Original subtitles

SALMAN RUSHDIE: When you read the work of the great writers,

you can immediately see that there's a worldview out

of which that work comes.

They have a kind of way of thinking

about people and societies which is their own.

All of us, if we really look inside,

have a way we think about the world.

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All of us create for ourselves a picture of the world.

Partly, that's created for us by our parents or by our teachers

or by whatever it might be.

But we all have a picture of the world.

We think the world is like this and we live

in that picture of the world.

And in a way, you could say that that's a kind of sanity.

And in a way, you could say that that's a kind of sanity.

And if our picture of the world breaks

because the world changes so much

and the picture doesn't seem to fit anymore,

that can be a little crazy-making, you know,

if we can't frame the world in a way that seems right to us.

So you have to think about what your picture of the world is.

Literally try and make a picture of the world in your mind.

What are the elements that you would put in that picture?

What would be in the front of the picture?

What would be in the background?

What would be in the background?

What would be in the corners of the picture?

For example, one of the things which

has helped me to uncover how ordinary people lived

in the past is to look at great art.

Often, at the center of the painting,

you'll see the main subject.

That might be a courtly lady or a wealthy patron

of the arts or a politician.

But if you look to the corners of the frame,

you'll see the everyday people, the guy

with the cart selling loaves of bread

or a store selling vegetables.

Ordinary life is in the corners of the frame.

Ordinary life is in the corners of the frame.

And it can be very helpful to see that.

So when you're making that picture of the world,

see what's in the middle.

See what's in the background.

See what's in the corners of the frame.

And gradually that can become something

like your picture of reality.

And then you write out of that.

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You know, when you read, let's say,

You know, when you read, let's say,

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, nobody else can write that stuff.

You know from one sentence who the author is because his world

view is so much his own.

That's true also of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Toni

Morrison and George Eliot, any number of great writers.

The thing that characterizes that genius

is that nobody else can do it.

is that nobody else can do it.

The reason they write the way they write

is because they are the people they are.

The writing that doesn't feel like that, that very often

is because it sounds like somebody else.

Either it sounds clearly like somebody else,

i.e. it's overly influenced by some other writer,

or it feels like 100 people could have written that.

I mean, the I could do that reaction is a very bad reaction

I mean, the I could do that reaction is a very bad reaction

to a piece of writing.

You don't want your readers to feel, yeah, I mean,

I could do that.

So the more personal and idiosyncratic it is,

the more it will feel authentically yours.

I mean, this comes back to the thing that I really do think,

which is that in order to be a really good writer,

you have to have an unusual amount of self-knowledge.

You have to really know who you are and what makes you tick

You have to really know who you are and what makes you tick

and why.

The line often is ascribed to Socrates, where he said,

the unexamined life is not worth living.

Writers are people who deeply examine their lives

and ruthlessly.

You can't be easy on yourself if you're really

going to understand yourself.

You have to go very deep.

I mean, it's like a personal psychoanalysis

to examine your life until you really understand

to examine your life until you really understand

what motivates you and what drives you

and what hinders you, what blocks you.

When you know those things, and you write from that knowledge,

you have a good chance of writing something that's yours

and nobody else's because it arises out of self-knowledge.

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Yes, as people say, you should write what you know.

But sometimes in order to write well,

But sometimes in order to write well,

you need to increase what you know.

You need to find out things so that you can write about people

whose life experience or whatever it may be,

gender, race, is not yours.

And that means getting out of your chair.

It means getting out of your apartment.

It means going into rooms that you don't normally go into,

asking questions.

It means listening to people, rather than

simply deciding for yourself how those people would be,

simply deciding for yourself how those people would be,

discovering, in other words.

What I say to students, and I would say to you

is, be sure that what you know is interesting

because these are students who, in many cases,

came from middle class families in the suburbs.

And there was an enormous amount of writing about middle class

families in the suburbs.

And my dad doesn't understand me.

My mother gets angry too much.

My mother gets angry too much.

And this girl doesn't love me who I care about.

And there's just too much of it.

And it was all kind of exactly the same.

And that's when actually, I said to one of the students, I said,

it would be better if a spaceship landed on the lawn

because then there'd be something enjoyable.

When I first started writing, I was

very influenced in those days by science fiction.

And so the first novel I wrote, "Grimus,"

And so the first novel I wrote, "Grimus,"

was about a fantasy world, you know, an imaginary island

populated by immortals.

