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Interview

Naomi Alderman

talks to Daneet Steffens

From Issue 44 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2010

When Naomi Alderman was little, one of her favourite books was Masquerade by Kit Williams. ‘It was a puzzle-treasure hunt book,’ she says, her dark eyes gleaming with enthusiastic recollection. ‘It had a series of beautiful pictures with clues in them which would lead you to where Williams had buried a golden hare. I spent hours poring over it.’ In what can only be described as a serendipitous case of serendipity, in 2004 Alderman reacquainted herself with Masquerade. (‘You know how that happens with creative work, where you become very excited about something and then there’s a period of dormancy and then whatever it was about the creative thing suddenly comes up again?’) And then what happened was this: ‘I was going to email a friend, and – you know those quotes that some people have at the bottom of their emails?’ she says. ‘I had one, and I was suddenly very bored with it. I spent about two hours thinking about what it should be – I was obviously putting off working on my novel’ – (this would be the 2006 award-winning Disobedience) – ‘and eventually I put in a quote from Masquerade.’ As soon as she’d sent the email, her friend emailed back saying, ‘Omigod! Do you like Kit Williams? I met someone at a party last night that you have to talk to!’

‘…what a strange thing it is to be a writer, making things up in your head.’

That someone was Michael Smith, head of computer games company Mind Candy, who wanted to produce a game with a Masquerade-like treasure hunt element to it. Mind Candy already had some thoughts about a backstory, but they looked to Alderman, as lead writer, to flesh things out: ‘So they had gone, “Well, there’s this Cube and the people of Perplex City have lost their Cube and there’s this character of Violet who was stolen by The Cube and taken to a parallel dimension, and she has a geeky friend called Kurt, and a sister called Scarlett….” And I was like, “Okay but when the story starts, then what happens?!”’ The first thing she did was tackle the characters (because, as she points out, ‘you can’t have the character of Violet just being quote unquote “sexy librarian,”’), then constructed a complex, interactive, virtual world. The set pieces included a daily newspaper, a Cube-worshipping cult and other facets of living so steeped in verisimilitude that even real-life corporate entities got fooled. ‘Perplex City was a geek paradise where being clever was more important than being gorgeous, so we thought, “Well, what kind of prescription drugs would they have?” she says, referring to pharmaceutical company Cognivia, whose website incisively reflected (and subverted) earthbound equivalents. ‘Obviously,’ Alderman grins widely, ‘drugs that would enhance your cognitive abilities.’

In fact, for an actual, real-life party, the Perplex City game crew wanted to get M&M’s candies printed up with their fictional drug Ceretin. ‘Normally you can get anything printed – your name, etc. – so we sent in the request, and M&M’s called us and said, “We can’t do this. We’re not allowed to print them up with the name of a drug.” Alderman’s glee is palpable – and infectious. ‘They had googled it, found the Perplex City website and thought it was a real drug!’

World-building for fictional properties, she asserts, is an intriguing writing arena – think movies, television, games. To create the Perplex City perspective, Alderman and her colleagues started with questions: what kind of problems would the world have? ‘We wanted them to be more technologically advanced than us,’ says Alderman. ‘We thought they’d probably be better at detecting crime, so, in the newspaper, we didn’t want a lot of mystery murder stories. But we had a lot of stories about environmental protection, and we had celebrity gossip – we had this whole long-running thing about this singer, Joya, and her boyfriend Alejo. They were on-again-off-again and then she was pregnant but she wouldn’t say who the father was…that was really fun to do.’ In fact, generating a fictional newspaper meant the world inevitably got stretched in all sorts of directions. An innocuous story about the governing council of the city, say, would offer up a new storyline tangent: ‘Hey! we’ve just mentioned that Nathan Earlywine has won the Council Leadership of the city so why not make him a character and have something happen with him?’

Originally, the game was to last nine months, but in a feat of writing-engineering ingenuity, Alderman and her cohorts spun it out for two and a half years. ‘God knows I didn’t know what I was doing when I started planning the story!’ she exclaims. ‘No one had done anything like it before – the longest similar game had lasted three months. So I plotted out a vague arc and my secret was, wherever I thought I would give the players a bit of information – “Oh, they’ll find this out from a book, or they’ll ask Violet and she’ll tell them” – I would make them work for it instead.’

Of course, if there’s one thing Alderman understands – aside from getting her audience wrapped up in a storyline – it’s community structures. Disobedience, located in the north London Orthodox Jewish community in which Alderman still lives, was touted as a lesbian love story; in fact, that relationship was one element in a larger, more organic whole. With a resounding absence of malice or bitterness, the novel – elegantly, revealingly – goes to the heart of what it’s like to be part of a structured, closed community, how the fact of living within one can be liberating as well as confining. ‘I was naïve,’ admits Alderman. ‘I didn’t realise that you can’t write a novel with a lesbian relationship without it becoming a “lesbian novel.” But I’m proud that I did it – a lot of lesbians have talked to me about it, saying, “You know, we’re really under-represented in mainstream media.” And it allowed me to talk about how to live a religious life, if something deep inside you calls you something different.’

