Interviewing your own characters

David Mitchell interviewed most entertaingly by @GuardianBooks podcast.

I’ve loved David Mitchell’s books (apart from one I couldn’t finish), but wasn’t expecting him to be so entertaining on all sujects from:

– his unlikely friendship with Kate Bush

– interviewing his own characters in the shower to see if they’re fit for the next job (this, I think, may be a fib, but makes a better story than days of note-making, crossings out and solitary walks, and what audiences want is to know what the act of writing is like, not what it’s like to actually sit there writing)

– deciding, after his sixth books, that he is not really a novelist

I come away from listening to this and rush to my notebooks, ready to seek new shapes to my writing, and to re-employ my favourite characters from my own previous writings.