Ask the Author: Nick Harkaway
Answered Questions (19)
Nick Harkaway
Well, my wife gets to see it whenever she wants. There are times when she'll be heavily into what's happening and she'll come home and jump up and down shouting "pages!" and that's how I know I need to be very productive.
Other than that I don't really make rules about it. Like right now my agent has seen some of the new book - although what he's seen is hopelessly out of date - and I sent my editor in the UK the first page basically just to make him crazy. (This is a very important part of one's authorial responsibilities.)
I probably wouldn't show the book as it stands to anyone beyond that, because it's still in a mess with wires hanging out of the ceiling. I'm making decisions right now, today, which could cause a page one rewrite or make it all fall into line and save me a couple of months. At that point there's not much percentage in asking someone to have an opinion.
On the other hand, I might, I just might, show a few pages to someone I admire if I was feeling down and needed a boost to get through a section.
People have all kinds of rules about this, and they worry about spending the magic and they worry about talking too much about a project under way and so on, and all those things have some validity - it is possible to talk rather than write, and there is something special about the delighted energy you put into something the first time you write a bit you've been waiting to reveal or whatever. But that said, it's also true that great creativity often comes out of relationships rather than solitude, and that speaking something makes it real and forces you to deal with the places where it doesn't work. So there are reasons to share, too. As in all things about writing, it's down to you and how you want to play it.
Other than that I don't really make rules about it. Like right now my agent has seen some of the new book - although what he's seen is hopelessly out of date - and I sent my editor in the UK the first page basically just to make him crazy. (This is a very important part of one's authorial responsibilities.)
I probably wouldn't show the book as it stands to anyone beyond that, because it's still in a mess with wires hanging out of the ceiling. I'm making decisions right now, today, which could cause a page one rewrite or make it all fall into line and save me a couple of months. At that point there's not much percentage in asking someone to have an opinion.
On the other hand, I might, I just might, show a few pages to someone I admire if I was feeling down and needed a boost to get through a section.
People have all kinds of rules about this, and they worry about spending the magic and they worry about talking too much about a project under way and so on, and all those things have some validity - it is possible to talk rather than write, and there is something special about the delighted energy you put into something the first time you write a bit you've been waiting to reveal or whatever. But that said, it's also true that great creativity often comes out of relationships rather than solitude, and that speaking something makes it real and forces you to deal with the places where it doesn't work. So there are reasons to share, too. As in all things about writing, it's down to you and how you want to play it.
Nick Harkaway
Almost none, but the tiny magic eyebrow-pumas that live in them whisper secrets into my ears while I dream.
(My wife forbids cutting the eyebrows more than is absolutely necessary. She says this is because they are lovely. I suspect she just worries about the puma habitat. Or maybe she also worries about the puma habitat.)
(My wife forbids cutting the eyebrows more than is absolutely necessary. She says this is because they are lovely. I suspect she just worries about the puma habitat. Or maybe she also worries about the puma habitat.)
Nick Harkaway
Mmmmm, tricky, because it's hard to see the back of your own head, as it were. I know that I draw on Conan Doyle for my sense of the language, because I read his books at a formative moment in my life. I also know that I sneak in flavours of Gravity's Rainbow when I think I can get away with it, and that I admire Jeanette Winterson, E. Annie Proulx, William Gibson, Michael Chabon, and Jorge Luis Borges. What I don't - can't - know is where that takes us. I also think that my style has varied a fair bit between books: TGAW was more machine-gun geek, Angelmaker was a little bit contemplative, and Tigerman used as few Latinate words and classical constructions as possible; linguistically speaking I was very restrained most of the time. Lester Ferris is a not guy who would say something was transparent, he'd say you could see through it.
And this new one I'm doing now? God only knows. It's dense, but I hope also transparent. We'll see. It's a complex thing to write, in part because I want it to be as easy as possible to read while at the same time it's got some really mindbending stuff going on. We'll see what happens.
And this new one I'm doing now? God only knows. It's dense, but I hope also transparent. We'll see. It's a complex thing to write, in part because I want it to be as easy as possible to read while at the same time it's got some really mindbending stuff going on. We'll see what happens.
