-Laurence Scott by Michaela Turner

Laurence Scott is a writer and academic who teaches literature at Kings College London, the University of North Carolina, and Arcadia University. He writes for the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, for whom he is a regular critic and reviewer. He is currently one of BBC Radio 3′s ‘New Generation Thinkers’, and will be writing and presenting programmes based on his research throughout the year. His second novel is ‘in-progress’. I caught up with him for Little Episodes at The British Library…

Can you tell us how you first became interested in writing?

It was in 1986 and I was living in my parents’ hotel at the time and my granny also lived with us and she had a little front room and in the window was a typewriter on a table and for some reason one day I started producing these really derivative episodes of ‘Thundercats’ that I would type up. For instance, if there was a ‘Thundercats’ episode called ‘Safari Joe’ I would make up an episode called ‘Desert Steve’. I reeled them off and then at different phases growing up I’d do these rip-offs: a page and a half of a mock-Enid Blyton mystery and then give up and forget about it. My teens were dominated by dreams of becoming a professional tennis player and I barely read or wrote or thought about writing; I just watched women’s tennis matches over and over again on tape. And then I remember being in Canada in a really grimy hall of residence in my first year at university and I read a paragraph in an Iris Murdoch novel – it was about two characters walking along by the sea – and the light and the scenery and everything was just completely captivating and that’s when I became spellbound by the possibilities of what a paragraph could do and then I started writing derivative Iris Murdoch-style short stories and one of those got me a place on the Trinity College, Dublin Creative Writing MA in 2003. From then on I thought I was a writer and it was no longer about just being ‘interested’ in it – it became the way that my thoughts and life were organised.

And what are you currently working on?

At present, I’m working on a much-anticipated second novel to follow the first novel that did not sell. So it really counts as a first novel still. I have about 10,000 words of sketches and notes for that and it’s been percolating since 2008. And I’m also working on a lot of non-fiction stuff such as essays and reviews.

Can you give us a sense of what the novel is about?

I would say it’s partly, like the first novel, about survivor’s guilt. And also the idea of how the person you are depends on the language in which you’re thinking.

Do you find that writing has any therapeutic value for you?

I’ve been thinking about this idea of writing as therapy. And it depends how you define therapeutic. If I wasn’t able to write at all I’d probably be a much less balanced person. I wouldn’t be able to live the happiest, fullest life. In that sense it’s a necessity, but it isn’t really therapeutic in the sense that I don’t use writing to work through the content of life. It’s almost that the traumas of my life can be useful in writing and become the wellspring from which literary ideas come. But it’s not necessarily that I’m using it as a way of venting. The images and the metaphors that come up from the sorrows of life – the things that you do need therapy for – don’t really get translated in a way that rids you of them. I would just say they become useful to you.

Who are your literary influences?

Well, I’ve mentioned Iris Murdoch but actually now, if I’m writing, I don’t read her at all because somehow she manages to get away with the type of sentences that can really tilt you off course. So I prefer reading people like EM Forster for irony and Alan Hollinghurst (who is also influenced by Forster). I love the intricacy of his sentences, however sometimes for a lesser talent or a less experienced writer that approach can become very ornate and a bit mannered so then I have Irish writers like John Banville and Colm Toibin who have a different sort of temperature to their sentences that cools mine down a bit.

What do you think is important about the work that Little Episodes does?

The work Little Episodes does is important because it is very very difficult to get anywhere in the current literary climate so artists need as many forums as we can get and especially ones that aren’t entirely obsessed with the needs and demands of a marketing department, constantly asking can they sell it? Can they package it in a certain way? Which is obviously the death knell of art. And what writers always have to keep in mind, and what older writers tell you all the time, is that you’re not a salesperson, your job isn’t to predict a market. So if there are places for disseminating work and to get some sort of momentum and readership going – all of that is important. So we desperately need initiatives like LE.

Would you say that publishing is a meritocracy?

I remember plaintively asking this question in my Creative Writing class. It was very doom and gloom from all the visiting writers and often they were teaching to supplement their income because they couldn’t really survive in the literary marketplace alone and I asked the question then: if you’re good enough will your book still get lost? And the consensus tended to be that it wouldn’t, that you just have to be good. And I think that’s a very positive way of looking at it: just be as good as you can and you probably will get attention. On the other hand, it is easier to be published if you’re a certain kind of writer and those writers aren’t always the best writers and that can be very discouraging. Again, it’s best not to think too much about the marketplace and just to write as much as you can as well as you can.

How do you tell if what you’ve written is good?

It fluctuates on this insane pendulum between ‘this is the best, most beautiful, virtuoso performance I’ve ever seen and all other writers pale into insignificance’ and ‘this is the gauchest, most terrible piece of work’. I do think you get better with experience at telling whether a piece has certain technical checkpoints that it needs, like: is it well balanced, is it interesting, is the rhythm and pattern of the sentences and the images properly calibrated? There’s a set of technical things that you get more shrewd at gauging the more you write. But I don’t know if you ever know if it’s Good enough in the big ‘G’ sense of Good…ever! I think you know when something is technically ready to be presented and when it isn’t based on the extent to which you can produce something at the upper limits of your talent and abilities and you can sense at different points in the process when it can’t really get much worse and when it can’t really be improved upon and that’s when you offer it up.

If you were on a desert island and could have only one book and one song to keep you entertained, what would they be?

This is really easy: people always teased me when I was doing my Phd because whatever talk I went to I would always bring up ‘Howard’s End’ by EM Forster and it came to seem like it was the only book I’d read – which isn’t far off the truth! It’s the only book I really re-read and return to as a sort of bible and a consolation and solace constantly throughout the years. I just think it’s so atmospheric and clever and the characters never let you down… that has therapeutic value! And my song… I think it would be Brandy and Monica’s ‘The Boy Is Mine’.

Lastly, describe yourself in 5 words.

Dishevelled, vaguely Semitic, ego-maniacal, empathetic, nasal.