Poured Over: Mark Haddon on Dogs and Monsters
Mark Haddon’s Dogs and Monsters is a collection of stories that span a wide range of topics and themes based on Greek myth and other literary influences. Haddon joins us to talk about the way he compiles his stories, their connections to other works of literature, writing in different genres and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.
This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app
Featured Books (Episode):
Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Porpoise by Mark Haddon
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
Full Episode Transcript:
Miwa Messer:
I’m Miwa Messer. I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Mark Haddon is here to talk about his new collection of stories. It’s his second collection of stories, Dogs and Monsters, and it is wild in all the best ways, and I cannot wait to talk to Mark in a spoiler free conversation because obviously we don’t want to give away all of the good bits. If you recognize Mark’s name, yes, he’s the guy who wrote Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time, which is almost 20 years old, is 20 years old. It’s been out for a minute and it’s been assigned reading in high schools and colleges all around the states and has done quite well and sold bajillions of copies. But we really do want to talk about the story collection, which is coming hot on the heels of The Porpoise, which was a retelling via Shakespeare via Mark. But Mark, my understanding is the stories in dogs and monsters were written over time and collected here sort of for the first time.
Mark Haddon:
Yes. And when you say hot on the heels of The Porpoise, certain things have got in the way, including my having a triple heart bypass almost exactly on pub date for the podcast post, which was unhelpful to say the least. So it slowed down my publicity, but it slowed down my writing as well. And also recently I’ve been struck by long, so this collection came together over many years and piecemeal during breaks in the fog.
Miwa Messer:
One of the first stories though, right, or actually the first story in the collection is one of the first stories you wrote sort of as you were coming out of the fog of heart surgery. Do I have that right? A mother story?
Mark Haddon:
My memory is so bad that I also, I don’t tend to write stories and finish them. I’ll sometimes write half a story and it’ll sit there for a long time. Sometimes I’ll finish it, but I’m always going back to it. I’m always going back to it.
Miwa Messer:
Okay.
Mark Haddon:
No page ever feels finished until I read it and I can feel that satisfying click of something falling into place. So sometimes I’ll be working on a story for years and years, just going back to speaking it and polishing it.
Miwa Messer:
Okay, so this new book, it’s a combination of a lot of things and it’s really, it’s an absolute delight, A little gritty in some places, but an absolute delight. And we’ve got retellings of Greek myths, we’ve got Dystopians where you and I were just talking about the ending of one story that we will not be discussing here, the story maybe, but certainly not the ending. We’ve got a UK prep school. There’s sort of a new take on the island of Dr. Moreau by HG Wells. You’ve got a story that’s an homage to Virginia Woolf, and I got to say, your brain is fascinating. It’s completely fascinating. So what I’m thinking as a reader is that you start with an idea and then the language. Am I right about that?
Mark Haddon:
Well, why don’t we go back to your use of that word retelling. I would say that what I don’t do is retelling,
Miwa Messer:
Okay.
Mark Haddon:
There are stories that fascinate me and one of the reasons they fascinate me is that even if you’ve never heard the story of the Minotaur or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, right, there’s a little bell that chimes in the back of your head. Now it’s part of the cultural wallpaper, isn’t it? Lots of those forms are so it is good to use that, but I only write about these stories when I have a beef with them. I think something’s missing. So usually it’s not a retelling, it’s a wrestle with that story. I like that I change something. I want to get in there and see the story from someone else’s point of view. I mean, you mentioned this. The first story is a version of the Minotaur story. I’m really interested in power and how stories get told to protect those in power. I thought, how can I retell this story in a way that’s interesting? And I suddenly saw that it could be told as a way of maybe covering up for the birth of a child with a profound disability. And what is the Minotaur is that kind of real person who’s having this story spun around them to take the attention away from something that’s seen as terribly wrong with them.
Miwa Messer:
You also set it in Elizabethan England, which I thought was a really interesting choice. You could have said it at any point. I mean, it works exactly as it’s written. Please don’t misunderstand me, but I thought, huh, okay, so can we talk about the setting for a second? Because not what I expected.
