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[28.8.06] [Stevens]
THE MAN WHO TALKS
 A great interview with Alan Warner over at Bookmunch by Peter Wild, who has a chin-wag with one of the few truly great British authors of recent times, about such subjects as writing, class and critics:
"I'm very suspicious of making too much of autobiography in a writer's work. If I wrote about my life as it is, my books would involve thrilling and numerous trips to computer shops and the answering of emails and climax with the monthly compiling of Irish VAT returns. Very Hell-raising! Writers work on the page, and their characters maybe come alive there.but their characters are not them. You search forlornly for biography on all my pages. I think Jack Kerouac is a good example of the folly of trying to work it ALL in. You get the dross as well as the brilliance. You get the writer's self important conviction that everything which has happened to them must be of interest to the reader and must inform his or her characters. I love the narrative of jokes and pub stories but don't want to be a writer of just anecdotes - though anecdotes strung together have informed the picaresque novel since the 15th century. My novels are a collage of things that have mainly just been imagined, a few might have happened to the author or to acquaintances, have been read about - but all must be subsumed to the overall Style of the novel. It is the novelist's Style we should turn our attention to - not the life. How has the Style been arrived at and how does it work? Or is there any original Style at all to talk of? Remember how Ezra Pound categorised all writers: the Inventors the Masters or the Diluters, I think it went. Because some things wont fit and just have to be left out - I adore Joyce but I think by Finnegans Wake, and with its style, it was easy for Joyce to work in all in!"
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