Alan Hollinghurst and Philip Hensher at Ways With Words: how to write fiction

Alan Hollinghurst and Philip Hensher delivered a masterclass at the Telegraph Ways With Words Festival on how to write fiction.
By Anita Singh
The two acclaimed novelists – and great friends – shared a stage to discuss their new works.
Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, The Stranger’s Child, is the eagerly-awaited follow-up to The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004
Philip Hensher combines writing novels with journalism and teaching creative writing at Exeter University. His latest book, King of the Badgers, is set in a fictional Devon town loosely based on Topsham in Devon, where he currently lives.
Here are Hollinghurst and Hensher on…

The process of writing
Hollinghurst: I wish I could just make writing part of my everyday life but I find it incredibly hard. There is a technique I was taught by Kazuo Ishiguro which he calls ‘the crash’ – you prepare intensively then set aside four or five weeks and go into a room for 12 hours a day. I gave myself a similar sort of set-up and it’s something I’ve kept up ever since.

Hensher: I think it’s fascinating listening to how other people write. But 12 hours at a stretch? No. I think it was Ian McEwan who said he writes exactly 500 words a day. And I wish I had never heard that because when I read Ian McEwan now I can feel where the break is…

Hollinghurst: We work at different tempi. Philip rather sickeningly has a novel just published and has already finished the next one. He has extraordinary energy, I have little energy.

Hensher: As you go on as writer, you start to think there’s no right or wrong way to write. It’s just the way a book will come out from you. You can’t speed up or slow down your rate of work. I know perfectly well that if I slowed down I wouldn’t be able to see the whole book. I would lose the sense of it as a whole. For me it would be like entering a slow bicycle race. I would just fall off the bicycle.

Real-life inspiration
Hensher: All my life I’ve lived in large cities. And then I moved to Topsham. I had been there for about two months when a complete stranger came up to me in the street and said, ‘Did you enjoy the wild duck you had the other night?’ The butcher had succeeded in selling me a wild duck and had told his next customer about it. It’s all a bit transparent and peculiar, and I thought, ‘Yes, there’s a novel here’. I kept saying to people as I was writing it, ‘It’s a gay Cranford’. My publisher actually wanted me to call it ‘The Gay Cranford’.

Seeing your novels adapted for the screen
Hollinghurst: I think I was quite sensible about having my book filmed [The Line of Beauty was dramatised by Andrew Davies for the BBC in 2006, starring Dan Stevens]. I knew it was going to turn into something different. In The Line of Beauty there are things that I don’t tell, big gaps between the three sections. A film needs greater narrative clarity so some things that I had left deliberately unsaid had to be dramatised. I read the script of all three parts and made some comments on them which were sometimes listened to. Andrew Davies said to me quite candidly that he preferred his authors dead. But there were compensations and wonderful performances. A good actor like Dan Stevens can do something with an expression that it would take me a paragraph to explain.

Whether writing is a skill that can be taught
Hensher: Yes, I think so. I think you can teach writing in the same way you can teach cabinet making. I think you can’t teach somebody to be a great writer, you can’t teach somebody with no aptitude whatsoever for writing how to write. On the other hand, you can teach people how a character can be constructed, teach people how to improve their writing. But you can’t turn somebody from Katie Price into Alan Hollinghurst by the sheer power of your pedagogy.