Mark Haddon:
I think I chose it because I feel comfortable in that setting. Maybe I’ve been reading far too much Hillary Mantel and it’s all stuck there. It’s in the back of my mind. I mean, one of the great things about these stories is they are for all time, aren’t they?
Miwa Messer:
Yes.
Mark Haddon:
The problem is when you can put them anywhere, the question is not where you put them. You can put them in whatever place you want, make it work. You’ve got to make the psychology work. If you make the psychology work, then everything else is backdrop and scenery and furniture, and that was the important thing for me.
Miwa Messer:
So ultimately then it’s character driving the story for you.
Mark Haddon:
Yeah.
Miwa Messer:
So actually let’s use A Mother’s Story. Let’s use that as sort of our, not just a starting point because it’s the first story, but to me really sums up what you’re doing in this collection. The idea that we’ve got an unexpected moment in time that you’re taking this story and poking holes in, okay, let’s call it a cultural cornerstone, right? You’re looking at power. You have given this mother a complicated life and a complicated child and a really horrible husband and an unpleasant daughter, very unpleasant daughter.
Mark Haddon:
Nothing drives the story better than someone really suffering, an empathetic person having their backs pressed firmly against the wall.
Miwa Messer:
I mean, you just said this a second ago. You’ve been chipping away at this story and writing and rewriting, so let’s use this to talk about process for a second, right? You’re chipping away. Does mom show up first? Did the kid show? How do we get to this finished story that I’m going to be thinking about for a really long time?
Mark Haddon:
Two things happened. One is to do with my interest in human beings and one is to do with my interest bizarrely in architecture. So the human being thing, the mother and the child came together. Very, very few people are people in isolation. We are all made by our relationships. And if a child has a disability, no child has a disability in isolation, there’s always there or the terrible absence of someone who ought to be there. So the two come bound together and that’s the joy and the burden of having, well, actually of having a child who is special in any way, whether society counts that specialness as positive or negative, whether you don’t have speech and you’re in a wheelchair or you are a top flight tennis champion often, often has a similar sort of effect on families, doesn’t it? People are bound together very tightly for a long time. So they came as a pair architecture. I was thinking of this idea of a maze with some monster at the middle and thinking about how the important thing is not the structure of the maze.
The important thing is what a thrilling idea it is. And if an idea is thrilling enough, you don’t even really need a maze. You just need people to believe in it. Once people believe in it and people like to believe in things which are both horrible and extraordinary. Conspiracy theories are never about simple stuff. Are they? Conspiracy theorists like to congratulate themselves that what they believing in is outrageous and beyond the pale? No, no conspiracy theorists congratulates them for having solved a simple little puzzle. They’ve peeled back the lid on something terrible and vast. And so that was the architectural aspect. It was the people and the building of a maze. And those two things came together.
Miwa Messer:
I could smell the setting. I was not thrilled to smell the setting, but I could smell it. Details though. I mean obviously you are making up things as you go. I’m not saying you’re researching all of this kind of thing, but is that part of the rewriting process or is that part of the, I know where I’m going with this as I’m telling the story because there is just things about food or things about other characters or lines of dialogue or things that mama’s thinking, things that mama does.
Mark Haddon:
I’m afraid to confess that smell’s there from the beginning.
Miwa Messer:
Okay, okay, well that’s fair, but you understand what I’m responding to. I mean, it’s very intense.
