Original subtitles

SALMAN RUSHDIE: A novel is written well

if the author is really looking at themselves

and what they're trying to do and becoming

very clear about it and saying, OK, here's

what I'm trying to achieve.

And this is what I need to do in order

to get there, to set yourself the boundaries,

set yourself the shape, and then stick to it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When you're trying to compose a novel,

it's very often helpful to know where to hang your hat,

so to speak.

If you don't have some kind of edifice built

of a story and a plot, some kind of structural element,

of a story and a plot, some kind of structural element,

it goes like this, then it can be

very hard to know how to begin to flesh things out.

The plot and structure are like the skeleton.

And the characters and events are the flesh

you put on that skeleton.

There are writers who have always needed that skeleton

to be very detailed.

I mean, according to legend, Scott Fitzgerald

was the writer of that kind, who really worked things out

very carefully before writing.

very carefully before writing.

And there are other writers who kind of wing it more.

And you have to find out which one you

are because the only rule, really, is whatever works.

That's the rule.

The advantage of structure is that you know what you're doing

and you know where you're going.

In a novel like "Midnight's Children," where

the actions of the characters are linked quite closely

the actions of the characters are linked quite closely

to historical events, I needed that plot

because I needed to be able to map the lives of the characters

onto the history of the country so that they

coincided at the right points.

And if I didn't do that, the book

would have been unbelievably messy.

So it desperately needed that kind of architecture.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When people are writing toward film writing,

there's all this stuff about three act structure

and exactly how you must allow a story to unfold.

My view is it's all nonsense.

Many of the very greatest films I've seen

have nothing to do with three act structure.

If you look at the great cinema of the French New Wave

or the Italian--

if you look at film directors like Visconti or to Truffaut

if you look at film directors like Visconti or to Truffaut

or Godard or--

you can't look at their work using that kind of a grid.

If it helps you to think I need to have

a beginning, a middle, and an end, three acts, then fine,

do that.

But it's but it's not compulsory.

And in a book, it's even less compulsory than in a movie

because a book can be a single moment.

because a book can be a single moment.

It can exist in a very single moment.

To talk about Joyce's "Ulysses," all there

is there is one day in the life of one man.

So yeah, I mean it's an idea-- the three act

structure, for example, is an idea you can use.

I mean, it's usable.

You know, it works.

But it's only one idea.

And my view is that the story will tell you.

And my view is that the story will tell you.

If you listen carefully to the story,

the story will tell you what it needs to be.

Sometimes you don't start at the beginning, you know?

And sometimes you start in the middle.

And then we've all now become very used

to the idea of the flashback.

You know, once upon a time the flashback felt

strange to the reader, you know?

Now it feels everyday.

So it may be that you want to start

at a dramatic moment in the middle of somebody's life

at a dramatic moment in the middle of somebody's life

in order to immediately engage you with the character

and what is happening to them and then tell you

how they got there.

A story has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end

but not necessarily in that order.

So the novel is an enormously fluid form, you know?

It really can be anything you make it,

It really can be anything you make it,

as long as you understand that it can't be random, you know?

It can't just be one damn thing after another.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

A lot of the development work of a book,

a lot of the the the preliminary thinking

is exactly about who's doing what

to whom, which people are kind to other people

and who's unkind, who is trying to get something out

and who's unkind, who is trying to get something out

of somebody else, who is more generous, you know,

who's going to shoot somebody, who's left standing at the end.

I sometimes think in my book, too many characters

don't make it to the end.

I sometimes think it's, you know, kind of a tough fate

to be in a Salman Rushdie novel because you get beaten up,

and then you die.

The question of how the characters' destinies are

The question of how the characters' destinies are

connected to each other, again, is different depending

on the scale of the novel.

If you're writing, you know, like,

a big epic or comic epic or anti-epic,

a big book with a large cast and a number of scenes

and sometimes happening over a long period of time,

you know, then in many cases, the destinies

of individual characters will not connect to each other.

of individual characters will not connect to each other.

When the novel has a smaller frame,

then the destinies of the characters

are absolutely interlocked.

And what happens to one affects all.

For example, in a multigenerational novel,

say Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks," for example,

several generations in the life of a family, a merchant family.

And essentially, what happens in the novel

is that the family declines, generation by generation.

is that the family declines, generation by generation.

Each generation is less than the generation that preceded it.

So when you read it, you have the old patriarch

who is, you know, powerful and successful and so on.

And as you get through to the sons and grandsons and so on,

they become weaker.

