Richard Smyth’s Shelf Life
Richard Smyth is a writer and critic. He is author of six books of non-fiction, including A Sweet Wild Note and An Indifference of Birds, and the novel The Woodcock. His most recent book is the critically acclaimed portrait of family life and nature, The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell. His short stories have also been widely published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
How and where are you?
I’m all right, thanks. I’m at home in my house in Saltaire, just outside Bradford. It’s freezing and I’m surrounded by wet laundry.
What are you reading right now?
Since I had kids – and the older one is five now, so that’s a good long while – my reading has gone to pot. I was always a bit of a boom-and-bust reader, reading either in intense bursts or hardly at all, but I’m worse now. My long-held rule about never abandoning a book part-way through fell by the wayside somewhere around the first potty-training phase (theirs, not mine). As a writer and critic this is obviously sub-optimal. I do my very best reading in pubs in the early-to-mid-afternoon. But of course this has its own attendant hazards. Anyway: I’m currently re-reading Len Doherty’s The Man Beneath, which was one of the first significant working-class novels to come out after the war, and led out that whole momentous Braine-Barstow-Waterhouse-Storey generation of northern writers. I’m also revisiting WH Hudson’s Birds In London, a 1898 book about birds in London, which is one of my favourites, even though he advocates rounding up all the stray cats and putting them in a ‘lethal chamber’.
And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
I like watching old cricket documentaries on YouTube while I eat my lunch (today I watched a really good one on Australian Test cricket in the early 60s (lunch was leftover cottage pie with a fried egg on top)). Otherwise I mostly watch the same sort of stuff everyone else watches. Succession’s quite good, isn’t it? And I listen to music more or less constantly. I’ve always been completely besotted by music without ever being all that interested in music. The last three songs I listened to were ‘Life’s Little Tragedy’ by Lambchop, ‘It’s Quiet Uptown’ from the musical Hamilton, and ‘Holding It Together’ by Gavin Osborn. I do a lot of my fiction writing to Michael Nyman’s soundtrack for The End Of The Affair, which is no doubt very revealing.
What did you read as a child?
Oh, anything. All the classics, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl. I came across a copy of Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski the other day and almost dropped dead from sheer nostalgia – I literally hadn’t seen or heard of it since I was about 7, which is a really rare thing these days (when you can get Bagpuss on DVD and play ZX Spectrum games online). I read anything on wildlife, Gerald Durrell, the Farthing Wood books, Willard Price (Willard Price was the best). When we reached adolescence my brother veered off towards horror and sci-fi, and I went the other way, into fantasy, so Tolkien of course, and then David Gemmell, Tad Williams, Terry Pratchett, David Eddings (those David Eddings books were just so staggeringly racist, I can barely believe it now). Then after that of course I grew up.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
I’m not very good at any sort of active learning. I prefer to just sort of do things and have the learning happen quietly in the background, without my really having to think about it. This is probably why I’m not very good at anything, and it may also be why I’m a writer, because I think that’s how you learn to write, or anyway it’s how I learnt to write. In my very early days I know I was influenced by my favourite writers at the time, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey. I played around with a few things in the style of Damon Runyon for some reason. But most of the learning has been back-office, behind the scenes, a quiet and productive composting down of everything I’ve ever read, to produce whatever it is I write. Sometimes I’ll consciously lift something from another writer – I thought a lot about how Thomas Hardy used local history and legend when I was writing The Woodcock, for instance – but not often.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
Generally I’ve been pretty lucky. Me and Tim Dee got slightly shirty about one another’s books at one point but we’re friendly now (and Tim is my hero: funny how things pan out). The worst was for my book Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History Of Toilet Paper, in The Scotsman. They said it was a candidate for the most pointless book ever written, and ‘not even remotely funny’. I’m not saying they were wrong, but it is still in print, so fuck them, eh. Critics! What do they know.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
I don’t worry too much about the sharp end, so to speak, the delivery side, the part where words get typed on to the page (and for me they’re always typed, I never, ever write anything freehand, no notebooks or anything: my work gets done at my desk, and that’s that). And the supply side, the research and development and all that, that, as I said, ticks over quietly in the background, taking stuff in, turning it over and about, mulching it down. The hard work is in hooking those things up so that all that well-rotted, mature compost comes funneling down into the fingertips, without any blockages or backfiring. Generally I just turn on the taps and see what comes out. Start writing, see what happens. I write in an extremely linear way – I almost always begin with the beginning and end with the end – and I’m also very draft-sceptic, or draft-phobic. Why write drafts? Just write the finished version first. Much easier (obviously I’m being silly but (a) that is actually how I work and (b) I think drafting culture among writers is getting a bit unhealthy, like you’re not allowed to think you’re a real writer unless you start every novel by writing a full draft in longhand and then putting it down a toilet).
How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
Long and varied. It’s mostly been luck and chaos. I think everybody in publishing is a bit demented because – as William Goldman said of Hollywood – nobody knows anything, and that makes for a really stressful environment in which to work. So everyone’s quite mad and has been for years. But there are plenty of good people in there doing good things, and for all the flaws and pitfalls and general stark raving insanity I’m quite fond of it. And I say that as an absolute nobody from nowhere who had to bang on the windows again and again, like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, til someone let me come in for a bit. In the 00s I wrote some terrible thrillers under a pseudonym, for money. That was good. I wrote – and illustrated! – my toilet paper book: also good. I’ve worked with wonderful publishers of various shapes and sizes. And I’ve done some books I’m really really proud of, The Woodcock, Wild Ink, An Indifference Of Birds, my last one, The Jay, The Beech And The Limpetshell. I’ve had crap experiences too, like with the publisher [HEAVILY REDACTED FOR LEGAL REASONS]. But mostly I’ve been lucky and had a lovely time.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
The critic John Self, who is a savage, likes to repeat the line: ‘Nobody asked you to start writing, and nobody will notice if you stop.’ I forget who said it first, but I find it very bracing and like to pass it on to every thrusting young writer I meet.
What are you working on right now?
As usual, I have a lot of unfinished things going on. The main one, and the one I’m really enthused about, is the book I’m working on on the environment and the far-right. That’s the big, substantial, serious thing. I also have a novel I’m about a quarter of the way through about a big insect-protein corporation and an ant invasion (I know what you’re thinking but it’s really good actually!) and I have the first sentences of another novel set during the Industrial Revolution. And there are some short stories buzzing about in there too. Lots of lovely compost.