ALI SMITH

Ali Smith writes novels and short stories. Her most recent novel, Hotel World, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. Her most recent story collection is The Whole Story and other stories (2003). In this interview, which took place in May 2004, she answers questions from visitors to the enCompass site, and reader in residence Susan Tranter. You can read more about her on Contemporary Writers.

Helen, UK: I really enjoyed Hotel World. I wondered if, as someone who’s written short stories before, it felt natural for you to break the novel up into shorter sections, using different voices?

AS: Hello Helen.  I don't think it's the influence of short stories, so much as the urge to tell a story in the several different voices that produce or provide it.  For me there's no story without voice, no voice without story, and no single story that doesn't imply another one right next to it, or behind it, or in front of it - there's always another story.  So when it comes to the novel, which is I think in many ways a more socially displaying form than the short story, by which I mean an art form that really lets us see how and where we live and who we live with, and the structures we live by, then the different voices, and a democracy of voice, if you like, are what make it for me.  It's a take on novel-writing that some readers, who like their worlds to be more complete and hermetic and their stories to be more comforting, to take a less fragmented or multilogued direction, might find exasperating.  It asks a reader to do quite a lot of work, and to participate.  For me it's the thing that drives the novel form.  

Chris B, UK: As Ali’s turned her hand to both novels and collections of short stories, which does she prefer, and why? And which is a truer reflection of life as we experience it?

AS: Hello Chris.  I prefer writing stories, for a very practical reason - they're shorter and they take less time to write.  They're much more likely to provide relief, if you're writing them.  Novels are years of worrying in the dark.  Short stories are (when you're lucky) much quicker to ignite.  But I'm interested in the second part of your question, because it implies we come to stories and novels for a reflection of, as you put it, "life as we experience it".  What's real?  And why is it anything to do with artifice, why do we look to artifice to help us with what we make of reality?  I've been struck recently by the way that heights of artifice (for instance in a film like Von Trier's Dogville, where the actors are stripped of walls and 'real' things like trees and streets, which are chalked on to the floor of a studio, with which they take theatrical part in recreating a street, or in books and poems by the modernists, or more recent, like Jonathan Safran Foer's audacious Everything is Illuminated, or Jan Kjaerstad's The Seducer, or Nicola Barker's Behindlings, or the recent novels of Atwood and pretty much everything by Angela Carter) really do provide an understanding of a communally experienced reality that's now so surreal that a direct 'reflection' of it can't illuminate as much for the shell-shocked, information-shocked generations we belong to as painstaking artifice can.  It's a time for Greek tragedies, is what I sense - a shift back to the tectonic plate-quality that story has, in whatever form it is delivered (novels and stories can both do it, in their different ways), to move us at foundation and remind us how to live and understand what we experience, individually and en masse. 

Trip, UK: When you first started writing, was it short stories or novels that were most interested in? Is it true that publishers will only put out short fiction if the author promises to write a novel too?

AS: Hello Trip.  I like your name. Is it true that people end up as the opposite of what they're called, like Muriel Spark suggests in one of her books (I think Loitering with Intent) i.e people called Joy, she says, are bound to end up stony-faced and miserable all their lives?  I imagine you as a graceful pavement walker who never trips, a graceful high wire artist  who never falls, never loses balance accidentally. 

I actually first published a book of short stories, so I got away with it, if you like, but I know of many writers whose first work is stories and whose interested agents or publishers have told them to put them aside and write novels.  Novels are hugely more marketable than stories, publishers believe; they believe that stories don't sell and that readers hate them.  New research, which you can find out about at www.saveourshortstory.org, suggests the opposite, that readers don't buy short stories simply because they just can't find them or don't see them in bookshops - not because they are particularly averse to them.

But from the moment you publish, the subtle, and sometimes less subtle, pressure is on to write novels.  It's not true, in my experience, that you have to promise to write a novel.  But you'll get more advance money if you do. 

Of course, telling stories has always been bound up with the market and its force, since poets in medieval dark barns chanted the stories people wanted in return for their supper.  I admire writers who are unaffected by the market, take for instance, Grace Paley, who writes only short stories, and whose short stories are models of energy,  impact and invention.  Look at Jackie Kay, who began as a poet, wrote a bestselling award-winning novel, then a collection of short stories so good that it's like a perfect refinement of all the work she's done before, a classic collection.

To answer your question, I began with short stories because that's what came naturally to me.  Then, because I wanted to see if I could write a novel, I tried that.  The alternating rhythm of stories-novel-stories seems to suit me, for the moment, I don't know why, presumably each form gives the other a break, and the only, the right, thing to listen to in the end is the natural rhythm your working life wants to take. 

David, UK: What did getting shortlisted for the Booker Prize mean to you? Did it put any additional pressure on you when you came to think about your next novel?

