← How I Write
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- [00:00]
A
Jan Martel is famous for writing Life of PI, which wasn't just a standout book, but also an Academy Award winning movie. So what stood out to me about him? He's strikingly well read, but also he's developed this really unique approach to storytelling. So many writers say it's all about character. Baby Gan says there's other things that are more important to me. And where other writers obsess over beginnings, it's the endings of stories that he really falls in love with. So if you want to learn about place, plot, people and prosecution, you're in the right place. Can you paint a picture in my head of, I don't know if I walked into your office or I stepped into your mind, what would I see? What is the architecture of what's going on there?
- [00:39]
B
Oh, that's very clear. I developed a system that just worked for me, which is kind of a computer become analog. So I do a lot of research, which is fun. So let's take the example of Life of PI, best known book of mine. You know, I did research on, on, on animal behavior, zoo, biology. I did survival at sea. I did a lot of research on religion, on the faith, experience, conceptions of the divine, on Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. As I was reading, I took notes, sometimes quoting from books, sometimes a single word. Indians speak, by our conception, a slightly old fashioned, colorful English. So I remember once hearing Indian use the word bamboozle, which we hardly use in North America. So I said, okay, so I'm one, you know, one element was the word bamboozle. Have someone use the word bamboozle, a lovely Indian, Indian English kind of word, in my conception of their English. So sometimes it's a word, sometimes it's a little fact. Like what kinds of tortoise, what kind of turtles do you find in the Pacific? Well, it's Ridleys and greens. Good to know. So, you know, sometimes be factual. Sometimes there'd be little scenes that come to my mind. I quickly write them down in a very uncensored way. Anyway, I do this and after for PI, after about two, two and a half years of research, I had like 400 pages of, of, of a hodgepodge of stuff. And so what I did then is I printed it up, took scissors and literally cut it up into constituents, parts, sometimes a tiny little snippet, sometimes several pages. And I'd cut the bottom of page and the tops and scotch tape them together and fold them up and then I put them in various envelopes, depending on where they belonged. If it was just a factual thing, like you know, turtles of the Pacific. I'd have a manila envelope that have turtles of the Pacific. But most that fit in what I understood as part of the chronology would go in an envelope. And that would be the backbone of a chapter. So what you'd find in my office, and I've done this for everyone, would be probably envelopes with a writing on the top of the envelope saying roughly what's in it and where it belongs. And so you'd have a line. I'd go from the beginning of the novel to the end. So that means when I start writing, first of all, I don't just write out of nothing. I open up an envelope, pull out these snippets, some several pages, a complete scene. Sometimes several times the same scene. And I have to collate them, figure out how to best. Sometimes just a single word. Bamboozle. So when I started Life of PI, I started with a novel that said author's note. And there was all the elements I wanted in the author's note. So I don't just write out of nothing. I have some things that are background. So I'd set them around my computer. And then I start writing on the computer. So you'd see all these envelopes. And that's. So that means when I start writing, I know exactly where I'm going. So when I started a Life of PI, when I wrote the first sentence, that one that's slightly clunky, I knew exactly how it would end, that there'd be 100 chapters. And I knew chapter 100 would be an excerpt of an investigator's report on this sinking of a ship in the Pacific and their conclusions about it. I knew that was my destination. And I sort of knew where I was going. And sometimes the envelopes would change positions. Like in the Pacific. It didn't really matter when PI sees a whale, when PI sees a ship. So that sort of moved around for Son of Nobody. Sometimes the envelopes were on top of each other because they would be. There would be a footnote envelope with a fragment envelope. And sometimes the fragments were long enough that there'd be different envelopes for each fragment. So you'd see basically a whole series of envelopes in my studio. And those were the different little elements that most people would have on a computer file using some sort of Scrivener program or something.
- [04:09]
A
And how much surprise is there as you're writing? Like, do you feel like, hey, I'm the architect? This is now the story. This is the sandbox that we're going to play In Versus. All right, here we go. Now the story is going to take on an energy of its own, a direction of its own. And now, as the creator, I've created the story, but now I almost need to surrender to the direction of the story itself.
- [04:34]
B
Yeah, it's very. Yeah, there definitely that happens. It comes to life. So what's in the envelopes is the starting point. It's not the finishing point. So I take them out and some I discard, some I expand on, some, you know, I play around. Sometimes a snippet doesn't belong here, it belongs there instead. So there's a. You know, it'd be like, in a sense, I'm coming to New York with my family. We're gonna plan this. Let's get guidebooks. Let's really research it. But there's plenty of space for spontaneity as we walk around and discover, you know, hey, this is where Friends was filmed. Oh, didn't know that. You know, there's discoveries along the way that enliven the trip.
- [05:08]
A
That is a good analogy, right? It's like a trip. You plan the trip, you have your reservations, your vaccinations, you're well prepared for it. There's enough leeway in a good trip that the trip can kind of unfold and take.
- [05:22]
B
You know, we're not going to do this today. Instead, we'll do this today. Right.
- [05:26]
A
But you can't miss the reservation at the Three Star Michelin.
- [05:30]
B
No, if you can afford it. No, you're right. You don't want to.
- [05:34]
A
You keep using the word scenes. Why?
- [05:38]
B
Stories take place in scenes, I guess. These envelopes very obviously were separate from each other. So clearly were different scenes, different parts of the story. And you play with them as you would with cards. As I said with this next one, the one that has no order to it. It's just the unit of a story, I guess, is a scene. Those little bits of unity of time, action and place.
- [06:02]
A
How do scenes relate to chapters?
- [06:04]
B
Yeah, there'd be several scenes in a chapter. Some were short. Like, I remember the author's note one for Life of PI was just a single envelope. But more elaborate scenes, there might be several envelopes. And within that little scenes, I might order them differently.
- [06:18]
A
In Hollywood, they say that the advice for a scene is to get in as late as possible and leave as early as possible. Do you think that applies to writing?
- [06:26]
B
What you don't want to do is write it out too much, that it leaves nothing to the imagination of the reader. Like, that's the Problem with cinema. Cinema is unbelievably powerful, but it's also overwhelming. If you think a movie, it supplies everything. You know, when you read a book, you create a movie in your mind. You read about a story, and in your mind you have a hazy vision of what the character looks like and of the setting and all that. So you're creating a movie which is very engaging. You're creating something, so you're involving yourself, which is why books can be. The written word can be so powerful, because it leaves so much for your imagination. A movie doesn't do that. A movie supplies you, obviously, with the visuals, but in case you're emotionally clueless, it'll supply you with music. So if there's a cello going, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, the buildup, and then the shark comes. It manipulates you emotionally. You see a phone. This is a classic thing. The camera looks at a phone, you know it's going to ring. So it supplies everything, which is delicious. Because you are submissive, compliant. You don't have to do anything. So you're swept away. That's great. But that kind of kidnapping, you don't be kidnapped too much. And that's a sign of a great movie where there's still a lot of mystery and you have to figure it out yourself. The kind of. That's why I can, you know, Netflix. I love Netflix. I binge watch Netflix, like anyone. But when they supply too little for you to imagine on your own, when they give you everything, they're forgettable. You haven't worked enough for it. Whereas a great movie, that's more, you know, a French art film. A French art film is great because you have to work so hard at figuring it out. It leaves so much, as you said, this thing just be concise and leave a lot for the imagination of the viewer to interpret. That's a sign of a really good movie, I think. It doesn't supply everything. The more you withdraw, the more the viewer has to come halfway. And therefore they like that. They like being engaged, co creating the story.
- [08:18]
A
The word that came to mind for me was possess. Like, with a book that I love, I feel like I possess part of it because it's been a partnership, right? If I read a book and I've imagined the story and I've imagined the characters and I have that idea, I feel like I. That book lives inside of me, as a part of me in a way that is different from an experience that I just kind of witnessed. Like, I think of the Great Gatsby with the book the Great Gatsby, it's like Fitzgerald and I, even though it was 100 years ago, we did this together, you know, Whereas the movie with DiCaprio and then the movie with Robert Redford, that's like something that I witnessed. It's like this is a neighborhood that I went to. Let me tell you about the neighborhood. Not an experience that I got to co create with the writer.