Nick Harkaway
Almost everyone loves that sequence. It's blatantly rude. I hear several people are even now trying to construct beds that do that. Did I know? No. Did I suspect? Yes. Most of us are filthy and greatly enjoy discovering a new and outré form of naughtiness. It's one of the things to love about humans.
Nick Harkaway
First of all: the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum" remains, to me, unassailable, though one can quarrel over the precise definitions of "I" and "am". That being the case and within the structures of a universe that may or may not actually exist in the form we assume from the measurements we are able to take, cake clearly exists and can be eaten and the experience of eating is pleasurable. Therefore, to your first question: yes.
As to which cake, I like a particular version of chocolate cake contained in the old Magimix cake book, iced with a butter, dark chocolate and golden syrup icing. I also like apple spice cake, carrot cake from one hotel half way up a mountain, and really good Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.
As to which cake, I like a particular version of chocolate cake contained in the old Magimix cake book, iced with a butter, dark chocolate and golden syrup icing. I also like apple spice cake, carrot cake from one hotel half way up a mountain, and really good Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.
Nick Harkaway
Wow! So many ideas. I would love to see Tigerman on the screen, big or small. And casting is magic, it needs real skill which I do not have.
However: I saw this article in my local paper with a picture of Simon Pegg and thought "Holy shit, he could play Lester!"
Which would be awesome.
http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/hampste...
However: I saw this article in my local paper with a picture of Simon Pegg and thought "Holy shit, he could play Lester!"
Which would be awesome.
http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/hampste...
Nick Harkaway
Oooh, good one. Two answers:
1. You know because you make it make you so excited, so thrilled by the reveals and so appalled by the pits into which the characters fall that you can't wait to get back to your desk to write some more. When your attention flags and you want to play FTL for iOS on your iPad Mini (totally random example, nothing to see here) you have to fix that. As long as you're bouncing up and down and unable to type the words fast enough, or rapt by the beauty and the horror or whatever, you're okay. Your sad scenes should make you weep, your murders should make you afraid. Oh, and that's the other thing: personal opinion - you need to own all the cardinal compass directions of narrative and emotion. If you want your audience to be scared, make them feel safe. Own safety. Then you can take it away. Etc etc.
2. The gig is not to write what will interest them, it is to make them interested in what you write. Someone like Jeanette Winterson could write about carving a wooden toothrbrush for a chapter and you'd be fascinated. Hell, she could write a book about it and people would queue up for a copy.
1. You know because you make it make you so excited, so thrilled by the reveals and so appalled by the pits into which the characters fall that you can't wait to get back to your desk to write some more. When your attention flags and you want to play FTL for iOS on your iPad Mini (totally random example, nothing to see here) you have to fix that. As long as you're bouncing up and down and unable to type the words fast enough, or rapt by the beauty and the horror or whatever, you're okay. Your sad scenes should make you weep, your murders should make you afraid. Oh, and that's the other thing: personal opinion - you need to own all the cardinal compass directions of narrative and emotion. If you want your audience to be scared, make them feel safe. Own safety. Then you can take it away. Etc etc.
2. The gig is not to write what will interest them, it is to make them interested in what you write. Someone like Jeanette Winterson could write about carving a wooden toothrbrush for a chapter and you'd be fascinated. Hell, she could write a book about it and people would queue up for a copy.
Nick Harkaway
Yes. Absolutely, yes. And in fact the new book essentially does have a female protagonist, although that's made murky by the protean nature of the story. I basically tossed a coin to see whether I wrote this book or another one which also had a female lead and was more unambiguous and - frankly - easier. I ended up doing the hard one because if you're not frightened of your new project you're coasting and people can tell when they read it.
Edie Banister, of course, is the closest I've come so far. Edie is overwhelmingly strong as a presence in Angelmaker given the relatively small percentage of the book that actually belongs to her, but part of that is because she has an Obiwan role: she gets to know everything and do anything because the resolution of the problem central to the book belongs to the main (male) protagonist, but as with the other characters so too with Edie: there's a dynastic succession going on, a passing of the awesome torch. And interestingly, Edie's the only one who gets a prequel, and the one I might tell more stories about...
