G
Guest
Guest
For you serious writers, I urge you look at this (I've taken out quite a bit, hopefully retained the gist of thigs; the full essay link is below). I plan to read Haddon's novel next. No offence meant by 'serious', just don't want to waste your time if you're here for fun only. P.
Mark Haddon - The Observer, April 11, 2004
I've been writing books for children for 17 years. Over that time, I've received a steady trickle of letters. … The best question I ever received came from a boy who asked whether I did much crossing out. I explained that most of my work consisted of crossing out and that crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
Three years ago, I wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel set in Swindon about a teenage boy with Asperger's syndrome who discovers a murdered poodle on a neighbour's lawn. It was published in two identical editions with different covers, one for adults and one for teenagers. To my continuing amazement, it seems to have spread round the world like some particularly infectious rash.
The other question I find myself having to answer at least once a week is: 'What's the difference between writing for children and writing for adults?' I generally take the union line. There is no real difference. Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
The truth, however, is more complex than the union line. … It's not a difference in subject matter, either. … It's not a difference between one book and another, or between one reader and another. It's a difference between ways of writing and ways of reading. For me - and perhaps this is not so odd for a writer whose next book involves skin cancer and nervous breakdown - the difference is about death. Not literal death, … but death's smaller harbingers: illness, failure, loss, the irony that we have infinite dreams but find ourselves stuck in one body for one life.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with. This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
Genre fiction says: 'Forget the gas bill. Forget the office politics. Pretend you're a spy. Pretend you're a courtesan. Pretend you're the owner of a crumbling gothic mansion on this worryingly foggy promontory.' Literary fiction says: 'Bad luck. You're stuck with who you are, just as these people are stuck with who they are. But use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.' Obviously, we all know men of 50 who have never paused to consider their own mortality, but I'll wager that very few of them are reading Middlemarch.
I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, though I do prefer curling up with an author such as A.M. Homes rather than Helen Fielding. Nor do I mean that the distinction is a rigid one. On the contrary, some of the best novels—Jane Eyre, The Woman in White—have a foot in both camps. I mean only that novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.
In fact, the book most often in my mind was Pride and Prejudice. … Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen. All we can think of is country houses, heritage frocks and Colin Firth's chest in a wet shirt. But if Austen were alive today, she'd be writing about chartered accountants in Welwyn Garden City. Her heroines were bound by iron rules about what they could do, where they could go and what they could say. Their futures depended on the single question of who they would marry. … Yet Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating. And her first act of empathy is to write about them in the kind of book these woman would themselves read—the romantic novel.
This was what I was trying to do in Curious Incident. To take a life that seemed horribly constrained, to write about it in the kind of book that the hero would read—a murder mystery—and hopefully show that if you viewed this life with sufficient imagination it would seem infinite.
When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable. With Curious Incident, I was trying to do something different. The first thing I was doing was writing to entertain myself rather than the person I remember being at six, or eight. Second, yes, the book has simple language, a carefully shaped plot and invites you to enter someone else's life. And these, I think, are the aspects of the book that appeal most to younger readers. But the book, I hope, does something more than that. The legs aren't quite the same length. It isn't entirely comfortable. It's about how little separates us from those we turn away from in the street. It's about how badly we communicate with one another. It's about accepting that every life is narrow and that our only escape from this is not to run away (to another country, another relationship, a slimmer, more confident self) but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.
As Christopher, my main character, says: 'People go on holidays to see new things... but I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.' And I don't believe you can fully understand this aspect of the novel (or of any novel) until you have heard at your back 'Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near'.
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away. But I do remember reading R.S. Thomas at 14—'Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,/ Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,/ Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud'—and being astonished that someone could arrange these perfectly ordinary words in a way that did amazing things to the inside of my head. I've spent most of my life trying to understand that mystery, and trying to give other people the experience I had.
