Hanif Kureishi - Love + Hate - Stories and Essays

The lesson here might be: you cannot use your kid or your parents as a prop, as a substitute for other relationships, or as a reason for not relating as an adult to other adults. Even parents have to grow up.

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What will be significant in a life can’t be discovered in advance, or even at the time. Meaning, trauma even, is a later construction arising from a realisation. I mean that people experience some sort of pain or feeling of loss; they know there’s been some inexplicable breach, but they don’t know exactly what it means. A writer, like a dreamer, is an ‘interpreter’ of experience, which makes writing an important form of thought, inscribing an event in the right place in the narrative you’re using at the time, or opening a space for a new one.

Speaking is easier than writing. There are no ‘creative speaking’ classes, though there should be. The danger and virtue of speaking is incontinence or spontaneity — speaking as a form of unpredictable performance. Most people can speak, they rarely stop, they need to get it out. You can’t really plan a conversation; it’s an improvisation made by at least two, and truth escapes through one’s fingertips. Someone can pull you through your defences, like picking a winkle.

Writing appears to be more manageable. Writing, like reading, is usually done in solitude, and there is nothing natural about it. Since people are their own obstacles and like to undermine themselves, it is an effort in overcoming. To write is to find out if you can be less afraid of yourself, less inhibited — freer, wilder, and yet able to structure your work. A thought occurs; you put it down, and revise it a dozen times, and then another ten. Most people can’t write well; it’s awkward, slow work, when done by hand. For me that is the best way, especially at the beginning of a project, when slowness and thought matter. Since it is abstract and self-conscious, as well as a form of separation and withdrawal, writing disconnects you from experience, freezing it. Sometimes this disconnection can feel like a sort of killing. Some young writers can even feel that if they write from their own life, or about their own family, that this objectification can be like murdering your own parents. They are rightly nervous of the amount of conflict and aggression which creative exploration seems to invite. No wonder they can feel inhibited. It’s easier to avoid difference and the problem of taking power, to play dead and choose to be passive or submissive, than to argue or be individual. But the price is higher.

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For young writers there is no audience. No one real hears them yet. They have to attempt difficult things. They must work at ideas which are beyond them. It would be sensible for them to find a good teacher, one who would push them. That would be their apprenticeship, when they would be rejected, criticised and knocked down repeatedly, as they would be in the world. Most of the young writers I teach don’t produce enough work. They’re over-anxious about the quality of what they’re doing, not bold enough, and, later on in the process, not tough enough when it comes to cutting and rewriting.

But at least if you can see writing as a form of costume or masking, you can see that it can be learned. The voice, the point of view, is a put-on. All this is pretence, a form of magical play, like string-work with more omnipotence. Even forms of recently fashionable ‘confessional’ writing, which appear to be told like it was, require as much art and construction as any thriller, which is why often these pieces turn out to be more fictional than intended. And this is more than just expressing oneself. The writer is a fiction, having created herself out of what she has been given.

I would go further. When you write, you are addressing other people; there is always someone else there, someone who sees you. And this absent reader whom the writer imagines — the subject the writer is trying to take on an outing, the implicit receiver of the words, the one who should understand — is also a fiction, an essential one. This fiction orientates the writer. The reader makes the writer possible. Yet thinking of the reader makes the writer anxious. This reader is judging you. This reader recognises you, and reads you properly. The reader wants to be fascinated and enchanted. This is the crucial question for the writer, as it is for any person. How do we keep the other’s attention? How do we keep their desire for us alive? What do they see, and do they love us? Will they forgive us our mistakes? Are we giving them something they want, something they don’t want, or something else altogether? Living with such anxiety, and answering it back, justifying your work, is necessary to the process.

Some writers think their characters have to be sympathetic. That is not at all necessary or common in good writing, and cute characters are off-putting. Obviously, you’d no more read a book on the basis of its characters being likeable than you’d choose a lover because they were nice. All that must happen is for the reader to become involved with the writer’s people, and see themselves in the conflicts and dilemmas the writer produces.

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The devilish character Jack Tanner in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman states, ‘The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.’

In his witty essay ‘The Writer on Holiday’, Roland Barthes considers this romantic idea of the place of the writer in the public imagination. If writers are ‘specialists of the human soul’ or ‘professionals of inspiration’, the writer simply cannot go on holiday like other workers because he — and it is usually a he — isn’t someone with a job. Art is a calling. A real writer is always a writer, and he can’t help it, he just has to do it. This kind of pure artist — Shelley, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Kafka, Plath, Nina Simone or the young Dylan, say — can’t leave himself behind, or turn off his mind, since you can’t cancel your subscription to inspiration. The Muse is a sort of ‘inner tyrant’. And not only is the artist possessed, he must pay a high price for his devotion. He should sacrifice not only his time and financial security, but should also forsake the safety of being a good person. Mad and difficult, he must place his work before his wife and children, whom he would rather see ruined than compromise his will.

This amusingly misleading but not uncommon notion of the artist a moment away from hacking off his own ear prevents us from seeing art where it mostly is: in the market, in collaborationist if not negotiated forms like pop and the cinema, and in most types of craft. The written word, and the story, is still fundamental to us. Everything we see on TV or in the cinema, and every song we hear, was written down first. The idea of the romantic artist separates the use of the imagination from the rest of the public. The idealisation of the artist is a limitation which leads to impoverishment elsewhere, and can cause us to forget that the imagination extends to all areas of life.

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Recently it has become common in film and television, and also in the novel, for the story idea to be based on the lives of real people. These are usually celebrities of some sort, often enduring a particularly dramatic period in their lives. It could be Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana, Tony Blair, Queen Elizabeth the First, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, or a sportsman, actor or murderer. Mad poets and mathematicians are popular, nicely illustrating the popular idea that genius and idiocy are never far apart. For a producer or a writer, this can seem like a good solution to the problem of finding a story. Most of the work has been done. The characters already exist in the public imagination; the action has taken place, and the writer will have a good idea of how these people might speak and what they might say.