Salman Rushdie on Creativity and Criticism

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard. I’m here today with Salman Rushdie, author of the Booker Prize winning, Midnight’s Children, and the fatwa-provoking, the Satanic Verses. His latest novel is Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.

Mr. Rushdie, thanks so much for joining me.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Thanks very much.

ALISON BEARD: So I’d like to start by talking about your writing process. How do you work?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: I’ve always had told myself simply to treat it like a nine to five job– if you have a job, you just go and do it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re feeling good that day. You know, if you’re a carpenter, you make your table. And my view is that I don’t think that writers, creative artists, can really afford to [? ally ?] themselves with– that’s called creative temperament. You know, I don’t think you can afford to wait for Julius to descend, or inspiration to descend. You have to just sit there and make yourself do it.

And I’ve, over the years– that is a discipline that I really have developed. And I can sit down at my desk every day and do my day’s work. I just do not give myself permission not to do it.

And once your mind understands that it has no excuses, it’s remarkable how it begins to play along– you know, do its job.

ALISON BEARD: What’s The hardest part about writing novels?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Just that understanding the world is a very difficult thing. And bringing human beings to life on the page is a difficult thing. And what’s most difficult about it is that it should not feel difficult to the reader– in order to create a living person on the page, which the reader and read and immediately recognize as that particular kind of living person– that’s really hard. The art that conceals art.

I’ve always felt one of the most important things for a writer is that they should have some interesting relationship with the English language, or whatever language they’re writing. And that relationship changes over time. There are things that you do with language, at one point in your life, and then you begin to feel that you’ve done that enough, and you want to find new voices, new styles, new manners.

And so that constant wrestling match with the language is– it’s also one of the best things about the job, it’s the most– I mean, I’m making it sound like it’s only hard work. It’s not. It’s actually the most enjoyable thing I could think of doing.

I think that the moment at which I’m happiest in my life is when I’m writing a book, and I can feel that it’s working. It’s exhilarating. It’s much more exhilarating and enjoyable than publishing a book. I actually, as time goes by, dread the moments of publication more and more.

ALISON BEARD: And why is that? Because of the publicity rounds?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Well, partly it’s just because of what’s expected of you. But it’s a very vulnerable moment, because when you write, you fool yourself into thinking that what you’re doing is a private act, because you’re alone in a room. Nobody else is reading what you do. It’s just you and the page, and you’re trying to make it work. And all the time you do it– which could be many years, and in my case, three times it’s taken five years to write a book– all that time, it feels like something that is just privately yours, and nobody else’s.

And then, along comes publication, and you’re obliged to admit this thing that you thought of as a private act is actually an extremely public act. And [? it’s very naked– ?] people get to say what they think of you. It’s like I’m dressing in public.

And also, I do think there’s something else about the way in which books are published now that is problematic. Which is that, in a way when I write a book and offer it to readers, it’s the moment at which I want to be out of the picture. If I give you a book to read, my view is, why don’t you read that, and once you’ve read it, let’s talk about it. In other words, you want to talk about the book after people have read it.

Because you don’t want to prescribe to people, you don’t want to tell people how they should read it, or describe what it means. You want that to be their discovery– for them to bring their imagination themselves to the book, and interact with the book. And that’s the joy of reading. The joy of reading is that communion between the reader’s imagination and the writer’s imagination.

So in a way, my instinct is to disappear at the moment a book comes out. And then, maybe one should do the book tour like six months later. And the way in which books are now obliged to be marketed is something which runs counter to my instincts about the relationship between the writer and the reader.

And if I look back, a couple hundred years, if you look at the 18th century, one of the great periods in the history of English literature, it was entirely possible for books to become extremely famous while their authors remained more or less unknown. If you think about the success of books like Gulliver’s Travels or Robinson Crusoe or Tristram Shandy– they’re books that were the greatest books of their period. They didn’t have to do anything to promote the book– the book was just put out there.

And Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne were able to continue to be private individuals, while their books became very celebrated. And I think that’s better–it’s better that way. But we don’t live in that world anymore.

ALISON BEARD: Right. When you published your first book, it wasn’t very well received. And this was a time when many young British novelists were becoming famous. So what made you keep at it?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Well, I look back at that young fellow, and I’m quite impressed that he kept at it. And I think one of the things that makes a writer a writer is that it’s something he really needs to do. You know, it’s not just a choice of a job or a career. It really is in the old fashioned sense of a calling– it’s a vocation. And writing speaks to something very deep inside the person doing it.

And it’s necessary– it’s necessary to the writer. And I’ve always thought that the only books worth writing are books of that sort. Books that are necessary to the writer.

Because, frankly, there already too many books. The world is drowning in books. And even if we read a great masterpiece every day, none of us would ever be able to read all the great masterpieces that exist already. And if you’re going to add a book to that mountain, I’ve always thought, it better be necessary for you to do so. Otherwise, save the trees.

ALISON BEARD: I love that. So how did you respond to criticism early in your career, and has that changed over time?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Well, I think that anybody who claims that they don’t care is probably lying. And it was very upsetting– it was very shocking to me when my first book came out and was received unkindly. And very pleasing to me, by the way, that that book is still in print, and doing quite well, and that people seem to like it. You know, you lose the short game, but you win the long game sometimes.

But it was very shocking, and it was actually very helpful to me. Because what it did, after I got over the shock, was made me question, all over again, what I thought about writing and how to go about it. And what did I think was wrong with that book? Never mind what the critics thought was wrong with it, what did I think was wrong with it. And it really made me go back and re-examine everything about my writing, and, if you like, start again in a different way.

And that starting again in a different way led to Midnight’s Children. So it was maybe a necessary mistake that I had to make in order to find out the writer that I really it in me to be.