Mark Haddon:
I love stuff both in life and on the page, and I find it very difficult to become wholly engaged with books that are not set in physical spaces where people don’t really have bodies where there’s no sensual stuff. I mean, I don’t mean as extreme as something like Ivy Compton Burnett, which is just dialogue. Quite a few writers whose books are kind of ideas floating in space and some readers love them, but I need to be able to see the room. I want that body on that chair doing that thing, and that makes it real for me. And I think when I’m teaching creative writing, we often discuss this at great length. I’ll say it’s not just the concreteness, it’s the detail as well. I often have a conversation about chocolate bars. If I say, if your character is eating a chocolate bar that’s lazy, come on. No one eats a chocolate bar. You have to choose a chocolate bar. And then I start to say, come on, tell me some brands. And in the room, we all decide which brand feels the most real. Everyone joins in. And within a very short time, we’ve got a little league table of chocolate bars for characters to eat. And there’s something about choosing those details that it does two separate things. One, it creates in the reader’s mind, but there are certain details which make you realize that the writer has really put the effort in to pause and think about this. You think this writer is working hard on my behalf. And I think that gives pleasure to both the reader and the writer.
Miwa Messer:
You really do trust your reader. I mean, I feel like I get to fill in some gaps. Are you writing always with a reader in mind or are you writing with story first?
Mark Haddon:
I think I am perpetually swapping hats. I’m writing for someone like me in a way, it’s pointless writing for someone who isn’t you. I mean are the reader got to hand, it’s a bit but much harder than a painter painting. And then stepping back from the canvas you write, you step back and you think, what would I think if I took this off the shelf in a bookstore and opened it up and my eye fell on this page? Totally out of context. Am I entertained?
Miwa Messer:
But you’re also a painter. I mean, you illustrated and wrote children’s books for years before you switched to fiction for adults. And I know the Curious incident has been published in YA Editions and Adult Editions. I’m going to treat it like it’s an adult novel that can be read by younger people. I’m wondering how much of your visual art and the time that you spend with that influence what you’re doing with words on the page
Mark Haddon:
Actually. Well, part of the strange things about Curious Incident that almost no one mentions is it’s an illustrated book,
Miwa Messer:
Right? That’s true.
Mark Haddon:
If you came into the planet Mars and you’re looking through articles about curious, innocent, almost no one mentions it, but I’m secretly so pleased that I illustrated that book and I did so using a mouse and Ms. Paint, which was that,
Miwa Messer:
Oh, seriously, I had no idea. Sorry, now I have to flip through this copy again. Oh, yeah. Okay. Now, yeah, I do see a little bit of more of the mouse happening, but…
Mark Haddon:
It was that horribly pixely, very low bitmap program that you got bundled with window back in the era.
Miwa Messer:
Yeah, as a baby bookseller, I may have used the Mac equivalent of Ms Paint to maybe design some ads that maybe we never see the light of day again. But
Mark Haddon:
In my life, the writing and the drawing are often very different or painting when I’ve had enough of words I thought, make something I still want to get to the end of the day having contributed some new thing to the world, I’ve had enough of words. It’s a relief to go and draw something because drawing something or painting something involves that same stepping back from the Canva saying, does this work with this entertainer stranger? But you don’t have to use any words whatsoever. You just make the picture step back, remake the picture.
Miwa Messer:
So capriciousness, right mythology, part of mythology is the capriciousness of power, the capriciousness of the gods. But it seems to me that in these stories too, our humans have become very, very capricious. And I’m thinking of my old school, the prep school story. I have to say, when I first got there, I was like, all right, who’s going to fly? Where are? And it’s a really clever way of looking at power. And you’ve spoken before about your experience of prep school and it wasn’t really a thrill.
Mark Haddon:
That’s an underestimation.
Miwa Messer:
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it’s pretty clear that it was not something you enjoyed, but this story is pretty great. And the way you talk about power between kids
Mark Haddon:
And how the power between kids translates, particularly in that class of people in the UK into the same patterns of power among adults, particularly adult men within the bastions of the establishment. I mean, I’ve been sitting on knowledge about that kind of school for a very long time. I was in a very odd state, both all my grandparents, very working class, my father to a complicated story, part of being a very talented artist, became an architect and made lots of money and took, cut a long story short, sent me off to a private school. I think he secretly wanted to have gone himself. I was being sent on his behalf. I did not enjoy it very much. The problem is I think the world has already had way more than enough stories about white men having a rubbish time at private schools, and we could do with them shutting up for a couple of hundred years.
