“Write what you know,” the adage goes, but novelist Rose Tremain doesn’t necessarily agree. “I’ve always been a great believer that if you imagine something strongly enough and [write it] well enough, then it can stand,” she said in her Hay event. The author, whose novels have featured all kinds of protagonists, from a transgender child to a middle-aged eastern European immigrant, highlighted the need for research and empathy when writing outside your experience. She also passed on a piece of advice from her late editor, Penny Hoare: “Don’t choke,” when writing difficult or harrowing scenes.
Tremain said that when she comes to write such scenes she is often tempted to skip past them and write about the events in retrospect. “And then I think, don’t choke … The readers will want to live it. If you haven’t done it, there’ll be a kind of lacuna in the middle of the page. They won’t believe you any more. And once belief in a writer goes, you’ve had it completely. The book’s in the bin.”
Several authors agreed that thinking about the reader as you write is important. “You can’t think which reader”, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell said. Thinking about which specific demographics will enjoy the book can hold you back, he thinks. But “you have to bear in mind … what does the reader know at any given time? How do they know that? What are they likely to be guessing at this point?” Writing should be like an “endless table tennis rally where you’re not playing to win”, he said, “or chess, which you do play to win really, but you don’t really care who wins … you’re both making a beautiful game”.
Poet, playwright and novelist Jackie Kay thinks writers need to put questions to the reader. “When you write novels, you’re asking questions of yourself all the time, and the thing that really involves readers is not answering them, but asking your readers to ask the questions,” she said.
On a more practical note, children’s laureate Joseph Coelho said aspiring writers should “carry a notebook wherever [they] go”, because “you never know when you’re going to get great ideas”. Inspiration can come from anywhere, so “observe the world around you” and “read everything”, whether it be comics, magazines or even “the back of cereal packets”, he added.
And for anyone trying to write a novel while holding down a full-time job, Colm Tóibín said: “You have to control your Saturday nights.” The author of Brooklyn and The Master wrote his first novel, The South, when he was working as a journalist and had “very little time off”, he said.
The first thing he found was that if he decided to go out drinking with his friends and woke up with a hangover on Sunday, then he would have no time to write. “You actually can’t do that if you’re writing a novel,” he said. “Get up on Saturday morning and at least have 24 hours completely to yourself.” That way you can find the space to think and get something down on the page, he advised. “And that includes not drinking and not talking to anyone and not checking emails and not washing yourself.”
“For me, it’s about character first,” said former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell-Horner, who was promoting her seventh children’s book at this year’s festival, and revealed that she herself had received writing tips from twice Booker prize-nominated novelist William Boyd and bestselling children’s author Jacqueline Wilson. “If you don’t love a character then why bother turning the page?”
Sometimes the greatest thing you can do as a novelist is to write like you’re doing a wheelie on a bike, Mitchell said. He told a story about some teenagers he had seen when travelling to a book event in Nottingham, who were “wheelie-ing for 70, 80 metres, at the furthest possible back tilt”.
“They were pedalling downhill to increase the velocity and swerving. It could have been a disaster”, he said, but they didn’t seem to be worried about that. “They were just wheelie-ing down for the hell of it, because it was fun.”
“Cloud Atlas was kind of my wheelie”, he said. “There wasn’t really a why or a how, it was just, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, that’s cool’ or ‘What happens if I do that?’”
That reckless way of writing is “something you kind of lose as you age and learn more about writing”, he added, saying he hopes “that sort of increased knowledge of art can compensate for that loss. But maybe the next stage is to try to keep the artistry and somehow try to get the wheelie back.”
David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, warns against getting caught up with reader demographics. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
