How famous writers write

The Way We Write: Interviews with Award-Winning Writers. Barbara Baker, editor. Continuum. [pounds sterling]9.99 p.b. xv + 234 pages. ISBN 978-0-8264-9505-1.

Barbara Baker is working here in a long tradition of an extremely useful product--the interview with the artist. This is certain to be an enterprise appealing to many of us, because the advent of the creative writing class and course has meant that there are thousands of aspiring writers who want to know the secrets of success. Clearly, there is no formula for that, and many of the writers speaking here are far more concerned with the daily discipline and the methods of gathering material than fretting about 'success', whatever that is.

There have been collections of interviews with writers on the market before, notably the series of Paris Review interviews done by George Plimpton, but useful as those volumes were, they did contain a large proportion of academic discourse and self-indulgence, so that many of them would have been enjoyed by devotees of a particular writer and few other readers who persevered with the whole texts.

The Way We Write is unusual in this category of book because the writers Barbara Baker talks with represent far more than the usual, rather exclusive respondents who wish to talk about the tedious detail of research or technique. For instance, on the one hand we have the established novelists, such as Graham Swift and Margaret Drabble, but on the other, we have less well-known but very interesting characters, such as Harry Mathews and U.A. Fanthorpe. In addition, we have children's writers included, and in that respect, Michael Morpurgo has some very wise words to give on the subject of where ideas and form come from in storytelling.

Some writers are very much enmeshed in the ups and downs of their careers, and Julian Fellowes is in that group. That is not so useful or absorbing as the kind of insight we have into creativity from Ursula Fanthorpe, for example, who is less concerned with prizes won and career moves made than with the actual daily practice of her craft. She says, 'I revise infinitely ... when you have got it basically there you just have to tinker. I love the tinkering process. I could go on forever'. That statement finds agreement in all us writers, as we find the gathering and thinking process to be largely great fun, particularly over a coffee and a chat with a fellow scribbler.

In contrast, the editor's questions also tease out the more enduring and tough issues of different ways into a story or a poem. Mr Morpurgo understands the dichotomy of 'planner and doer' in this respect, as he explains his modus operandi in this way: 'I am a very lucky writer, I tend to wait until the good idea happens, and when it does, the voice comes with it or just before it ... I don't plot or plan: I tend to dream things out and trust to my instinct when I sit down'. He is struggling to explain what many storytellers know--that the best tales grow from a mix of drama and authenticity. For him, the authentic feel comes from his certainty that the voice for the teller is the right one.

Some of the writers here take a more cerebral approach to their explanations of success and many enjoy explaining the benefits of failures and false starts, but overall, Barbara Baker has taken care to assemble a mix of practitioners who will offer something for almost every variety of novice writer, and it has to be said that even established writers would learn something from her book. A perfect example of this is the sheer off-beat but fascinating words of Benjamin Zephaniah, the poet and novelist who has taken writing into places previously untouched by the creative word. He says at one point, 'I am a very physical person in that I do a lot of jogging, and kung fu and boxing. Sometimes, because these things involve rhythm, poems can come to me while I do them. For instance, I remember a poem I wrote about money that came to me while I was jogging, and as I think of it now, my feet are going, the rhythm is still there'.

The Way We Write is arguably one of the most successful and accessible volumes of writer interviews we have seen, with just the right balance of analysis and sheer individual and absorbing explanations of the craft of writing. It should be read and used in creative writing courses across the country and beyond. I have already made use of it in my own writing group.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning