Why I Write

With Dr. Arthur Kase at a       Kansas City Symposium

I write because I must. It’s the only valid reason for doing something that is so antisocial. I write first in longhand, on one side only of a pad of white, ruled, A4 paper with a Pilot V5 Extra Fine pen. I like the scoring sound of the nib; the triumph of completing a page and laying it to one side; scratching a line through duff words; the formation of certain letters in the alphabet. I like the sense of progress that comes from manually numbering a page. And I know that anything I compose straight onto a PC will be total rubbish – cheap, slack and sometimes even juvenile. I cannot understand why it should be, but it is. Writing is not a burden to me: I find no need to bribe myself. My only necessity is to be facing a blank wall: a window or picture is fatal.

      The first thing I do in every session is to re-write the page I was last working on. It reminds me of the story and gets my eye in, as it were. This will sound extraordinary but for me a page written is a page forgotten. I have a global sense of the story and a precise knowledge of what is to happen in the current chapter. But once it’s written – gone! I never look back because I know I’d see so much that could have been done better. It can wait. The result is that it’s really quite exciting when I come to the first typed draft. What have we got here! In the case of White Blood I had to be hauled away from the PC. I’d thought it was good as I wrote, but it came so easily that I grew suspicious…It was a strange feeling, the eagerness to read what had happened in a book that I myself had written.

     Two great worries: first, that the plot doesn’t work, second that one loses the manuscript or one’s house burns down.

The influences on my writing

    The fiction writers whose style or method of exposition have influenced me include several Russians: in particular Nabokov, Tolstoy, Bulgakov and Isaac Babel. Add to these Stevenson, Conrad, Joyce Cary, Camus, Saul Bellow and the most individual of all writers in English – Laurence Sterne. I’m talking here not about the casual enjoyment of a text but about beauty and authenticity, and thus a feeling of absolute truthfulness in every single aspect of the story being told.

With Volodya, my interpreter, in Smolensk, where White Blood is set.	Caithness: Listening to the sea

     The philosopher I most enjoy is Isaiah Berlin. For poetry give me the Polish Nobel winners, Wisawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz any time. Dylan Thomas and Stevie Smith have a special section in my mind. I like the work of Derek Walcott, Larkin and the staider poems of Octavio Paz.

     A government with any pretensions to being civilised would institute a Poets’ Tax by which 50% of soccer-players’ salaries and bankers’ bonuses would go to a Fund for the Encouragement of Poetry. A world without fiction would be intolerable but without poetry it would be uninhabitable.

     The final question: why do I write historical fiction? Because of the “Hodge Boys” hanging above the stairs, because of my studies at University, because I have a firmer grip on the past than I do on contemporary life – by which I mean only that the technology and language of previous times are wholly accessible to me. There is one more reason: to imagine how one would behave oneself if caught at a great turning point in history, such as the Russian Revolution, is irresistibly frightening.