I

Writing is an odd profession, and people have plenty of theories about why we do it. Some think writers write for fame, or money. Some think that they write to create something beautiful that will outlast them. Some think they do it for critical acclaim, or for prizes. To a writer, by contrast, most of these theories ring false. No writers are famous, and no fame is a pleasant thing to have in any case (just look at Hollywood celebrities). Posterity too is an odd, insubstantial reward, more theory than practice. No writer who has thought about it for five minutes can seriously think their work will outlast them in any way that will make much difference to them once they are gone. The world is 4.5 billion years old. We’ve managed to preserve Shakespeare’s plays for four hundred. A book is essentially a glossy magazine with a hardback cover. In relative terms, it is likely to be gone just as fast. And critical opinion is notoriously fickle: acclaim is by and large a matter of luck, of creating the thing which is just the right combination of new and familiar, while many serious writers are more interested in creating something entirely new which critics will possibly hate. There must be other reasons, then.*

*apart, obviously, from all the excellent ones these first-graders have already come up with

II

When I first became a writer, I wrote for the love of writing. I accepted payment for my work for the pragmatic reason that it helped me make my work better, and it funded me to continue to write. And it’s true that a lot of writers begin to write full-time, if they get the chance, because they love the day-to-day process of developing their craft. But without a clearer sense of mission, even this can become meaningless. How can I know in which direction to take my work, unless I know what I’m trying to achieve with it, and in whose footsteps I follow? Recently, talking to my agent about one of the writers I most admire, he said, ‘It’s an odd thing to be a writer, though: your life’s work essentially adds up to seven or eight books lined up on a shelf.’ Which, if you think about it one way, is utterly dispiriting. And yet, if you think about it another way, is a warning to make sure that work counts, to make sure the sense of purpose at the heart of it is substantial enough to sustain a writing life.

III

Here are some real reasons writers write, which I’ve heard over the years.

1. Because it makes them happy. Because, day by day, they want to sit at their desk and make up stories, or entertain people, or create art. And according to their philosophy of life, the job that makes you happy is the one worth choosing.
2. Out of a kind of curiosity, to see how far they can push the creative experiment they are engaged in, to see if they can make something which is formally new, or – occasionally – something singular and bizarre that they felt like creating anyway.
3. In order to get better at writing: these writers, akin to an Olympic athlete, or an artist, see themselves as engaged in a lifelong struggle to master a craft. Warning: writers are usually rather solemn about this, but it's probably a necessary coping mechanism if you're going to write for a living.
4. To bear witness to something, in themselves or in the world. Or, in the words of the first-graders, 'to tell about important events'.
5. To connect with others, to communicate, to say something and to see that story resonate with the readers who encounter it, and hear those readers reply, ‘Yes, I have felt that too.’ Perhaps to make readers laugh. Perhaps, indirectly, also to help them feel a little less alone somehow.
6. To return to certain themes which they wrote about a long time ago but which they don’t think they’ve yet plumbed the depths of; these writers write out of a kind of obsession, a feeling that they’ve still left something uncreated, or unsaid, and are usually partly motivated and partly annoyed by their inability to lay that obsession to rest.
7. To write something which hasn’t ever been written before. As Milan Kundera put it, to attain ‘beauty in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said.’ As the first-graders put it: 'to express thoughts'.
8. And probably, most commonly, some combination of all the above, coupled with a separate mission which is their own.

IV

A few years ago, when I was still a young adult writer, I attended a panel discussion at a literary festival in London. The first question was the usual first question: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ This is a hard question for most writers to answer, and I’ll admit we struggled. Still, each writer took the question literally and did their best. The first said something like, ‘I often overhear conversations on the bus and that sparks something in my mind.’ The second said something like, ‘When going for long walks.’ Another talked about a real-life story she had read in the newspaper. Still others, including me, talked about the moment when they first began to sense that they had stumbled upon the spark for their novel: a conversation, a chance coincidence of events, the persistent voice of their main character. Then a fellow writer from a minority background spoke up. She got her ideas, she explained, from the fact that the folktales of her home culture weren’t ever written about in English. She wanted to put that tradition and its literature on the map. She wrote from that position of marginality, with a sharp sense of her own place in literature and her purpose as a writer: not just to be part of literature but to change it, to widen its borders. The rest of us, I realised all at once, had misunderstood the question. We were getting it all wrong. You get your ideas, your motivation to keep writing, from those things that preoccupy you, that consume you, that keep you awake at night. All the rest is just incidental.