On the other hand, I had some good material from that time and I thought, am I going to die before telling this kind of story? I can do it at least once, can’t I? And I think the flip side is that it does have something important to say about the power, particularly in this country because some of the people I went to school with are now running the country in lesser or greater ways. But I also wanted to talk about, and I think you referred to this, systems are rarely built so that one group has power over another. It’s a horrible gray area in which you can’t survive those systems without becoming implicated in somehow without buying into the system that is hurting other people so that the morality is messy and ambiguous and uncomfortable.
Miwa Messer:
Well, morality and also definitions of monstrosity can flip. And that’s part of why I bring up my old school because I mean, who’s actually the kid who’s not great? I mean, I’m trying to dance around a couple of things. There are a couple of switchbacks in the story where you’re like, oh, okay, okay. These boys think they have it figured out completely, or the narrator I should say. And it’s just ultimately, he’s kind of missing the point a little bit because he’s sort of trying to protect himself and trying to figure out who’s the monster, who’s not the monster, how do I survive? How do I get out of here? And also parents being really unreliable. That’s kind of a great trope of children’s literature. It’s like, well, the adults are kind of useless. They’re always useless. They don’t really understand what’s going on.
Mark Haddon:
Well in most children’s literature, the parents have to be gotten rid of but the remaining adults are never reliable,
Miwa Messer:
Right? Unreliable. The first set of outside forces we’re just like, why am I being forced to play alone with this? Which does though lead me to quiet limit of the world because I do feel like these are siblings. I do feel like you are in different ways addressing that same sort of class consciousness. I mean, we’ve got a character who ends up, obviously it’s a play on a myth, but who ends up being immortal, but someone forgets to ask for the other bits of immortality that would make it a little more pleasant then what this character is going through. And so again, we come back to this idea of messy morality, but also what’s a monster? What’s not a monster? So did my old school come first? Do you remember the order that you wrote these stories in?
Mark Haddon:
What’s really interesting is that I’d never seen them as paired in that way. And that’s great. I mean, I think one of the uplifting things about writing a story that works if it ever happens is that two people go away and have positive experiences, but then disagree violently about what those stories were about. No, for me it was very much about getting what you want. And if you get absolutely what you want, what is it like? Particularly, I think all of us to some extent have trouble coming to terms with the fact that we are going to die. That lies finite. And I’ve had periods in my life when that’s been absolutely terrifying. But I remember doing one of those periods. I’ve very rarely been uplifted by those little Instagram type catchphrases that are meant to give you wisdom. In a nutshell. Most of them are at all useless. But I remember one which has always been incredibly helpful to me. It was ran something like this. There are people who get depressed about the fact that life is finite, who cannot think of what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. So people want their lives to go on forever, but can’t work out what to do with the time they’ve already got. And I thought, let’s have the time go on almost forever. What do you do with an infinite life? And it turns into a nightmare very quickly.
Miwa Messer:
I mean, honestly, I would not choose immortality. Absolutely. Maybe it’s because I read as much as I do, but no, thank you. I’m good. No, thank you. I do not want need to live to be 120. Thanks very much.
Mark Haddon:
Well, I think most of us wouldn’t choose a mortality, but we find it very hard to press the stop button as well.
Miwa Messer:
I’m just putting off thinking about it. I’m just avoiding the thought at all. Although grief is sort of one of the great cornerstones of literature, right? I will read about great, that’s the messiness that I like to read about. I don’t want sort of perfect pat solutions. I was not, but dogs actually. And it’s spelled D.O.G.Z. In the story collection, D.O.G.Z. reminded me a little bit of what you were doing in The Porpoise in that you were playing with the classical, but then shifting how you tell the story. You open The Porpoise with a plane crash and it’s very much present day, and then suddenly we’re in a completely different timeline and lots of different things are happening. And I sort of feel like you’ve done a little bit of the reverse with D.O.G.Z.
