A Quote by Kate Atkinson
I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.
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What I like writing about are people's relationships, not necessarily great big dramatic things but the smaller things in life and how they affect characters and challenge and change the people that they are. I do like a happy ending, so my books have to have a happy ending.
It's often the case that the most strained moments in books are the very beginning and the very end - the getting in and the getting out. The ending, especially: it's awkward, as if the writer doesn't know when the book is over and nervously says it all again.
Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage. I've always written in the long format, five, eight, 10-minute pieces rather than one-liners, so since writing books, the process hasn't changed much. A piece in my live routine can end up as part of one of my HBO specials, and it can also end up in one of the books.
You have to remember that no matter how big your goals or how many you have, there are going to be times when you miss by a little bit. You have to be realistic and flexible. One reason I have so many smaller goals is that even if my big goals don't happen, I've still achieved so much along the way, I don't feel the loss.
Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!
I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.
Generally I start writing when I have even the smallest idea of how a book is going to go, because the physical process of writing itself keeps the mind active and focused on the job at hand. Usually I write in about 5 drafts, but that simply means there are 5 definite times when I go in a linear fashion from the beginning to the end of the book.
In the beginning, me and my bandmates just did stuff on our own - we had smoke bombs, we'd dress as crazy and as weird as we possibly could, just to give ourselves a different ambience. But when we started making money, of course, the ideas started getting bigger. We were big fans of Broadway; we were like, "Man, when you go see a Broadway show, you just get pulled right out of reality; you're into their world for a two-hour period. It would be nice if we could do that onstage with a music concert".
I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another.
And so, we end with a beginning. Because every ending is really a beginning. All you need is a house that's old and creaky ... filled with lots of books ... a cat ... a person who's willing to try again ... someone who promises never to leave ... and most important of all ... a little Hope.
But I think writing should be a bit of a struggle. We're not writing things that are going to change the world in big ways. We're writing things that might make people think about people a little bit, but we're not that important. I think a lot of writers think we are incredibly important. I don't feel like that about my fiction. I feel like it's quite a selfish thing at heart. I want to tell a story. I want someone to listen to me. And I love that, but I don't think I deserve the moon on a stick because I do that.
I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.
Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what this is about."
I'd rather be dealt with as a person than a persona. With my children, I'm just 'Mom.' At the end of the day, the position is just a position, a title is just a title, and those things come and go. It's really your essence and your values that are important.
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
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