Notes from David Mitchell's talk on his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet at the Brighton Festival, 6 May 2010.
Gremlins in the system... ooh I have a God-like resonance tonight [the audio is erratic, by turns echoing and then cutting out]
[Dejima as C18th] cultural cat-flap
The Dutch named their warehouses.
For a priceless coin of time, their hands are linked by a few inches of bitter herb [...] I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket. [...] Crickets scritter and clirk in the garden's low walls of stone [The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, p122-3]
Elmore Leonard's dictum that readers skip description but not dialogue, as if the quote marks catch the eye.
all of my book [a slip of the tongue but appropriate since they are all one book in some senses]
inability to say what you want [is the interesting bit in dialogue/communication - this reality of miscommunication present in much of his writing, eg the stammer in Black Swan Green]
Use of one, then two then three narrators to gradually dial up intensity and pace.
floor became the wall [lifted from a shot in Donnie Darko, and an attempt to avoid cliche]
On developing characters: starting with their autobiography - their relationships to the key people in their life, and attitude to money, love, work, sex, death, etc.
Film as the guiding/organising metaphor of perception/experience since the second half of the C20th. Thinking in terms of camera angles and shots.
Questions on William Golding from the floor: acknowledged as an important influence, and similarly jump from one style to another "like a human flea"
The book's published next week but they're selling at his author talks already - I've only dipped into it so far, but it looks great.
Related: How we work: David Mitchell.
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