Here are a few of the questions that Kureishi answered today, two of which were from me, that I found really interesting. The whole session was very writing-based, so I hope you enjoy!
Do you read your own reviews?
"I don’t read the reviews anymore; I don’t have to if I don’t want to. I don’t feel obliged to. But then someone always sends you a text, you’re lying in bed on Sunday morning and you think, ‘I know there’s going to be some reviews in the papers today, I’ll have to avoid the papers,’ and then you look at your phone and someone says, ‘I wouldn’t read the observer today’, ‘Oh for God’s sake shut up!’. So people do let you know, usually your friends. But you don’t have to read anything you don’t want to. And why should you? With films it’s slightly different. You would read the reviews because you really need to know about the box office. With a movie you really want to know how the movie’s going to do on the first weekend. Otherwise by next weekend it’s dead, it’s gone, it’s out. So you might want to know about that, or how it’s doing in America, or how it’s doing in Denmark as opposed to Spain. But you don’t have to take any notice."
How do you deal with criticism?
"Well it depends on what criticism it is, doesn’t it, whether it comes from somebody you respect who has something to say; somebody who might say to you ‘You could have done a bit better with that’, that’s a better idea than you saw, that would be an interesting thing to say. If someone says ‘I think your writing is no good at all, it’s sort of hopeless’ you wouldn’t take any notice of that. You wouldn’t be interested in that. So really it depends on who you’re listening to and whether you want to listen to other people. I think you should listen to other people but that’s not the same as reading the newspapers, where they say ‘Hanif Kureishi’s career has been in decline for a long time’ and you think, that may be the case, but I have to carry on writing."
With novels do you prefer to write in patchwork style or in chronological order?
"I do it in patchwork. What you’re doing really as a writer is you’re surfing, you’re trying to find a wave and get on it, and that wave is your own excitement and your own interest. If I’m interested in something in the morning then I’ll do that, because I know there’s a bit of libido there, a bit of excitement there, there’s a bit of enthusiasm. And then when that runs out I’ll look for another bit of libido and enthusiasm and I’ll get onto that bit. And it’s that that drives you. If you’re sitting there doing something and you think ‘I don’t want to do this, it’s awful, this is dead, it’s boring,’ there’s absolutely no point in you doing it, so you’re looking for a bit of buzz, and you might think, oh I’ll write a bit from the end, a bit from the middle, a bit here and there and eventually you’ll link it up, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re working. And everybody has their own process. That’s how I work now, I didn’t work like that when I was 25, but I work like that now."
Have you ever had a moment where you thought 'This isn’t working; I give up'?
"I’ve had some really bad times. Some really bad times where I thought the game is really up.I’ve written say, two or three things, and neither of them have done very well; they weren’t very good. I wasn’t going to make a living and I thought ‘Fuck it, what am I going to do now? I’m going to have to become a teacher.’ Times were really hard. And then I recovered, but it was touch and go. There are times when you think, ‘I can’t, I’ve got three kids, I can’t support these kids doing this, I just can’t get them through it. I can’t earn enough money doing this, and I haven’t got any ideas and it’s just not going well.’ It’s really tough to do it, not be a writer, but to make a living as a writer, they are different things. We can all sit at home and write but not everyone can make a living from it. So it has been really tough at times, really difficult. But last night I was having dinner with two friends, two male friends, really bright men, and I was talking to them and I thought, ‘Both of your lives have been really difficult.’ Both of these men have been though things that would really stretch you and I thought ‘Living in the world is really difficult, for everybody.’ And these men are really bright and capable, two blokes but they’ve had really hard times, but they’ve come through. So it’s seems to be that living in the world, and it being really difficult, and it being extremely painful, with a lot of suffering involved was the natural state of things. It’s really just your capacity to deal with that. It seemed to me touch and go but I got through. I was lucky, and grateful when I got through as a writer. And it’s to do with my talent but it’s also to do with circumstance, and also to do with luck. It’s fantastic to have been a writer, and to be a young writer, that’s bloody hard. There’s so much self-doubt, and nobody wants you; nobody wants new writers, there’s no necessity for there to be another short story. You’ve got to make the world aware that it needs this. You’ve really got to sell it. You’re selling stuff to people that they don’t want. But you can get through it if you work."
Should a story have a hidden meaning?
"The problem is that everything is a metaphor. You try and write it literally; someone writes a story about an alien and then you think, ‘Why do you feel like an alien? You’re the alien, why do you feel that way? Is it for instance to do with your family?’ So you couldn’t help that. There’s always a multiplication of meaning, you can’t fix the meaning. That’s the problem. You say something to somebody and they take it the “wrong” way. And in that space, there is creativity, people begin to think. So you can’t fix the meaning, even Gaddafi can’t fix the meaning. You can’t hold the meaning down, it just slips away all the time, I’m afraid. So there will be hidden meanings, other people will interpret things differently, about what you say, about who you are, everything, about your dreams; meaning slips all the time. And that’s what it is that enables people to be creative, they hear things. If you told me a story about an alien, I’d hear it in a way that would make me think what an alien was, for you, and you couldn’t stop me thinking that, you couldn’t pin it down. So you will have communicated to me more than what you meant. But that happens in all human interaction too, so I could see something in what you say that you couldn’t see yourself. That would be interesting, but it would be hell for you. Because you can’t fix the meaning. That’s what dictators do, dictators want to fix the meaning. They say, ‘That’s the meaning, and there aren’t any other meanings, you’re not even allowed to think of the other meanings’, and that is fascism. That’s not what we do as writers, we try to create meaning, and to create works of fiction, that create more meanings, and multiply meaning, and that is really what it is to be creative."
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