Edie Banister, of course, is the closest I've come so far. Edie is overwhelmingly strong as a presence in Angelmaker given the relatively small percentage of the book that actually belongs to her, but part of that is because she has an Obiwan role: she gets to know everything and do anything because the resolution of the problem central to the book belongs to the main (male) protagonist, but as with the other characters so too with Edie: there's a dynastic succession going on, a passing of the awesome torch. And interestingly, Edie's the only one who gets a prequel, and the one I might tell more stories about...
Nick Harkaway
I'm not quite sure when we met. I know where - at Pinewood Studios - but basically every memory I have of Pinewood is swallowed by fatigue, aspiration, randomised lust and surreality. I fell in massively unrequited love with an orange-haired animator/costumer who wore the coolest Vivienne Westwood jeans in the universe, met a very charming young actress named Angelina somethingorother who everyone else was madly in love with and who has gone on to do rather well, and stood in the car park in the pre-dawn with a troop of mounted knights led by Richard Gere riding past me to a catering bus. At some point I aloso met Jasper.
We don't have any plans to collaborate, I think in part for the same reason you're wondering if we might: because our thought processes can be similarly quirky. Working with people you like is hazardous, so it's probably better we just take tea and cake from time to time. I think it would be more interesting to pair Jasper with, say, Ian Rankin, and see what kind of incredibly alarming thing came out of that...
We don't have any plans to collaborate, I think in part for the same reason you're wondering if we might: because our thought processes can be similarly quirky. Working with people you like is hazardous, so it's probably better we just take tea and cake from time to time. I think it would be more interesting to pair Jasper with, say, Ian Rankin, and see what kind of incredibly alarming thing came out of that...
Nick Harkaway
Weeeeellllll, I get ideas the way you get hit by raindrops if you go outside in a storm. Some of them are good and if I'm lucky they collide with other ideas and then I have a story. Some of them are awful. Really, really awful. I sit bolt upright in bed and shout something about how I'm a genius and I write it all down and I wake in the morning to a note about how bananas are going to kill the King of Silesia and take over the world, and only a trained monkey called Newton, armed with a grocer's apron wrapped around the skull of a dead saint, can possibly save us. And I look at that and I have to admit that while it possesses the virtue of originality it is clearly crap.
But every so often ideas collide and produce something exciting, and then it's not a question of persuading myself to write, but of budgeting time to do other things like eat.
Where ideas come from... I think that's about taking the brakes off your mind. We're all trained as kids to stop thinking the ridiculous things and be sensible, and writing is about recapturing the possibility that there are invisible mousemonsters that sneak onto buses and chew the furniture and they are kept in line by a young woman with a magic accordion. It's about permitting yourself to touch the weird in search of the amazing.
But every so often ideas collide and produce something exciting, and then it's not a question of persuading myself to write, but of budgeting time to do other things like eat.
Where ideas come from... I think that's about taking the brakes off your mind. We're all trained as kids to stop thinking the ridiculous things and be sensible, and writing is about recapturing the possibility that there are invisible mousemonsters that sneak onto buses and chew the furniture and they are kept in line by a young woman with a magic accordion. It's about permitting yourself to touch the weird in search of the amazing.
Nick Harkaway
A completely demented story that is going to turn my head inside out and make my brain come out of my ears. It's got surveillance, murder, history, sharks, alchemy, semiotics, economics and art, post humanism, theories of time and existence. For the first time in my fiction-writing life I'm doing research frantically, my head feels as if it's bursting at the seams. It's nuts. God, I hope it works. As I said earlier: if you're not close to the line, everyone's bored, and that's no good. But wow, this is taxing.
Nick Harkaway
Honestly: seeing my kids every day. Most of the dads I know just don't get to do that. I see them in the morning, I can take a break and have lunch with my 18mo son if I want, pick my daughter up from school. Everyone should be able to do that. The world would be nicer.