- [09:04]
B
Totally. A book is a co creation, which is why that's what's wonderful about books, is you can have the same book and two people read it entirely differently. One may hate it, one may love it, because it's a co creation you bring. So a book that you just said that possesses you, it's one that speaks to you. But that same book, another person might say, oh, I thought that was totally boring, totally unconvincing. I didn't like it at all. And yet it's the same book. Whereas a movie, as I said, it's like just on the plane, I just got back from England, I watched the movie, fantastic movie called Begonia. I loved it. Emma Stone's amazing and so is Jesse Plemons. He plays this conspiracy theory kook with his mentally disabled cousin. And they're amazing. The acting, that's the thing about a movie is great if it just lets actor, great actors act and you see raw emotion. And it was so well done. All three characters were phenomenal in that movie. But nonetheless, there's a certain level of. There's only so much variety you have in reaction, so there's less room for subjectivity. So most people will enjoy it in the same way as a visual gag.
- [10:08]
A
Right. I was thinking of the Shire. So if we both read the Lord of the Rings and you say, hey, I'm gonna describe the Shire, and then I do the same thing, our descriptions will be very different, they'll be very contrasting. Now if we go watch the Peter Jackson movie, our descriptions would be a lot more similar.
- [10:26]
B
Yeah, exactly. But also there's a good example, Lord of the Rings. I never finished those. I found them so boring. Whereas an entire generation loved the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It was their bible. I remember starting those as a kid and I didn't get into them. I just didn't get into them. And that's what's wonderful. I find there's more of a personal reaction to books than there is to cinema. Maybe it's a spectacle that you can come collectively. There's an individuality to the reading of books that makes them I guess they're weak in a sense. They don't necessarily unite people. Books don't. I mean, like, I guess Bibles and Qurans unite people, but otherwise books don't necessarily unite people the way a song might. For example, you can have an anthact. They have national anthems, a song that unites a people. You don't really have national books. There's no single. I mean, religions would. But otherwise you don't have national books. You can't reduce the United States or Canada or France to a book. You have a diversity of, you know, great writers. Perhaps you don't have that with the written word. I mean, Americans, I suppose, the constitution, you rightly are proud of your constitution. It's a very well thought out.
- [11:31]
A
But it's a different thing.
- [11:32]
B
But nonetheless, that's as close as you get to a national book. And that's just a constitution. But you don't have national books because I said the reaction is very private, very diverse. And that's wonderful about literature. It's such a personal thing.
- [11:43]
A
How about animals as characters? I mean, so often you think of animals in children's books.
- [11:49]
B
Yeah, animals are great because first of all, most people like animals because there's so many of them. It's unlikely to say someone who says they hate all animals. People like animals. Either domesticated animals, they anthropomorphize them heavily and they're companions, or wild animals. People love wild animals because we hold them to be beautiful and pristine and something perfect, whereas we've sullied our existence, our globe, with who we are. So I use animals, I have used animals just simply because they're good storytelling vehicles. You know, people aren't as cynical about rhinoceroses and giraffes as they are of people from Texas or people from France or, you know, people from India or Muslims, where we're full of prejudices, which simplifies our life but is also very cruel and distorts reality. Whereas people are rarely cynical about animals. They may say, oh, I hate scorpions, they're terrifying, but that's sort of slightly odd. I mean, lions are also terrifying because we hold them to be beautiful. We find lions nonetheless attractive.
- [12:50]
A
They're majestic.
- [12:51]
B
They're majestic. And so each animal. And also we tend to anthropomorph, we tend to project onto them. Hyenas are, you know, cowardly and ugly. Well, that's purely subjective. And lions are beautiful, majestic tigers too. Elephants and. And they have come in such different shapes and all that. They're just very Plastic. You can do a lot with an animal character. Hence why there's so much in children's literature. And it's funny. Although, you know, it used to be much more common to use them. In fact, I just mentioned Kafka in terms of my next book. Kafka used animals all the time. You know, the metamorphosis, obvious example. Gregor Samsa wakes up and he's a dung beetle. He's a beetle. There's also one that I mentioned in this next book called Josephine and the Mouse People. It's about mice. He constantly uses animals. Jack London used animals.
- [13:33]
A
Do you feel like you have a different sense of range when you're working with animals? Like, in what way does it expand, what you're able to do, contract what you're able to do? Is that the right way to think about it?
- [13:45]
B
Well, it's just very versatile. Like, one of my novel, Afterlife of PI, was called Beatrice and Virgil. And there I used a donkey and a monkey. And here they were heavily anthropomorphized. They spoke. They were together traveling. Even though the monkey is a howler monkey, which is a South American monkey, and the one's a donkey, and there are donkeys in South America, but you don't necessarily have howler monkeys and donkeys hanging out. So there was completely the traditional use of animals as vehicles for human thought. And there I just chose them for what they might symbolize. We hold monkeys to be clever. We hold donkeys to be stubborn and enduring. And this was, after all, a metaphor on the Holocaust. And one thing you can say of Jews is that they have been extraordinarily clever as a people. Any number of Nobel Prizes, and they're just a very, very creative people. And donkeys are enduring and stubborn. And the Jewish people have survived for centuries despite adversity. So in a positive way, one can stereotype them as being as clever as monkeys and as enduring, as stubborn as donkeys. So I wanted two animals that might symbolize, stereotype Jews in a positive way because this was an allegory on the Holocaust. So they are, in a childish way, in a sense of using animals as a vehicle as masks for human beings. But all the other ones, I try to use them as wild animals, including in this one, Son of Nobody, my latest novel. There I use a variety of animals. In part, this is also a break. If you always have human characters, it's a nice break to have. And it can be very emotional in self. I remember there was a scene, I just remember this now, where a character who she's just turned from being a woman to a man and she's leaving her lover and he's a man and she's dropping off the key through the window, the mail slot, and the dog is desperate, wants to go with her and he's licking her hand and she's dropping off the key there. The dog allowed me in a very open way to express need and want and a feeling of abandonment, but a way that wouldn't encroach on her too much. We don't mind leaving a pet behind. If it was a person saying, please don't leave, that would I want something short and abrupt. So this dog desperately sniffing her hand as she's dropping the key allowed me to make an emotional point in a very forceful way.
- [15:47]
A
Why do you think animals work so well in Animal Farm?
- [15:51]
B
Well, because there, once again, it goes to stereotyping and the pigs are clever and evil and they want to take over. I say we project onto them. So there's what was named the old horse, who was hard working and loyal and a little bit blinkered. You know, it allowed us to see different animals. I said we find animals very engaging and we project onto them. So as I said, we recognize if you use it in an artful way that has the animal be what you think it might be, you take it on very easily. I said people aren't. As soon as you have an animal character, I find people suspend their disbelief and are willing to believe it.
- [16:22]
A
Yeah, well, that's what was coming to mind for me is Animal Farm is obviously about a very heavy topic, but the entire time we've been talking about animals, I've had this like low grade chuckle the entire time. They're funny, they're light. And that allows you to access heavier topics in a way that a history astonished Russia wouldn't allow you to do. It's so kind of overwhelming.
