Books
Novelist B G talks about balancing writing with his day job as a lawyer and his family life.
By Kevin Powers, Joanna Trollope and Zadie Smith, a thriller set in North Korea and a round-up of crime fiction.
Turning points in lives are usually banal. I was walking back from a university tutorial when a guy asked if I wanted to write for Victoria University’s student magazine, Salient. I submitted an earnest review of
La Maman et la Putain for a classic-film column. Fifteen years later, I’ve published five novels.
Even my first book was an accident. I was backpacking through North and West Africa. A friend asked if I was going to write about it. I thought, why not? I wrote something … and like most books, nothing happened. I put a few sections on a now-defunct website. I wrote a piece about the trip for the Listener. I thought that was it. Writing wasn’t a dream, so nothing felt crushed.
But then a friend saw the posts, got me in touch with her ex, who got me in touch with Murdoch Stephens at the Wellington independent publishers Lawrence & Gibson. I had written a lengthy scene about a stomach bug in Senegal. Murdoch was suffering from a stomach bug in Syria at the time. We were united by uncontrollable excrement and a love of adventure.
I love Lawrence & Gibson’s approach. The writers make the books themselves. Binding, guillotining, splicing. These are rife with accidents. Each book has its own imprint, whether it’s a slightly jagged edge, an upside-down page, or an overenthusiastic glob of glue. Our books won’t sit in your bookshelf in a neat row.
I’ve carried this approach through to my writing process. The advantage of being a lawyer is that you become used to meeting arbitrary deadlines.
I’m always suspicious of writing tips, but I have a set process. I spend six months thinking and planning. I’ll know the theme I want to explore but I’ll read anything. I’ll talk to anybody. When I get to the point that I’m so desperate to write something, I’ll wait a couple of weeks, and then write.
Itry to write a first draft with as few filters as possible, so accidents can happen. The first draft is always rubbish but it has an energy that you can’t create in subsequent edits.
I don’t set rules as to when I write. I have a full-time job with unpredictable hours and I’m a new parent. I just write when I can.
I might be drunk. I might have woken up in the middle of the night for no reason. I might be stuck in a bathroom on a family trip so I won’t wake my napping toddler. I then spend six months editing.
It all sounds chaotic, and it is. But writing is trying to coalesce chaos into something coherent.
Something no one has really asked you to do, but you do it anyway. I view accidents as a process of gleaning, a disruptor of routines, a way of forcing yourself to be open to new ideas and new people. My reliance on accidents has led – rather accidentally – to a back catalogue.
At Lawrence & Gibson, the writers make the books themselves. Binding, guillotining, splicing.