The several wobbly piles of books on my bedside table would, if amalgamated into one pile, be at least as tall as the table itself. What’s on your bedside table at the moment? And when he had finished, he looked round and smiled, like he was saying, ‘That’s the way it’s done.’ And then he strutted off. When the Prophet appeared he waved me airily aside and then just wrote his own dialogue. (I still do.) In Piranesi there was a character a little bit like that, but he was a very different person from Childermass and I didn’t exactly love him. And then he pretty much wrote the scene for me. Whenever he appeared in a scene I felt like he pulled up a chair for me to sit down, made me a cup of tea, and told me he would handle everything. I’ve got this.’ In Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell it was Childermass. In both novels I’ve written there’s been one character who has turned up and said to me, ‘It’s OK. The story is the plot, yes, but it’s also the events and the characters and the unique atmosphere - the unique taste of that story alone. That is the thing I am always trying to get right, the story. The thing is not to write for an imagined person or a real person, the thing is to get the story right (or as right as you can) to find the right characters to serve the purposes of the story and conversely to find the right story that the characters can tell. I don’t really have any sort of reader in mind when writing. Who did you have in mind when writing Piranesi? Very much the sort of place where Laurence Arne-Sayles would feel at home.īefore sharing his Journals with us, Piranesi addresses The Sixteenth Person ‘Who are You? Who is it that I am writing for?’ (page 12). It described an intellectual landscape where psychedelia, the occult and religion butt up against each other. I also read Gary Lachman’s, The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn off your mind. As it turned out, it was completely irrelevant. I thought I need to know this because there are clouds in the House. For Piranesi I read about the history of clouds. It is a real struggle to decide what I actually need, as opposed to what is a fascinating little byway. If, for example, I realise that the characters possess a number of forks, I can easily get side-tracked into reading a history of forks. What was the research process like for the book? Details I’d entirely forgotten are there in Piranesi. But when I did read it I was astonished by the way that story and Piranesi echo back and forth. Until very recently I don’t believe I’d read it for 20 or 30 years. So this story has been with me for almost 40 years, but for several decades I couldn’t work out how to write it or what the characters’ story was.Īnother Borges story that I particularly loved was The House of Asterion. Two characters inhabited it one character understood the house instinctively and could navigate it easily and the other character could only really increase his understanding of the house by studying the first character. So at some point in the 80s I wrote a few pages about a Borgesian sort of world which consisted of a vast house in which an ocean was imprisoned. One world, for example, is an endless library (The Library of Babel). Some of the worlds he created are strange - worlds that pose philosophical questions and make you think in ways you’ve never thought before. They’re generally very short, very precise and very jewel-like. In my twenties I loved the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges.
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