I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.
In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.
What I feel is that true creation happens when you're making something out of nothing - like it's divine, you know. Creation is a completely divine concept.
I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things.
I have written ever since I knew mechanically how to do it.
When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'
My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.
In improvising, you've got your scale; you've got the notes that are going to sound good with other notes, the intervals that are going to sound good. But you've also got all the chromatic possibilities, the possibilities of sounding dissident, of being unexpected.
Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time.
I'm the rogue Canadian in my family - I just happened to be born here while my parents were studying here.