But their weakness and strength is relative, you know?

They're relative to their father and their grandfather.

So even though they have their own stories which are not

So even though they have their own stories which are not

influenced by the earlier generations,

the novel is saying to us, this is a novel

about the decay of a family.

So of course, you want to feel as the author,

and your readers will want to feel,

that the book has a strong cohesion, you know,

and that it is in the shape it's in because that

is the necessary shape.

And the way you feel that as a reader is

And the way you feel that as a reader is

to feel that the characters are very

integrated with each other and that everything that happens

to each character is significant not only

in that character's life but in the lives

of the other characters.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Mirroring is a very useful device,

where something happening over here

is like something happening over here.

is like something happening over here.

And the reader sees that and connects them.

What is best is if it's not exactly the same.

If it's exactly the same, it's too artificial

and will be seen as artificial.

But if there's a relationship, if there's

over here a mother and daughter having

a certain kind of bad relationship

and over here in another place or another generation there's

another mother and daughter having

a difficult relationship-- doesn't

have to be the same difficulty.

have to be the same difficulty.

It doesn't have to come out the same way.

But the reader will say, oh, yeah,

this thing is like that thing.

And it helps the reader to grasp the larger form of the novel.

So those things, echoes and mirrors, you know,

are useful devices to create the sense of structure.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think most people who write books

have some little germ of something inside of them

have some little germ of something inside of them

that they need to get out.

There's usually some little thing eating at you

that you need to express.

And so how do you do that?

I mean, there's a number of answers.

One answer is trial and error, you know?

I mean, I certainly had the experience

of many false starts, you know?

And I find that actually beginning a piece of writing

And I find that actually beginning a piece of writing

is a question of finding the right entry point.

Some of the doors you go through will just lead to a dead end.

And other doors will open out into an attractive space,

a space you want to be in, you know?

So which slice through the world do you take?

You know, I mean, I very often, even now, have like nine, 10,

11, 12 attempts at finding that door

to go through before I know that I've found the one that

to go through before I know that I've found the one that

leads me through the story.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We're looking here at some of the work notes

that I made during the five-year process of writing "The Satanic

Verses."

And then they're notes which, in many cases,

don't bear a direct relationship to the finished book.

don't bear a direct relationship to the finished book.

But they are part of the thinking process

that I went through in order to arrive at the way the finished

book actually looks.

What I was doing, trying to kind of wrestle

this quite long and complicated book to the ground,

was I would kind of talk to myself on my typewriter.

I would ask myself questions about the characters and about

the themes.

And I would try and answer them.

And I would try and answer them.

So on this page, amongst other things

I was asking about, I asked myself,

what is Gibreel Farishta's fate?

And I answered in a way that is actually not true of the novel

that I finally wrote.

I mean, it's a kind of sketch.

To be mad with jealousy when sane, to be denied God

and therefore to be like a bull in a China shop

when possessed of his angelness.

Well, I mean, something like that

happens in the novel but not exactly that.

happens in the novel but not exactly that.

You know, so I'm seeing these now

for the first time in a very long time.

And it surprises me in many ways how many of these notes

are some distance away from the book as it finally took shape.

Structurally, the book has a number

of intertwined narratives.

And in the beginning, I wasn't even sure

if I was thinking about one book.

if I was thinking about one book.

There was a moment at which I thought these

might be three separate books.

There might be a book about Indian immigrants in London.

And there might be another, more kind

of visionary book about these angel-devil nightmares,

these visions.

And eventually, I began to understand

how the stories sat together and how they kind of communicated

how the stories sat together and how they kind of communicated

with each other.

But that was a long process.

trying to understand how the structure of the book

was going to work.

And a lot of this material here is just

me trying to get to grips with that.

I think, you know, looking at this again,

the thing it shows me is that one of the ways in which I

the thing it shows me is that one of the ways in which I

have approached writing--

I mean, this is, you know--

I mean, "The Satanic Verses" came out in 1988.

I started writing it five years before that.

So this stuff is--

I wrote this a long time ago.

But it's clear that one of the processes I had-- and I mean,

to some degree I still have, is to talk to myself, you know,

is to interrogate myself, say, look,

what do you think about this?

Or what you are trying to write makes

Or what you are trying to write makes

me think of the following, and how does that work?

And I would try all sorts of things

to answer that, you know?

These notes here are a part of the process

of getting to grips with it.

But they're not-- I mean, this is not the end product at all.

These are steps on the way.

[MUSIC PLAYING]