Hilary: "This is what I recommend people who ask me how to get published: trust your reader. Stop spoon-feeding your reader. Give the reader credit for being as smart as you, at least. Concentrate on sharpening your memory, and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say, then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat; drink blood; give up your social life - and don't think you can have friends. Write in the quiet hours of the night, and prick your fingertips, and use the blood for ink.
"But do I take my own advice? Not a bit."
"Hilary Mantel is an intense, troubling and evocative writer. Her principle themes, are of history and individual identity, religion and rebellion, and the influence of the dead upon the living. Her fiction asks how we come to be the people we are."
Hilary: "I don't think I can help it, it's very much the way I view the world, I think. I don't trust it tremendously. I always feel that if I put my hand on the wall, my hand might go through it. I think as a child, you see, I was always listening hard; I was always trying to get some purchase on what was going on, and work out what was happening in the next room. There's a little bit in Wolf Hall where Cardinal Wolsey says "never let me hear you say you don't know what goes on behind closed doors - find out". And that - I spent my childhood trying to do that, so that becomes a habit. You really do need to know for self-preservation whether the devil is behind that door."
"Not everyone thinks that."
"Fools."
Hilary Mantel, BBC 2's Culture Show.
No comments:
Post a Comment