- [16:46]
B
And with Beatrice and Virgil here was the Holocaust. And I deliberately. Because, see, that's one of the things I find problematic with the Holocaust is how do you represent it? We know what happened historically very well. It's been analyzed endlessly and still is by historians. And people have written fiction, which is usually in a single mode of historical realism. So in other words, featuring human characters living between 33 and 45 in middle and Eastern Europe telling the same story over and over and over and over again. Nothing wrong with that. That's exactly what happened both historically and in social, realistic, fictional terms. But it gets repetitive. I find that there is with the Holocaust a feeling of Been there, done that. Sure. The emotional tone is always the same of tragedy. Of course, that's what happened, you know. But to always hear that same tone, the same geography, the same characters, you know, these satanically evil Nazis and these endlessly innocent Jews who are just trying to live their lives, where character doesn't matter whether you're a good Jew, a bad Jew, an engineer or a student, whether you're fat or ugly or beautiful or accomplished or not accomplished or criminal didn't matter. You're Jewish, you're dead, and the Nazis didn't matter. If you loved your wife and you liked the violin and you had a pet cat, you're a Nazi guard, you're horrible. Character doesn't matter in Holocaust stories. So it's very, very limiting. So I said, how can we discuss it using all the tools of art so it doesn't appear both tragic and dull? And so I thought, well, I'll use animals once again, first of all, because they're engaging and also clearly symbolizes that this is an allegory. If you have a talking animal, very obviously it's an allegory. It's a metaphor, because animals don't talk. So it allows you a certain distance from your subject, which allows you to approach it in different ways. I was trying to do, in a sense, with the Holocaust, what Animal Farm, what George Orwell did with Stalinism, with Animal Farm, tell a light, engaging, delightful story that's about a very heavy topic and gives you, in a very quick way, what you need to get from Stalinism. The use of propaganda, the use of coercion, the use of lying. You know, what went wrong with Russia under Stalin. You could read 17 tomes about it if you have the patience for it and the interest. Or just read animal farm in 92 pages and you'll get what happened to the Russians. I think we need that. In the same way with the Holocaust. And people are shy of that. They get nervous about it if they're not Jewish and I'm not Jewish. You know, at one point, you got to be careful what you're saying in case you're accused of trivializing the Holocaust. And you get very nervous.
- [19:05]
A
Sure.
- [19:05]
B
And so that's. I can understand that you don't want to traipse on people's sensibilities. But at one point, we have to be allowed to make our mistakes and discuss, you know, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You say something stupid, you're corrected. You know better. That's how we. So we have to be allowed to do that, including with The Holocaust. So how best to do that? I said, oh, I'll use animals very clearly, allegorically allegorical allows a certain lightness, but while discussing a heavy topic. So exactly what Orwell did with Stalinism.
- [19:32]
A
And then as you're thinking through a story, whatever it is, whether it's Life of PI, whether it's self, whether it's this book with the Holocaust, what matters to you in the opening pages of a book, in order to set the scene, like, what are the. I don't mean to trivialize it, but like if you had a checklist, it's like, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this. On the first five, 10 pages, what is it that you're going for to bring somebody into the book?
- [19:58]
B
Sometimes you have stories that start with big opening sentences. You know, call me Ishmael du Mauret Mort today Mother died. Or, you know, l' entre Monsieur Couchet de Bonheur. For the longest time I went to bed early. Proust, you know, some opening sentences are like, wow, they stand out. And others, you know, are one long paragraph and it's setting a. It's setting a scene. It's the setting. I don't really know how I start. I mean, in fact, it's funny you should mention that I remember never liking the first sentence of Life of PI. This story was born as I was hungry, which has. As this story was born as I was hungry, you know, always as like. As like, which one is it? And also it doesn't work particularly as a sentence. It doesn't stand out. It's neither here nor there. So I never particularly liked it, but I just couldn't think any better and I just moved on. So I don't know to answer that. I guess each time, you know, you all want. You obviously want to do some draw. Either an interesting character, an interesting turn of phrase. Sometimes dialogue is a good way to start because right away you're in the. You're in media res, in the middle of the action. I don't know, it just has to work somehow.
- [21:02]
A
Tell me about in media res.
- [21:05]
B
Well, that's like the Iliad starts in the middle of the argument, in the middle, you leap right into the action. But once again, sometimes you have people who slowly build a setting and then it starts to happen. Sometimes you start right away. As I say, I plan everything. So I don't necessarily dwell on the beginning. I dwell on sort of everything. And ultimately everything has to work. Everything has to be Connected.
- [21:24]
A
When we were talking about how you're architecting your books, we were talking about, okay, you have the facts of the story, you have the research, you have the scenes. But then as you write the book, it kind of elevates into a story. It's like a. Like a emergence that comes out. And then you were just talking about how you read the Lord of the Rings and, like, you weren't hooked. So when you think about a story, maybe in character, maybe in plot, what matters to elevate it into a story? But really I care as a reader, I now care about what's gonna go on rather than series of events. This happens that.
- [22:00]
B
Well, I guess, emotional investment, something that, like, for example, I love Agatha Christie. She's a writer who. Her ambition was perfectly matched by her accomplishment. Her murder mysteries are utter delights. They're well written, they're funny, they're insoluble. Only with her short stories have I managed to read them and figure out, oh, this is the murderer. None of her murder mysteries have I ever, upon first reading, been able to figure it out. Even though once Poirot reveals everything, you say, oh, Christ, I missed that. That was so obvious, like, you know, murder on the Orient Express. There's a scene where a porter knocks on the door of a cabin, and the person in there is this coarse Chicago gangster. So he knocks and someone replies in French, you know, the porter says, are you all right, Mr. Whatever, Mr. McGregor. And Mr. McGregor replies in French, non sava. And the porter says, okay. And he moves on. Well, once you resolved it, once you get to the end, you say, of course. Why would a coarse Chicago gangster speak French? But she's so artful in how she puts things. You don't notice it. All these. And then you have all these little red herrings where you say, oh, that's definitely something. She lures you that way. And so there's someone who. Perfectly. So there. It's. In a sense, your curiosity engages you. I do like things that are narrower, focused. I don't particularly like grand epics. I like things like. Like I remember loving one of the great. Like a few of the great books of my life have been very individual stories. Like, for example, the Sailor Fell from Graves with the Sea by Yukio Mishima. Story of a sailor who meets a woman, ends up living with her while he's not at sea. And that staying with his mother, is felt as a betrayal by her son, who therefore tries. Doesn't try, poisons him. It's, you know, it's a single Individual story. But through that you see a prism on life, on a child's warped perception of what it means to be successful, what it means to be a man. His perception of his mother, it's narrow and small, but it reflects the universe. Another one, a wonderful. Remember reading this and being ported by it was sort of a forgotten. Oh, they did win the Nobel Prize. And Knut Hamsen, who was a Norwegian writer, he wrote a book called Hunger, and it's about a homeless man in Christiania, which was the old name for Oslo. A homeless man in Oslo just wandering the streets of Oslo and his perceptions of things. It's searingly subjective. It's just him. And this is set like in the early 20th century, so long before homelessness was a big thing in a very bourgeois society. A homeless man who has no home, nothing. And it's just this slightly delirious vision of the city and the people he meets and what happens to him. So I like, I guess, few characters and going deep with that. So Lord of the Rings was too much, too symphonic, I guess, and I wanted a sort of a solo. But it all comes back to subjectivity, that wonderful subjectivity of art.
- [24:52]
A
It is really nice, though, when there's a story that's really simple and it's easy to follow, but somehow it contains
- [24:57]
B
the universe in it. Well, what you want. I mean, art is not about answers, it's about questions. So that's why, belatedly, I became interested as a secular person in religion, because I put religion and art together as magical thinking. They're both about magical thinking. You posit a fantastical school called Hogswart with a wizard called Harry Potter. You create alternate worlds that still resemble ours. You got to go beyond rationality, but that makes us more sane. We go beyond the rational to regain our sanity and live in this world. Same thing with religion. It has some reasonable mechanisms, like theology is a reasonable attempt to understand the divine. But it goes way beyond the rational. So to me, they're both magical thinking and they're both about the sublime. They're both about getting beyond what seems obvious and comprehensible to a sort of awe, a sense of awe, A sense of the sublime.
- [25:50]
A
Yeah. One of the things to that point about magical thinking, if you go to, like, a Greek Orthodox church, they're always talking about the sacred mysteries of just this acceptance that the equation might not end up squaring itself. We believe it's true, but we just can't figure out how or why.
- [26:08]
B
Yeah, and that you can achieve. It's Funny, just this morning, I don't know why I remembered this song from. What was her name? Mary something. Turn, turn, turn. And she quotes the Bible and it's, you know. To everything there is a season.
