David Mitchell is the kind of guy who can get a church-load of people to hear him speak in spite of $30 ticket. He’s the kind of a guy for whom this audience will sit in awe of, leaning forward to catch every syllable, laughing at jokes that were clever not funny. He’s the kind of author for whom this audience will wait more than an hour to have their books signed by him. He’s the kind of author fans go fanatic about, consuming his every written word (of the three audience members who asked him questions, two prefaced it by saying “I’ve read all of your books”). He’s the kind of writer who is always nominated for the Man Booker.
But he never wins. And for every fan he has that has read every single word, there’s a person who put down Cloud Atlas in disgust, halfway through. Not everyone loves him. Not everyone agrees that he’s great. There are many who think he’s a gimmick, a fraud almost, another popular fad. There are many who would not consider him or the works he write to be “literary.” While he might be popular, he’s not beloved–at least, not by all.
I’ll admit, I’ve never read any of his books (although, as a now proud owner of Slade House, I will), so I cannot attest one way or another about the merits (or lack thereof) of his writing. I did not find his reading particularly engaging, but in his defense, there are certain types of writing I find better-suited for the page, not the ear. And I did find the question and answer part of this event, intensely interesting–in fact, I think many of his answers help explain his position in the literary world.
First, I must give some credit to Peter Ho Davies for being excellent at leading this conversation. As a writer himself, Peter knows the kind of questions to ask that will create an engaging and unique discussion. I’ve yet to be disappointed when Peter is involved in these question and answer sections.
Since David Mitchell’s latest novel, Slade House, and some of his previous work have dealt with ghosts or other fantastical elements, these were brought up in the discussion. In today’s modern literary world, such elements of “genre” writing are typically not well-received when written by a literary figure (or by a non-literary figure, but the literary world doesn’t tend to comment on those works)–they do not fit the current mold of literary and they will be treated as such. This is in spite of the fact, that as David pointed out, these were elements used by previous “greats” such as Dickens and Shakespeare. Instead of acting like he bestowed literariness on these ghosts and other supernatural things because he was the one writing them and not some “genre” peasant (as other literary writers have done in the past), David Mitchell called out the literary world’s attitudes on the subject matter by saying, “I don’t like the idea that mainstream literary writers are not allowed to go here and if they do, they are not taken seriously.” He did not treat “genre” or “genre”-writers as if they were beneath “literary.” He did not acknowledge “literary” fiction as anything other than another kind of “genre.” As someone who is often frustrated by the holier-than-thou attitudes of the literary realm, hearing an author like David Mitchell also express frustration was a great relief. Of course, this attitude of David might also help explain why the literary world has not fully embraced him.
Another important idea brought up in the conversation was the idea of world-building and how David uses it in his novels. None of his books are direct sequels of each other, but certain characters that appear in one occasionally appear in another. This is another decisive characteristic of Mitchell’s novels. Some people love how he is creating his own universe; others think it is a gimmick. When asked about creating his own universe, David described this as happening in three different stages–and to me, at least the first stage, seems like this did spiral out of gimmick. He stated that he did it at first “because [he] thought it was cool.” Now, admitting that you did something because you thought it was cool, at least in the serious world of literature, strikes me as very un-writerly. His second stage is not much better. This second stage was born out of a need for a fully-developed character without putting in the effort to create a character with a backstory and motivations and interests and independence and all that other junk that makes a character seem real. He explained this by saying that “writers are some of the laziest people on Earth.” As a writer myself, I would really like to disagree, but at the same time, there’s some truth there.
The final stage of David Mitchell’s world-building was born out of a desire to create his own Middle Earth. There’s something glorious and beautiful when it comes to building your own universe that operates by your own rules and full of your own creations and your own history that you can just keep adding to and adding to and nurturing for as long as you live and breathe and write. Both Peter and David talked about making maps of worlds unknown, undefined as children, worlds that were theirs and no one else’s–I’ll throw in that somewhere in the drawer of my childhood dresser is probably a dozen maps of worlds that I drew, named, crafted, and abandoned. Writers have this desire to create and that is why they write, why they are writers, but sometimes this creative desire is so potent that a single story or novel is not enough to get it out and there mustn’t just be sequels, there must be dozens of histories and characters and lands just off the page, so that for every page written, there are three pages unwritten. In his own words, David described his conflicting desires: “part of me wants to spend every creative voltage on something enormous, something cathedral size, something galactic–and I want to write stand-alone stories.”
I’ll say once again that I have not read any of David Mitchell’s books, but after the conversation between him and Peter Ho Davies, I can say that I have become absolutely fascinated by him and his ideas about writing and cannot wait to begin Slade House.