Nick Harkaway
Yes, for a while. It's curious who - Humbert Pestle still occasionally jostles me and wants me to tell his side of the story of TGAW, for example. It's one of the interesting thing about TV and movie deals - there's always a clause about sequels, and you think: "maybe I could just outline that and someone else could do the hard work..."
But the other thing that happens is that new characters come along and evict the old ones. Lester Ferris et al has given way in my mind to Constantine Kyriakos and the cast of the novel I'm writing now. On a practical, maybe a psychological or even a neuroscientific level, there's a limit to the number of fully-fleshed identities I can carry in my head. So people get phased out, and then they exist in the book, and if I want them I have to feel my way back to who they were and how they've evolved while I was away. Which is weird.
But the other thing that happens is that new characters come along and evict the old ones. Lester Ferris et al has given way in my mind to Constantine Kyriakos and the cast of the novel I'm writing now. On a practical, maybe a psychological or even a neuroscientific level, there's a limit to the number of fully-fleshed identities I can carry in my head. So people get phased out, and then they exist in the book, and if I want them I have to feel my way back to who they were and how they've evolved while I was away. Which is weird.
Nick Harkaway
Sure. I have a couple I keep meaning to pitch, actually. And I'd LOVE to write some superhero stuff at some point on an established character, ideally one of the ones everyone thinks is rubbish so I can do something totally nuts. But there's only so many hours in the day, and I haven't even written up my new TV pitches. Or finished the new novel. It's a question of timing and serendipity (extraordinary word).
Nick Harkaway
Probably Frankie Fossoyeur, and for the simple reason that if I could sit down with her it would mean she was real, and that would in turn imply that incredibly amazing things were possible in the world. If I was nice to her she might build me a submarine, or a time machine, or a magic who-knows-whatifier. Plus also a lot of my characters are really unrestful, terrifying people to be around. Frankie is driven, brilliant, and benevolent. That's going to make for interesting dinner conversation. Can you imagine how much trouble I'd get into with Mercer Cradle? Or how infuriating it would be to spend time listening to Jed Kershaw explain foreign policy? Ike Thermite would be fun, though...
Nick Harkaway
The first thing is that I don't think they're a mismatch. You can't make someone genuinely scared, for example, until you've let them laugh for a while. Laughter is often our first response to something unsettling, but if you as the author take ownership of it from early on, you get to choose when it's allowed, and you can block it at the crucial moment so that something disturbing really hits home. It's a rhythm thing, a dance. So I want to be able to make you happy, sad, confident, nervous, optimistic, desolate, and so on. If I can make you love someone, I can make you fear and hate whoever threatens them.
The next thing is that pulp has always been sneakingly serious. It's often been a refuge for ideas, groups, sexualities and so on that the mainstream isn't talking about. What we do in our entertainment, what we look for, what we fantasise about, is indicative of how we feel. Lots of 70s and 80s movies are about the creeping threat, others are about total annihilation - the two faces of Cold War angst. In the early 2000s you get the infiltration of Marvel's universe by a string of terrible shapeshifters preparing to wreak havoc... pulp is always about serious stuff, and gets away with that by being pulp.
And yes. Yes, I do get too silly. I had to cut 25k words of elephant narration from Angelmaker because it was completely screwing up the narrative. It's a balance, you're in dialogue as you write with an imaginary reader, trying to work out if they're with you or thinking you've jumped the shark. If you're not close, they're bored. If you actually go over, they're laughing at you. So you dance and hope like hell.
The next thing is that pulp has always been sneakingly serious. It's often been a refuge for ideas, groups, sexualities and so on that the mainstream isn't talking about. What we do in our entertainment, what we look for, what we fantasise about, is indicative of how we feel. Lots of 70s and 80s movies are about the creeping threat, others are about total annihilation - the two faces of Cold War angst. In the early 2000s you get the infiltration of Marvel's universe by a string of terrible shapeshifters preparing to wreak havoc... pulp is always about serious stuff, and gets away with that by being pulp.
And yes. Yes, I do get too silly. I had to cut 25k words of elephant narration from Angelmaker because it was completely screwing up the narrative. It's a balance, you're in dialogue as you write with an imaginary reader, trying to work out if they're with you or thinking you've jumped the shark. If you're not close, they're bored. If you actually go over, they're laughing at you. So you dance and hope like hell.
