Original subtitles

It's often been said, and I think it's true,

all writing is rewriting.

It's very rare that when you put something down

for the first time that you don't need to look at it again.

What's more characteristic is that it needs work, needs work,

and rework.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

To be frank, the hardest thing of all

is to make something out of nothing.

You know, that the terror of the blank page.

You know, that the terror of the blank page.

What do you put down on it?

And very often, your first attempt to put something

down on the blank page we'll be imperfect.

And my view is, you should go with that.

It's important to get something down.

Because once you have something down, however rough it is,

then another part of your mind kicks in,

then another part of your mind kicks in,

which is not just your creative imagination

but your critical imagination.

Because then you're looking at a thing that's actually there.

And you can start thinking, what's wrong with this?

And what needs, what needs to be cut?

What needs to be added?

What needs to be changed?

You can look at it critically.

And that becomes a process of improvement.

You will do well to be your own best editor.

What you should look at when you look at your own text

is two things.

One is, are there things that you

are saying that are superfluous that you don't need to say?

That it would be better if you didn't say them?

And are there things that you haven't

And are there things that you haven't

said that need to be said, and that would improve

the text if you did say them?

You have to look at both.

Both having said too much and having said too little.

And if you use those two tests on every page, it can be very,

it can actually make you read your work very objectively.

You should be revising your language, constantly.

And sometimes, you want to revise the actual action.

Maybe you think that something that you had planned--

that when you actually get round to doing it,

it's kind of not satisfying to you.

And you have to find a different way.

I'm looking at the language and I'm

I'm looking at the language and I'm

looking at the development of the story all the time,

and trying to see if it's going the way I want it to go.

Or are there false notes?

Are there some other things that I

thought would be good that end up being less successful than I

hoped they would be?

This can happen also with characters.

A character that you think is going to be an important

character, when you actually introduce them,

you realize that they're-- actually,

you don't have that much room for them.

And they can become a much smaller character,

And they can become a much smaller character,

or they can, sometimes you can leave them out altogether.

And vice versa.

They can be characters which you didn't expect

to be big characters, but who somehow force themselves

upon you.

They're too interesting when you start making them.

You want more of them.

You want to give them more scenes.

And so they grow in the book.

I always like that when that happens because it makes

me feel that the book has a kind of organic life of its own.

That I'm trying to stay in charge of,

but I'm also interested that it grows in its own way

and it tells me things.

But

Yeah, I think you have to just, you have to be very alert when

you're writing a book, both to questions of language

and to questions of form, and to questions of story.

You have to watch it all the time

because it's very easy for a book

to go slightly off the rails.

And when it's doing that, you need

to be able to put it back on the rails.

The truth is, when you have a big book,

and there's a lot of characters coming in and out--

you can make all the notes you want.

You can draw as many diagrams as you like.

But in the end, you hold it in your head.

I mean, I find that I just have this spider's web in my head

I mean, I find that I just have this spider's web in my head

connecting all the people to each other.

And it stays there all the time I'm writing the book.

And it's my way of knowing who's doing what to whom.

And you can feel it there when it's there.

You know how everybody connects to everybody.

And I find a very strange thing that

happens when I'm finishing a book

is that at a certain moment, the spider's web disappears.

And you don't have the book in your head in the way

And you don't have the book in your head in the way

that you've had it for X years.

At that point, it becomes very dangerous to revise it.

However, whatever it is, at that point,

it's like performing brain surgery blindfold

or wearing boxing gloves.

And there's a moment where you just

have to think, OK, whatever this book is,

whatever its faults are, this is what it is.

I can't touch it anymore.

There's no worthwhile book that was simply

written once and published.

Because it's not how the mind works.

We try to approximate what we're doing.

And then we try gradually to get closer and closer and closer

to what we think we were supposed to be doing.

So yeah, revision is everything.

Sometimes it feels better just to go on, and try and get

Sometimes it feels better just to go on, and try and get

some kind of a draft down on paper.

And then maybe step away from it.

Take a bit of a break.

I've always found just the act of getting

to the end of a story or a book immediately shows me

what I needed to do before.

You get to the end, and you think, oh.

Yeah, but I needed to have much more of this.

And I needed to have much less of that.

And this is wrong, but that is right.

And suddenly, you begin to see the book just because you have

And suddenly, you begin to see the book just because you have

the whole thing sitting there.

So there is a good case for saying

you should just press on and get something down.

And then take a step back and then look at it.

And then go into it and try and fix.

I mean another way of doing things, which

I find that I do more and more nowadays,

is to fix all the time.

That's to say, if I do a day's writing, always the last thing

That's to say, if I do a day's writing, always the last thing

I do at night after having stepped away from the desk,

and had dinner, or whatever it is, I always read

what I wrote that day again.

And that's for two reasons.

The first reason is that maybe I can

see something that needs fixing, in which case

I'll try and fix it.

And the second reason is that it puts the book in your head

so that it's there in the morning when you wake up.

so that it's there in the morning when you wake up.

And you can go forward.

But I would say that the important thing

is to be able to step back from the work.

And then come back to it and look at it afresh.

The critic Randall Jarrell had a very nice funny line.

He said a novel is a long piece of writing that has something

wrong with it.

That I think is probably true.