- [26:20]
A
Turn, turn, turn. That was the song that my dad played at his mother's funeral last year. Yeah, that was a song. Every season there is a turn, turn.
- [26:32]
B
To everything there is a season and a purpose under heaven. It's a beautiful song. It's a lovely.
- [26:36]
A
It's like a very ecclesiastic.
- [26:38]
B
Yeah, and it's written by Mary. She was a. She was a. The Paul McCartney discovered her and brought her up. Mary something. And I forget her name. English. Lovely song. To everything there is a season and a purpose under heaven. So just thinking that, like, there's a season, we can all get that fourth season. We get old, you know, we're born, we grow up that season. But then. And a purpose under heaven suddenly elevates it to, oh, is there a purpose under heaven? What does that mean? How do I interpret that? So just that idea of the, of the sublime can be achieved quite simply if you're open to it. And that's exactly what religion and art are good at, is putting you in that state of awe of the sublime.
- [27:13]
A
As you're writing and thinking through flow and pacing. What is the role of punctuation in terms of the role of a period, a semicolon, a comma, and how that creates an experience for the reader?
- [27:27]
B
I'll go with a nice nitty gritty technical question. I love punctuation.
- [27:31]
A
I know you do, that's why I asked.
- [27:33]
B
Yeah, I love punctuation. I mean, we all know words, right? We all know words. The word table, the word camera, the word sunny, that's pretty clear to everyone. But writing is about how you marshal those together and the rhythm you give them. Sort of like music. And whereas in music you have tempo, it's literally on the bar, the tempo. It's not obvious what gives you the tempo in language, on the page, in speaking, you know, the breath somehow gives us the tempo. You can't necessarily speak in a super long sentence. First of all, you're going to forget where you're going and you need to breathe. But in writing it's punctuation. And I've always found punctuation to be a really something really rich. So I've always enjoyed, you know, you got to be really sparing with the exclamation mark because it's highly manipulative. You know that if there's an Exclamation mark. It's supposed to be a big emotion, which very occasionally you can tell the reader, you can telegraph that to the writer, to the reader, that this is emotional. That's why I have an exclamation mark. Or if it's a shout, hey, you know, that makes sense to have an exclamation.
- [28:37]
A
Right?
- [28:37]
B
But you want to use that sparingly. You know, the colon is a useful one for. Here's a list. So get ready for a list. You know, semicolon is an interesting one because this is related, but you don't want to use too many of those. And it gets tiresome.
- [28:50]
A
Right.
- [28:50]
B
You don't have too many short sentences in a row.
- [28:52]
A
What was striking reading, how you think about this is the way that the comma injects a sense of propulsion in the writing.
- [28:59]
B
Yeah. Commas is the toughest one. Everyone knows a full stop. Well, it's hard to. Like, you know, the Oxford comma. You have a list. Joe, Jack and Judy. Is there a comma after the second name before the last. The last name? Joe, Jack and Judy. Is there a comma after. Before the. And, you know, yes, it is. If it's something like, you know, the Bishop of Bath and Ancaster. Of Bath and Ancaster is one single unit. You obviously don't put a comma because it's together, but I find the comma is the one that I agonize the most about. God, this is so nerdy. But, you know, punctu. It's nice to have as few, because then you have flow. But if there's too few, it gets confusing. So in this next book, the one that the forgiven and forgotten about my mother's alma is the one in a box, because each one is a single sentence. There are no question marks because a question is indicated by the tone, but usually by the punctuation mark. But it also finishes a sentence. So in this one, there's no question marks and there's only a single period at the end of each one. So I make use a lot of the comma. It's what gives me the flow. And I also do sent. I always do paragraph breaks because it's one sentence. I can't. I hate books that have single columns of text. Those are very hard to stay with. So I'll have paragraph breaks even though it's a single sentence, but I'll make use of the commas because they really. It's like the. The drummer in a band. To me, the comma is like the drummer who gives the Rhythm of the sentence that's achieved through the comma. Also just for example, I mean, the use of the period will dictate how long your sentence is. One of the very few rules of writing that I sort of try to stick to is, you know, don't have sentences that are the same length one after the other. You don't want to have 17, 10 word sentences in a row. That gets boring. You want to have one that's longer, one shorter, one longer. You want to gently vary them. And that's all determined by the. By the full stop.
- [30:47]
A
When I was teaching writing, we had this idea called the reading the right edge, where basically what you would do is you would put every single sentence one by one. So rather than it being a paragraph, it'd be this sentence. Okay, hit return this sentence. Hit return this sentence. And then what you would do is you would have to see how far that sentence would go to the edge of the page.
- [31:08]
B
Right.
- [31:09]
A
And so what you would want is, you would want. Almost like an accordion. An accordion, exactly. To just try to vary the sentences. And it is one of those things that when you vary the sentence, it is astonishing how much that improves the flow of your writing. And then once you realize these are the things that a long sentence can do, these are the things that a short sentence can do. And then here's how the ensemble of long, medium and short sentences can work together. It is one of the simplest, fastest ways to improve your writing.
- [31:39]
B
It is. And it's. And you think that the reader who, after all their eyes are just gliding over the. They actually notice those. It does rhythm their reading too. Now, having said that, it is one of the quickest way to improve your writing. I've resisted these sort of nostrums about writing. I remember my partner loves creative writing and I slightly. Because I remember once, unfortunately reading something about how if you're describing a landscape, the best way to do it is from left to right and top to bottom, your mind kind of like a camera that if you're describing the farmhouse here, the mountain here, this there, that there, that there, somehow that's not as satisfying as a slow panning of the camera. Like this. And if you have to. Like that.
- [32:22]
A
Yeah.
- [32:22]
B
And reading that now annoys me because if I ever have to describe something like that, it irks me to know that there's this so called rule here about description.
- [32:33]
A
It's too clean.
- [32:34]
B
Well, do I follow it or do I deliberately don't. Do I deliberately jump around? Because it annoys me that there's this alleged rule, or do I actually follow it, but feel that therefore I'm following a formula, having just said, we just said, okay, the next time I got to write 10, 5 sentences. 5 words, sentences in a row. Because, you know, don't tell me what to do. It just has to work. And maybe it will work with 10 sentences that are exactly like a rectangle.
- [32:52]
A
Have you done any photography?
- [32:54]
B
Never.
- [32:54]
A
So do you know what the rule of thirds is?
- [32:56]
B
No.
- [32:57]
A
Okay, so this is a core photography rule. So in a image, you basically, you have a grid. And so on the grid you have nine different boxes.
- [33:10]
B
Okay, okay.
- [33:11]
A
Because it's three by three. And basically the temptation is in photography to line up your subject in the center. But the problem is when you do that, you don't have a certain kind of motion. So what you do is you either go towards bottom right, top right, top left, bottom left. All this to say that it is one of those rules that once you learn it, you're like, like, yes, I'm so happy that I know about the rule of thirds. And every single time I take a photo, that is the first place that my brain goes. But I don't want to take every single photo in the rule of thirds and just be a slave to the rule.
- [33:45]
B
Exactly.
- [33:46]
A
But I am so happy that I know it, so that then when I break the rule of thirds rule, I'm doing it deliberately.
- [33:52]
B
Yeah, that's exactly it. You want to be aware of rules, I guess, in a general way, so you can artfully break it. Yes, that's a good point, because you can't break every single rule. So you can break the rule of thirds, but then you adhere to whatever rules, other rules might be in photography to do with, I don't know, composition or something else. Same thing in writing. You can't, you know, you can play with spelling, like through thru. You can play with punctuation, have none at all. But you can't do. You can't break all those rules all at the same time. Then you get really arduous stuff. Like, I remember the French, the nouveau roman movement in the 50s and 60s, 60s. Didn't care about setting, didn't care about character. And you can see that, oh, this is different. This is a different way to tell a story. But it's tough to survive. It's tough to have that endure. Because at one point it gets tiresome. Not that you want familiarity, but you want a few handrails that you're holding to help you get into the story and move along with the writer. So you want to break some rules, but not all of them. So I guess there's an example. Rule of thirds. Be aware of it and then artfully break it when it suits your purpose.