Mark Haddon:
D.O.G.Z. has written partly in response to what I think is one of those wonderfully warmly, luminous passages in classical literature when Ovid’s telling that story of Acton, who stumbles on the goddess Diana bathing and gets eaten by his dogs. The dogs are all given names, names and their heritage and everything else, and in a way that no other dogs in classical literature are, and none of the other characters in those stories are. And a, it’s just deeply touching. I mean, if you feel warmly towards dogs, it’s amazing to see Ovid stopping to sort of give all the dogs names. And also you think, as so often happens when you’re in a museum or you are reading classical literature, you think, oh, these people were like us. They felt really happy about their dogs. They gave their dogs names, they scratched them behind the ear. And when suddenly there, there’s a bridge reaches through time, 2008 just vanishes, and you’re just there. And maybe the story is a way of fleshing out that bridge, sort of that link between dogs then and dogs now. And there are the bearers of so many ideas about ourselves.
Miwa Messer:
Absolutely. I mean, and I say this as a dog person, okay, I’m totally biased, but a good dog. Oh man, a good dog is the best. It is absolutely the best. But let’s talk about other influences too. I mentioned at the top of the show, Virginia Woolf and HG Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Interesting choices. And also if you could see how far apart my hands are right now. Come on, mark. Now, Virginia Woolf has always been an influence for you. I mean that much I know. And so let’s start with Woolf for a second, because you do see her influence in the way you write as well, but you’re also really clear that when you were younger, you read an awful lot of straight up science guides, really straight up nonfiction science books. So when did you come to Wolf and when did she start to really dig into the back of your brain and turn you into, well partially turn you into the writer you are now?
Mark Haddon:
I came to Wolf during my degree, which was, I confess, not taught terribly well, and I sort of passed over her and didn’t really get to her, and I expect I was mid twenties before I went back to her, and the light bulb really went on. I don’t think there’s another writer in the English language who managed just to articulate that thing that you can do in a novel, but you cannot do in any other form about what it’s like to be a human being in that weird conjunction of a mind and body moment to moment. People often, well nearly always talk about a room of one’s own as sort of feminist political tract. And I think that’s true, but what people often don’t notice, the number of rooms in Virginia Wolf that are metaphors for the human mind, there’s always someone in a room looking out through a window, looking out through a door. There’s a sense of me being in here and the world being out there. I’m both protected and isolated at the same time. And I think that boundary between in here and out there, whether it’s a house or a mind or a body is where she exists, she’s always moving back and forth across that boundary. I don’t think anyone else does that as well. And I don’t think you can do that in any other artistic form.
Miwa Messer:
I agree. I don’t think you can. I mean, the novel is designed to reveal interiority, right? The novel sits in liminal space, and I should say short stories and novels sit in that liminal space, right? Between what do I know? What do I, don’t know. The reader is always the outsider. Ultimately.
Mark Haddon:
The other thing she does, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do, and you’ll see this when she does sort of group set pieces, particularly in something like To the Lighthouse, there’s a voice that she uses and it moves in and out people’s minds within a room. And you’ll get a sense that a group of people, a family, a set of friends, have a shared consciousness and she’s talking with the voice of that shared consciousness. I know when I last thought about this, it was when I got to see Vanya on stage in London where Andrews Scott played all the characters in Chekov’s play, and it was rewritten by Simon Stevens who wrote the stage version of Curious. Now he all the characters and everyone’s saying, isn’t it amazing that he articulates the difference between all the characters so subtly that you can see him moving from one person to the other, but there was another level of something going. The way it was constructed made you realize that a family is made up of individuals, but it’s an entity itself. It has its own consciousness, its own voice, and it captured that brilliantly.