Nick Harkaway
Sit. Think with a pen in your hand. Do it today. Scribble in a notebook. Plot, draw bubbles and lines and get a sense of where your story might go. Known where the takeoff and the landing are. Then get started. Write! Keep going. Do not get sucked into endless revision. Move forward as long as you can, fix what doesn't work, move on. Edit later. Come to the end. If you write five thousand words a week, at the end of fourteen weeks you've got yourself a novel. Then the work really starts...
Nick Harkaway
ARGH! There's no such thing. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills. For example: very often, around the middle of a book, I grind to a halt. I can go no further, everything I write is catastrophically stupid. I tend to get very upset about that, and I'm unmentionably annoying to be around for a few days. My wife generally has to remind me how to fix the problem.
The way you fix it is you go back to the beginning and you get rid of all the junk, broken stuff you put in back before you understood what the hell the book was actually about, the stuff that is now preventing you from doing the really amazing things that will make the book special. You have to re-envision the whole thing, understand what you meant but could not at the time express. Sometimes that means cutting heavily, sometimes it means changing great swathes, sometimes it's a question of reading that crucial passage that carries your book in potential and taping it up over your desk.
Calling that moment "writer's block" is slandering yourself. It's not a block, it's the process. Don't demonise it! Beg for it! It's what stops you from writing lousy prose, saggy plots, unsatisfying endings. LOVE YOUR CRITICAL FACULTY.
Alternatively: at any time in the course of a book, I may find I cannot write it, bash away at it, hate myself, and then realise it's because I haven't done my chores. I haven't paid the credit card bill or whatever.
Understand: your ability to write is bound up with who you are and with your moods. It is tied to whether you are happy, sad, tense, relaxed, blah. It is you. So when something is wrong with your inkflow, that means either that you've goofed creatively or that you're not fixing something broken elsewhere in your world.
Love your mutant power. Do not try to force it to do something. Learn to listen.
The way you fix it is you go back to the beginning and you get rid of all the junk, broken stuff you put in back before you understood what the hell the book was actually about, the stuff that is now preventing you from doing the really amazing things that will make the book special. You have to re-envision the whole thing, understand what you meant but could not at the time express. Sometimes that means cutting heavily, sometimes it means changing great swathes, sometimes it's a question of reading that crucial passage that carries your book in potential and taping it up over your desk.
Calling that moment "writer's block" is slandering yourself. It's not a block, it's the process. Don't demonise it! Beg for it! It's what stops you from writing lousy prose, saggy plots, unsatisfying endings. LOVE YOUR CRITICAL FACULTY.
Alternatively: at any time in the course of a book, I may find I cannot write it, bash away at it, hate myself, and then realise it's because I haven't done my chores. I haven't paid the credit card bill or whatever.
Understand: your ability to write is bound up with who you are and with your moods. It is tied to whether you are happy, sad, tense, relaxed, blah. It is you. So when something is wrong with your inkflow, that means either that you've goofed creatively or that you're not fixing something broken elsewhere in your world.
Love your mutant power. Do not try to force it to do something. Learn to listen.
Nick Harkaway
In the street. I was standing in front of a locksmith's cubby in an old part of town, and suddenly I saw a branching set of possibilities. I'd been reading a LOT of Borges, some other strange, heavily textured stuff, and I found myself dictating chunks of prose into my phone to transcribe later. And then I had to stop because I was editing Tigerman! But now... here we are.
That moment of ZOINK! BOOK! is often very bolt-of-lightning, and it's tempting to see it as some kind of irreducible mystical event, but actually it tends to be a collision of ideas that fuses a whole load of things together and produces a universe, a basic notion, and a tone. I go from there.
That moment of ZOINK! BOOK! is often very bolt-of-lightning, and it's tempting to see it as some kind of irreducible mystical event, but actually it tends to be a collision of ideas that fuses a whole load of things together and produces a universe, a basic notion, and a tone. I go from there.
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