- [34:53]
A
What are the other rules that you think of and sometimes follow, but also sometimes willfully ignore when you're at the keyboard?
- [35:03]
B
Really? None. As I said, I've never taken creative writing. I've never thought about writing as a craft. I learned how to write. It sounds stupid, but just reading good books, as a kid reading books that moved me and then eventually sometimes noted things like Conrad's. So I guess I did notice punctuation, but then I didn't go to find rules about it. I just figured, oh, this is fun to play with. I will play with it and see what that yields. You know, it's nice playing with parentheses, too, and em dashes. You know, it's sometimes fun playing. Some people really like their parentheses things in brackets. So I don't have any rules. I just stumble my way to something that seems to work, which I guess means I'm sometimes reinventing the wheel. But it also means that it feels like my approach is fresh every time I write something. This looks. Oh, this looks great. This works. This works. And I've been lucky. In some cases, my editors have agreed, and other times they haven't. They said, this is terrible. Like, I remember, for example, in Life of PI, PI's in a lifeboat with a tiger. He meets another person in a lifeboat, a blind Frenchman. So they're all blind, and they realize they're there. So they start talking to each other, and so they're blind. And as their boats are being moved by the currents, I said, instead of having the dialogue be just, you know, indented by and, you know, falling down the page in a straight line, I said, why don't I have their little bits of dialogue float around the page? So initially they're like this. And as they're talking, the dialogue slowly comes closer, then crosses exactly like their lifeboat. So you would visually see what they cannot, that they're moving through space while they're talking. I said, that's brilliant. I'll even have the dialogue start off the margins, like, right on the left and then right in the gutter and move around. I thought that was wonderful. I thought, this is really cool experimentation that will yield something. Well, my editor hated it, saying, it's just you masturbating on the page, thinking you're really clever. It's just annoying. So we had that dialogue, you know, just flush left. She, you Know, she. She said it really doesn't work. And I thought, initially I initially resisted. Then I realized, oh no, wait a second. Yeah, you're right, you're right, that that doesn't work. So I try all these things, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I try not to have rules except to feel for the text, to feel that this is somehow coming alive to me. Because after all, as a writer, you're the first reader, and if you like what you've done, then fingers crossed, other
- [37:18]
A
people will have you written with AI at all.
- [37:23]
B
No.
- [37:24]
A
Why? No. You're like, because.
- [37:26]
B
Why would I? It'd be like hiring someone to have sex for you. I love writing. I love the materiality of it. My partner volunteers in a lot of things, so at one point she had to do governance papers for a charitable organization. You know, how their board works, like just legalese, small print kind of stuff. So she used AI to generate that, because AI could access the kinds of rules that a charity should have in terms of how it operates. So it's legally protected. So for completely non creative stuff like that, sure, I'll go to A.I. you know, my shoulder hurts. I'll go to A.I. on the computer. But for anything creative, I said, why would I want to use it when it's the very creative language that I like? So I've never used it, and I suspect we'll tire of that quickly. I'd rather read a bad short story by a human than a good one by a computer. Because after all, what you want in art is connection. It's connection with another human being, a chatbot that's your boyfriend or girlfriend. That's short term, long term, you don't want that. You do want that human connection. So I find AI will probably be a useful tool in medicine, possibly a useful tool in the legal system, but for the creative endeavors, even for music, I gather AI music can be quite good. But it's a question of whether you know it or not. It's the deception. If I'm told it's AI music, if it's really background stuff, like, you know, really ambient background stuff, then possibly, I guess I'll listen to AI but if it's something that actually is meaningful, I want it to be human, because it's precisely that imperfection that I want.
- [38:59]
A
I think the question that's coming to mind here in terms of how much I want to read something written by AI is how much does it matter to me that there's a human on the other side of this? So I need to draft up a contract later this week. I'll probably use AI to help me do it, to think through the finances and stuff like that. Because when I send that out, the person isn't looking at me, saying, david, did you dig into the depths of your heart and soul to write this? But then if a friend is getting married, this happened to me a few years ago. So AI was early. This was chatgpt3 time. And we're at the wedding, and we're sitting around. It's probably 100 people at the wedding, and at every single table was a note that was written from the bride and the groom about why we meant so much to them. And so I sit down and I open it up, and, you know, it's probably 80 words, 100 words. I'm like, wow, that is. That is so touching that they did that.
- [40:01]
B
Don't tell me it was AI.
- [40:02]
A
And we have some drinks. We're out partying that night, and I go up to the groom. I say, hey, I just want to let you know that was one of the nicest things I've ever seen at a wedding. And he gives me the old. The old wink. And he says, yeah, we got AI to write it. And I was just like, dude, dude. I would have so much rather you written something that's half as sincere as that, filled and littered with typos than to have AI write that. It felt like a violation and a betrayal.
- [40:38]
B
It's like when I was a little kid and we had homework to do and you had to do research. It's long before computers. You go to an encyclopedia. Well, the obvious thing is, hey, they've written that. I'll just copy it. And you pretend it's your own. Well, obviously, a teacher would much rather have something misspelled, poorly punctuated, but actually from you showing your effort than just copying out of an encyclopedia.
- [40:58]
A
Look at the way that parents hang up crappy photos that their kids have pictures that their kids have dropped.
- [41:02]
B
Yeah, exactly. It's the authenticity, the connection.
- [41:04]
A
It's not a Picasso, it's not a Rembrandt, but it's my son, it's my daughter. This is what they've done.
- [41:10]
B
So I think once you know it's AI, then suddenly it's like special effects in movies. I find my kids when they watch movies with special effects, they'll just shrug because we know a computer can generate anything. So sort of inflation sets in where we're less and less impressed. Then you have a great actor who's just acting with no special effects. And it's like, wow, that works. That's really amazing. So I said. I just mentioned that movie inflation.
- [41:36]
A
Inflation.
- [41:37]
B
Well, it's just the value. The value of the special acts diminishes because it's so common now. Their currency is devalued. You know, takes. As I said, I find movies with special effects and I just make me shrug. Yeah, they're kind of cool, but then I shrug and I forget it. Whereas what really has an impact is the actor emoting the authenticity of that. So I just gave the example of Begonia, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. When they're acting, it's like the camera's right on their face close up. And she's just speaking to this conspiracy Theki psycho, saying she's an alien. So she's saying, okay, yes, you're right. I am an alien. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. You can tell that she's lying, but she's trying to be truthful to this dumb wit who's a conspiracy theorist. So it's so rich to a person to see someone emoting. We want that authenticity, and so we don't want the AI, the special effects of AI that could give to prose. If you don't know it's AI, you'll fall for it. But once you know it, as you said, it becomes devalued. You want the authenticity.
- [42:32]
A
Here's a thought experiment for you. So what happened in art was we had the invention of photography, which could then capture the real world so clearly that artists stopped painting realism, and then they got into Impressionism, and then that became Kandinsky. And then now you're in Rothko Modern Art. Pollock, you know, here's my unique style, my unique vision. All this to say is, does this metaphor work that AI will get so good at capturing human writing that humans will then have to write in very strange, esoteric ways, and that writing will sort of devolve in the way that modern art has devolved of. Rather than trying to communicate something, I'm just trying to show my distinctiveness and how different I am to prove that I'm not a computer.
