A Quote by China Mieville
Well I don't feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing.
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When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
There are certain scenes in the edit you're playing with it and certain scenes don't put back together the way you imagined. Sometimes they're better and sometimes they don't have that thing, so it's never foolproof. But you certainly get an idea that here we've got enough and we've got to move on because you're always against time and money there. Whatever the budget is, you have to get practical about it.
The reason I took on directing a film myself was because, no matter how skilful a director was or how much I liked the film, there'd always be beats where I'd go, 'Oh... well, that's skilful, in a way, but it doesn't get the flavour I'd intended in the script.'
Sometimes with certain writing, you feel like you've got to be literal, hit it hard on the nose, just to get the point across. Good writing is more subversive I think - or good scenes. They are about one thing on the page but you can make it about something completely different.
Parsimony is enough to make the master of the golden mines as poor as he that has nothing; for a man may be brought to a morsel of bread by parsimony as well as profusion.
Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
So much of writing is discovery. Sometimes I feel like a rat in a maze, trying to discover the way out. My little heart is beating, and I'm racing down a path thinking, this is the route, it will get me there, as I turn this way and then that.
My literary criticism has become less specifically academic. I was really writing literary history in The New Poetic, but my general practice of writing literary criticism is pretty much what it always has been. And there has always been a strong connection between being a writer - I feel as though I know what it feels like inside and I can say I've experienced similar problems and solutions from the inside. And I think that's a great advantage as a critic, because you know what the writer is feeling.
I don't know that I've gotten much feedback directly from the literary world; sometimes I doubt even the notion that there is a literary world, though I guess there is or was.
What I really care about is writing... Some people feel about touring the way I feel about writing, which is, 'Whoa, I can't believe I get to do this as a job.'
Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.
When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way
When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.
Although I usually think I know what I'm going to be writing about, what I'm going to say, most of the time it doesn't happen that way at all. At some point I get misled down a garden path, I get surprised by an idea that I hadn't anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory.
There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art. ... A lot of my songs are very serious, I'm like dead serious about certain things and I feel that I'm writing about the world, through my own eyes. ... I have a love for simple basic song structure, although sometimes you'd never know it. ... Most of the songs I wrote at night. I would just wake in the middle of the night. That's when I found the space to write.
There's definitely been a focus on the literary aspects of my music, and I always get a little cringey because I don't feel like I'm particularly literary. There's a sort of academic label that's put on me that seems inaccurate.
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