Writers on Writing - Louise Welsh

LOUISE WELSH
Reading Made Me into a Writer

Reading made me into a writer. My family were always on the move. I didn’t have many books, but wherever we were we would visit the public library twice a week. Which was fortunate, because moving so much I didn’t have many friends either. Being an egoist I always put myself at the centre of the novel. I wanted to be the adventurer, the one telling the story, the author. Writers win, even when they lose, they tell the tale.
When I was fourteen I was involved in an accident. Recovery involved lying motionless for three months. I was miserable, humiliated, lonely. Once more books were a refuge. I started to write - bundles of poems. I hope someone incinerated them along with my casts.
After that there was no writing for a long time. I opened a second hand book shop and kept on reading. Then, in my late twenties, I got itchy fingers. I began to meet other writers and for the first time started to think of myself in that way, not just a reader but a writer. Eventually, I wrote a novel and someone agreed to publish it.
Of course I’d rather be a movie star, but next to cinema, books are the best thing.

Writers on Writing - Michel Faber

MICHEL FABER
Making Unforgettable Pictures

At the time of writing what you are reading now, I am sitting next to stack of paper 967 pages high. This is a novel that I started twenty years ago and of which I have written three versions, each good, each better than the last. For seventeen of those twenty years, there was not the slightest sign that I would get any money or any recognition for those 967 pages. There's only one reason why anyone in their right mind would undertake such a labour -- passionate love of language.

Now that I have readers, I enjoy the challenge of making unforgettable pictures materialise in their heads and diverting their thinking onto paths they wouldn't otherwise have travelled. But before I had readers, I worked just as hard to achieve these things, for no one.

Overall, I'd say my work has evolved from being thematically ambitious but rather artificial, to having compassion and warmth. I've reached a balance between the alienation that gives rise to unusual and disturbing ideas, and the life experience that allows me to share human insights. It's interesting to see the way my latest novel - the huge Victorian one - has changed over the years. It used to be a very circular, determinist story. As I rewrote it, it became more good-humoured, more open- ended, more respectful of human potential and the preciousness of love. It's still dark as hell, mind you. But less so than it used to be -- like me.

Writers on Writing - Jeremy Reed

JEREMY REED
Above all - Imagination

I started writing as a child, and ever since leaving school I have somehow managed to support myself on writing books. I suppose I've only managed to continue by not questioning the risk involved, or the enormous vulnerability that such a pursuit entails. Part of my quest has always been to defy the system and to live outside its institutional parameters. Too many writers attempt to make compromises. I believe you're either one thing or the other.
What has always driven me to write is imagination, and a lack of books I want to read. I try to create the sort of poetry and prose that I wish others had written. My models are J G Ballard, Jean Genet, Edmund White, and the poets James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbury and Thom Gunn. I look for risk, zaniness, colour, cutting-edge material, and above all - imagination.
One of the great rewards for me is to have had my work earn high critical acclaim from some of these writers - like J G Ballard, Edmund White and John Ashbury.
I write for at least six hours a day, so to me writing means connecting with the universe in my own way. I hold my pen up to the sun before I write and write into scarlet-covered school exercise books. I write by hand as I like to feed my neurology into the page. Sitting in front of a terminal all day is the occupation of the business sector. I tend to write at home in the morning and in the afternoon I go out to a local café and continue there for two or three hours. I love pop music, so tend to break up the hours of writing with bursts of sonic distraction.
Writing means everything and nothing to me. On the one hand its my obsessive preoccupation, my life-force, and on the other hand I'm consumed by its ultimate meaninglessness. I suppose if you take anything seriously, then you are acutely aware of the downside as well as the up.
I wouldn't wish to do anything else but write, no matter the material insecurity it brings. I made that pact with myself a long time ago. My work is crowded with small detail. I think of myself as a kleptomaniac. I write like I am directing a film,; with great visual clarity. I aim for the kicks that imagery brings, and hope that others too will get off on reading what I've written. Finishing books is the hard part. Knowing I'll never go that way again. And usually it rains at the time, and rain is another form of lyric expression…

Welcome to Textum

Welcome to Textum (reincarnated). To get things started I have decided to post some material from the archives. Unfortunately I do not have everything - Textum was once a 'cut and paste' operation! I hope you enjoy browsing the annals.