Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Speaking for myself, sometimes

when I'm writing something, I'm really much more enjoying

writing the bad characters than the good characters.

Because there's a kind of freedom in it.

Let yourself be bad on the page.

The heart of the novel, traditionally, was--

The heart of the novel, traditionally, was--

you could say it's a line from thousands of years

ago from Heraclitus, where he says,

essentially, the character is destiny.

You know, a person's character is their fate.

The kind of personality you have determines the kind of life

you will have.

And the novel as a form has always followed that.

The character is like this.

Therefore, their future-- their fate is of this kind.

And I remember when Charles Schulz, who draws--

And I remember when Charles Schulz, who draws--

drew the Peanuts comic strip, talked about giving up,

stopping doing it, before he--

I mean, some time before he died--

a lot of people wrote in asking him

that, before he stopped drawing it, there was just one thing

could he please allow it to happen.

And that was could just once Charlie Brown

kick the football.

And he never did it.

Because he knew that if Charlie Brown once kicked the football,

Because he knew that if Charlie Brown once kicked the football,

he would in some ways stop being Charlie Brown.

And if Lucy just once didn't whip the football away

at the last minute, then her Lucyness would be compromised.

Their character was their destiny.

It was his character to always fail to kick the football.

It was her character to always whip it away.

But now we live in a world in which character

is often not destiny.

When I was writing "Midnight's Children,"

I had this sentence, which was originally very

near the beginning, which was, "most

near the beginning, which was, "most

of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence."

And then, in the end, I thought, that's

too Tolstoyan in a way to have as a beginning.

And I buried it inside the book.

But what I meant by that is that our daily lives are affected

by decisions taken and things happening in rooms

we don't even know the existence of, between conversations

between people whose names we will never know,

who decide things about the economy, about war and peace,

who decide things about the economy, about war and peace,

about all sorts of things that directly impact our lives.

And that seems to me to be a very modern concern,

the fact that our lives can be changed by things

we can't affect.

And to put it at its most tragic, when those planes flew

into those towers, and those thousands of people

passed away, it wasn't anything to do with their character.

passed away, it wasn't anything to do with their character.

Their character was not their destiny.

And yet, there's a colossal event

that we have to come to grips with.

And we have to try and work out new strategies

to encompass this world in which sometimes our character is not

our fate.

With character, sometimes you'll find

that you know the character very well immediately.

that you know the character very well immediately.

And if so, then that's a great good fortune.

Sometimes writers, in order to have that feeling,

will base the central character on a variation of themselves.

It gives you a feeling of confidence

to be somewhere close to yourself, you know.

And you know, many people have done this.

So the great American Nobel laureate Saul Bellow

So the great American Nobel laureate Saul Bellow

did it all the time so that the character

of Moses Herzog in his novel "Herzog"

is not only like Bellow, but has a number

of things in common with Bellow's life,

major events in Bellow's life, like his wife running off

with his friend.

When I wrote--

I think only when I wrote "Midnight's Children" did

I use the idea of having a central character who

I use the idea of having a central character who

was close to me in many ways--

my age just about, give or take a few weeks,

a child of the same generation, born in the same city,

in the same social class, you know,

and going to the same school.

And it helped me.

But, again, what happens as a character comes to life is he

or she begins to take on characteristics of their own,

which are not yours.

And then you have to listen very carefully to what

And then you have to listen very carefully to what

those characteristics are.

So for example, when I was 14, I left

Bombay to go to school and then university in England.

And my life afterwards became very international.

Saleem never leaves South Asia, between India

and Pakistan and Bangladesh.

His whole life is there.

So that's one difference.

The other thing is that I felt that as he grew older,

The other thing is that I felt that as he grew older,

he became quite passive.

Instead of being a protagonist, a person who

makes things happen, he became a person to whom things are done,

and increasingly a kind of victim of events

rather than a kind of shaper of events.

And there was a moment when I was writing it when I thought,

I don't like this.

I want him to be more proactive.

I want him to be more proactive.

And I tried to write scenes in which he was more dynamic, you

know, took charge.

And they were awful.

They were completely unusable scenes

because that isn't who he was.

And in the end, I had to learn the lesson

that once you've made the character,

you have to respect who the character is.

My view is that anybody can write about anything.

Because if that's not so, then nobody

can write about anything.

can write about anything.

