How I write: CK Stead likes spirit of Dickens for inspiration
Poet Laureate and award-winning novelist CK Stead’s third and final volume of his memoirs, What You Made of It, covers from leaving the University of Auckland to write fulltime to today. When it comes to a writing routine, he is very disciplined.
Which writer do you turn to when you have writer’s block?
Dickens is the most dependable because when he’s in the vein he has such ongoing momentum and confidence, a swing in the step, which also means a smile on his face. In other words he has a communicable buoyancy which is something I very often want to achieve myself.
At other times there are different effects I’m hoping for, and I may look to other models. It isn’t that I want to imitate these writers but to catch something of their spirit.
When it comes to a memorable book, what is more important, a great plot or great characters?
Neither! What’s most important for me is always the quality of the prose, the writing skill. This will manifest itself as much in the dialogue (its brevity, sharpness, wit) as in discursive passages.
Character is in what people say and do, not in descriptions of them; and not in what they are said to ‘think’ (very often unconvincing). Plot is an organisational matter, dependent on the writer’s skill as a storyteller. It can be very important, but it won’t on its own lend distinction to a novel.
What book do you go back to time and time again to re-read?
There are favourite Dickens novels I like to re-read. When I was very young I used to return to The Great Gatsby quite often, not because I thought it was ‘‘perfect’’ but because there was a yearning, lyrical quality that suited me temperamentally – suited the young poet I suppose.
Later, but still young, I used to reread novels by Alberto Moravia, in particular one called Conjugal Love, because they taught me something about meta-fiction, and about the important question of provenance in fiction – i.e. where the story is coming from, who knows these facts and how were they acquired.
What book did you read as a child or teen that had a profound effect on you?
As a child I read more than once Young Jack about a boy, Jack, and his friend Oliver. It made a big impression on me at the time, but all I can remember now is that it opens with them up in a tree in the village while down below men are being recruited to fight in (I think) the Napoleonic wars.
Years later I discovered that the author, Herbert Strang, was really two people one of whose surname was Stead. Much more important was RL Stevenson’s Treasure Island read to me by my father when I was about five, and re-read often. Such brilliant story-telling and such good (picturesque though highly conventional) characters. I’m sure I could still read it with pleasure.
Another along those lines was John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, which might have influenced the writing of my Smith’s Dream.
What’s your writing routine?
When I left the university I had a fairly strict writing routine: an early walk or swim and then three or four hours writing fiction (or poems if I was ‘in poetry mode’ – I was alternating a novel and then a book of poems); then lunch and in the afternoon whatever else was in hand – reviews, preparation for public events, ‘work’ things.
We’d had an old shed knocked down in the back garden and replaced by a Lockwood office – my writing space, not to be invaded by family – so I ‘went to work’ by going out one door, across a deck, and into another . ... In later years I got less regimental about it; but I think I began like that because I was afraid that once I didn’t have the institution and its timetables bearing down on me, I might get slack and lazy.
I need not have worried. I drove myself harder than the institution had ever done.
What You Made of It: A Memoir, 1987-2020. Auckland University Press, RRP$49.99