Anyone who is or who thinks they might be a writer should read this piece by AL Kennedy in today’s Guardian. Coming upon it made me want to jump up and down and shout hallelujah. Because this – ‘putting everything into writing’, as AL puts it – is what it’s all about.
The joy and fear and work involved in writing have to be real and full to have meaning and to achieve anything.
That’s it, precisely. And the joy of reading Kennedy’s essay lies in knowing she has the talent and the tenacity to put her money where her mouth is. Her fiction – sometimes thorny, sometimes abstruse, always felt, always meant, always intelligent – reads like a battle fought and won. She’s someone who stakes her life on her work. In other words, the real deal.
Above all, the pure act of writing – the truth that it is still there for you and you for it – is a wonder. And it need have nothing to do with the details of your life. Within it, you can be away from everything and saying out new dreams, just because you can, because human beings do sing for other human beings and make unnecessary beauties. Onwards.
Perhaps it is because certain sections of the literary establishment seem actively to fear fiction that takes risks that Kennedy’s most recent novel The Blue Book didn’t even make the longlist for last year’s Booker. It makes me clench my fists and grind my teeth to see our bravest writers so ill-served. Read Michael Bywater getting stuck into this groove here.
It’s ‘lit. fic.’ that has difficulties. Only a few, like Christopher Priest and Hilary Mantel, have the narrative genius to do it straight from the shoulder. The rest drift hopelessly into pink-embossed chick-lit or yet more nervous adultery in north London. With good reason. These are prissy times.
Great article. We’re not doomed yet.
Work on the new book is going well, even if the word ‘well’ has to let itself be defined in my own peculiar fashion. About ten days before Christmas I realised that the 20,000 words of draft I’d written to open the novel was not what I wanted. At all. So I dumped the lot. Today I got back to where I was and reached the 20,000-word mark (again) and this time it feels much more like it.