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[MUSIC PLAYING]

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SALMAN RUSHDIE: Speaking
for myself, sometimes

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

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writing the bad characters
than the good characters.

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Because there's a
kind of freedom in it.

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Let yourself be bad on the page.

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The heart of the novel,
traditionally, was--

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The heart of the novel,
traditionally, was--

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

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ago from Heraclitus,
where he says,

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essentially, the
character is destiny.

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

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The kind of personality you
have determines the kind of life

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you will have.

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And the novel as a form
has always followed that.

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The character is like this.

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

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And I remember when
Charles Schulz, who draws--

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And I remember when
Charles Schulz, who draws--

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drew the Peanuts comic strip,
talked about giving up,

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stopping doing it, before he--

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I mean, some time
before he died--

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a lot of people
wrote in asking him

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

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could he please
allow it to happen.

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And that was could
just once Charlie Brown

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kick the football.

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And he never did it.

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

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

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he would in some ways
stop being Charlie Brown.

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

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

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Their character
was their destiny.

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

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It was her character
to always whip it away.

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But now we live in a
world in which character

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is often not destiny.

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When I was writing
"Midnight's Children,"

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I had this sentence,
which was originally very

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near the beginning,
which was, "most

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near the beginning,
which was, "most

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

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

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too Tolstoyan in a way
to have as a beginning.

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And I buried it inside the book.

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

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by decisions taken and
things happening in rooms

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

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between people whose
names we will never know,

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

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

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about all sorts of things that
directly impact our lives.

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

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the fact that our lives
can be changed by things

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we can't affect.

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

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into those towers, and
those thousands of people

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

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

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Their character was
not their destiny.

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And yet, there's
a colossal event

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that we have to
come to grips with.

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And we have to try and
work out new strategies

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to encompass this world in which
sometimes our character is not

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our fate.

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With character,
sometimes you'll find

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that you know the character
very well immediately.

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that you know the character
very well immediately.

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

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Sometimes writers, in
order to have that feeling,

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will base the central character
on a variation of themselves.

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It gives you a
feeling of confidence

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to be somewhere close
to yourself, you know.

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And you know, many
people have done this.

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So the great American
Nobel laureate Saul Bellow

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So the great American
Nobel laureate Saul Bellow

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did it all the time
so that the character

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of Moses Herzog in
his novel "Herzog"

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is not only like
Bellow, but has a number

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of things in common
with Bellow's life,

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

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with his friend.

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When I wrote--

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

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I use the idea of having
a central character who

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I use the idea of having
a central character who

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was close to me in many ways--

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

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

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in the same social
class, you know,

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and going to the same school.

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And it helped me.

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

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or she begins to take on
characteristics of their own,

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which are not yours.

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And then you have to listen
very carefully to what

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And then you have to listen
very carefully to what

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those characteristics are.

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So for example, when
I was 14, I left

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Bombay to go to school and
then university in England.

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And my life afterwards
became very international.

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Saleem never leaves
South Asia, between India

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and Pakistan and Bangladesh.

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His whole life is there.

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So that's one difference.

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

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

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he became quite passive.

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Instead of being a
protagonist, a person who

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

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and increasingly a kind
of victim of events

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rather than a kind
of shaper of events.

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

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I don't like this.

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I want him to be more proactive.

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I want him to be more proactive.

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

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know, took charge.

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And they were awful.

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They were completely
unusable scenes

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because that isn't who he was.

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And in the end, I had
to learn the lesson

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that once you've
made the character,

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you have to respect
who the character is.

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My view is that anybody
can write about anything.

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Because if that's
not so, then nobody

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can write about anything.

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can write about anything.

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If we are going
to limit ourselves

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

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about straight people, and
only gay people can write

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about gay people, and
thin people can't write

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

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

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then the form of the
novel dies immediately.

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So it's very
important to learn how

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to engage with realities
which are not yours.

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to engage with realities
which are not yours.

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The answer to how you
do that is that I think

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it should be understood--
you should try and understand

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

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very different
from reportage, not

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very different from journalism.

