Narrative threads: How to write a Booker-shortlisted novel, by Marlon James, Douglas Stuart, Elizabeth Strout and more

Douglas Stuart
John of John

Who knows where a novel really comes from? I spend years gathering loose threads and then, when I feel like the cloth will hold, I start to weave them into a narrative. I suppose I began internalising John of John back in 1994, the year I went to college and chose to become a weaver myself.

But it was in 2019, in the anxious period waiting for Shuggie Bain to be published, that I really found the thread for John of John. I decided I would go to the Western Isles. It was a place I had been longing to see all my life and I had a vague idea that I might set a novel there about an adult son who has been called home to a crofting community to care for his difficult father. I reasoned that even if a novel didn’t emerge from the trip, at least I would have seen more of my own country.

I was drawn to the Western Isles for many reasons. I was keen to see the Harris tweed weavers, but I’d also just finished writing Young Mungo, a novel about sectarian violence where young Glaswegians seemed intent on destroying beauty, and so without being able to articulate it, I had set out seeking a spirit of gentleness, to write about creativity within working-class lives – about beauty, and colour, and nature, and music.

People have a romantic notion of the islands – and perhaps I had a little too. Although they are stunning, they are very real, very practical places, where it can be difficult to earn a living and raise a family, where managing your relationship within a community is of the utmost importance.

I started in Vatersay and, after slowly travelling up the archipelago, I finally arrived on the Isle of Harris. It was there, in the home of a local woman, that I saw what my third novel might become.

We were sitting at her kitchen table, talking about her involvement in the local church. I mentioned that I’d been struck by the number of spinsters and bachelors I’d met on my trip. It seemed unusual given that crofts seemed to benefit from larger families. When I asked her why she thought some folk had never married, she replied that they had probably just “missed their moment”. I agreed that it must be tricky to find love in a settlement with so few people, and then I ventured that it would be harder still if some of these older people had been gay. The woman looked at me with such cool horror that I realised, in that moment, that the novel was going to be less about a son returning home, and more about the father he had left behind; a weaver who was tied to the land, a man who had never been able to find love, or any sense of himself, in the only place where he belonged.

Elizabeth Strout
The Things We Never Say

A woman works in the drugstore in the town in which I live in Maine, and one day almost two years ago, she whispered to me – no one else was in the store – “I just want it over!” She cupped both hands on the sides of her mouth and said: “The election.” I told her I felt the same. She said, looking around nervously: “I never, ever say anything about it to anyone, but I just want it over.” I told her I knew what she meant, and off I went. I have no idea who she voted for, but her pain was palpable. As was mine.

The Things We Never Say is a tribute to people such as her, people who are distressed about the way things are, and have been for a few years, in our country, the United States of America. We live it, breathe it, it is everywhere among us, and while people will talk to like-minded people (sometimes) there is much that people will not say to each other about our current situation.

Not only was this true as I was writing the book, it is even more true now; the book shows the decline of our democracy. And through it all we continue living our daily lives. We go to work, we shop for groceries, we take walks with friends and laugh, we go to our quilting clubs, and all around us terrible things are happening, and most of us are not talking about it.

I have spoken publicly about my inspiration for Artie Dam, the protagonist, how I found an old photo in an obituary and saw a splendid ordinary face … This is all true, and it gave me the visuals I needed for him, but the book itself came forth because of what is happening in our country. I made Artie a high school history teacher because he would have had – perhaps – a deeper understanding of what was going to happen, and in fact, has happened.

I interwove his personal story – because we all have a personal story as we move through our time in history – and I wanted his inner life to somehow reflect what was happening in his outer life. Artie’s time in history has caught up with him, and this is his story. It is our story.

Marlon James
The Disappearers

There is a blind man in Mallorca who could tell this story better than I could. What he might not have in art he has in truth, and he could tell you about his life before he went blind, his hopes when he still lived in Jamaica, the night that took his vision, the mob that nearly took his life, and the last thing he saw: the man who took his eyes out. All alleged of course. The blind man was gay – is gay – and the last thing he saw was what Jamaican men do to gay people. But until three years ago I thought this man the stuff of urban legend, a story that shook my young gay self down to the bone and sent me hurling into the closet with the door slammed shut.

The thing is I knew it happened. The rumour was that on a night in the early 90s, a mob descended on a group of gay men in Kingston, gathered at either a support group or a branch of Jamaica Aids support, and beat them within an inch of their lives. That among the mob was law enforcement, men in business and a very famous musician. All alleged, of course. There has never been a written record of it, no police report, no news article, no lead in the nightly news, and so I was convinced it happened.

Rumours are ephemeral, which is why in Jamaica they are almost always true. We know that you pay a price for standing on fact. Espousing a truth means making yourself a target. Speaking truth to power in the end attracts power to stop it. Because it is the kind of news that fades, the kind of news that is untraceable, the rumour speaker knows that he has the safety of knowing that his truth will never come back to expose or convict him. So, he speaks it freely. They killed a gay man. One of the mob was Jamaica’s biggest reggae singer. The gay men were getting safe sex advice. The gay men might have been having sex. The men were all black. The men were a mix of black and white. The men all had Aids. All alleged of course.

I tend to make novels out of stories that haunt me. The stories that haunt the most sometimes tell me the least, leaving me with gaps and leaps, and holes that stop the tale from adding up. This is where I feel most useful as a novelist; as something between a historian and a journalist, making real the lives of imagined people. Or filling in the other dimensions of a one-dimensional event. Or, most importantly, conjuring what might have been the consequences of a singular, sometimes forgotten action. It might not be exactly as the blind man in Mallorca would tell it, or it might be totally different. But a story can be real if not factually true, and sometimes that is truer than reality itself.

