Graham Swift interview in The Scotsman
This Scotsman interview with Graham Swift is a few days old now – but still a very interesting read, especially his thoughts about authorial voice and how writers step out of their skin to become other people. I read Waterland at the beginning of 1994 as a result of Bookcrossing and was bowled over. Subsequently I read Shuttlecock and was confirmed in my impression that this was a writer whose work I wanted to spend more time on. This just makes me want to go out and track down all the books I haven’t come across yet:
A truth beyond words
“…I’m not the kind of writer who goes around with a mental notebook.”
In other words, if the conversations of, say, the car salesman or market trader in Last Orders seem authentic, it’s not because Swift is tape-recording the speech he hears on the streets. “My voices aren’t usually spoken voices, they are internal voices,” he explains. So does the voice come first in his novels?
“I honestly don’t know what comes first. Voice is a sort of shorthand for something more complicated. Voice is character, the whole way in which someone presents himself, not just to the world but to himself. It’s to do with making a character come alive.
“There have been all kinds of things said about my writing which make me bristle. People have said it as a compliment, but I’m afraid I don’t take it as one: that I am a great ventriloquist. I absolutely refute that,” he says, with quiet emphasis.
“It suggests what for me is a completely false sense of character. If you ventriloquise, it’s as if there’s this dummy, this mechanical thing and you the writer are somehow performing a trick and making that dummy apparently speak. I’m not a personal writer in the sense of being autobiographical. But my fiction gets very personal. It’s about the stuff we all share.” Read the full story here…
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