Miwa Messer:
Well, that also sounds like A Spot of Bother, which was your second novel, which weirdly comic, everyone gets their own turn. Every chapter is narrated by a different character in this family. And I mean, it sets off with kind of a wild premise. And essentially though we’re getting a portrait, not just of the family members, but as you said, the entire family as an entity. And just listening to you talk about Wolf just made me think, oh, oh, right, okay. I also love the title. I really love the title. It works for the book, but also it’s just, to me, it’s very funny. It’s just one of those things where when you read it, you’re just like, oh, that British understatement thing that you guys do. But with Wells, I mean Wells and Woolf also stylistically,
Mark Haddon:
He wasn’t quite the sort of epitome of Edwardian male writing against which he was setting herself, not quite. There is something of that doll solidity about him. What I like about him, however, is that the ideas in his best books, they don’t lend themselves easily to being co-opted by any particular ideology. They sort of break free of that. You can read something like the Time Machine as racism, as anti-racism, a sort of critique of civilization. If you go in with a certain point of view, you can use it to sort of back yourself up, but it twists and turns and sort of, it escapes you. And I think that is a perennial fascination for me with his stories. In fact, at the moment, I am resting with a story, which is sort of an extension of the time machine for precisely that reason. He’s got his hooks into me, so he’s not done with me yet.
Miwa Messer:
Okay, okay. But let’s talk about other influences too. Let’s talk about other writers that you’re pulling from or painters or musicians. I mean, I feel like there’s so much that runs through the back of your brain as you are creating, I mean, obviously I pulled out Wolf and Wells because of this book specifically, but there’s obviously there’s Shakespeare and Greek mythology. But what else? Because there’s a lot. I think you read prodigious, I’m guessing.
Mark Haddon:
I haven’t been reading prodigious recently. My brain has been so foggy, although I have to say I sound reasonably awake now, but there’s nothing like the adrenaline bursts of appearing on a podcast to wake you up. It’s like being in a house on fire. I’m still sleeping about 10 hours a night and reading quite slowly. I’m coming back to normal, but it’s taking a time. I do read a lot and widely, but I have a shockingly poor memory. I am, I think, one of the few people on the surface of the earth to have read Proust twice by accident.
Miwa Messer:
Sorry. That’s great. That’s really great.
Mark Haddon:
I got to the end of the last volume of the Terence Kilmartin translation years ago now, and found my own pencil markings in the margin. I thought, oh dear, I’ve been here before, haven’t I? A bit of me would, I think like many of us would love to have a memory, like a library where everything stored and retrieved at will. I have come to terms with the fact that I have a compost heap in my head. Everything goes in, nothing can be retrieved, but it all mulches down into something which is creative and productive. I just have to hope the Proust is in there somewhere, being eaten away by bacteria and creating something nutritious.
Miwa Messer:
I think it’s hysteric because also memory is such a big part of, I’m sorry, the irony of it all is not lost on me. But let’s go back to the compost for a second because all of its cooking, all of its creating, all of its, but how do you know when you have the voice of a story or a novel, especially when you’re pulling, alright, you have your basic idea that I’m going to poke away at power structures. I’m going to poke away at the stories we’ve been told that have become sort of foundational in literature and our worlds and our cultures and all of that. But how do you know when you have the voice? Because that feels like the little sort of sticky bit that really is kind of harder to figure out, right?
Mark Haddon:
Interesting. What you and I was talking about this recently during a live event, I was saying that the way we’ve been talking about themes, power, old stories is slightly retrospective. It’s writers, and a lot of writers do this. They look back, they see the themes and they give the impression that that’s why they picked up that story.
Miwa Messer:
Okay.
Mark Haddon:
It’s more the case that I carry around this great rag bag of images and ideas and lines. I mean, I have literal scrapbooks, so it’s both a metaphorical and a physical rag bag, and I’ll often start writing ideas. It’ll take a long time to know if something works. And ultimately, it’s got to do with none of what we’ve been talking about. It’s got to do with, can I read a half page of this back or a few paragraphs, and does it sing to me? Does it hang down? Again, it’s me swapping hats. It’s saying, as a reader who knows nothing, does it hold my attention? Does it entertain me? And I think if most writers were honest, that’s the question you do have to answer in the end, will it hold the attention of a stranger and move them? And I hope I can do that, but it doesn’t mean I throw away a lot. There are lots of ideas which seem great. I can’t make them sing on the page.