- [43:28]
B
I don't know. We'll have to see, I guess I would argue no, because we're very visual animals. So just as we move, we see things, and their creative authenticity isn't necessarily apparent. So there on your wall, you have a New Yorker poster. Now, I pretty well know that that was done by a human being just because it's the New Yorker and it's probably an older one, but that could have been generated by a machine, by AI So there I've taken it in passively. Reading isn't passive. I mean, I suppose I glance and I see the word New Yorker. Yes, but something longer. You have to want to read it. There's a more greater engagement in the reader. So I don't think readers will want to engage with something deliberately weird just to be contrasting with something super smooth called an AI text. I think, you know, one thing that's going to happen, I think publishers. There was that scandal just recently, that book. It became clear that it was partly or heavily AI written and immediately lost its credibility and was pulled out by the publisher. Ratchet was pulled off the market. I think publishers are going to start saying, hey, it cannot be beyond spellcheck and maybe minimal AI you cannot use AI And I think readers will agree with that and that the ones who cheat on that will be seen as cheaters and, you know, are not only not going to be published, but even if they manage to get published, won't be read. They'll be, you know, they're not going to win prizes, they're not going to win good reviews. They'll be. It'll be pointed out that this is not the way to do it. So. But, you know, who knows? I don't know. We'll see.
- [44:55]
A
Tell me about the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction and why that the difference is important.
- [45:02]
B
Well, because genre fiction follows rules.
- [45:04]
A
How would you define them?
- [45:06]
B
Familiarity. You know, a murder mystery you enter, or a fantasy or a romance.
- [45:13]
A
This is genre fiction.
- [45:13]
B
Yeah, genre fiction, you have certain expectations. In a romance, there will be love. Now, it doesn't have to be a man. And a woman. Could be gay, could be lesbian, could be a man falls in love with a rock or his dog. But there has to be the element of love. You know, science fiction, you expect alternate realities that have a strong element of technology. So there are rules, there are expectations. I think we read genre fiction to be comforted. You read a Harlequin romance to be reminded that love can be wonderful, especially if you're unbelievably beautiful and your other opposite is unbelievably beautiful and the sex is amazing. You want to be reminded that love can be like that. There are certain expectations and they must be fulfilled. I think in literary fiction there are no rules, which is both the problem. Sometimes they don't work because, like, you don't know what you're doing. And this doesn't work for me because it's so subjective, so individual, but it's also going to be exhilarating when it does work. So literary fiction, when you start a great novel, you don't know where it's going and it can be addressed to everyone. A great novel, a great novella, great short story will speak to everyone. So the example I gave when I was sending books to this prime minister of Canada called Stephen Harpy, who was this dumbass, narrow minded white male, I sent him these books every two weeks to say this is what the written word could do. And the first one I sent him was the Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. Dead white male, but it's amazing. But Ivan Ilish, who slowly dies and is about the effect, the reaction of the people around him, you cannot read that without somehow being Wiser for it 100%. Anyone will read it, will be transported and will be wiser. For they'll say after that I must live a better life. So you don't know where it's going to go and anyone can read it. Genre fiction appeals to people who want a specific product. A cowboy Louis Lamour cowboy story or a murder mystery. It has certain parameters that you want and you want to be comforted. You want to be. This is the world that I know and I want you to reinforce that. Literary fiction takes you to new worlds. And therefore that's why it can be distressing, it can be discombobulating, it can be upsetting. That's the greatness of literary fiction. There's no rules that will take you to new worlds. Genre fiction will not take you. It can push the boundary, but it still remains the world of whatever horror fiction or murder mystery or whatever. You need both. You want variety. You don't always be eating Cordon Bleu 3 star Michelin food. You want your junk food too. You want your. Not that genre fiction is necessarily junk food, but you want both. You want a bit of everything.
- [47:32]
A
It's interesting that you use the word product talking about a book. There I was at Barnes and Noble. Actually, it wasn't at Barnes and Noble. I was walking back from the Nets game and I walked past Barnes and Noble and I was looking at the window and there was a really popular nonfiction book in there that sold tens of millions of copies at this point. I was looking at it, I was like, what is going on with this book? What is this book? Why are people frustrated by it? But also why has it done so well? And it occurred to me that it wasn't a book, like many people Think of books. It was just a perfectly delivered product. People had a problem that was perfectly solved in a very. Almost like a pill like form in text. And I never thought about that fiction could be maybe something like that, a product until you were talking right there.
- [48:22]
B
It just has to work. But we can never figure out what is it that will work. It always comes as a surprise. Speaking of punctuation, remember that movie eats, shoots and leaves? Who would have thought that a book about punctuation could do so well? Well, we're a surprising creature. Our curiosity is aroused by the oddest things. Hence why publishing is venture. Because if we knew what would be a bestseller. And sometimes we feel publish the next Stephen King. Yes, for sure it'll sell well because we know him, people like him. But otherwise, who knows what's going to be successful. We think this is good. It didn't work, but this one really worked. It's always a surprise what works and what doesn't.
- [48:55]
A
What is your relationship with reviews? Do you read reviews? How do you think about reviews?
- [49:01]
B
Not really. There's four kinds of reviews I find. There's, you know, positive reviews for the right reasons. So those are great. Someone's read your book and understood in the way that you think it's meant to be understood. And they praise the things that you like in it. So that's great. Those are the best. But then you have positive reviews for the wrong reasons. People have misunderstood your book and said something about it that you don't recognize, and that's slightly jarring. And then you have bad reviews for the wrong reasons. They've misunderstood your book and didn't like it because of that, which is kind of annoying. And then the worst ones, of course, are the bad things. Bad reviews for the right reasons. They've pointed out weaknesses that you didn't see that you don't like. But either way, there's something jarring about them. In a sense, the positives are the good reason. Well, you don't want your ego to get inflated and you succeeded this time, but what about next time? That's a whole new book. So I generally like just now, Son of Nobody's coming out. And my publishers, my agent are passing along reviews, although my agent just told my publishers he doesn't read all of them. So just send them to me and I can use them for promotion elsewhere. I will just glance like, is that a positive one? Good. Okay, good. But I don't look at the them too closely because you know what? It's not about praise. Art is a Gift. You create something like a meal. You go in the kitchen, you take these disparate elements. You create a meal. Well, you could create just for yourself. But if it's an elaborate thing, it's to offer to others, it's a gift. So you don't give a gift wanting a gift in return. You give it to the world. And the world is entitled to do what it wants with your gift. Hopefully it'll like it. But if they don't, if they take you and throw it in the garbage can, well, I guess that's what they needed at that moment. And you can't. You know, it's like with Buddhism. Passionate detachment. You give all you can to this art, and then you give it to the world, and then you walk away. So right now, the book has just come out. I'm sort of looking at them and gratified that the buzz is quite positive. It's very positive. And after that, that's it. That's good enough. And I don't look at them particularly because I don't know what I get from them. It's up to the reader to read it how they want and get what they want out of it. They'll always bring something surprising that you didn't expect. I saw that in spades with lion of PI reading this book. Like my books did really well in Korea. I have no connection to Korea whatsoever. But they read Life of PI, and obviously it meant a lot to them. They brought something to it, and that's their business. It's not for me to say, like, the number of times people ask me to interpret a book for them. Life of PI. What did the island mean? What is Richard Parker? And ultimately, I say, well, you know, what. What is he to you? I mean, I may have an opinion, but I'm just one reader among many. You decide it's your book in a sense.
- [51:26]
A
You know, I've been thinking of stories a lot like dreams, where a bit of what you're doing is you're creating a dream. And there's historically been dream interpreters, and there's. Once you're in the realm of dreams, you're dealing in the realm of archetypes, you're dealing in the realm of symbolism, you're dealing in the realm of guesses at different levels of confidence intervals. And maybe that's a little bit of what a story is. Is. It's like a very conscious dream that you're giving the world, but it's a vivid dream. And. And certain parts of dreams absolutely can say something oh my goodness. My best friend was attacking me. Wow. I didn't realize that we had so much tension and conflict in our lives. Clearly that's what that dream is telling me. But also the world was upside down. I have no idea what's going on there.
- [52:13]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the word that I have used over and over is that a book is a co creation. You bring something to it and therefore you make it your own. So it's not the role of the writer to say that's wrong. That's right. You run with it. You make of it what you want. It's your business. So I see it as a co creation. Everything I read, I co create in the sense that I see what I want to see in it and disregard things that I don't want to see. And I think every reader does that.
- [52:38]
A
How much have you taken from plays? I know that that was a big part of your early writing process.
