The Hanif Kuresihi Method From Interview no. 13 • Brainstorm ideas – have a big rush with lots of ideas; a novel will take hundreds of pages of notes with bits of character, incidents, bits of other people’s books, maybe a drawing, something that happened yesterday. • Go through the notes and stick them together to see whether they hold together in some sort of order. The demands of each book are different and you have to find a method each time. • When you get down to work, write by hand – your earliest experience of writing is of using a pen and it wires you into this earlier self. There’s some sort of intimacy with you, yourself, the page, the way you make characters that there isn’t with a computer. • When you start – it doesn’t matter what form, be it play or novel – think of a visual image in your mind, as if it were a film, a central dilemma. It has to be a good idea for a story, for example, there’s this bloke, it’s the night, he’s going to leave his wife in the morning or not. • Ensure that it’s a good structure, something to work in that’s dramatic. You have to be sure that your punters will want to know what happens. In this case: Is he going to leave in the morning? • Start with a solid idea then fill it out with whatever you’re thinking about. It’s like having a party – you’ve set up the room, but who knows what’s going to happen once you’re in there. • Put everything down, then pare it down. That’s the challenge. Look at each paragraph and decide if there’s much too much there and you can say it better. You might only have to write one word, like Beckett or Pinter. • Start showing it to two or three people, getting some response, responding to them, and thinking about it in much more detail. You may get annoyed with them, annoyed with yourself, but it’s vital to do it. • Work on the second etc. draft, until it’s ready to present to your agent. • A lot of the work can start off as other forms; you can start off writing something as a short story or as a movie and then switch into another form that seems more suitable. Only when you’ve finished is the difference significant, when you think about where you’re going to get the money, what actors are going to be in it. Start with a solid idea then fill it out with whatever you’re thinking about. It’s like having a party – you’ve set up the room, but who knows what’s going to happen once you’re in there.
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