Miwa Messer:
Do you throw them away, throw them away, or do you just put ’em in a box for later?
Mark Haddon:
Well, it’s all deep in some hard drive now, isn’t it?
Miwa Messer:
Right. Yeah, no, there’s that
Mark Haddon:
My wise wife said to me some years ago, why do you keep such ridiculously long list of things to do? Why didn’t you just get rid of the list and the important things will stick in your head? And I’m better at that now, and I do apply it to writing as well. It’s a good idea to just let go of stuff that doesn’t work. Aspects of it that do work tend to come back. I’ll tell you a story, which I still find quite spooky, which is that shortly before I wrote The Red House, I wrote a completely abortive, well, was it even a novel? It was a grotesque, overwritten, purple concept book, which eventually had to be taken behind the barn and put out of its misery. It was nine separate sort of sections. They were all going to be children stories about lost children one way or another. And guiding Motif or metaphor was those, there’s nine by nine tile puzzles, which were given away in party bags at Children’s Party. You have one missing square and you have eight movable squares. And the cost of the horrible asymmetry of the missing square was the motility of all the other squares.
So it was going to be called the Missing Square. I’m embarrassed. One chapter was like a film script, one was a horror story, one was in verse outrageously over the top and terrible, terrible idea, mostly about trying to tell readers how clever I was, not really about entertaining them, which is always about idea. And eventually I got rid of it, justifiably telling the story that I’ve been telling you now to Claire Ted, who writes The Guardian on stage at a short story festival just after the Red House came out. And she listened to it, my story, and she said, mark, you said you threw that idea away. Have you just realized that you’ve just written a novel in which there were eight adult characters and one dead child?
Miwa Messer:
And that’s how we got the red house,
Mark Haddon:
And the hair stood up, literally stood up on the back of my neck. It was a demonstration that that principle does work. If you throw away the chaff, then the wheat will come back somehow.
Miwa Messer:
Is that the first piece of advice you’d give a writer at the start of their career? Just let go of the stuff that just is, I mean, you kind of know when something’s not working, right? I mean, even if you’re sitting down early on, I mean, you kind of know when stuff is bad.
Mark Haddon:
Yes. But it would be a shame to give writers early on all the negative advice about throwing stuff away. They’re probably needing more encouragement. But yes, you’re absolutely right. One of the, I always say writers at an early stage start by thinking their job is to accurately get what is in their head or in their heart onto the paper. And it takes them a long while to realize that the reader doesn’t give a damn about their heart, their head. They just want to be entertained by the stuff on the page. And you have to sort of forget yourself, forget yourself and your own needs altogether. But at the same time, I’ve gone off at a slight tangent there, but I’m coming back right now.
Miwa Messer:
Okay.
Mark Haddon:
You will never, I think, be a half decent writer unless you have that little critical voice at the back of your head. Unfortunately, when you are early on in your career and most of what you’re writing is rubbish, it’s really hard to listen to that voice because it’s saying, this is all rubbish. But later on, you need to support and encourage and amplify that voice. And I always say to people, go and find readers whose response is not because it’s positive or because it’s negative, because when they say something to you, you say, oh, yes, I secretly knew that all along. I’ll get rid of that. We have a run joke in our house. I often get my writing to my wife to read, but I know her so well that I’ve occasionally dropped something onto her lap saying, do you mind taking a look at that? And just the physical act of putting it on her lap creates this kind of beam of light from heaven, which illuminates the passage, doesn’t work, and I’ll just take it back and say thank you. And she’s not utter of a single word.
Miwa Messer:
Well, how many books now between the children’s books and the books for adults? I mean, you’ve written almost 30 books, right?
