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Interview

Ali Smith

talks to Frances Gapper

From Issue 18 ◊ Jul/Aug/Sep 2003

Ali Smith’s voice is quick, with a soft Inverness accent – she has been accused of reading her own work aloud too fast, but says she can’t slow down. She has piercing eyes in a changeling’s face and uncanny ways of suddenly being there or not. When I arrive at her house, in a hidden, garden-filled Cambridge street, she’s just unloading the Saturday morning shopping and insists on washing her hair before the interview, but is back in about 30 seconds, head wrapped in a white towel.

We sit on a sofa in a book-lined room, just inside the front door but absolutely quiet. Her partner Sarah Wood, another swift appearer and vanisher, has settled the tape recorder on
a chair between us. The floor is wood laminate, like the one gouged up with a hammer and screwdriver – ‘that laminate cost us a fortune to put down’ – in ‘May’, a story in Smith’s new
collection, The Whole Story and Other Stories.

This, her third collection, was written because ‘I was supposed to be writing a novel and I couldn’t.’ Realising that three or four of her stories were set in different months, she had the idea of a collection tracing the cycle of a year. ‘Only one story has the title of a month, but they’re all about different months. I didn’t want to do it too obviously, because that would be annoying, it would just feel like you were being corralled as a reader and a writer, but if I kept it subtle enough, it would probably have some proper effect of cycle.’ She wrote most of the stories between February and September 2002, then took the collection on retreat and wrote the last story there.

‘You know how every month has a feel to it which you only really notice at that first moment? You realise the thing has moved on, you think, oh it smells different now, or it’s colder, or…. That’s what I concentrated on for each story, the moment of change.’ There’s no story called ‘The Whole Story’ in the collection, she points out, just as the year is ‘never all there, it’s always moving on to something else.’

Smith’s passion for books glows in the new collection, a book full of books and bookshops and book clubs, its cover a photograph of a cast of a bookcase by Rachel Whiteread. In the first story, a boat is made from copies of The Great Gatsby. The second story, ‘Gothic’, introduces a bookshop customer who dries his handkerchief by hanging it on The Chronicle of the Twentieth Century, as well as a sinister David Irving-type character.

Books are far more than possessions or objects, the things you line your walls with: this is one of Smith’s recurring themes. In ‘Text for the Day’, a haunting story in her first collection Free Love, a young woman tears up her books and scatters the pages through the world. ‘The end of that story is bleak,’ Smith agrees, ‘but it’s blown open. Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.’

While there’s pressure on any writer of short stories to turn out novels instead, Smith’s publishers must be especially eager for a follow-up to Hotel World, her wildly successful second novel. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes in 2001 and last year won three £10,000 prizes – the Scottish Arts Council’s Book of the Year prize, the Encore Award for a second novel and the East England Arts Simply the Best prize.

Is she making a living from her writing? ‘I am,’ she says, ‘but it’s fragile and I don’t know how long it will last.’ Virago gave her £1,200 for Free Love, published in 1995, then £3,000 for Like, her first novel. ‘This isn’t liveable in any way, especially if the second book is a novel. Like took me three or four years to write. I was lucky that I’d been ill, because I was on invalidity benefit and I was able to work quietly.’

‘Then Granta gave me a two-book deal, £10,000 for each book, and there was this mass of money, my God! That was fantastic. But it’s not going to last that long, if you think how long it takes to write a book, it’s about £5,000 a year. But all the same, that was it, I could do it now.’

With the money from one of last year’s prizes she was able to pay Wood’s mother back the deposit she’d given them to buy the house: it was ‘a relief to be able to do that’, Smith says. Of the other two prizes, ‘one is spent, spent over the year, and the rest is in the bank. So I’ve got a bit of money put away, which will last me for two years, and with any luck I’ll write this next novel.’

Now 40, she began writing stories 11 years ago, after going down with ME and leaving her job as a lecturer in English at Strathclyde University, ‘I hated my job so much, when I was ill and came out of it and decided to leave, a lot of things got off my back. It took a long time of lying on my back for that to happen.’ She no longer does any academic teaching and also tends to avoid creative writing teaching if she can, finding it often rewarding but extremely tiring.

When she and Sarah returned to Cambridge from Scotland, she remembers, ‘people were very frightened of me. They would ask, what do you do? I’d say, well I don’t do anything actually, I’m waiting to see what I’m going to do next. And they would shrink back in fear, absolute fear, because what kind of risky and scary thing is it to have no definition, no thing that you can say, that’s what you are. It was interesting.’

Before the stories, she’d written a lot of poems, through her teens and beyond. ‘I remember lines that were so terrible…’ At university in Aberdeen from 1980 to 1984, she was encouraged by creative writing fellows William McIlvanney and Bernard MacLaverty. ‘Someone says to you, you can do it and you think, maybe I can. It makes all the difference.’

She also wrote plays while at Cambridge studying for a doctorate. Were these different from the radio plays she writes now? ‘No, much the same. They all do the same thing. They all go “Oh, it’s a play!” in the middle. And it’s a lovely thing to do and I love it, it’s the easiest thing to write, to write plays. There’s always a point where the people in the play recognise the structure that they’re in.’ Except in the last one, she says, where instead ‘the people recognised that they made their own erotics.’

I ask if her writing comes from any particular tradition. A Scottish one, she immediately replies – ‘and Scotland being on the edge of something larger is always about being from a different perspective, you’re an insider but you’re an outsider all the time.’ She talks about the Caledonian antisyzygy, ‘that peculiar split in Scottish writing – like Jekyll and Hyde, or Confessions of a Justified Sinner, where you’ve got the angel and the devil.’ But then adds that she also comes from a Modernist tradition, that of Joyce and Woolf, which ‘broke everything up and everything could start all over again. So you could understand both reality and books from a new angle, a renewed angle.’

