Start Writing Fiction
Using yourself
NARRATOR:
Weve already done some work on how and where to find and research
your characters. Here novelists talk about how theyve used themselves
in their fiction (the autobiographical method in Novakovichs terms),
often as a starting point for the creation of someone different. As youre
listening to Abdulrazak Gurnah, Michle Roberts, Monique Roffey and
Alex Garland, make a note of any approaches that are similar to your
own and approaches that seem quite different but which you might like to
try.
ABDULRAZAK GURNAH:
I dont in any case expect that you can evade this, you know, that you,
that you can escape writing about your experiences, or if you do then in
itself that becomes a kind of project. You can say well Im going to write
about everything but Im going to keep myself out of it. Now what would
be interesting then if you were a reader is to see where that suppressed
self actually comes into the writing however hard you suppress.
But, you know, I dont feel like that at all and I know a lot of writers dont.
There are a lot of writers who in fact quite happily write about
themselves, Saul Bellow being one, Phillip Roth being another, who
quite happily write about themselves. They make themselves the subject
of their fiction. Vies Naipaul is another one in recent times. But I still
believe that in fact it is actually harder to keep the writer out of the writing
than people imagine, at least the kind of fiction that I write and like to
read.
MICHLE ROBERTS:
I think every novel has its root in the real world in that it presents me with
a problem that I then try and solve. It might pose a question that the
novel tries to solve. The Mistressclass was inspired by, I cant remember
what now, its so long ago, its vanished into the unconscious. I think it
was inspired by a real situation in my life in that I have sisters, Im very
interested in the relationships between sisters its a theme I return to. I
am a twin sister. Im fascinated by twins, by doubleness, by the other,
the mirror image whos not the same as you.
So theres an autobiographical element there. But Ive found over and
over again, every time, if you just write about yourself, youre too close to
yourself, to your own stuff, you cant see it properly. So normally you end
up repressing, writing quite clumpily and clumsily, and you need to open
up to the world and throw your own stuff out into the world and find what
T S Elliot called in this grandiose term an objective correlative.
For this new novel I knew I wanted to write about sisters again,
particularly sisters who were rivals. I found a pair of sisters, Emily Bronte
and Charlotte Bronte, and I suddenly remembered that Id had wanted to
write about passionate obsessive unrequited love ha ha Charlotte
had exactly that experience with her tutor M. Heger in Brussels, so I was
off. Id found a subject in the world. But I think actually Im writing a lot
about my feelings about being a twin when I was little. Its not directly
autobiographical, but theres an energy there.
MONIQUE ROFFEY:
Well to be honest, August isnt that different in terms of his cultural
background and his age. Hes a sort of middle class man of similar age
to me when I was writing it. I think if he was a young boy who lived in
China then I would have had to have made a much bigger creative leap.
And again I mean, its a book of internals and internally I understood
where August was coming from and what I was writing about and that
men and women do share the same emotional territory in many ways
and so it wasnt a big leap in terms of craft I didnt have to sort of think
of any clever techniques in which to sort of put trousers on, August
internally, I knew what he was, I knew what he was about really so it was
very easy to make the switch.
ALEX GARLAND:
In the case of The Beach, the protagonist, and I think theres, its
something that young writers or, maybe young is the wrong word but first
time writers often do is that what they end up doing is they draw a lot on
themselves to flesh out the character. So I did that a lot I think with, the
narrator of that book because you could do it and then you could drop in
a few things that he would do that you wouldnt do, and suddenly youve
got a fictional character who will take you in different directions.