I am an honoured, and happy, to be here, speaking to you, but I would like to remind you that from the point of view of a writer, I am not quite here. The fact is that I am, nearly always, out of sync with the present moment and location. This may sound a bit confusing, but let me try to explain.
While I sometimes do find myself in the present, in this case I suspect the year is 2012 since this presentation is titled “My Encounter with 2012”, this occurs rarely during any given year itself. This phenomenon is something that is rather peculiar to the writers of novels, people whose jobs revolve around projected ideas, and if you hear me out you will also find that it makes a lot of sense.
Writing, as a job, necessitates existing in multiple time zones at the same moment. Now, in 2012 for example, I’m working on an almost contemporary novel, set around 2010 or so (I’m not exactly sure), but of course by the time it gets published, it would seem to the very contemporary reader to be positively ancient. When it reaches the reader, a minimum two or three years down the line the novel will appear to be looking back at some obscure, misty, long-forgotten epoch…
...My present.
Likewise, whatever book I am publishing this year, is the fruit of something that happened in the early 21st century.
This means that to even attempt to be in the present is a futile, utterly hopeless, endeavour. Whatever is observed from a novelist’s point of view, whether it is a place or a behaviour characteristic of a time, a moment, a year, an era – it is a disturbing, but undeniable, fact, that as soon as the novelist makes a note of anything, the present has already started its descent into the past. Writing is, thus, a continuous process of eroding the present, and turning it into past.
And that is just one of the peculiarities of fictional time.
Another major oddity is that while writing a novel – from concept through publication – takes 2 or 3 years on an average, reading it is a 2 or 3 day activity. The time compressed into a book is actually a huge chunk of a novelist’s lifetime – while paradoxically, for a reader, the same book may last just the duration of, let’s say, a flight or train journey.
I was planning to pause for effect here but as I only have ten minutes at my disposal to finish this speech (which by the way took me two months to write), I must navigate with uncommon haste – at least for a writer.
So, all things considered, what does 2012 look like from my viewpoint?
Muddy, for I’ve always felt that a good novelist is like a shellfish. Let us consider the shellfish, an animal that lives somewhere deep down in murky waters, most of the time with its mouth shut, single-mindedly focusing on how to become a better shellfish. Eventually, somebody who appreciates oysters, if our good novelist is comparable to an oyster, that is, hungry gourmand will grab it, flip it open (like a book), and devour it. In a lucky circumstance the oyster contains a pearl that will be remembered forever, treasured as one of the valuable things of 2012. However, most of the time oysters don’t produce pearls; mostly they just spend their lives turning into a... juicy bite.
That, to me, is a reasonable analogy for a writer’s time. So far I’ve spent this year in relative seclusion, barely talking to anyone, slowly, arduously working my way through literary material that will hopefully become a polished pearl; an act of magic similar to that which turns grains of sand into beautiful ornaments. On the other hand, maybe the book that results, will just turn out to be a quick mouthful for somebody who may or may not appreciate it.
That’s the way it is with books and their writers. One year you’re the rage, another year you’re forgotten, next year you may be rediscovered again. But like the oyster, the writer really has no control over these things. The only thing he or she can do is to keep writing.
In moments of despair, when I am struck with the horrific feeling that no pearl is going to come out of the oyster, when the novel isn’t going anywhere, I try to think that I am, instead, like the carpenter who lives down the road from me. (That’s one of the advantages of being a writer: every other day you can change your approach, and rethink your work.)
I see him often. The carpenter is a quiet man. He squats on the ground with his tools, working on pieces of wood, carving out shapes that he then puts together, and as if by magic, there’s suddenly a beautiful chair before you. Or a table, perhaps. I feel a sense of brotherhood especially when I see him working on a bookshelf (just like he’s done for me).
Good writing to me is a lot about that: about the craft of turning raw material into something that somebody will find useful and want to keep. The carpenter knows what he must do and doesn’t waste much time on talk.
I try to adopt that same mind-set. Of course, a carpenter has a more direct contact with his customers: his advantage is that he knows exactly what size and shape of a chair, bed, table, shelf the customer wants. But my job, if being a novelist can be called a job and compared to that of the carpenter’s, is about creating something that somebody else will need to have. For after all, the purpose of writing is that your book is taken home by some book-lover who discovers a copy of one of them in a bookshop and decides to adopt it.