Her new novel, The Lessons, out in April, is set in another structured community – Oxford University. The story follows a group of students as they create their own social bubble in a gloriously decaying mansion, then as they disperse into the wider world. Resounding with echoes of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the novel nonetheless establishes its own territory, creating a portrait of love – or perhaps, rather, devotion – in one of its more unresolvable aspects.

Alderman went straight from her Orthodox Jewish community to Oxford, and to her the similarities were quite obvious: ‘People were still saying to me, “Yes, because you’re here it means you are one of the best people in the world.” I mean – terrible!’ She shakes her head. ‘It happens in Lessons, when one character leaves to go to Manchester University – which is a great university – and the others are, like, “Oh dear, oh dear, how awful for you,” as though it’s even worse than leaving uni altogether. Orthodox Jews talk in a similar way about people who are Reform or Liberal, that it’s kind of worse than being not Jewish at all.’ And there’s another similarity in her eyes: both are worlds designed for men in which women are trying to find their place – ‘but the organisation of the institution isn’t necessarily very friendly towards that.’

Post-uni, she spent a year working as a PA to publisher Frances Lincoln, then as an editor at a law firm – ‘and I’m the kind of person who, provided with a ladder, begins to climb instead of looking to see whether the ladder is leaning up against the right wall.’ She was working at the firm’s Manhattan offices on 9/11, which, to her, signalled the end of the road in many ways – with the job, with her religion, with New York, with the then-boyfriend. She applied for the creative writing MA at East Anglia – ‘It was a life preserver thrown out in front of me, so I could swim towards it’ – and was accepted. ‘It was a kind of detox, coming from Manhattan to Norwich, from working as a high-flyer to being a student again. It was restarting my life and deciding, “I’m going to do it better this time.”’

For Alderman, starting over proved golden. For one thing, while at UEA, she won the David Higham Award, which brought the perk of an agent. ‘There’s a sniffiness about creative writing MAs, a particular kind of British sniffiness,’ Alderman says, quietly but with conviction. ‘I think British people don’t like self-help or self-improvement concepts, or that you can earn something through merit. Their idea is that you are born to something – either you’re born with a talent or you’re not, either you’re born with a privilege or you’re not – and you just have to settle for what you’ve got.’ Alderman’s take is more practical: ‘An MA reduces the level of your gamble – the most you’re gambling is a year of your life. No employer is going to look at your CV and ask, “And what did you spend this year doing?” It also qualifies you for a range of work, opens up a lot of opportunities. When I went to talk to Mind Candy I hadn’t yet published a novel but I could say, “I’ve got an MA in creative writing.” It shows that you are someone who takes their writing seriously, who wants to do it professionally.’

Then there’s the experience of being around other writers, benefiting from constructive criticism. ‘No one’s going to sit you down and say, “Okay, this course is structured in 12 parts and we’re going to study the following things and today we’re going to study character,”’ she says. ‘No, no, no! I mean, once you’re beyond the basics, that’s not really that useful. There’s only so much you can learn by looking at other people’s work; you have to learn by looking at your own work. And what’s really helpful is the discipline of having to produce 5,000 words every few weeks and then handing it out to a group of 12 complete strangers who are not invested in any way – people aren’t very cruel because they know they’ll be handing their work out too, but they’re going to give you helpful comments.’

The various aspects of the course – even the more painful ones – were invaluable to this writer’s development. ‘You have to learn to take criticism. Some of it’s totally useless and you learn to sort the wheat from the chaff – another great lesson if you want to write – but you also really understand that this process is going to make your work better. Also, it put me in a world where words were valued; I was among people who thought that good writing was important for its own sake. It was a very life-changing year. I arrived really uncertain, and I left really certain that maybe I would never get paid for this, but that this was what I wanted to do.’

‘There are no second drafts in gaming. I think a lot of writers find that quite scary…’

A writer compelled by two very different medias, Alderman finds prose and games writing completely compatible. ‘There are no second drafts in gaming,’ she says, snacking on tea and banana bread in a flat pleasantly filled with books and computer games in perfectly equal proportions. ‘I think a lot of writers find that quite scary, and I think if I were only writing games I would find it very frustrating. But because I have my novels that I can control and hone and chisel away at until they’re perfect, the idea of a game – you’re writing something in the morning, it goes online in the afternoon and by the evening people are talking about it on their forums – is really exciting and sort of adrenaliny.’ While she has primarily worked on narrative-heavy games, there are people out there who are writing dialogue for FPS (First Person Shooter) games in which the player, as the name suggests, is essentially shooting and hitting targets. ‘I have a friend who was working on one of those: you are a soldier wandering around and blowing people up, achieving your missions. The writers are very much led by the game designers and programmers who say, “We’ve come up with a really cool idea in which you have this sort of gun and the targets will come at you really rapidly,” and the writers come up with the justification for the mission. Or you might have to come up with 50 lines the character will say when they achieve a hit, so they’re not always saying, “Perfect hit! Great!”’
Thus far, her two main writing outlets have intertwined themselves seamlessly: she was working on Perplex City while finishing Disobedience, and finishing Perplex City while starting The Lessons. She finished off Lessons last summer while working on a treasure hunt game for The Guardian. Rather than driving herself round the bend during this extended period of duo-tasking, she appreciates the tidy symbiosis: ‘Creatively, they feed into each other quite nicely. People say, “Oh, writing’s a lonely business!” and it really is – I’m quite sociable and I find it hard going, being stuck all day with the characters in your head. And I live alone, so it’s not like I have family around to go, “Hey!” – not even a cat or a dog.’ With games, the results are instantaneous: ‘You’re working with people, talking to your audience all the time, you can hone what you’re going to do tomorrow based on what your audience said today – it’s moving forward all the time, you can never unpick anything: when it’s done, it’s done!’ Working on a novel is an entirely different animal: the nice thing about the world of novels, on the one hand, is that the writer is the most important person in the creative process. On the other hand…‘Omigod, you’re four years in a room, keeping up your own sense of belief. It’s really easy to lose a stance of whether the writing’s working or not. Certainly, I go through hideous periods of self-doubt where I think, “It’s all rubbish! It’s just rubbish!”’