ALISON BEARD: How did the fatwa, after the Satanic Verses, affect the way you approached work? Both immediately thereafter, and then over the long term?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Oh, immediately– immediately it got in the way a great deal– I didn’t have much time or ability or head space to think about work, because the world was shouting in my ears. In the end– and when I say in the end, I mean once I could get a grip of myself– I actually found, and I’ve always thought, that the fact that I was a writer really helped me to survive that experience, because it allowed me to continue to explore the world, and say what I had to say, and not be silenced.

And as a writer, I always thought, from a very early point, that the thing to do was to try and continue to be the writer that I had always wanted to be. And by then, I had some idea about what that was. I didn’t want to be derailed as an artist. And I thought, [? stole ?] myself, quite firmly, just try and go on being the writer you’ve always visioned. And go on down you road.

ALISON BEARD: And you certainly did. But why should people in business read fiction?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Well, these days, any publisher will tell you, nonfiction sells better than fiction. The reason I continue to adhere to the novel, is the nature of fact is practice [? of ?] everything. One person’s fact is another person’s truthiness. Speaking of, somebody who was–I was a history major, and so the study of history and how facts are created, how things come to be seen as true. One of the things you learn from the study of history is how contested events are. How there isn’t simply a fact– there are version which collide.

And the fact is to be discerned somewhere in the middle of that conflict of versions. And the point about fiction is that it recognizes that as a normal condition of life. That truth is something imperfect, not objective, or that objectivity is very hard to arrive at. And that there is another kind of truth that human beings respond to very powerfully, which is a kind of self-truth, or emotional truth. The truth of relations between human beings, how we are with each other. The truth of what is our relationship to place, to our country, to our ideas, to our belief systems.

This other kind of truth, which has to do with human truth, lived truth, that’s what you find in a novel. So that if, for instance– one of the things I think is happening now, as people in America finally begin to have access to better translations from around the world, they’re able to use literature to understand parts of the world which otherwise are obscure to them, although those parts of the world crop up in the news all the time.

You know, if you turn on the news and you there’s something about Afghanistan, what you see is explosions, and people shouting at each other. But if you read literature, if you read let’s just say, The Kite Runner, you begin to understand the lived experience of that country, what it might actually be like to be an Afghan person in that place, facing those things. And so you understand something you didn’t understand, otherwise.

ALISON BEARD: So that’s the importance of novels. But you’re also very active on Twitter. What attracts you to social media?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Just immediacy– just immediacy. Just to say what you have to say right away, and not be mediated through a journalist or– you just get straight out there.

And I’ve always thought, you know, novels, books, they take a really long time to write. It’s ridiculous to try and address topical issues in fiction, because five years later when you’ve finished the book, we live in the moments in which the subject changes very fast. And it’s the wrong way to try and take up an issue that a kind of hot button issue.

So Twitter is, if you like, social media are the exact opposite of that. They have no long term life, but they have that sort of immediacy of communication. And that’s useful.

I mean I was very against Twitter in the beginning, and resisted enormously having a Twitter account. A friend of mine twisted my arm and said, just do it. You’ll see that you enjoy it. And so I tried it, and found myself– to my complete shock– having what’s now getting on to a million people following. To have that voice, or that platform, particularly when you factor into the phenomenon of the retweet– it sort of takes it to many, many more people.

I just think it puts a megaphone in your hand. And when there’s something to shout about, it’s useful to have a megaphone in your hand.

ALISON BEARD: You’re also asked to give many speeches. In a recent commencement at Emery, you encouraged the audience to strive for something beyond seeking happiness. What do you strive for?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: You know, it’s a strange thing, writing. All you want to do is to write something that will out-last you. My friend, Martin Amis said a wonderful phrase where he said, what you hope to do is leave behind a shelf of books. You want to be able to walk into a book store and say, from here to here, it’s me.

And that idea of making something durable, making something that outlasts fashion, that outlasts contemporary events, that outlasts the world in which it was made– there’s something very beautiful about that to me. And if I can do that– I won’t be around to see it, but if that happens, that would be what I would want to happen.

And I’m very happy, [INAUDIBLE] Midnight’s Children is not, what, 34, 35 years old? And the fact that young people still feel it speaks to them, that they’re still able to read it, [INAUDIBLE] that’s very satisfying. Because it means people who weren’t born when the book came out still connect to it, still have some sense of its valuable to them.

So that’s like leaping the first hurdle– leaping to the next generation. If it can leap a few more of those hurdles, then it has a chance of sticking around. Yeah, that’s what I would like to do, just leave behind books that last.

ALISON BEARD: Midnight’s Children received so many accolades. Is that a difficult thing when your second book is your most popular?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: I mean, truthfully, not really. It was a book that changed my life for the better. It did wonderful things for me, that book. It created my– people’s sense of me as a writer. It made me financially independent, it was a book that I’ve been enormously grateful to. I know, now, I don’t write like that anymore. That was a young man’s book.

And Midnight Children’s was published when I was 33. When I started writing it, I was 27 or 28. And now I’m about to be 68. It’s a long time ago. And my view is always that the great thing about the writing life is that it’s a really long life. And there’s no retirement age. And all you do is you write the next book. You find the next book to write, and you write that. And sometimes people love it, and sometimes they don’t. I’ve had both experiences. And doesn’t matter– you just go on writing the next book.

ALISON BEARD: And your next book is Two Years Eight Months Twenty-Eight Nights. Mr. Rushdie, thank you so much for talking with me today.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Thanks very much.

ALISON BEARD: That was the author, Salman Rushdie. He’s the subject of our September Life’s Work interview. For more, go to HBR.org.