David Mitchell / Features / Untitled Books

"A book is an outgrowth of a personality."

David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell was named as one of Granta's twenty best young British novelists in 2003. His most recent book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is published this month.

Where are you right now?

In my hut in my back garden in West Cork.

Where do you write?

Here, at my desk; in my notebook, in an armchair; on planes.

How do you write?

By recording in words the scenes that are workshopped and staged in my imagination.

What keeps you writing?

My addiction to it.

Who do you write for?

Me, and the rest of the world. Nobody else.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?

My wife, and certain old friends.

How do you know if your work is good?

If my wife hands my MS back after a few hours, it's good.

If it languishes on the bedside table for days, it's a dog.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

Ten or twenty, in varying degrees of completion.

Which book do you wish you'd written?

I esteem many, but I can't make 'wish' bridge the gap of the fact that I didn't write them and couldn't have done so. A book is an outgrowth of a personality, and unless you can be someone else, you couldn't write that person's work. Why would you want to when it's tough enough writing your own.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?

Life's too short for literary guilt. Go ahead, go on, nobody'll ever find out, go on, read it, you know you want to...

Which writer made you want to write?

Ursula le Guin's Earthsea, Isaac Asimov's Foundation books and John Wyndham's The Chrysalids.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?

This time my problem is with 'most': how do I measure James Ellroy's against Marilynne Robinson? Kazuo Ishiguro against Neil Gaiman? Compelling and original and tightly-composed narrative excites me, whoever wrote it.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?

Dozing on the sunlit sofa in the corner of the room.

Oh, you mean my job? Not sure. Designing video games?

What next?

Global dominance by anti-democratic states followed by modernity dropping out of the sky as its oil tanks all run dry at once. But don't panic.

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is published by Sceptre

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Friday, 7 May, 2010