- [52:44]
B
Well, that was because I became a writer as a result of a movie in the 80s, I guess, Reds, about an American communist journalist who wrote a book called Ten Days that Shook the World about the October Revolution. It was turned into a movie by and with Warren Beatty and it was with Jack Nicholson. And Jack Nicholson played Eugene o'. Neill. A young, charismatic Jack Nicholson played Eugene o'. Neill. And there was a scene in that movie where Nicholson, o' Neill is at. In his hotel room at a desk working on a play. And Diane Keaton comes in and she, in the movie, plays an actress who's in one of his and they have an exchange about the play. And I happened to have taken a theater course that summer where I read o' Neill plays. And I'd never made the connection in that way of a work of art, being from a conscious artist, a writer. So you had this incredibly charismatic actor playing Eugene o' Neill, whom I just read. And I suddenly thought, hey, maybe I can do that. So I lamely went home and started writing a play. Even though. And it was a terrible play. I'm not at all a playwright. Moving plot strictly through dialogue in a way that increases att and then goes down is a knack I do not have at all. So I wrote a couple dreadful plays and then moved on to prose. But I'm always been attracted to plays because there's something you're talking about setting to start a conversation. What I love about plays is only dialogue you don't have. And it takes place in a stage that can be in your head. Yes, it's in a, you know, theater with Four. But ideally, it's just in your head. Our head is the shape of a theater with four walls and these opening color eyes, windows. And so a stage can be portable, A play can be anywhere. It's just human beings speaking. So there's a spareness to plays, an orality that I find very attractive. So I have it in Beatrice and Virgil. It turns on a play. So I started with plays, but I quickly find prose much easier to handle.
- [54:34]
A
How does what you learned from plays about writing dialogue, how does that show up in your prose?
- [54:40]
B
Well, in prose, dialogue can play a much simpler purpose of just conveying information or an emotion as spoken by a character. But it doesn't have to have that seesaw sort of increasing tension. It doesn't have to sound natural while not being natural, while conveying information but not being too heavy.
- [55:00]
A
And as you're trying to bring characters to life and you're. I'm trying to think of the different stages of bringing character to life. That first mapping out the novel, then the first draft, and then the constant refinement that goes into writing. What are the things that you're doing to give a character texture and then also to make the reader care about the character?
- [55:22]
B
I don't. I don't think about that at all. Like, you know what in Life of PI, PI was at the end of my concerns, I wanted this idea of someone who was religious. You know what? All my characters are kind of the same. I don't like when I read fiction to have a completely. Remember Carson McCullers? What's that one where one of the characters is a little person? My perspective is I want to look at life in a very personal way. I just want to look at life and understand it before the lights go out. So I don't necessarily am interested in strong blinkers. You know, the character who is blind, the character who's a dwarf, the character who is this? I'd rather just have someone who is a vessel. Like, I'm in the car with you, you're the driver, and I trust you, and we look out. I want someone who knows how to drive and the roads are clear, so we can. So I'd rather have an ordinary character in the face of extraordinary circumstances. And PI's a perfect example of that. I never thought about PI. I want someone, obviously, who's interested in the world, who's open and then things happen to him, rather than someone who's really weird and curious and the banal happens. So, you know, in Life of PI, there's a shipwreck In Beatrice and Virgil, the Holocaust befalls these two people. But those two people, symbolized by monkey and a donkey, are just ordinary people who just want to get by. They want to have their three meals a day. They want to be loved and loved. They're completely banal, one might even say boring people. But then the appalling, the extraordinary happens to them. I find that's more interesting because then my reader. Because we all think we're normal. The weirdest person you see out there, like, whoa, you're so strange. He'd say, I'm totally normal. This is who I am. Everyone, we all think we're normal. So what we want to have brought to our attention is the extraordinariness of life. So that's where I focus on in character. I never thought of the character of PI. Just in my latest novel, Son of Nobody, Harlow Dunn, the scholar, he has a dissolving marriage. He has a daughter. He's studying this. I never thought about him in terms of his peculiarity. That's why I never describe my characters. These sorts of novels where someone is describing great detail, I find pointless because words are terrible at description. If you emphasize anything with someone's nose, you suddenly imagine this enormous nose. If you mention he has a little scar, you imagine this, you know, this great cut.
- [57:27]
A
It's a caricature.
- [57:29]
B
It becomes a caricature. It's very hard, subtly, to describe someone's appearance because words aren't good at that. Photography is. Words are much better at thinking and emotion. So in Life of PI, there's a lot of thinking about the divine emotions. It's great. So I never dwell on characters. I never describe PI. I never describe Harlow Dunn. He is just a vessel to look at something. And what he's looking upon is what I'm really interested in. So I never think of character.
- [57:54]
A
Can you tell me more about the extraordinary moments? What makes for a good one?
- [58:01]
B
In a story? Yeah, that I've read or that I'm creating?
- [58:04]
A
That you're creating or that you've read. But I like that idea that you have these ordinary characters, you have these extraordinary moments. What makes for a good extraordinary moment versus one that feels contrived or all kinds.
- [58:16]
B
So, for example, Son of Nobody has a rather unusual format. At the top of the page you have verse fragments of the lost Trojan War epic. So it looks like poetry. You know, the line is ragged, and at the bottom you have footnotes that comment on the text. And they're unusual footnotes. There's dialogue. They describe Harlow's dissolving marriage. A wonderful moment for me was, hey, that's a great idea. I can elevate the humble footnote. I like footnotes. Not technical ones, but ones that illuminate something that can't quite fit in the text. They can be really illuminating. I remember reading Dante's Divine Comedy and endlessly enjoying the footnotes because they flesh out what Dante was talking about.
- [58:49]
A
Talking about David Foster Wallace.
- [58:51]
B
Yeah. See that?
- [58:52]
A
He just goes crazy in the footnotes.
- [58:54]
B
Yes. So I like footnotes. So at one point, there's a line in the novel, which I did there. You talk a moment of wonder. I have this line where I say, you know, we're all footnotes to a greater story. To me, that's really true. We're all little footnotes. We're little minor things. I'm just one little person here. I'm a little footnote next to other little footnotes. But collectively, that is everything. We are the. You know, the American nation is the result of 300 million footnotes going about creating this texture that appears on the top of the page that is this great American civilization. So I like this idea of. So one of one moment of wonder was just in a purely theoretical way of devising the layout of this page that would be in verse, in footnotes, and elevating the humble footnote. That was a moment of horrible. As a writer, you always have sentences that you're particularly happy with that just seem to say something that either is artfully told and that is true, that speaks to you as a human being. And so I said that line that I just said, we're all footnotes to a greater story. I kind of like that. I'm not showing off about it, but it spoke to me as Saying who we are as human beings would take
- [59:52]
A
me back to the. What makes a good extraordinary moment.