My problem was that I hadn't realised the importance of what I'd learnt writing for children. It's not about you. No one wants to know how clever you are. Like children, adults need to be entertained. Even those reading to make themselves better people would prefer to enjoy the process. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed. I remember a picture from an encyclopedia in my junior science library. It was a medieval woodcut of a man who had climbed a long ladder and found himself touching the sphere on which the stars revolved. He'd removed a panel from the sphere and was staring through the hole into the outer darkness. This is what I now want from a good book. I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
© Mark Haddon full article
Mark Haddon - The Observer, April 11, 2004
I've been writing books for children for 17 years. Over that time, I've received a steady trickle of letters. … The best question I ever received came from a boy who asked whether I did much crossing out. I explained that most of my work consisted of crossing out and that crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
Three years ago, I wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel set in Swindon about a teenage boy with Asperger's syndrome who discovers a murdered poodle on a neighbour's lawn. It was published in two identical editions with different covers, one for adults and one for teenagers. To my continuing amazement, it seems to have spread round the world like some particularly infectious rash.
The other question I find myself having to answer at least once a week is: 'What's the difference between writing for children and writing for adults?' I generally take the union line. There is no real difference. Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
The truth, however, is more complex than the union line. … It's not a difference in subject matter, either. … It's not a difference between one book and another, or between one reader and another. It's a difference between ways of writing and ways of reading. For me - and perhaps this is not so odd for a writer whose next book involves skin cancer and nervous breakdown - the difference is about death. Not literal death, … but death's smaller harbingers: illness, failure, loss, the irony that we have infinite dreams but find ourselves stuck in one body for one life.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with. This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
Genre fiction says: 'Forget the gas bill. Forget the office politics. Pretend you're a spy. Pretend you're a courtesan. Pretend you're the owner of a crumbling gothic mansion on this worryingly foggy promontory.' Literary fiction says: 'Bad luck. You're stuck with who you are, just as these people are stuck with who they are. But use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.' Obviously, we all know men of 50 who have never paused to consider their own mortality, but I'll wager that very few of them are reading Middlemarch.
I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, though I do prefer curling up with an author such as A.M. Homes rather than Helen Fielding. Nor do I mean that the distinction is a rigid one. On the contrary, some of the best novels—Jane Eyre, The Woman in White—have a foot in both camps. I mean only that novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.
In fact, the book most often in my mind was Pride and Prejudice. … Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen. All we can think of is country houses, heritage frocks and Colin Firth's chest in a wet shirt. But if Austen were alive today, she'd be writing about chartered accountants in Welwyn Garden City. Her heroines were bound by iron rules about what they could do, where they could go and what they could say. Their futures depended on the single question of who they would marry. … Yet Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating. And her first act of empathy is to write about them in the kind of book these woman would themselves read—the romantic novel.
This was what I was trying to do in Curious Incident. To take a life that seemed horribly constrained, to write about it in the kind of book that the hero would read—a murder mystery—and hopefully show that if you viewed this life with sufficient imagination it would seem infinite.
When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable. With Curious Incident, I was trying to do something different. The first thing I was doing was writing to entertain myself rather than the person I remember being at six, or eight. Second, yes, the book has simple language, a carefully shaped plot and invites you to enter someone else's life. And these, I think, are the aspects of the book that appeal most to younger readers. But the book, I hope, does something more than that. The legs aren't quite the same length. It isn't entirely comfortable. It's about how little separates us from those we turn away from in the street. It's about how badly we communicate with one another. It's about accepting that every life is narrow and that our only escape from this is not to run away (to another country, another relationship, a slimmer, more confident self) but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.
As Christopher, my main character, says: 'People go on holidays to see new things... but I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.' And I don't believe you can fully understand this aspect of the novel (or of any novel) until you have heard at your back 'Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near'.
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away. But I do remember reading R.S. Thomas at 14—'Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,/ Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,/ Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud'—and being astonished that someone could arrange these perfectly ordinary words in a way that did amazing things to the inside of my head. I've spent most of my life trying to understand that mystery, and trying to give other people the experience I had.
My problem was that I hadn't realised the importance of what I'd learnt writing for children. It's not about you. No one wants to know how clever you are. Like children, adults need to be entertained. Even those reading to make themselves better people would prefer to enjoy the process. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed. I remember a picture from an encyclopedia in my junior science library. It was a medieval woodcut of a man who had climbed a long ladder and found himself touching the sphere on which the stars revolved. He'd removed a panel from the sphere and was staring through the hole into the outer darkness. This is what I now want from a good book. I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
© Mark Haddon full article
