Gregory Norminton’s Shelf Life

Gregory Norminton is the author of five novels — most recently THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY (4th Estate, 2018) ­— and two short story collections. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan. He lives with his wife and daughter in Sheffield.

How and where are you?
I’m at home in Sheffield. I haven’t been all that well: a Christmas flu became double pneumonia early in the New Year and I spent two weeks in hospital, half of that in Critical Care. I’m able to write this, or do anything, thanks to modern medicine, so for all that, in my convalescence, I can look back on some gruelling days and nights, my abiding emotion is one of gratitude. There are no books in the grave, or if there are, it’s too dark to read.

What are you reading right now?
I’ve had plenty of time to read in the weeks since I was discharged from hospital. I usually have two or three books on the go, alternating between fiction and non-fiction. Novels go down quickly, but I often work slowly through travel or history. My current doorstopper is Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas – a vast compendium of social history and curious anecdote, one of those great books that contains the DNA of a dozen other potential books. I’ve been meaning to read it cover-to-cover for about twenty years. I’m also keeping Portraits on my bedside table: a selection of John Berger’s essays on art and artists. On the fiction front, I’m reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, taking it slowly as the precision of her prose and the depth of her vision demand. A longer-term reading project, that will take me much of the year, is the astonishing three-volume We All Hear Stories in the Dark by Robert Shearman. Its hundred-and-one interlinked short stories are a ghoulish delight.

And, of course, watching or listening to?
I’m not watching much TV at the moment. I find it too enervating in the evening, given my need of rest and that I am a talentless sleeper at the best of times. I’ll watch the odd film in instalments – most recently Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter and Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland – and my wife and I usually go crazy on a Friday night and watch one, or even two, episodes of a TV series, most recently the Swedish family drama Bonus Family.

Music was a lifeline for me in hospital. My daughter leant me her MP3 player and I was able to find some classical amid the K- and J-pop. Having limited mobility, and a deep investment in mental escape, I found myself listening intently to familiar melodies. It was transporting, each track a realm of movement and resolution that I was permitted to visit for the length of time it took to play. I was especially drawn to choral music, marvelling at the fruit of human breath even as I fought to regain my own.

What did you read as a child?
Unlike my more intimidating contemporaries at university, where I read English, I had not been a devourer of books as a child. I’d been a nibbler. Novels I rarely finished until I was in my mid-teens. Thirty years on, I still get a thrill when I reach the final page. I dipped into fiction, but I dived into history and fact books, daydreaming about the former and filling my head with factoids from the latter. The great reading passion of my childhood was comics – specifically bandes dessinées (I grew up in a bilingual household). These included familiar titles like Asterix and Tintin, but also whole series that British readers won’t be familiar with like Spirou et Fantasio, Le Scrameustache, Les Tuniques Bleus. My passion for the form led me to attempt my own material, some of it in French and some of it in English. It was only frustration with my limited drawing skills that got me attempting prose fiction. I still love comics (I’m working on one with the writer-illustrator Zara Slattery) and find frustrating their low, albeit rising, cultural prestige in the UK.

Which books and/or writers have inspired you and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
I’m influenced in big and small ways by many of the books I read, and few works of fiction have nothing to teach someone who’s trying to write it. The more widely you read, the greater the potential nourishment. You never know when your work may be bolstered by what you encounter. For instance, picking up Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield this morning, I stumbled on a detail – concerning bell-ringing, as it happens – that provides a solution to a narrative problem in the novel I’m working on. At the risk, which I often run, of sounding pompous, I’d compare reading and writing (as interconnected activities) to an ecosystem. There’s a constant flow of nutrients between the former and the latter. Just as biodiversity is key to a healthy ecosystem, so a diversity of influences is key to a functioning literary imagination. The solutions to your narrative or formal problems have almost certainly been found by authors before you. This is one of the things that I most enjoy about teaching creative writing: I can steer perplexed students to books that might clear a path for them. And they can do the same for me.