Having given you these analogies, two simple images of what my life in 2012 looks like, it is a little bit strange that I stand here before you speaking, when I should be sitting in my quiet mountain cabin, emulating either the oyster or the carpenter... or both, really. For I’ve always been of the opinion that the so-called writers who speak a lot, whom one meets in cafes and bars for example, and who love to talk about their writing plans, are very unlikely writers.
Whenever I hear a writer talk about what he or she hopes to do, my mind hibernates and I am someplace else. Art simply doesn’t exist in the abstract: art is the process of creating art. Compare it again to the carpenter’s work: you cannot sit on a chair that’s in your fantasy, as little as anybody will read an unwritten book that a wannabe author boasts about in a cafe. A chair is a chair only when you can touch it, just like a book is a book only when somebody can find it in a bookshop and read it.
But paradoxically that pseudo-writer, who sits in a cafe and talks about writing, is more in 2012 than I will ever be.
As I said before, my work as a novelist, while removed from the current moment by the barriers that I have described so far, is to try and say something about the present, and ensure that this ‘present’ remains relevant and interesting 2 or even 20 or 200 years from now.
Therefore the primary reason why it is actually good to avoid being too involved in current reality, I believe, is because good writing needs to be timeless. Which is only possible if you’re one step removed from the present and can see it with a certain perspective. Personally I don’t like to mix too much real life into fiction, and do not rely on using actual events or fictionalising people I know (except for the occasional stray incident I might hear of and that is just too bizarre not to put into fiction). For if one is too involved in the year 2012, one’s writing will pretty fast turn dated and will not be very memorable a few years on.
As a writer, then, one develops a very unusual relationship to real time. For several years, while working on a novel, one is locked into a parallel world/space/time of one’s creation; which I in my mind compare to the lifetime of a shellfish. Writing fiction really needs to be about creating an imaginary world and populating it with people, by and large, from one’s own mind, from scratch. To me, the best fiction is the purest fiction: just take a grain of sand – one grain from the real world, and build your pearl around it.
For the same reasons, too much reality, too many encounters with the current year, becomes a great distraction, and results, at best, in flawed and impure pearls.
That’s why I don’t quite like being in 2012. Maybe I will enjoy it in hindsight, once the year is over and I recall it in fragments, like memories of my visit here in Shanghai, mixed up with fragments of other years, other experiences, but during 2012 itself, as we meet here and now, as much as I can, I’d prefer to avoid being too much part of this for the aforesaid reasons of creativity and productivity.
Sometimes, one looks up from the work (the work being a huge mess of papers on one’s desk and yellow post it-notes and charts on the walls), and perhaps a month has passed and one is astonished to notice it is... autumn. And, to my surprise, I find myself here in Shanghai where I am invited to speak to you. While everyone else has been living in 2012, and new fashions have been introduced and clothing styles have changed, I am still wearing, as you can see, the outdated pre-2010s fashion I wore years ago, when I started my current novel project.
Meanwhile, as time goes by, I am lost in myself, with myself, alone but in the company of hundreds of interesting characters. In my parallel time, the fictional world becomes more real to me than the real world: it must, because if that world isn’t real to me, how can it be evocative to my readers?
So please don’t get me wrong: fiction should have a degree of verisimilitude and a story should evoke reality – the reader must be pulled into a solid world of seemingly genuine characters, even though fictional.
This is my point: Fictional time is, in the best of circumstances, always more interesting than factual time.
Therefore, I turn myself into that oyster I mentioned before. Again, I dip back into great imaginary oceans of inspiration, where time stands still and moves at the same time: where five minutes of story can take five days to write, or where a month’s worth of fictional events can be compressed into a minute’s worth of writing.
So here’s to a fictional 2012, sure to come alive in the books of the future, and hopefully much more interesting, even, than the present year; for the way I see it a fictional year is always a more imaginative year. Thank you very much for letting me take ten minutes of your valuable lifetimes to tell you all of this.