How does she restore her faith? In that sense, the games are a tonic. ‘Even if the novel is rubbish and I convince myself that I’m a terrible, terrible writer, nonetheless I have to write something for the game that day and I put it up and then people go, “Oh! This is interesting!” and they’re just playing the game, not thinking about the writing. They just get into the story.’
Plus, she gets to commiserate with fellow writers, Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans (‘My year at UEA was me, Diana Evans and Tash Aw and, yeah, I think we’re all still quite astonished, going “Oh, look, this has gone quite well!”’). She and Evans have ‘regular chats where we have little fantasies where we can stop being writers and just be farmers instead. “Yeah, we could build things with our hands and grow things in the soil instead of all this really airy-fairy stuff.” I mean,’ she says, shaking her head, ‘what a strange thing it is to be a writer, making things up in your head. It’s the sort of thing that as a child you get told off for. Then, suddenly, it’s your job!’

Evans gets a big thank-you in Disobedience’s acknowledgements page. ‘Yes,’ says Alderman. ‘I was working on it at UEA and I had a title in Yiddish, Dafka’ – a Yiddish word whose versatile meaning nudges close to just for the sake of defying or confounding expectations – ‘and I was told, “You can’t call it that, you can’t call it a word in a foreign language.” So we were trying to come up with a title that would communicate something of dafka and, bless Diana, apparently she and Patricia Duncker sat in one of their tutorials trying to come up with a title and they came back with about 40! Some were jokey like The Things You Shouldn’t Do, but there was this word, Disobedience, and it really worked.’

Shortlisted for the 2009 National Short Story Award, with a new game (a suffragette murder mystery!) scheduled for 2010 and with her next novel firmly in the works, Alderman qualifies as a writer who’s always got her next project in the pipeline. ‘Yeah,’ she admits, ‘they’re like teeth for me: the old one is pushed out while the new one’s growing in. Until the new one is forming inside my mind, I’m not willing to let the old one go. I need the new one to hold on to before I’m willing to go, “Okay, you may go off now.”’

NAOMI ALDERMAN was born in London in 1974. Disobedience won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2006.

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*44 The Alderman Method

• Have a super-efficient work schedule: six hours a day, from 10 to 4 or 5 with a break for lunch, six days a week, for up to three months. Then break it lest something go wrong with your brain.
• Get out of the house. Use your local library.
• Be a night person. Wake up about 9 o’clock and drink hot water. Avoid the Today programme – it’s too shouty. Read first thing in the morning instead, a book by someone who’s been dead for more than 100 years, like Middlemarch or The New Testament.
• Break your fast, then get started: go to a library, take the tube, still reading or thinking.
• When you arrive at the library, bag a good seat – very important for the work of the day.
• Get a seat by the window so you can look out, but hopefully not directly facing the window or with a window behind you, but a window to one side.
• Be picky about your libraries and your seats!
• This part is actually quite ritualistic: once you’ve found your seat, go and find a book: run your eyes along the shelves until you find a book that catches your eye – it can be a book by an author you’ve never heard of, or an author you’re familiar with – open it up and read a few paragraphs. Allow this text to remind you that this is what books are for. They’re there just so that you open them and suddenly discover a whole world – or just find a particular sentence to admire.
• Use this action to get your juices flowing, to spark the ignition, then begin.
• A good loping pace for a first draft is about 800 words a day. More than 1,000 and you lose some quality.
• Choose a pace that you can keep up for days and days and days – weeks at a time, really – without getting tired. You can push to write 2,500 in a day, but then the next day there might be nothing, the well will be dry.
• Sunday is a good work day, it’s quiet.
• Three to four hours of hard writing can be a good day’s work: 800 words that you’ve gone over a couple of times. Leave things off slightly in the middle so that you can come back to it the next day rather than staring at a blank page.
• Having said that, allow for a period of time before that intensive work for just jotting down scenes, accumulating notes for the next book, writing down a sentence as it occurs to you.
• It’s quite common that you just need something when you are starting, a little kind of beacon – maybe it’s a scene that you’re swimming towards, maybe it’s a character who’s going to have some sort of trajectory – you need to have somewhere, someone that you’re swimming towards.

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