Rebecca Perry
May We Feed the King

Poetry had left me and I missed writing. Bolstered by publishing a short work of creative nonfiction about my childhood as a competitive trampolinist, I started working on two separate short stories, testing if fiction was something I could do.

One story was about a young attendant to a dying king, and another about a lonely woman using replica food in her home to create scenes and their resident spirits, with the ultimate goal of cohabiting with them. At a point it became clear to me that she was working her way towards the young attendant, and that I was writing one book and not two separate stories at all.

A year or so before that I said to two of my friends, while visiting the Royal Magdalene Almshouses in Glastonbury and feeling transported by one of the dressed bedrooms, that I was interested in writing about staging and replica.

Thirty years before that I squeezed a plastic grape in a sofa showroom.

I had no idea what would happen in the book when I started writing it, or how it would end. Iris Murdoch once said, “One should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself”, and I took that as a mantra, letting the book emerge. It turns out that can be quite messy, and it took a while to find its final form. Initially the chapters were alternately contemporary and historical. At one point I cut and rewrote half of it. Some decisions, like the short chapters, were instinctive. Others were the work of much stylistic experimentation. All the usual messy business (I assume, having only done it once) of writing a novel.

On that journey, what surprised me most was that the wider world fed more into the writing of the medieval part of the book than it did the present-day sections. I was already thinking about power and empire, but writing at the height of the genocide in Gaza and watching in horror the results of unchallenged, untethered absolute power, certainly shaped the writing of the king and many of the characters around him. Before this, I assumed that novels exist in a state of purity in the mind, untouched by current events. I’m sure that’s sometimes true, but in my case the contemporary and medieval worlds had to be in conversation.

Luke Kennard
Black Bag

It was March 2021, and I had chronic neck and back pain from spending eight hours a day teaching on Zoom during the lockdowns. I was also temporarily head of my department (which anyone in academia will know to be a completely thankless and enervating role). I had given myself a night off to work on some poems because I go absolutely spare when I’m not writing. It was about 10pm, I probably had a glass of wine next to me, and I was looking for interesting phrases in social psychology articles. I had 12 tabs open, when I found, in a footnote, a brief precis of the black bag experiment (University of Oregon, 1967). It struck me as beautiful and ridiculous. I wasn’t really interested in the findings of the experiment, which focused more on others’ gradually more affectionate reactions to black bag over time. What obsessed me was the experience of portraying black bag: what kind of actor would leap at the chance to do it? The fact that it was a pretty neat symbol of the status of the artist in the 21st century … The fact that I wasn’t averse to the idea of doing it myself because, ugh, just being a person at all is so wearying.

It was a really lucky and completely arbitrary find and I felt utterly rejuvenated by it as a concept. I like writing that has some kind of constraint (like Georges Perec’s novel A Void, composed without a single letter “e”), a rule that starts to generate the work; that becomes its own inspiration. But this was a constraint for a character within the book, and that struck me as even better. Within minutes of reading about it I felt like I was black bag, my constant inner monologue turned into even more of a bathysphere than usual.

I immediately abandoned the poem I was working on and started writing a first-person scene where an out-of-work actor talks to a psychology lecturer about the role of black bag. It was pretty much all I wrote from that point on. I wrote BLACK BAG on the front of a notebook and vowed to do as little research as possible.

M John Harrison
The End of Everything

I always start writing from an interest in form, rather than from ideas for characters or scenes or stories. They come later. As soon as I find the form, I look for its weak points so I can break it. The two forms that interested me when I began to think about The End of Everything were the UK novel of catastrophe after the second world war, expressed best in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and its outbreak of ambulatory carnivorous vegetables; and the novel of the alien invasion of Earth epitomised by HG Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds.

In both, the disaster is bounded, understandable and, most importantly, solved. This is not necessarily true of disasters in the real world; they’re constant, unmanageable, entangled with one another and with global politics; and wherever possible they go unacknowledged by people whose comforts are not immediately threatened. The classic disaster stories burst in on a fictional population, rag it about, and then, having taught the reader a lesson, recede. They encourage us to feel good by presenting unpredictable upheaval followed briskly by the defeat of the threat and a return to some form of the author’s preferred cultural ground state.

I wanted this book to offer a different shape: a catastrophe the nature of which is impossible to parse, and which continues unabated for the foreseeable future. In short, actual change. Nested inside the novel are various parodies, pastiches and political metaphors; a certain amount of grotesque humour. The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong. It’s a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend. It’s an alien invasion narrative in which the aliens arrive not as Wells’s invaders from Mars but as incomers from another dimension, paralleling the gentrification of places like the UK’s south-east coast. Their motives are so unhuman that we aren’t sure even they know how – or why – they came.

As a favour – and with a whispered You’re welcome! Enjoy! – I’ve passed on to the reader some of the puzzlement and confusion of the characters in the book as they face a future with the alien. I hope, though, that the issues are transparent: the collapse of rationality that comes with Trumpism and the internet, and which consciously confounds the ability to make a factual statement about anything; humanity’s inexplicable attempt to break down and abandon the environment it can’t live without; the loss of any sense that we actually know how to manage the world except via a Netflix empowerment fantasy.

In an early film of The Day of the Triffids, the triffids are defeated by spraying salt water on them; in the novel itself, the hero and his dependents ignore the issue of giant carnivorous plants and retreat to the Isle of Wight, where they return to the ground state by starting an allotment. We don’t have those options.