Breaking the rules

>> A.L. Kennedy on how writing is akin to demonic possession

by JULIET WATERS

At age 35, Scottish prodigy A.L. Kennedy has published seven books, including Original Bliss and So I Am Glad, to massive critical acclaim. Her latest novel, Everything You Need, is the story of an older writer, Nathan Staples, who teaches his daughter how to write. The book takes place over seven years, 1990-1997, and every year Nathan gives Mary one rule for writing. While Kennedy was in town last week for Blue Metropolis, I asked her to comment on them. "They're Nathan's rules," she insists, "not mine." But even though "Nathan's a terrible teacher," she still sees truth in some of them.



1. Pay attention to everything.

"I suppose that can be said of any job. But I pay too much attention... I observe too much. I stare in an unhealthy manner. It would probably be better for me if I paid less attention. People are always like 'go away... ignore that please... you're being annoying.'"



2. Nobody can stop you writing.

"Obviously no one's been able to stop me writing, so that's kind of one for other people. Because you meet lots of writers that other people have stopped writing. It's the most grotesque invasion of privacy. My mother had a book that was accepted for publication and my father said that she couldn't publish it because she was using the family name. So she isn't a published author because she went along with that at that point, which is terrible."



3. Disregard the publishing world and everything bad or good that is said about your work.

"What I do is just close down. I don't read the papers anymore. I don't watch a lot of television except stuff I want to watch and the news. It's very easy to do that because the media in Britain is just so bad that I don't want to go anywhere near them. I listen to the radio. I read Private Eye for British news and The Nation for American news."



4. You do not own your words.

"Yes. That one I really, really believe in. And it has to apply to anyone who has the capacity to produce words in any way. Plus it works both ways. On the one hand, academia and the publishing industry will acknowledge that people have a voice, but they won't acknowledge that everyone has one. And you must: particularly if you use words all the time, you have to realize that they come to you as a favour and other people have had them before."



5. Listen to it. Listen to the work, it will tell you how it wants to be written.

"That one is true to a particular time in the process. I mean you know yourself, when you're writing something, that when you get to a certain point, it knows what it would like to be. And if you just sit down calmly and interrogate it then you'll realize what it is. I mean the poor thing is lying there going, 'Oh, I want to be an opera... obviously not a sonnet.' The idea of writing the whole thing by yourself without any assistance from the novel--that would be horrible."



6. There are no rules.

"Yes. I completely believe that there aren't any and that you shouldn't listen to anyone who gives you rules."



7. Do it for love.

"Well, that's a given. The horrible thing is that it doesn't matter whether you love or not. If it's your vocation it doesn't go away. There's a lot in common between writing and demonic possession or slavery."

Everything You Need by A.L. Kennedy, Jonathan Cape, hc, 567 pp, $39.99