And if you're writing something that's 80,000, 90,000, 100,000,

And if you're writing something that's 80,000, 90,000, 100,000,

200,000 words long, it's kind of impossible

that every word will be perfect.

So perfection becomes a kind of pipe dream.

What you have to try and do is to make

it as perfect as possible while understanding

that there will be imperfection because everybody

suffers from that.

What you need to know is that it's always

possible to make something a little better.

possible to make something a little better.

It's good to have an attitude of dissatisfaction with your work.

Look at every sentence all the time.

Do I need that sentence?

Is that the right word?

This is what I have always done long after the editorial

process is over, when the book is

in the process of being made.

I'm still almost every day reading over and over

and over and over it.

And trying to see is they just some tiny little thing?

And trying to see is they just some tiny little thing?

Is there a comma I don't need?

Is there a paragraph I should break into two paragraphs?

Is there a sentence that needs to be added?

And usually, this goes on in the production period

until you get the first galleys.

And when they arrive, your publishers will say to you,

as it were, this is your last chance to touch the book.

And so that read is very important

And so that read is very important

because it is your last chance.

After that, it is what it is.

Yeah.

My view is that I am very skeptical of what I've done.

And I'm constantly trying to tweak it until--

and these can be tiny tweaks.

But sometimes a tiny tweak can make a substantial difference

to the way in which a paragraph is read.

to the way in which a paragraph is read.

So it's worth going on and on and on, going over and over

and over and over it until you can't anymore.

And then you just have to live with it.

The thing about knowing when it's bad,

it should be more or less in built.

I think most people who are at all

I think most people who are at all

good at writing can see when they've made missteps,

and when there are false notes.

I mean, the truth is that if you can't tell when it's not good,

then you have a bit of a problem.

Because if you can't tell when it's not good,

you can't really tell when it is good.

Again, I mean, I would say the only real--

there isn't a trick to it.

The only trick to it is to be, is to read a lot,

and to know, to know what it is that good writing is.

and to know, to know what it is that good writing is.

And I think you only get that knowledge by reading.

And then be ruthless with yourself.

I mean, Hemingway has this line that every writer needs

to have a good shit detector.

What he means is, if you don't know when it's bad,

you don't know when it's good.

So what we have here is from my literary archive

So what we have here is from my literary archive

which is at Emory University in Atlanta.

Some pages which are early versions of the beginning

of "Midnight's Children."

Typed on my little Olivetti Dora portable typewriter.

In those days, long before the arrival of anything

like a computer.

They're annotated because these are unfinished pages.

They're annotated because these are unfinished pages.

Some of the versions here are quite like how it ended up,

and some of them begin in different places.

For instance, there's a section here which is in the novel

but begins in a completely different place.

It begins with Saleem as a boy in the garden of his family

house in Bombay with his father, watching

what had just been launched, which was the Russian Sputnik

satellite.

satellite.

And I remembered as a child standing

in the garden with my father.

And him saying, look over there.

And you saw this moving dot, shining, moving dot,

moving across the sky.

It was just a magical moment of my childhood,

and I wanted to use it.

But in the end, I thought, that doesn't set it up in the way

that it needs to be set up.

So this is an early version of the beginning.

And it's actually described as a prologue.

And it's called omnipotence.

We're in the garden in the evening watching

We're in the garden in the evening watching

the Sputnik cross the sky.

I'm thinking of Laika, the first and last dog in space.

I remember as a child feeling very sad for the dogs.

Dog was up there, wasn't coming back.

And the idea of this dog being sent into space

to die I thought was very moving and sad.

And the thing about that is it came

to feel to me like the beginning of a different kind of novel.

In a way, that's the beginning of the kind of novel

In a way, that's the beginning of the kind of novel

I originally conceived of, which was a novel about childhood.

And that would be a good beginning

for a novel about childhood.

But because I now had this rather larger plan

for the book, where it would be not only about childhood,

but also about India, about the first 30

years of independent India, I thought

that doesn't set it up the right way.

And then the beginning that I found

And then the beginning that I found

I thought set it up better.

This novel took an enormous amount of time to write.

It took me pretty close to five years to write.

I think I started writing it in 1975 or 6,

and wrote it for a number of years.

And partly, it was slow going because I had really bitten

off more than I could chew.

I mean, it was a really very big, ambitious idea.

I mean, it was a really very big, ambitious idea.

And I was a very inexperienced writer.

So there was a lot of stopping and starting, and wondering

how to do the next bit, and trying to not panic,

and to remain confident that it would work out in the end.

So there was a lot of that going on.

And yes, a lot of writing and rewriting along the way.

I mean, it was the most ambitious thing

I mean, it was the most ambitious thing

by a million miles that I'd ever tried to do.

And as I say, I was not at all confident of my ability

to pull it off.

And indeed, when I'd finished writing it--

I mean, when I finished writing it, I was quite happy with it.

I thought, you far as I can tell, this is a good book.

But because until that moment, I had really

no success as a writer at all, I wasn't confident

no success as a writer at all, I wasn't confident

that my judgment would be shared by anybody else.

And so I remember thinking, well,

if people don't agree that this is a good book,

then maybe I don't know what a good book is,

and I should maybe give up trying to write it.

So there was an enormous amount for me personally riding on it.

And I mean, fortunately, people did think it was a good book.

And so here I am all these years later still writing

books as a result.

books as a result.