Nicholas Shakespeare

There's a quote of Conrad, if I might read out, which I'm sure will be familiar to your listeners, but it seems to me when I was thinking of what to talk to you about writing, this seems to me never to go away, what Conrad says.

He says, all art appeals primarily to the senses.

My task, which I'm trying to achieve, is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel,

before all, to make you see that and no more, and it is everything.

So I would say that's my literary mantra.

I try to follow that Conradian rule as closely as I can, hopelessly failing, of course, but at least I try and follow it.

And I admire Ian Fleming.

For doing the same thing.

I mean, every paragraph is full of pain or pleasure or scrambled eggs or champagne.

It's wonderful.

You're in the situation.

And therefore, when you're in the situation, the writer can kind of really do what they like with you.

Well, before I started writing...

One's always very wary of reading any fiction when you're writing your own because you become like flypaper and a bit oversusceptible to other writers' tics.

I know that two years ago before, or three years ago before I started writing, I had been reading the American novelist James Salter, another novelist I enormously admire.

He didn't write that many books, but every one of them, a bit like Patrick White, is a kind of

toleratory reading I was very impressed by Salter's way of handling language and it seemed very fresh to me and I probably borrowed imperfectly from him in some of my own ticks in this novel but I don't know if other writers have this experience but with me always writing is trying to get a pebble out of my shoe I have an idea a plot quite a strong plot idea but I don't know the answer to

And I write the novel in order to find the solution in a way.

Well, apart from Javier Morales' Berta Ila, I've read two stunning novels, both by Germans.

One is by a German who's recently died called Walter Kempowski, which is called All for Nothing.