches of my Mum in 'Winnie' but nothing in the circumstances is real. The endless collecting of books and bookshops and reading across different forms is true of my life, and it's as true now as it was then.
Can you tell us something about your reading interests?
I'm really organised with my reading in that there are a lot of books in the bedroom, but the bookshelf that is closest to me contains the books that I have read and will re-read. There are lots of Puffins from the 1960's and 1970's and also Paddington. I've got The Dark is Rising with me today, I'm halfway through it again because I need to read that every couple of years. I re-read a lot of Anne Tyler. I've got a bookshelf that's two books thick now of everything that's there waiting. Ebay is a useful source: I'm finding lots of vintage horror sequences of the 1960's and 1970's because that's a kind of abiding ongoing interest. Things like The Guardian series by Peter Saxton, which had vanished from the face of the earth and The Fontana Books of Horror. Strange Boy and Exchange are books that can be read by anyone old enough to relate to the emotions and themes in them. I don't see that they are necessarily 'teenage' books.
Do you have a clear idea of the age of your readership before you start writing or is it something that emerges in the process?
I decide afterwards what age group a book is for, once it is fairly set. And I see it as extending my potential audience down in age rather than narrowing it. I first started writing for a younger readership when Steve Cole approached me with the suggestion that I write something for a young adult list he was developing. I thought that after writing ten books it was probably a good time to confront that childhood stuff; you can really blow it by making your first book autobiographical. Steve persuaded me not to present it as a series of memoir vignettes, as it could quite easily have become. It was about fashioning it into a fullblooded, fully realised piece of fiction that would stand up for a younger audience. That was a really interesting process and I learnt a lot about developing a well-rounded plot because one of the big differences in writing for a younger audience is that they've got really good 'bullshit detectors'; you can't be precious and trixy with narrative like you can for adult readers. The reason I resisted doing 'The Summer I Was Ten' novel earlier is because it was upsetting. I needed to wait until I'd become more resilient, learnt more about the craft to protect myself. That's one of the things you teach students - it is not all about vomiting on the page. It's about creating a work of art that other people – not just people you know - can read. It's a process of uncovering things you had forgotten. I found that my brother remembered things that I don't, and vice versa. There's something about being inside a book like that, which is quite frightening. You find that the past is recoverable in a particular way.
One of the things that strikes me about your writing is the authenticity of the dialogue. How do you help your students create well-constructed, believable dialogue?
Dialogue is about the way language speaks people, rather than the other way round. There is a whole process of learning about writing dialogue by making people listen, transcribe, edit, think about the moments when people give themselves away, identify the subtext, and the tensions and games going on under the surface. I get students to write their dialogue out in scenes and then experiment by chopping out every other line or every other half sentence, taking off the first two lines or the last line, ripping the page down the middle and presenting the first half. Otherwise dialogue often comes across as too finished. Another exercise I use is to give students a list of people to spy on. They have seven pieces of paper and only one of them is for recording dialogue. The other pieces are for what is happening with that person's hands, which they have to record in as much detail as possible. On another page they write about what is happening at the next table etc. Then they edit the pieces together like a filmmaker. In the observation that a writer needs to do there are lots of parallels with drama and film, but also sketch books for painters. The editing is about pulling different bits of observation together into something that seems real - but obviously isn't. It's an artifice. In all art forms there is a spurious naturalism that can be learnt, like the acting in East Enders - posh actresses putting on common accents. In the same way in fiction you see a lot of very nicely spoken people masquerading as working class characters talking about drugs.
Are you still developing your own technique?
Yes, after writing seventeen books I'm still developing my techniques. That's one of the reasons I teach because I learn from teaching. And I believe that students learn from what's being said about other people's work as much as their own. I'm very lucky to be immersed in that all the time. Each time you sit down to write a new book you learn more about technique, and you invent technique.
What have you recently discovered about yourself as a writer?
When I was writing my most recent book I enjoyed planning,writing a synopsis and being a bit more conventional, structurally than I used to. Exchange is the most conventionally shaped novel I've written, and that's deliberate. Some of the black humour is toned down. For me it's interesting to see what I do if I don't give myself those black jokes. What does it turn into? I think it comes from being more experienced. I've spent time finding my voice, developing my aesthetic and having reached a point where I'm quite comfortable about it, I don't have to cling to it quite as tenaciously. I can go back to experimenting, but in a quieter, less wild way. More recently with my writing for adults, I've realised that it's not fantasy and science fiction that I really like, but mystery. I'm heading towards crime fiction, which is something I would never have touched at one time, but I'm finding I enjoy the mechanics of those stories. I've discovered that I write prose that can be addictive. It's about writing sentences that 'face the right direction': sentences that you don't have to go back to the beginning to understand what they are saying.
I've discovered that writing clear prose is something that I do.