And it didn't work very well.

And so I thought, next time, write what you know.

And that's where I thought that, OK,

I would like to write a novel arising

I would like to write a novel arising

from my childhood in Bombay just because I know it.

And the thing that interested me about it

was that my generation in India was the first generation

for over two centuries that had grown up

without a colonial power, the first generation of free people

to be born in India for over 200 years.

I thought, yes, it's what I know,

but it's also an unusual generation

because it also was the generation of transition

out of colonialism into the new world.

out of colonialism into the new world.

I think many of the writers that I most admire

have this ability to write about a very

broad spectrum of society.

So they're not confined to any group.

If you read Charles Dickens, he can write about everybody

from murderers and pickpockets to prime ministers

and archbishops and everything in between,

petty little shopkeepers, everything.

petty little shopkeepers, everything.

That's a good thing to learn how to do.

And in order to do it, you need to get out into the world.

Dostoevsky used to obsessively read the crime

pages in the newspapers.

And every book he ever wrote is a murder story

and very often arising from something

he found in the newspaper.

He thought, let me write about that.

He thought, let me write about that.

You read a story in the newspaper which says,

student murders moneylender.

Well, from that to "Crime and Punishment" is a big step,

but that's the germ of "Crime and Punishment"

from which he made this great masterpiece.

So I would suggest that there is always--

you will grow as a person and as a writer

by broadening your horizons.

by broadening your horizons.

I think one obvious way of doing that is to travel.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be international travel.

The journey from Manhattan to Nebraska

is not like going to the North Pole.

But get out of the comfort zone.

And the other thing to say about that kind of travel

is you should go by yourself, if you take somebody with you,

you bring your world along.

you bring your world along.

If you go by yourself, then you're

just there exposed to the world you're in.

And the interaction is stranger and often more surprising.

If historical novels attract you,

find a period in history that you

feel interested in, whatever that may be, and dive into it.

Research is a kind of journey all of its own.

And you can find things out that you

would never in a million years have dreamed

would never in a million years have dreamed

of that are better than anything you could have made up

because one of the great things about being a writer

is that it's a long job.

You don't have to retire.

Nobody's going to fire you.

If you want to do it, you can do it.

But if you want a long life as a writer, keep discovering.

Finding things out as a very good way of having that life.

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The question of influence is important

because all writers have influences.

Writing comes out of--

yes, it comes out of the writer's own experience

and their own take on the world.

But it also comes out of their reading.

It comes out of the books that came

before them and the books of their contemporaries often.

And influence can be very, very helpful.

And influence can be very, very helpful.

It can show you the way.

When influence becomes unhelpful is

when it leads to imitation because you will do something

which isn't nearly as good as the thing you're

trying to imitate.

And what I think happens in a literary career--

and I think of influence as being like,

you know, if you have a rocket ship waiting to take off,

you know, if you have a rocket ship waiting to take off,

there's a whole gantry around the rocket ship, holding it up.

And then the rocket ship takes off.

And the gantry falls away.

And then the rocket is just going.

I think that's what it is.

Influence is the thing which helps you get on the launchpad,

holds you in place.

But at a certain point when you've taken off,

it falls away.

And then you don't think so much about other writers that

And then you don't think so much about other writers that

influence you because you're on your way,

and you know where you're going.

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I'm going to read from this manuscript.

This is a novel which I called "The Antagonist," which

I wrote in my mid-20s at a time when I had never published

anything.

And it was a book that I wrote a full draft of it.

And it was a book that I wrote a full draft of it.

I wrote something like a 300-page draft of it

and almost immediately felt that it was a failure,

and so much so that I never showed it to anybody.

I never revised it.

I never offered it for publication.

I just put it away.

From that day until this, I've never held it in my hands

again.

And it's a book that I think anybody

who plows their way through it would see

who plows their way through it would see

is heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon, and in particular

by "Gravity's Rainbow," which anyway,

is a very difficult book.

And for me to attempt to do something like that

was perhaps doomed to failure.

I should have known better, but I didn't.

But I learned by doing it not to do it again.

But I learned by doing it not to do it again.

It will begin with a roll of drums

and with a staring eye, that much is certain.

Sound without vision, an apprehensive fanfare

to the unknown, modulating to vision

without sound, the mute, compromised wisdom

of hindsight.

But how to evaluate the scenes in between, the middle ground,

the development?