If we are going to limit ourselves

to a world in which, you know, only straight people can write

about straight people, and only gay people can write

about gay people, and thin people can't write

about fat people, and bald people can't write about people

with hair, men can't write about women or vice-versa,

then the form of the novel dies immediately.

So it's very important to learn how

to engage with realities which are not yours.

to engage with realities which are not yours.

The answer to how you do that is that I think

it should be understood-- you should try and understand

that there's an aspect of writing fiction which is not

very different from reportage, not

very different from journalism.

For example, one of the major characters

in "The Moor's Last Sigh" is an Indian painter, a woman

painter, called Aurora.

And she's about as unlike me as it's possible to be.

And she's about as unlike me as it's possible to be.

I mean, first of all, she's a woman.

Secondly, she's fantastically flamboyant, outspoken,

Bohemian, and kind of badly behaved, and therefore,

great fun.

And in order to know her, first of all,

I had to think about, who do I know who's like that?

Are there bits of them that I can steal,

little mannerisms that I can steal?

little mannerisms that I can steal?

I mean, you very rarely steal the whole of a character.

But you might steal a way of saying something,

a way of expressing yourself, you know, or a gesture,

or a certain kind of laugh, or just something that helps you.

And then I thought about are there historical models--

there actually was a very eminent Indian woman painter

of that period, the period around independence,

called Amrita Sher-Gil.

And she was, in some ways, quite like my character in that she

And she was, in some ways, quite like my character in that she

was very outspoken and not willing to subject herself

to the conventional behavior of the time and kind of bisexual,

but at the same time, very influenced by Gandhian ideas.

So she helped me a little bit just by existing, actually.

Just by being there, it gave me permission

to invent another Indian woman artist of some eminence.

So characters are usually drawn from a collection

So characters are usually drawn from a collection

of bits and pieces glued together by your imagination.

My own view has always been that nobody in a book,

no matter how minor a character they are,

nobody should feel just sketched in, you know.

nobody should feel just sketched in, you know.

I mean, if you think about a painting,

it would be awful if in a grand master painting

you had wonderfully drawn central-- painted

central characters and then just lightly sketched

in figures on the edges.

It would feel unfinished.

So my view is that, even if it's somebody

who appears for a page, for one scene,

you should somehow try and make sure

you should somehow try and make sure

that they're there, that they're as physically

real as you can make them.

We see this in the movies.

Sometimes somebody can walk on in a movie and have one moment,

you know.

But they're so idiosyncratic.

Wonderful character actors can inform one scene.

You feel like the character has a whole story behind them,

even if you're not being told it.

I think you should just try and aim for that in a novel too.

The character walks on, and it should

feel like they have a whole story behind them.

feel like they have a whole story behind them.

It's just that that's not the story we're telling.

In George Eliot-- when she wrote "Middlemarch,"

she gave herself--

the main male character in "Middlemost"

is described as being basically the most boring man

in the world.

And yet, there he is.

He's there all the way through the book.

How do you write interestingly about somebody

How do you write interestingly about somebody

you have said is very boring?

It's almost impossible.

But that's an interesting challenge,

you know, to set yourself the task of a character who

is unsympathetic-- doesn't have to be boring,

but a character who's unsympathetic,

and to try and write about them in a way that

engages the reader's attention and doesn't totally

alienate the reader.

I mean, one of the most remarkable things

about Nabokov's "Lolita" is that the main character is vile.

about Nabokov's "Lolita" is that the main character is vile.

You know, the main character, even to himself, even

in the book, he tells you that he

knows that he is a vile person.

And he's a pedophile.

And yet, reading the book, you're engaged with him.

You're right there with him all the way through it.

It's an almost impossible thing to pull off,

to take somebody as wrong as that

to take somebody as wrong as that

and to make that the character who

is the person who you accompany through the story, you know.

I'm not suggesting that you do that.

But it might be an interesting exercise

to take a character with a likability problem,

let's say a murderer, and to try and write about them in a way

that the audience, the reader's sympathy

is engaged with that character.

is engaged with that character.

You know, it can't only be the way-- the case

that you write books in which good people are good

and bad people are bad.

Life's not like that.

So you need to be able to write books in which good people have

real bad problems and bad people can be interesting and engaged

with.

And I think-- speaking for myself,

sometimes when I'm writing something,

I'm really much more enjoying writing the bad characters

than the good characters.

than the good characters.

Because there's a kind of freedom in it.

Let yourself be bad on the page.

It can be fun.