I never really have blank page syndrome. I don't get blocked. I have a plan for my novel before I start which, although incomplete, probably contains enough material for several novels by a quieter kind of writer. And I try to get my arms around that material and see where it takes me.
Ned BeaumanPlot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
Ned BeaumanYou couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.
Ned BeaumanThere are probably a couple of things I'd never write about until everyone I know is dead. And then there's other stuff which nobody would want to read a book about anyway.
Ned BeaumanMystery, investigation, false leads, solution - we associate that structure with genre fiction, but it exists in our real lives, too. There's no reason why literary fiction shouldn't be able to acknowledge that and make it fresh.
Ned BeaumanIf I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.
Ned BeaumanI guess the main thing I definitely don't enjoy is having a job which involves selling things. You become an author because you think you're good at writing. Not because you love to promote yourself. I enjoy some of it and I've had a really fun few years so basically I have nothing to complain about. But what I don't like is the thought that it's going to go on for the rest of my life.
Ned BeaumanI was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solves mysteries.
Ned BeaumanThe simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.
Ned BeaumanI always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you're a quarter of the way through and it doesn't feel so unmanageable any more.
Ned BeaumanI've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.
Ned BeaumanStatistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking.
Ned BeaumanI love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films.
Ned BeaumanThe reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.
Ned BeaumanI'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.
Ned BeaumanThere's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.
Ned BeaumanI started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.
Ned BeaumanI'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.
Ned BeaumanIt seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.
Ned BeaumanSo intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.
Ned BeaumanUntil I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.
Ned BeaumanPoliticians often like to suggest that their policies come about through objective thinking, but if you look at British fascists, for example, what you see - what I see - is a group of people coming to the decisions they came to because something happened to them when they were nine-years-old, or because of some deep prejudice that formed in them subsequent to that.
Ned BeaumanMost romances aren't swept aside by big historical events. Most romances in the history of the world fall apart because of other, smaller happenings. History can sometimes be in the background, the thing which instead of rupturing your life merely irritates you by pressing itself now and then into the foreground.
Ned Beauman