How should he judge the rightness of its resonances?

How should he judge the rightness of its resonances?

The sky is nude today, encasing his documentary

in a very un-February blue, a blank canvas,

lacking character or definition, devoid before genesis.

He imagines a signature in the corner, scrawled perhaps

in factory sacks near the horizon.

Blank Sky Number 63, Andy Warhol.

And smiles bitterly some.

People get rich and famous and respected

by cracking bad jokes.

by cracking bad jokes.

You see, I don't even know what that's about.

And I think I'm just grateful that I had the brains to put

that away in a drawer.

And that is the first and last time in my life

that I've ever read from it.

I could see that what I'd done was to be over-influenced

and to fall into the trap of imitation.

The only way of thinking about the book

The only way of thinking about the book

was that it was a poor imitation of the work of another writer.

At least my shit detector was working.

It told me, don't do any more with this.

And I put it aside.

And from that day to this, I've never looked at it again.

But here we are.

I've now read a paragraph of it loud.

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What happens with most writers is that you start off

with a world you know.

with a world you know.

And you can write about that.

At a certain point, you may find or you

may begin to feel that you've exhausted

that material, that you don't have anything new to say.

And that's where I think it helps to, in a way,

take on some of the skills of the journalist

and to just set yourself to the business of learning the world.

To give just one example from my own experience,

To give just one example from my own experience,

in my novel, "The Golden House," which is set primarily

in New York City, one of the things I wanted to do

was to write a character who was thinking about a gender

transition, thinking about transitioning, and very

conflicted about it, not at all sure what they wanted to do

or indeed who they were or wanted to be.

And this is not my personal life experience, you know?

And this is not my personal life experience, you know?

I needed to know much more about it than just a couple of people

that I happened to anecdotally know in my own life.

So that meant going to find out.

It meant going to talk to people and learn things.

And so yes, everybody can write about everything.

But that doesn't mean that you can get away

with doing it sloppily.

And if you do do it sloppily, you

will be called out when you deserve to be called out.

One of the things that helped me actually,

One of the things that helped me actually,

several years ago, I was asked, actually by people working

with the Gates Foundation to help to put together a book

project to write about the HIV/AIDS problem in India.

I asked to stay in what is now Mumbai, my old hometown,

to talk with the transgender community,

in India, the hejira community, which

I knew about from my childhood, seen them around.

But I'd never, as a word, got inside the community.

But I'd never, as a word, got inside the community.

I spent a lot of time with them in order to write a piece.

And the thing that interested me is that they varied a lot.

Some of them were very hurt and wounded and defensive.

And others were very confident and kind of

activist and interested in political activity

to improve their lot, to improve the condition of the community.

Anyway, so there's a spectrum of character types.

But the one thing they all agreed on

But the one thing they all agreed on

was that they wanted to characterize themselves

as a third gender, that they didn't see themselves

as men who had become women.

They saw themselves as a third gender.

And they wanted to be recognized as a third gender.

So that, I thought, gave me a bit of a handle on it.

I thought, OK, well that's how it works in that culture.

Let's see how it works over here.

So what I'm saying is the only answer

to how to get outside your own skin is to go find out.

to how to get outside your own skin is to go find out.

Go find out.

There are writers, great writers,

for whom their immediate world is enough.

And they can spend a lifetime creating a body

of work of the highest quality.

One of the great examples of this is William Faulkner.

There he is in Oxford, Mississippi,

which is a small place.

which is a small place.

And yet, he makes a lifetime's body of work, of great art,

from this tiny patch of the earth.

But even there, Faulkner, for example,

wrote very well about the race issue

and was actually in his time quite disliked

by quite a lot of white people in Oxford because

of his sympathy towards black people in Oxford

and how they were treated.

and how they were treated.

So even there, he was able to perform

the act of empathetic migration from his own skin

into the skin of another.

I think really, in the end, the only thing one

can say is to, in Shakespeare's words, to thine own self

be true.

If you feel that what you have written

is as truthful and honest as you can make it,

you're the best judge of that, actually.

you're the best judge of that, actually.

Again, of course you can show it to people.

And I think if you're at all worried about it,

then you should show it to people.

And if they say that they feel you've got things wrong,

then you should try to correct them.

But in the end, the great gamble of literature

is that you do it by yourself.

You do it by yourself.

And then you offer it to the world.

And then you offer it to the world.

And you hope that the world will like it.

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