- [59:56]
B
So one thing that I often like to bring out, for example, is that the foundations of Western civilization is Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and the Gospels. Whether you've read them or believe in them is not the point. But these are the two. Everything out of the west came out of Greece through the Iliad and the Odyssey and then Greek philosophy. That's half of who we are. And the other half is the story with Jesus of Nazareth. Whether you like them or not is not the point here. And it's amazing to think that none of them have any facts attending them. There's no facts attending Jesus. We don't know when he was born. December 25th was the Romans mistaking it for the winter equinox. In fact, it's the 21st, not the 25th. And they thought, what better day to have Jesus, Jesus be born. But the days when the winter days get short and there's more light in our life, here's a new God. He's bringing every day more light to us. So let's have him be born on the winter equinox. They got the day wrong. That date was devised 300 years later. We don't know when he was dead. People say, oh, Easter Friday. Well, that's a day. It's not a date. And when the day he dies varies every year, you know, people die on a specific day. Warren Harding died on August 2, 1923. I don't know why I mentioned that. U.S. president. He died on that day. Every single day, every single year, it's the same. It doesn't vary. Jesus varies. We don't know most of his life, we know nothing about him. So moment of intellectual illumination to know that these are foundational stories of which we know nothing. There are no facts to do with Troy. There are no facts to do with Jesus. But what do they both have is story. There's something about them that we endlessly want to storytell about. Where sometimes things have a billion facts attending them, but they don't live in us. I just mentioned Warren harding. Like, forgotten U.S. president. Well, we can actually go back and find a million facts about him, but no one talks about Warren Harding. He's forgotten. There are facts there with no story. So there's a moment of intellectual illumination that you know what? You don't actually need facts. You don't want lies. But facts only go so far. Then you want story. So that's intellectually illuminating. Then there are moments of emotional intensity in life of PI. When PI reaches the beach, he lands and the tiger leaves without saying goodbye. We like closure. Goodbye. Good seeing you. If I just left here, it'd be like, we want that full stop to go back to punctuation, you know, we want. So when in life of Paiwen, the tiger and that. I didn't think that out very much. I just did it spontaneously because he's an animal. He's not going to go turn around and growl a goodbye. That's Anthropomor. He just walks off into the jungle, not knowing it's a Mexican jungle, hoping he'll survive. He does not say goodbye. But PI is devastated by that, and readers have. So that's a great discovery here. That's emotionally powerful. He's constructed this story with his tiger, who he doesn't realize until then, hasn't necessarily co created that story with him. The tiger just wants to fucking survive. And he's finally reached land again. He goes away. So that was a moment of emotional wonder that was nice to come upon and to create. And they sort of come by happens. You try to plan these things and sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't.
- [62:41]
A
As we begin to wrap what makes
- [62:43]
B
for a good ending, one that properly concludes a reader's expectations without answering everything. You want a degree of mystery as to what might happen next or even what has happened. So you want a degree of closure, as we want for a funeral, but without forgetting the deceased, without forgetting what has just happened. So you don't want something rushed, you don't want something completely unexpected because then the reader feels that they haven't understood what has preceded it. So, yeah, you want to come see that. I find easier to finish than to begin. You asked me about the beginnings. I can't even remember the beginnings of my stories, but I'll remember the end of each one. So Life of PI. I very clearly remember what I wanted. Same thing with Son of Nobody. I very clearly remember how I wanted to finish it. I think you want the reader to be left with a sense of wonder and questioning while yet feeling that their expectations were fulfilled.
- [63:44]
A
I was also thinking of detective stories as you were telling that. Of all the little strands that show up in a detective story. And we were talking about this earlier, the things that you end up missing, that then all come together and there's
- [63:58]
B
a certain
- [64:00]
A
sense of almost pleasure of, wow, this person connected. All of those things that I had seen that I didn't know that they were going to come together. And I didn't even realize that I'd been thinking about those things when I. Which all just came together and they had given me all of these ways of seeing that. Then boom, ensemble at the end and it comes together at last.
- [64:20]
B
Well, genre fiction, I think the conclusion just has to fulfill very clearly the reader's expectations. If you're writing a lovely romance with a lovely couple, and they're great and the sex is great, and then the last page, he cuts her head off and puts her in the oven, eats her and throws her head in the bin, the reader of the gentle, sweet romance would be horrified, saying, this is not what I wanted. You know, they want confirmation that love is beautiful in a murder mystery. You want the novel, the murder resolved. I remember seeing with my partner a murder mystery was it by Tana French. No, see Jane Harper, in which one crime is resolved, but as part of that crime was another one against a child in a forest. And it's very prominent and it's never resolved. And I remember that's really weird. Like, so maybe it worked in the book, but in the. If in the. In the adaptation it didn't because I was left like, well, who killed the little kid? How can you not address the question of who killed the little boy? Well, other stuff is so that. So I guess in genre fiction you want a confirmation of your expectations. In literary fiction, it's dicier because you don't know what the expectation is. Not necessarily clear, but the writer has to make it sort of clear at one moment, towards the. At the end.
- [65:28]
A
The words that have been coming to mind for me are satisfying and mysterious. And what I mean by this is there's a certain satisfaction to a good ending. Like I was saying with the detective novel, it all came together nice. But also what you were saying earlier is that there has to be a certain mystery for a story to live inside of you. Because if there is that sense of mystery, if not everything has been wrapped up, then that story begins to. You begin to grapple with that story. That story becomes part of you. That story lives on in your mind and you're like, what is going on there? It's a puzzle that you can continue to solve over the years. And satisfying and mysterious almost feel like antonyms in a way. They feel like they're at least in contradiction. But I think a good ending might hit both of those notes.
- [66:14]
B
Absolutely. Like if you think of the ending of Moby Dick, which ends with the description of the ocean just endlessly rolling and hitting the beaches. I forget the bit, but that's perfect contemplation of the ocean, its ceaseless movements, the eternality of time. It works wonderfully. Exactly. That's what you want. You want the reader to have something that they can behold at the end of a story, but not necessarily all resolved, that they can still. It still glows with sort of a degree of mystery. They're wonder, they're pondering on it. I said a work of art is ultimately a thoughtful emotional product. You have to feel something. But if you feel too much, then once the emotion settles, you forget it. It also has to be thoughtful. A good example of that, for example, here's a good example, is of Gregor Samsa, the Metamorphosis. So Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning, he's a big dung beetle. He's an enormous insect in his bedroom, to the horror of his parents, who, you know, reject him. And he lives in his little room now. And because now he no longer works, they have to hire borders, and the sister plays the violin. There's a wonderful scene in Metamorphosis where the sister plays the violin for these Borders, who are quite arrogant types. And Gregor, who's this beetle, is in his room, and he's trapped, supported by the music, because despite being a dung beetle, he's still human. And he feels the music of his sister. So he edges out into the light and horrifies the borders. And so I think it's his father throws an apple at him and he gets stuck in his carapace. And, you know, then it's the downfall. He bends to die. So there's a story where eventually he dies. And so that's a clear, you know, beginning, middle, end. We were born, we live, and then we die. So it follows that arc. That's satisfying. But then what do we make of that story? Why did he become a beagle? What does it mean to become a Beatle? What does that mean to us? So there's a perfect example of it's resolved, the ending. And yet it remains mystery. You live with Gregor Samson. It's a famous story that this absurdity of it lives with us because in some ways, we are always touched by absurdity. So I said, you want resolution, but not. That resolves everything.
- [68:08]
A
What's the famous line? You want a ending to be surprising in the moment, but inevitable in retrospect. Does that land with you?
- [68:15]
B
Oh, I never heard of that one. That's a good one. So, yeah, Dust line with me. That's a good one.
- [68:20]
A
Well, let's end here. Indifference. Why can't artists be indifferent?
- [68:26]
B
Well, they can't be indifferent about what they're writing about because you have to be passionate. But there is the mistake that we made that think that artists might have valid opinions about things beyond their art. Like, I have opinions about what I've written my book, what they might be about, what I might be trying to say. But my opinion about Donald Trump or AI, I'm no more prescient than anyone else, any other citizen, in fact, maybe less. So. One thing we have to remember about artists is they're solitary agents. We have no obligation to anyone but to ourselves, which is great, because we're free agents, which means we can say the outrageous rock and roll songs that in the 60s scandalized people because it was all about sex. Well, yeah, we want to talk about sex. We enjoy sex. We don't want to be repressed like you old people, you know. So art can break rules, and it does that because it has no obligation, no constituency, except the artist himself herself. So we are free agents. That's exactly why tyrants are afraid of us. Because we will say whatever we want, which will shock some people, but delight others. And it's the way of staying free. There's something inherently free about art, and it's because we don't owe anyone anything. But the downside of that is then, because we have no constituency, we don't represent anyone but ourselves. So our opinion is just ours and may not reflect a greater, wiser judgment. When you do want cohesion, like in a political body, you want people to vote and have one set of policies. You don't want random artists who are just doing whatever they want. That's not good for governance. It's good for freedom of mind, but not for a functioning society, necessarily.
- [70:04]
A
Jan Martel, thank you very much.
- [70:05]
B
My pleasure, baby.
- [70:06]
A
It's good to meet you.
- [70:07]
B
Yeah, same here.