Trying…to write what you are writing

Samantha Harvey with her trophy and Emma Barnett EMMA BARNETT

The woman who just won the prestigious Booker Prize nearly didn’t. Well to be more precise she nearly didn’t finish the book which the judges were unanimous in awarding for its beauty and ambition. 

It’s breathtaking what a different decision sometimes may have meant isn’t it? 

Often we never know what may have happened - but that sort of thing is binary. Samantha Harvey knows.

I had the pleasure of interviewing her on the Today programme the morning after the night before. Sat alongside her gleaming trophy - she still seemed stunned. Happily so.

Samantha Harvey in our studio EMMA BARNETT

Her book Orbital tells the story of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station and as someone who has never ventured to space, has no plans to and should the opportunity arise, would probably turn it down, Harvey felt she no place telling this story. Like she was trespassing.

As she put it: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” 

So after starting it - she abandoned it. 

But then she went back and never stopped. Though successive lockdowns, the book came out of her and seems like it helped her to traverse that discombobulating time.

Write what you are writing. 

And keep writing it. It sounds the simplest thing in the world when you, well, write it down. But nothing happens if you don’t write it and something might if you do. And that doesn’t have to mean a famous literary prize. It probably won’t. But something else might - and you don’t know what you don’t know.

Sometimes life pauses writing and our work as we know it. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has her first adult novel coming out next March in 10 years. She is a dear friend of mine and a woman I immediately connected with when I first interviewed her on Woman’s Hour a few years ago after the shocking death of both of her parents in quick succession. (Her resulting short book, Notes on Grief, is still the one I reach for when others are bereaved and offer up tentatively with love).

It is no coincidence that in the decade she has spent having her daughter and family, learning to parent and losing her parents, she hasn’t written like she has before. Something we talked about candidly here in my first programme back after maternity leave. But also here - in one of my favourite moments where conversation of actual constipation due to pregnancy turned to creative constipation. As is often the case with Chimamanda, we were gravely serious one moment and howling with laughter the next.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Emma Barnett EMMA BARNETT

She returned to the UK last week and delivered a lecture at the Royal Academy about a writer’s unknown beginnings. She sees writing as divine and never thinks of the reader while writing; only the story and her characters. She isn’t thinking of the point she might make or how it will be received. Chimamanda is also concerned about censorship in writing and sounds like she has a process to insure against anything stopped her writing what she feels needs to be written,

Try to cancel the noise outside and quell the doubts in your own mind. 

Write what you are writing.

But if you aren’t a writer - you can still take the learning. Do what you are doing. And keep doing it, even when there feels like there is no ground beneath you.

Or even, like our new Booker Prize winner, you fear you might be trespassing.

Roam and roam free.