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For example, one of
the major characters

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

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painter, called Aurora.

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

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

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

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Secondly, she's fantastically
flamboyant, outspoken,

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Bohemian, and kind of badly
behaved, and therefore,

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great fun.

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And in order to know
her, first of all,

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

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Are there bits of
them that I can steal,

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little mannerisms
that I can steal?

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little mannerisms
that I can steal?

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

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But you might steal a
way of saying something,

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

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

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And then I thought about are
there historical models--

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there actually was a very
eminent Indian woman painter

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of that period, the period
around independence,

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called Amrita Sher-Gil.

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

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

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was very outspoken and not
willing to subject herself

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

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

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

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Just by being there,
it gave me permission

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to invent another Indian
woman artist of some eminence.

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So characters are usually
drawn from a collection

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So characters are usually
drawn from a collection

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of bits and pieces glued
together by your imagination.

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

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no matter how minor
a character they are,

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nobody should feel just
sketched in, you know.

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nobody should feel just
sketched in, you know.

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I mean, if you think
about a painting,

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it would be awful if in
a grand master painting

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you had wonderfully
drawn central-- painted

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central characters and
then just lightly sketched

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in figures on the edges.

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It would feel unfinished.

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

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who appears for a
page, for one scene,

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you should somehow
try and make sure

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you should somehow
try and make sure

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

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real as you can make them.

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We see this in the movies.

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

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you know.

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But they're so idiosyncratic.

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Wonderful character actors
can inform one scene.

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

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even if you're
not being told it.

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

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The character walks
on, and it should

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feel like they have a
whole story behind them.

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feel like they have a
whole story behind them.

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

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

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she gave herself--

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the main male character
in "Middlemost"

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is described as being
basically the most boring man

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in the world.

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And yet, there he is.

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He's there all the
way through the book.

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How do you write
interestingly about somebody

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How do you write
interestingly about somebody

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you have said is very boring?

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It's almost impossible.

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But that's an
interesting challenge,

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

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

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but a character
who's unsympathetic,

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and to try and write
about them in a way that

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engages the reader's
attention and doesn't totally

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alienate the reader.

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I mean, one of the
most remarkable things

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

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

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

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in the book, he
tells you that he

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knows that he is a vile person.

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And he's a pedophile.

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

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

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It's an almost impossible
thing to pull off,

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to take somebody
as wrong as that

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to take somebody
as wrong as that

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and to make that
the character who

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

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I'm not suggesting
that you do that.

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But it might be an
interesting exercise

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to take a character with
a likability problem,

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

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that the audience,
the reader's sympathy

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is engaged with that character.

244
00:12:30,021 --> 00:12:31,871
is engaged with that character.

245
00:12:31,871 --> 00:12:35,111
You know, it can't only
be the way-- the case

246
00:12:35,111 --> 00:12:37,811
that you write books in
which good people are good

247
00:12:37,811 --> 00:12:40,721
and bad people are bad.

248
00:12:40,721 --> 00:12:43,211
Life's not like that.

249
00:12:43,211 --> 00:12:47,321
So you need to be able to write
books in which good people have

250
00:12:47,321 --> 00:12:51,251
real bad problems and bad people
can be interesting and engaged

251
00:12:51,251 --> 00:12:52,301
with.

252
00:12:52,301 --> 00:12:54,101
And I think--
speaking for myself,

253
00:12:54,101 --> 00:12:55,991
sometimes when I'm
writing something,

254
00:12:55,991 --> 00:12:58,841
I'm really much more enjoying
writing the bad characters

255
00:12:58,841 --> 00:13:00,021
than the good characters.

256
00:13:00,021 --> 00:13:01,541
than the good characters.

257
00:13:01,541 --> 00:13:03,521
Because there's a
kind of freedom in it.

258
00:13:03,521 --> 00:13:05,051
Let yourself be bad on the page.

259
00:13:07,751 --> 00:13:09,781
It can be fun.