Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels

You’ve chosen the theme ‘books that have helped shape my novels’, and before we move on to those books, I want to ask about your creative process. What impact do the books you read have on your own writing?

I think of my writing, reading and thinking as all part of one continuous activity. These books weren’t read for research or for any specific purpose. They’ve just helped shape my thoughts on certain matters, and those matters have emerged one way or another, sometimes in a very submerged or indistinct form, in the fiction I’ve been writing.

How does the germ of an idea evolve into a novel for you?

I tend to leave long gaps between novels; I’m quite happy not to write for months on end. I don’t have anxieties about writer’s block either – I don’t even believe in the concept – but I’m a great believer in hesitation. I think there’s nothing wrong with pausing when you’re not sure how to proceed. And in that rather dreamy, floating kind of mental state (one which I long for once I’ve started a book and can no longer have it) I go where my reading and thoughts and travels take me.

Sometimes I experimentally write out a first paragraph – or middle paragraph, even – of a novel which I feel no obligation to write. Those kind of dabblings I always set down in a green, ring-bound A4 notebook. It’s full of paragraphs from novels I will never complete, or hardly start. But sooner or later, one of those paragraphs will snag my attention, and I’ll come back to it asking: why does that interest me so much, why does that seem to offer a peculiar kind of mental freedom? And so I might find myself adding a page or two. It was with a complete free hand, for example, that I once wrote what turned out to be the opening of Atonement – with no clear sense that I was committed to anything at all, I was just playing with narrative positions, with tone of voice, with a certain descriptive moment. Or I might decide that what I’ve written belongs to the middle of a novel, and then I’ll spend some idle time tracing out a beginning. Then abandoning it. It’s a way of tricking myself into writing novels.

Can you tell us more about the everyday process of how you write?

I sit in front of the computer, but I often have a pen in my hand. Word processing seems to me a blessing, a vast improvement on the mechanical clattering of typewriters. Close, indeed, to mental processes, in the sense that passages, pages, chapters, whole novels are held in a memory. I like the special, privileged nature of prose that’s not yet been printed out, held in some special space that resembles a private thought, or a secret.

So what’s the pen for?

Sometimes thoughts come in a rush, and I need to jot down five or six key words. It’s easy to lose the idea of a whole passage if you don’t get the markers down quickly. Or sometimes a pen is useful for trying out more complex sentences. But I mentioned the pen in my hand simply to say that longhand and word processing go nicely together.