There are, of course, those novelists who matter most to me: the ones who compel me to become a completist, or whose deaths, though I never met them, feel like a bereavement. Hilary Mantel, for instance: the great historical fiction practitioner (and theorist) of our time, who gives even her most peripheral characters details of appearance and manner that impart the breath of life. Penelope Fitzgerald is another essential writer. She has gifts not unlike Mantel’s, with a genius for elusiveness and suggestion. You read her work with caution and delight, eager to re-encounter it even as you are in the midst of it. She is also, famously, a source of encouragement to late starters, having begun her fiction career in her early sixties, her tank already full of life and experience.

Other exemplary writers include Samuel Beckett (for his cadences), William Golding (The Inheritors and The Spire rewire your brain), Russell Hoban (for whom writing was “a matter of being friends with your head”), Vladimir Nabokov (a tutor in paying close attention to the visual), Alan Garner (no one else fuses the mythical and the scientific, dream and reason, as he does), and Ursula K. Le Guin (who approached fantasy and SF with the mind of an anthropologist). There are authors not on this list who still matter to me but less intensely than formerly, and there are authors I have yet to discover, or to read with due attention, who will join it in the future.

What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
The worst review and the most painful review are not the same thing. A hatchet job can be laughed off; not so the percipient review that gets to the heart of your failure. Generally speaking, the most infuriating reviews must be those that crop up on Amazon – the ones that drag down your star rating because their copy of your book arrived with a creased cover or a two week delay.

I know some writers who can cite verbatim their worst reviews. I’m not one of them, I’m afraid. A worse fate these days is to receive no reviews at all.

Tell us a little about your creative process.
Sure – I rise at 6 am, practice yoga, then pump iron till breakfast. I’ll down a raw egg and eat wilted spinach with a seaweed extract that’s excellent for brain health. If the weather’s fine I’ll go fell-running before settling down, after a shower, to my writing. Most writers use desks, but I can only work in a sensory deprivation tank where nothing will distract me from my inner vision.

In this world, meanwhile, my process is a little less Instagram. I’m a gifted procrastinator, which means I have to get my wife to hide my laptop on writing mornings so I don’t fritter them away online. If I’m researching a project, I try to combine reading and note-taking with experimental fragments of narrative: writing dialogue between characters, say, or bits of description. Playfulness is essential. If you write from the outset with a frowning reader in mind, you become inhibited. So I find it helpful to scribble things down on scraps of paper, tricking myself into believing that my first draft is nothing more than a doodle. I then transfer the doodle to a notebook, improving it on the way. Typing up is the next stage, and again this offers scope for fine-tuning. Once I have a few pages of typescript, I print them out and scribble over them, returning to the computer to enter those edits. I’m sure there are more efficient ways to write, but this is, usually, mine.

How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
Fair to middling. Next question?

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Nicholas Royle’s tip for solving a creative problem is to go for a walk. This is sound. We tend to unknot things when our bodies are active and our minds can work without being watched. Perhaps the most illuminating artistic advice I ever received – in the sense that it unlocked something in me – came from one of my drama school teachers at LAMDA. I was performing one of Richard II’s soliloquies, really leaning into the sorrow and self-pity, when Greg de Polnay interrupted me. “Don’t act the emotions of the speech. The words convey it already. Try playing against the emotion with irony, or sarcasm. Otherwise it’s one-dimensional.” In other words, resist the obvious. An interesting text, like an interesting stage performance, contains ambiguities and contradictions. This sits uneasily with the moralising and polemical side of my nature.

What are you working on right now?
I’m in the foothills of a new novel, part historical and part contemporary. I’m also tinkering away at the final stories in what I hope will become my third collection. I await, with dwindling hope, some publishing interest in the graphic novel, Sweeney’s Progress, that I am working on with Zara Slattery. Finally, I kept a journal during my hospital stay which may or may not become a short book about breath and illness and healing. I have 150 pages of notes. Tomorrow I start the process of finding out whether they add up to anything.