More interview: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/the-younger-side-of-nick-hornby/6457/
Author’s Website: http://www.nicksbooks.com/index.php/archives/category/news/
TBR: You claim that it’s not possible to plan the kind of book that you write in any detail. How do you actually write your books?
N.H: I start with a fragment of narrative, or a character, something that seems to have resonance for me and which allows me to explore the kinds of themes I’m interested in. But I don’t begin to write for maybe a year, and in the meantime other elements start to attach themselves to the initial spark. A character or scene from another idea might suddenly start to make sense in a new context, things accumulate…And then I sit down with a very rough sense of a beginning, a middle and an end, maybe just a tonal sense rather than plot points. Most of the work, the jokes and the observations and the smaller narrative episodes, come with the actual writing rather than with the preparation.
TBR: You’ve said that the difference between writing novels and screenplays is that novels do not necessarily pass through the hands of a good editor, whereas screenplays are constantly scrutinised and, therefore, improved. Yet it strikes me that the quality of writing for the cinema is far lower than that in contemporary novels.
N.H: Well, I’m not sure you’re comparing like with like. If you’re talking about subtlety and sophistication, then novels of course have the edge. But so many novels don’t work – they are undisciplined, shapeless, they lose their readership. Whatever you think of film scripts, they frequently work as far as an audience is concerned. All I meant was that if the degree of scrutiny given to a screenplay – sometimes by the wrong people, financiers and producers who have no sympathy for the material – were given to a lot of contemporary novels (by sympathetic readers!), then those novels would be improved no end.
TBR: Both you and Zadie Smith have repeatedly stated that as readers and writers you feel more American than British “My content is British, my style American,” you said at one point. Yet you come across to a non-American foreign reader as very English.
N.H: Both Zadie and I write about our own cities and countries, but we probably both feel that we’ve been shaped much more by American writing than by our own. It’s that American simplicity and inclusivity, its soul, its lack of allusion….My own literary heroes and models, the people who made me want to write, were all American: Tyler, Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, Carver, Ford, Roth….
TBR: Martin Amis says novels should stand the test of time, yet you say that you’d “rather be read now than in the future” and also that you write to entertain, that you deal with “the affecting of the emotions in some way.” Is this the definition of a popular writer, or has it something to do with reflecting popular culture in your novels?
N.H: Oh, this stuff…..! One thing I know: you can’t be read in the future UNLESS you are read now. This idea that ‘literature’ can somehow survive without a contemporary readership is new, and I suspect wrong. There is a particularly dreary kind of literary writing which quite clearly aims for posterity – I’m not interested in reading it, and I’m certainly not interested in writing it. As for the reflection of popular culture – I don’t think this has much to do with anything, because clearly one can write about popular culture in a way that excludes. I don’t want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them! It seems a very worthwhile thing to do to me, to write books that are about something, that aren’t beach books or genre books, and that are read by large numbers of people. How much more fun it is to be told by people at a football match (as I was last night) that they enjoyed How To Be Good – and these are not people who are going to read Rushdie or Bellow – than to have to wait a few hundred years……
TBR: In your view “the gender thing doesn’t apply anymore.” Your work should be read, in other words, as a declaration of the mutual understanding of the sexes. Yet you – and in a certain sense Helen Fielding – are saying that this new will to understand each other means accepting the other as they are without romantic illusions. Don’t we, though, need some kind of romantic illusion to make relationships survive?
N.H: I’m not sure that this is how my work should be read at all, but never mind. We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place – after that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons.
TBR: The humour in your novels is one of their distinct and most enjoyable characteristics. The idea of making people laugh is something you have repeatedly criticised literary fiction for not considering “an important job.” Yet your novels are becoming sadder; you have even said that you’d like to make them both sadder and funnier. Are you worried that readers may typecast you as a comic writer and find comedy where there’s none to be found?
N.H: I’m really not worried about anything! I write the books I want to write, and readers will either respond or not respond. All I want to do is make sure that I continue to try to exploit the potential I have.