V

After that day, this fellow writer’s clear-eyed sense of purpose kept coming back to me. Here was a writer who knew what she was doing and why. And, what was more, couldn’t all the writers I most admired say clearly what their mission as a writer was, too? It was already encoded, rather unsubtly, in their work. Derek Walcott: ‘we would never leave the island / until we had put down, in paint, in words… / all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines’. Virginia Woolf: ‘I have had my vision’. And practically all of this interview with Gabriel García Márquez, which is basically one long, sometimes hilarious, mission statement.

VI

So now, when people ask me where I get my ideas from, I answer differently. I say, from the fact that I didn’t see many European writers of my generation writing about the financial crisis, and being young, and coming from a small town. Or, because I feel there’s an interesting story still to be told about how big historical events affect small places. Or, from a wish to write differently about the past. Or, because I felt that European history contains undiscovered stories about small communities which have something to say about our present circumstances. I say these things unashamedly, because that’s the real answer to the question of where our ideas come from. Out of a common wish that all writers share, not just to create literature, but to change literature, to widen its borders, and in doing so to widen all borders, just a little, perhaps.

VII

On the notice board beside my desk, I keep a rotating stock of quotes about writing. They are there to remind me of the spirit in which I should sit down to work each day, and rather than being inspirational, they are mostly rather discouraging and pragmatic. Here’s the first, from Robert D. Hamner on Derek Walcott:

‘His ability to renew himself, to revitalise his imagination, to rediscover the myth of his life and his culture, places him among the greatest poets of our century – poets who write out of their obsessions without repeating themselves.’

A writer’s aim: to write out of your obsessions without repeating yourself.

And here’s the second, the last verse of the poem ‘Curriculum Vitae’ by Samuel Menashe, which contains possibly the least glamorous portrayal of the writer’s life in the history of literature:
​
Time and again 
And now once more 
I climb these stairs 
Unlock this door— 
No name where I live 
Alone in my lair 
With one bone to pick 
And no time to spare
 
With one bone to pick, and no time to spare, seems to me a pretty accurate portrayal of a life spent writing. Every day you climb the stairs, unlock the door, and return to the same themes, hoping to advance a little only in your ability to explore them. So if you’re going to spend your whole life picking the same bone, obsessively, over and over, it helps at least to be able to say what bone you’re picking, and why.

So I'm just back from US and Canadian publication week for The House at the Edge of Night, and thought I'd share some reflections. This has been an extraordinary two weeks, for many reasons. In no particular order, here are some of my thoughts, now that I'm back at my desk and normal writing life has resumed again.

I
Firstly, publicity is daunting - and it is pretty much a hundred times more daunting than standing up in front of a room full of children as I used to do in my other life as a teacher, or making a speech at a wedding, or any other public speaking that we do in our normal lives - but it is also a privilege. To be given a platform to talk about your work, despite the fact that you are an emerging writer or come from thousands of miles away, can, in fact, be transformative. During this fortnight, I found an open-minded, generous community of readers and writers which had space for writers like me in it, and the importance of that to my morale as a writer cannot be overstated. The first photo above is from an event that my Canadian publishers, Doubleday, organised for The House at the Edge of Night and The Hopefuls by Jennifer Close (which I encourage you to read because it's excellent!). I also did my first bookstore event while in Canada, at Novel Spot Bookshop in Toronto (see second photo), and about ten heroic early readers actually showed up. And the third photo is with other debut writers Imbolo Mbue, Emma Cline and Martha Hall Kelly at Random House's twice-yearly reader event, Open House. Here's a link to another of my favourite things: discussing the book on Canadian TV. I think Canada must be one of the only countries in the world where the national media spends so much time talking about writers and books. When I asked the producer how many writers they featured, he said: 'As many as possible.' Therefore they are my new literary heroes, and you can find the link here.

