Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan says he became a writer by “being a reader.” His parents, who both left school at 14, insisted on weekly family visits to the library when he was a child and sent him to boarding school, where he discovered Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene. His 15 works of fiction include Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday, and the newly released Sweet Tooth . HBR: There’s a passage in Saturday where the protagonist, a neurosurgeon, is operating in a state that psychologists would call “flow.” How do you achieve that in your work? McEwan: It happens to me only occasionally, and it’s accidental. I can’t plan for it, but every now and then it occurs: All barriers fall away, and I’m outside of myself, I forget where I am, I’m completely locked into the moment, all sense of time, desire, even affect, even emotion, is gone. It’s usually to do with confronting something difficult, breaking through, solving problems. I think this is one of the unsung forms of human happiness. It’s not about possessions or being rich or successful. It’s about achieving that selflessness—total absorption in something that interests you and challenges you. I think that probably outside more-obvious matters, like sex or skiing or whatever, it’s one of the most potent forms of satisfaction available to us. All people have the potential to have these moments. I’m not sure I really like the word “flow”; I don’t think that quite catches it. How does your writing process start? I have a large green ring-bound book—deliberately large so I don’t carry it around too much—that lives on the desk, and I doodle in it. My notion of starting a novel is there’s something in there nagging me, or several things at once. They might be separate bits of writing; they might all belong in the same thing. If I ever look back on those doodlings after I finish something, I see that the finished work incorporated all of them but in ways that surprise me. There’s a phrase that the English critic and short story writer V.S. Pritchett used: “determined stupor.” A determined stupor is required in a novelist. You need silence and this kind of mental rambling out of which things begin to emerge. Characters walk to you as through a mist. Certain phrases require unwrapping. Sometimes, for example, I’ll write an opening paragraph that I know I’ll never have to complete, but knowing that I don’t have to continue it liberates me, and that way I trick myself into writing 500 or 600 words. Then I think there’s something there, and I go back, and before I know it I’ve written more. So it never feels like choosing a subject. I just have these things in the back of my mind, the idea that there’s something unexplored, which needs looking at, and then suddenly I realize I’m on the job—I’ve drifted into a piece of work that’s going to take me two or three years. I’m always delighted by that. I have a general sense that it, this thing I’m going to write, exists if I’ve written roughly 20,000 words and I’m still interested. Then I know I’m committed. There’s no way back. I’ve read that you’re quite disciplined and precise as you progress. Yes, once I get going, a good day is somewhere between 700 and 1,000 words. I think it’s important in creativity to understand the value of hesitation, to not be in a rush, to pull back and pause—not because you’re blocked, not because you don’t know what to do, but just to let things enrich themselves. The moments I walk away from what I’m doing are often the moments I think I know exactly what to do but I don’t quite trust it. So before I go charging down the alley, I resist. Then I go back. I don’t believe in just splurging it down incorrectly. It’s better to get as much right the first time around as you can. You’ve said you love solitude. Solitude is one of the great privileges of civilization. I don’t need it massively; I just need it during the day. Christopher Hitchens once said to me that he thought happiness was writing all day knowing that you are going to be in the company of an interesting friend in the evening, and I think that about gets it. That’s perfection. If from nine o’clock in the morning until seven the day’s entirely your own, and then you’re going to take a shower and go downtown and be stimulated in conversation with food and nice wine, you are riding one of civilization’s lovely waves. How do you know when a book is finished? You don’t know, really. You think you might be finished, and then other things occur. But put it this way: When I reach the end of a first draft, that’s when I raise a glass—literally, a glass of champagne—because the rest after that point will be interesting but technical, another six months’ work, another year. And when do you stop that tinkering? I sometimes give a book to my editors and say, “This is the penultimate draft. If you’ve got any notes, send them along.” I’ll also show it to my wife, who’s a very good editor, and maybe one or two friends, and then I’ll listen to what they have to say. A good edit note is one that I instantly recognize as right, as if it’s what I was always thinking. If someone says something that requires me to agonize about it, in the end I realize I should just leave it as it is. You’re known for your deep field research, for bringing an almost scientific realism to your writing. Why do you take that approach? I think one of the most important qualities of a mind is curiosity. If I’m interested, I want to know more and then I’ll educate myself. It’s not difficult. Finding these things out is not a burden or a task, it’s a pleasure. The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead. Your books have been critically and commercially successful. Did you set out to achieve both? Not consciously. I mean, I’ve written more or less the same way since my early 20s. If I’ve acquired a wider readership, it’s been incremental over 35 or 40 years. Every now and then it surges. Every now and then it falls back. Typically, for me publishing a book means reading some of the worst reviews I have ever received and some of the best. Why do readers get engaged? Well, I’d like to think I pay a lot of attention to the interior of other minds, how I construe what it’s like to be someone else. I don’t know how to best describe what I do except to say you should work honestly, patiently, true to what you think is right, and hope that other people see the world the way you do. After writing so many novels, how do you stay fresh? I love hiking, and I’ve had the same backpack for many years, and it always gives me pleasure to think of it sitting in the cupboard waiting, hanging on the hook. In it is a compass, a couple of lighters, two survival blankets, a couple of candles, some painkillers, about 50 meters of very thin but strong rope, and two one-liter water bottles. Hanging nearby are my boots. I like mostly going in the mountains with a friend. I like tennis, but I stopped playing squash because you can’t play social squash. I’ve read that you also “run from the last thing you did”—alternating between novels set in the past and in the present, for example. Is that another technique for staying innovative? Yes, I do somewhat urgently need to shift my ground once I finish something. It doesn’t really seem like a calculation but it turns out that way. You’re the son of a soldier and a housewife. How did you become a writer? By being a reader. It’s as simple as that. My parents missed out on education, so they were very keen to see me have it. Even though we had no books in the house, every Tuesday during my childhood in North Africa, we three—my parents and I—would go to the library. So I was always reading a book. I read and read and read. Neither of my parents knew children’s classics, so nobody said you must read Black Beauty or whatever, and I was left to just pull books off the shelf and read the first page to see if I was interested. Then I went off to boarding school in England in my early teens, and I don’t know if anyone was really guiding my reading, but the library was better. So I started to read Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene and books like The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel Sea . Then there came a point in my 19th or 20th year where I thought this was a conversation I could join—that I didn’t have to be only a reader. But by the time I started writing, I was absolutely crammed full of other people’s ideas, so it was quite difficult to find myself initially. As recently as 2010 you said you were still in search of your best work. Do you continue to feel that way? Oh, yes. I mean, I could be completely delusional. There has to come a point in your life when your best work is behind you. But you need to keep alive the illusion that it’s still in front of you. It gets harder. The stamina of writing a novel is quite intense. You need to keep in shape. But I still think there’s something ahead of me that I haven’t recognized yet and will do. In interviews you talk about your kids a lot. How do you reserve time for them while also getting the solitude you need to work well? The key to that is to always have your study door ajar so your children can wander in and out and think there’s nothing special about it. They’ll ignore you until they need you. If you want privacy, the paradoxical answer is to remain constantly available. How do you handle the publicity tours? The best bit of writing a novel is writing the novel. Then six or nine months later you’re required to schlep around like some guy selling brushes and you become the employee of your former self, who was so happy at his desk, freely dreaming. He’s sending you as his salesman. I feel there has to come a point when you’re no longer required to go out explaining yourself. Of course, I think I’ve said this about five times, and then I end up rolling over and doing it again. But the only time I said I’m not doing any at all in the States, I sold more copies than I ever had of a novel—and it came out the week of 9/11. That was Atonement .

Ian McEwan

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