And a tradition of women writers, she says, who are always disappearing – who publish and then are lost. Co-editing the Virago anthology Brilliant Careers, with Kasia Boddy and Sarah Wood, it was especially difficult to find women writers for some of the early years of the 20th Century. Smith had to dig deep in archives and copyright libraries before finding, for instance, the American writer Susan Glaspell. Her own publishing career, she feels, is every bit as precarious as those of writers republished by Virago who otherwise would be gone forever – ‘forever – you wouldn’t ever find them again. And nobody would know where to look for them.’

I think of the ghost of Sara Wilby in Hotel World, for whom words disappear before she herself does quite. ‘Imagine cold butter disappearing into heated-up bread, gold on its surface, going. There is a word for heated-up bread. I know it. I knew it. No, it’s gone.’ Lise, another character in the same book, falls sick with an unspecified illness and loses her grip on language. Since her illness has no name, says Smith, ‘it’s not surprising that language disappears for her, because what can it mean, when there’s no name for what it is you are or do or have?’

She goes on to say how in everything she’s written, ‘there’s a push as to how things mean what they mean… how do we make words mean the most we can, when they seem to thin out?’ So in Like, ‘there’s a point where Amy thinks of words as a rope bridge stretched across a chasm, that’s what words are for her.’

This reminds me of a wonderful moment in Like, when English Amy and her parents, visiting Scotland, turn up at Ash’s house:

‘“What kinds of tea do you have?” she asks me.

Kinds of tea? I think, as I’m leading her in, pushing through past my brothers. I have no idea what she can possibly mean.’

How does Smith go about writing? I ask, hoping for some tips. ‘You want me to talk about anal processes?’ she says crossly. ‘It’s very straightforward: either I write or I don’t. Most days I’ll write something, but sometimes it will be reviews and I won’t get time to write anything else. I try and write every day unless I’m being lazy and I have long swathes of being lazy, of waiting to see – not exactly being lazy, being fallow or something. If I’m working on a novel I’ll try and work on it most days, if I’m working on short stories, I can have a week off maybe in-between.’
It’s a confidence trick, she adds, to keep going with anything that one writes. ‘It’s so scary. I’m always thinking the next thing won’t work. I’m always surprised when it does.’

Prompted by the music coming through the wall – ‘That’s our new neighbour. She’s great on the piano’ – Smith changes the subject from writing to reading and the importance of reading books more than once. A well-made book, she says, is the same as a piece of music. ‘You know when you hear a piece of music once, you haven’t heard it properly, you want to hear it again. A well-made book will reward you in exactly the same way as music does, in that you will understand and love a piece. You’ll feel the cadence and the depth of it and hear things in it all the time. If you pay it a little more attention, it will reward you, like all art. Like everything,
actually.’

She wrote Like ‘on purpose to be read twice at least. I imagined one of those infinity signs. You would get to the end and you would go, what the fuck, wait – and then you would have to go back and when you went back you would see both stories again clearly, and then perhaps if you got to the end again you would think, well, wait – and maybe even go back again.’

We go for a walk around the house, where she and Sarah have lived for three years. Its light-flooded upper floor, opening on to a roof terrace, was previously an artist’s studio and Smith says with delight that whenever the temperature changes, ‘either cold or hot, the whole place fills with an oil paint smell.’

I remember she once likened the short story to a stone thrown into water. What did she mean by that? OK, she says. The short story is now a form close to poetry – often an image, a lyric moment at the centre of a story ‘will allow everything to happen round it, to come together, to coalesce. Everything radiates out from that moment. So if you throw a stone in water, you see concentric circles. You know that something has been changed or moved and in a moment it’s going to be gone. There will be no record of that moment.’

‘So,’ she says, ‘stories are perfect for a Romantic kind of optimist/pessimist like I am, fascinated by the transient.’ 

ALI SMITH was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her first collection of short stories, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award. Her first novel, Like, was published in 1997, and her second collection of stories, Other Stories and Other Stories, in 1999. Her prize-winning novel Hotel World (shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes) was published in 2001. The latest collection of stories The Whole Story and Other Stories was published in the Spring.

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*18 The Smith Method

• Usually, very unlikely things happen. Allow for this. For example, you sit down to write a story about something, but as soon as you start you find the story wants to do something else or go somewhere else. It’s important to listen to this impulse.
• Personally I don’t find that some ideas are suitable only for short stories and some for novels. If I’m working on a collection of stories, then all the ideas that come are probably relevant to the collection of stories, and if I’m working on a novel, then probably they’ll be for, and turn up somewhere in, the novel. The point is – nothing is wasted. Somewhere along the line, that idea you had two years ago but didn’t know what to do with then will reassert itself when you need it.
• Most stories are at least two stories, if not more. You have to find a way to put the pieces together. The process is actually about dialogue, the story’s own dialogue, your dialogue with whatever the story is, and the story telling you what it is back. In that meeting of writer and thing, person and process, that’s often where the life of it is. If you get it right.
• There is no correct time of day to write (people often ask if one time is better than another).
• If you get stuck, just stop and wait. Go for a walk, or lots of walks. Read other books. Usually it’ll come on its own, when it’s ready. There’s always something else to do. There’s no point in trying to force it.
• There are no rules. Let yourself be surprised.
• Don’t be scared of not writing something. Something will be happening in the creative process, even when you think nothing is.
• If you talk too much about the writing process, then the process will leave you. Think of an animal in the underbrush: if you go towards it then it will probably run away, but if you’re very good and quiet then it will stay and it can watch you.
• Trust the process.
• As an aid to confidence bear in mind a writer like Joyce Carol Oates, who writes
  several books a year, just keeps going, one after the other after the other. There will always be another book after the one you’re writing. There’s always something else.

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