​II
Miraculously, shortly after I arrived in the States, people also began reviewing the book. It was featured by People, The Dallas Morning News, NPR, the Star-Tribune, the National Post, Interview Magazine and New York Magazine, which named it one of their 100 Best Beach Reads Ever (a little bit ridiculous given that, in my opinion, you can read anything on the beach like Marquez or Tolstoy or George Eliot or Shakespeare, but I'm not going to split hairs here...). I'm incredibly grateful to all of these critics for reading and engaging with my work. As a writer, you're often advised not to read reviews. Critical opinions are the obvious exception. To have your work reviewed by a newspaper or magazine is a rare opportunity to see how a serious, informed reader reacts to what you have written, and it always leads to interesting conclusions. For instance, from reading these reviews of my work, several things came up which I'll take back with me to inform my future work. Firstly, that people are still overwhelmingly willing to read magical realism, and to read about small places and alternate versions of history, which kind of gives me a license to keep doing it. Also that all those hours I spent honing my sentences were probably worth it. And that there is an interesting split between readers who see my writing as serious, realist (although in a different tradition to the dominant realism of English-language literature) and focused on historical issues, and those who see my work as escapist and romantic. Obviously, I hope it can be different things for different readers, and I believe that there is no rule that says a writer cannot both celebrate beauty and seek truth, but it's interesting to see that division, and that both kinds of readers can like my work. Because I can't see Italy or Europe from the outside since I live here, and because most of the early readers with whom I checked my work are actually from small islands and small towns, like me, so were focused on the accuracy of how I depicted the small place, it is interesting to me that outsiders from great cities have such overwhelmingly strong cultural associations with the idea of Italy that they might automatically see the island on the book as more 'romantic' and 'escapist' than I do, or than it is for the characters. And that is actually pretty interesting and important to discover. Also, I have learned that there are a million different ways of interpreting the words 'beach read', but New York Magazine's, which encompasses Tolstoy, Marquez and F. Scott Fitzgerald with the definition 'a beach read needs narrative momentum, a transporting sense of place, and, ideally, a touch of the sordid', is pretty much perfect.

III
Now that The House at the Edge of Night is out everywhere in English, the book is no longer mine, and that's a good thing. Writing a book is always a slow process of losing. As you edit, and then watch the publicity process unfold, and then see the book in shops and reviewed in newspapers, the book becomes less and less yours and more and more the world's, until you bid it farewell and it goes away from you. So, honestly, I feel a little bit like a parent on their child's first day of school who has packed their lunch, dressed them in their new uniform, walked them to the gates and is now, finally, ready to let them go out into the world on their own. Very soon I'll be working intensively on the next one. This is right and proper, but the fact that I feel The House at the Edge of Night couldn't be in better hands is a big part of what makes me willing to let it go in the first place. And this is mainly thanks to the way in which my publishers, Hutchinson UK, Random House US and Doubleday Canada, as well as booksellers, librarians and readers, have supported, championed and advocated for the book so that I no longer feel I have to.

IV
I didn't realise until this fortnight that when you write a book, people will also let you write other things, and that this takes ages and is really difficult because you are not a journalist but is something you should probably say yes to. So I wrote this essay for LitHub, about how we support emerging writers through the long apprenticeship necessary to the craft, which I've wanted to speak about for the longest time. As writers of long-form work, I think we often feel powerless to engage in short-term debates - to write a book takes me two years, so watching events like Brexit or the sinister rise of Donald Trump unfold and not being able to say something coherent about it the way a talented journalist can is sometimes frustrating. But writing this essay has persuaded me that there are ways we can engage more immediately with the world, as writers of novels, and that we should probably do so more often. 

V
And finally, for one of the first times in my life, I also met some other writers. In particular, meeting Jennifer Close, Imbolo Mbue, Emma Cline and Martha Hall Kelly during this trip - four very different women writers, all of whom were kind and supportive - was a high point of the whole process. So, to finish, here's a link to one of my favourite moments, a panel discussion at Random House's Open House day with three of those writers. We found many points of connection and solidarity, and that's something I've carried with me back across the sea.