Mark Haddon:
That is very possibly true, and I would not the top of my head,
Miwa Messer:
I am guesstimating. I think there’s sort of 16 books for the short set as I call them, and then eight for adults. Yeah, eight for one poetry collection, two short story collections, and then four novels, five novels, yes. So I mean, there is a body of work. You have been doing this for more than a minute, but having written children’s books too, does that influence how you approach the work for adults? I mean, you keep talking about wanting to be entertaining and you are dealing with some really big ideas and heavy themes, and yet you are constantly coming back to whether or not what you’re doing is entertaining on the page.
Mark Haddon:
Well, entertainment is a broad church, isn’t it? Okay. Entertainment is both Ted Lasso and Macbeth. We can be entertained by some complex, difficult, dark stuff, and I am, but what I did get both from writing for kids and writing for television, which I did very briefly, never indulge yourself. It’s not about you. And particularly in kids writing, no kids are going to applaud you because you wrote about the weather really well for two pages. I mean, sure, if you’re a genius, do the weather, but you’ve got to be a genius, and you’ve got to be certain of it. Check yourself at all times. I think we all know examples of great writers who are prone to this, who feel the fact that they are themselves and that voice is, their voice is sufficient to justify them taking up your time. I think you need to justify taking up someone’s time. You’ve got to be delivering something. Never don’t rest on your laurels. And you can’t get up with kids because particularly very young kids, I remember the first time I ever read stories to a class of very, very young children. Now, I sat there and opened a book and I was about to read a story, and I was in Scotland and there was a boy and a girl sitting in the front row, and the girl turned to the boy and said, Luke, his hands are shaking.
There’s this brutal honesty among children, and they have that brutal honesty. I’d say up until teenage, if you perform badly for an adult audience, they will indulge you slightly because they’re embarrassed on your behalf. Children don’t give a damn. If you’re not entertaining, that’s it out the door. And I think I’ve retained a sense of that, and I think that’s solitary and helpful.
Miwa Messer:
Okay, so I alluded to this story that I’m still thinking about, the ending of which is called The Bunker, and it’s dystopian. It’s more than a little unexpected. And obviously we are not going to talk about the ending of this story that I will not stop thinking about, but it does sort of sit outside of a lot of what’s happening in this collection in a different, I mean, the themes are there, but the substance and the style are slightly different. Can we grab a few minutes with that story before we round out this episode?
Mark Haddon:
I think there is a connection, some of the other stories, and it’s a perennial theme for, I cannot remember the name of the writer who spoke about this, and I’ll be forever grateful for them. I think it was an Irish quote, but I haven’t tracked them down. They talked about how do we get from the here and now into the weird zone in a way. And I think of that, remember when we were kids and we read stories, it was really easy to, at the 13th, chime of the clock to open the panel beside the fireplace or through the door to the secret garden. You could just do that, couldn’t you? To the weird zone.
We now know that in our daily lives, this mundane world is all there is, but we still have a sense of there being somewhere else, somewhere straight, somewhere different on the other side of that membrane. And I always want to give credence to that profound sense we have that there is some strange nearby place. How do you get there through myth, for example, through talking about what’s going on in the mind of dogs through mental ill health, psychosis, dreams. There are plenty of ways out of the mundane world into other worlds, and one of the things that I did in the bunker was set up two separate realities.
Miwa Messer:
Oh, yes, you did.
Mark Haddon:
And leave the reader unsure as which is real and which is not. There’s that famous story about the Chinese philosopher who dreams that he’s a butterfly. The problem with that formula is that it starts off by saying he’s a Chinese philosopher. The really interesting stage is when a dreams of being B, but B is dreamy of being A, and they don’t know which is which. And I thought that encapsulates that profound sense of a weird world right next door to which I am always drawn.
Miwa Messer:
And that pretty much does sum up actually, Dogs and Monsters really Well, I mean all of these worlds are, well, you can hold them in the palm of your hand or you can listen to them on the audio book because the audio book’s pretty great too. But I’m going to say thank you, mark Hadden. This was great. I had such a good time hanging out with you Dogs and Monsters is out now, and go check out The Porpoise too while you’re at it. Thanks so much.
Mark Haddon:
Thank you very much indeed.