John Lanchester
speaker
548 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 27 Jun
John Lanchester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And Phoebe rather prides himself on being a bit pénible.
And then you realise actually, it's not exactly softer than that, but it's more complicated than that.
Whereas Kate is someone who presents as nice.
And there's something much tougher and darker about her that gradually gets revealed in the course of the book.
vary because they're the motive effectively, they're the plot motive of the book.
I think there's a technical trap you can fall into if you're narrating a book in the first person, that you have to be careful to give enough life to the characters who aren't talking because the voice can completely take over and then everyone else isn't quite real.
I really admire
some of Philip Roth's books, but there are points in them when I feel that the first-person narration is so overwhelming that there's this claustrophobic feeling that you actually become that guy.
And I don't want to be that guy in the case of many of Philip Roth's books.
And so, yeah, you have to leave, in the case of that thing of kind of strong voices carrying the story, you have to leave those doors open for other people to be alive.
And they are, as I said, they're kind of the plot motor of the book comes from them.
And also one of the ways your working process changes across writing books.
And I've always been a plotter, as you say, but one of the things that I've learned, you know, it's funny, you carry things over from fiction to nonfiction and backwards the other way.
And I learned when I was writing a memoir about my parents, a lot of the things that you have to do to make a person seem real,
in the way that people are really in real life is you have to leave things out you have to select and um you have to pick which stories you tell which details you you emphasize structure and selection i was you know um structure selection and sequence i think the three s's that they're the same techniques fiction and non-fiction um but then i learned but i learned from that that
One of the ways in which you make people seem alive when they went back to writing fiction is you spend time with them in your head.
So when I used to plan, I would just plan the kind of things, the structural things that happen in the book.
But now I do a thing of trying to inhabit the life of the characters in my head.
And one of the things that happens is they're more alive and you know more about what they're likely to say and do.
I learned that writing capital, that the more I'd sort of try to kind of inhabit the selfhood of the people I was writing about, the easier it was to write.
Showing 161–180 of 548 · page 9 of 28
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