AS: Hello David. It meant a lot of book sales, and people at my publisher being uncannily nice to me.  It meant a rise in visibility, which is never that good for a writer.  It gave a small literary novel a punt out into the bigger market.  It gave people who introduced me at readings something to say, and reviewers and pundits a reason not to like my books or books because familiarity breeds etc.  It was very luxurious and very surreal.  It was nothing to do with books and the writing of them.  It meant the phone rang constantly for months.  It meant I wrote stories, which take less long-term concentration than a novel does, because the fuss of it was always interrupting whatever I was concentrating on.  It is now a good long time ago, but people still ask me about it, like you just have.  Why is it so relevant?  I'm not being cheeky - I really want to know, I really want to ask some rhetorical and some puzzling questions about it, probably because I am of the publicity-shy school, and also because I still believe that writing things down is, primarily, nothing to do with the self the writer happens to have or the hype that surrounds her or him or a certain book he or she might write.  Why have competition and fame and shortlisting and such things become so important when it comes to writers?  What is it that people think will be so much more fulfilling, about a life that is really in many ways the same hard-working life as any car mechanic or piano tuner or drill-wielder for BT?  Why are we always forgetting that books are nothing to do with how a writer is perceived or what it means to be a successful one (people do tend to associate aesthetic success with shortlists, which is proof of insanity), and everything to do with what art is and what it does when we make it well or properly, and how it opens up the road to show us how the cables under the surface put us in touch with each other, it shifts us reliably from a to b, it hits the right note at the right time?           

Susan Tranter: What sorts of things do you like to read, and do your reading habits change when you’re writing?

AS: Hello Susan. I like reading everything.  I read randomly, all the time.  When I'm writing I read at the weekends, because I'm usually too knackered to read in the evening and too busy to read in the morning.  I just went on holiday and I took 16 books, for a week - I'm an idiot.  It was far too many.  But  I couldn't choose between them, and I wanted to read them all.  It was my bag and I carried it!

Margaret Keane, UK: Does Ali build characters on some people she has met, seen, or knows? And does she plan story completely first?

AS: Hello Margaret. It's hard to analyse what you do - I'm a bit afraid that if I tell you how I do it I won't be able to do it again, because I'll be too aware of myself doing it. I think I begin with a small outer or inner fact about someone, usually in his or her voice, whether 1st person or 3rd, doesn't matter.  One little thing about them can tell me (and a reader) something about him or her and imply lots of other questions and things, which then begin to expand out of this one small thing.  I consciously avoid using people I know, mainly because it really won't work.  It is like trying to write autobiography - which is when you realise that everything is fiction! 

Say there's a girl you're writing about.  Okay.  So look at her hands.  She bites her nails.  How old is she?  Is there an age at which, if you're a girl, biting your nails is more resonant or marked?  If she's 12, biting her nails will be different from if she's 16, and will imply different things.  What does it mean if a woman of 34 bites her nails?  and so on and so on. 

I imagine I am planning the story first.  I think I know exactly what it will do.  And then it does what it wants anyway, often in opposition to what imagined I wanted.  And then I have to check to see if this is what it should do or if I should argue it back into the shape I perceived originally.  It is a live exchange, always. 

Girish, India: I have been told some curious things about writers’ writing routines. I would like to know Ali’s routine. When does she write?

AS: Hello Girish. I am not very curious really, in habit - I write in the middle of the day and the afternoons, into the early evening, until about 8.  If I'm editing something fully drafted I will work for longer. 

A lot of this time is spent staring into space or worrying that I haven't done the dishes.  But the thing people who write most need is time.  If you take the time, something will get done. 

Riita, Finland: What are the three most important things you need to be able to write?

AS: Great question, Riita. Time, space and your senses.

You need time, as I said in the last answer.  You need space that's yours.  You need to open your senses out away from yourself, so you can hear and see and etc - outside yourself, beyond yourself.

Other things are nice to have.  Money is nice, it can buy time and space.  But it's not fundamentally necessary.  A good friend who acts as your shit-detector, who reads what you do and gives you feedback and a reason to argue back, is invaluably useful.  A deadline is useful.

But really all you need is a little time, a little space, and the ability to listen, or see, or sense beyond yourself.  These three things gift each other to each other; they're a good triangular structure for sitting down to work.     

Susan Tranter: Are there any writers who perhaps haven’t received the recognition they deserve that you’d recommend to encompass visitors?

AS: Hello again. Ciaran Carson, the Northern Irish writer.  His novels are like no others.  Alice Thompson, a Scottish writer whose novels are far too underrated.  Rebecca Brown, an American writer whose originality and powerful short stories have influenced all sorts of people and whose influence has never been fully recognised; likewise Grace Paley.  

Susan Tranter: Many thanks for taking part in this interview Ali. Can you tell us what you’re working on at the moment, or is it under wraps?

AS: It is covered with stuff and bound round with ropes, like a Christo and Jean-Claude monument.  I know it's there, and recognisable under there, and I'm hoping it's a novel, but I'm not totally sure what it'll be like when the wraps are off...

Thank you for all the questions.

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