Charlie Hill

Episode 464

RLF Introduction: Hello, and welcome to Writers Aloud, the podcast about writing from the Royal Literary Fund.

Ann Morgan: This episode is devoted to an interview with novelist, short story writer and memoirist, Charlie Hill. An inventive writer who employs a range of styles and forms, Hill has taught experimental writing for the Arvon Foundation and founded and ran a community literary festival for six years. He draws on his experience of deprivation in early adulthood in his writing, but the urge to put words on the page has much deeper roots, as he started out by telling me.

Charlie Hill: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. I can remember – almost my first memory of school – was two stories that I wrote, I think we were given prompts: but one was about tiger hunting in a jungle and one was about whaling on a whaling ship. And thinking about that now, I don’t know…it’s a strange choice of topics for a six-year-old to be asked or seven-year-old or wherever I was, to be asked to write about.

But yeah, that’s my first memory of writing stories and having them read and it’s almost one of my first memories of being at school, so yeah, it’s difficult to sort of pinpoint really.

Ann Morgan: So it’s always been there in the background somewhere, storytelling, and putting words on the page in one way or another?

Charlie Hill: Yes, I mean, there was a period in my twenties when I didn’t, when I wasn’t writing and putting words on the page because I wasn’t really…yeah, I didn’t really have the resources, either time-wise or…I had bought an electric typewriter, just before PCs became slightly more common.

Ann Morgan: Yeah, because actually there’s this brilliant anecdote in your, in your memoir,  I Don’t Want to Go to the Taj Mahal, where you say you got your first publishing opportunities at the first attempt with the Observer Magazine, and from that you thought: Oh, if I write three of these a month, I’ll be fine. And you bought a typewriter and set off, and you were still a teenager at that point, I think, is that right?

Charlie Hill: Yes, I think I must have been, yeah, I was nineteen I think, yes, you’re right, actually, blimey, yeah. And I can still remember, it was 150 quid for 1500 words, it was a freelance column, and they used to have something called ‘Spleen’ and it was a full page, open to…wasn’t necessarily freelancers, it was just people who wanted a go.

And I wrote a piece about civil servants and at the time I was working in the Civil Service, so as a civil servant, and sent it off, and as you say, I was completely unprepared for the fact that they just took one look at it and said ‘Yes’, and then paid me 150 quid. And I was on, as I said, around about probably 300, 320 quid a month or something like that. I can’t remember the figures, I’m not really… it’s just…it’s the figure in relation to what I was on.

I mean, obviously, it was in the realms of fantasy that you could just strike it, because, that was…it’s a bit like when…my first published short story. And again, I thought, and that was the first short story I’d written and that went to Ambit and I was like: Blimey! I was again surprised by that, but I hadn’t learned from the previous experience of publishing my first nonfiction, so I had almost exactly the same reaction, which was: Right, okay, this is it, I’m gonna be…I’ll be made here!

And then it was about ten years between that and my next short story being published, so yeah.

Ann Morgan: Yeah, there’s a lovely thread that runs through your writing actually about this kind of, well, you call it actually in your memoir, you call it, ‘a stubbornly contrary, go my own way-ness’. This kind of rejection of the mainstream, I think, or rejection of the standard way that things are done, and a lot of bravery, I think, tied up with that.

I mean, the kind of jacking in the job and buying a typewriter, for me, was a sort of example of that, of just, taking a plunge, leaping at something, that’s really…it’s quite endearing and quite charming. And in fact, the title itself, I Don’t Want to go to the Taj Mahal, sort of sums that up, doesn’t it? It’s a kind of, I don’t want to do what everyone does. Has that always been a thread for you do you think, is that a kind of central theme in how you go about your work and in your storytelling?

Charlie Hill: Yes, I think it probably has. And that’s a very kind way of describing it. I’m not sure everyone I’ve come into contact with either personally or professionally would necessarily describe it as ‘endearing’. And I think ‘stubborn’…yeah, stubborn…I don’t know? Yeah! But yes, yeah, I think so.

I tend to like to write, or I’m sort of moving away from that – this – now, but up until very recently, I tended to like to write against something. So, my first novel looked at sort of, the milieu with which I was familiar, in which I was growing up and blah, blah, blah, in which all my mates were from. And decided to sort of complicate the battle, if you like, which is what summat James Baldwin said, I saw recently on The Marginalian, he said, ‘One of the writer’s tasks is to complicate the battle’.

And the people I was growing up with were in this sort of…there’s various different sort of subcultures and they were all politically active up to a point and they were all creatively active up to a point, and almost instead of celebrating that I decided to engage with it critically. So I was writing against these subcultures.

Ann Morgan: Anti-antidisestablishmentarianism, is that right, or is that…I’m getting confused with my antis?

Charlie Hill: Yeah, I suppose, I think that’s it, yeah, it is about complicating the battle. Whilst they may have held and may have campaigned and may have been involved with much that I approved of, you know, it would have been too easy for me to write about that in a purely positive way, I think.

Ann Morgan: So this was The Space Between Things, is that right, your first novel?

Charlie Hill: This is The Space Between Things, yeah.

Ann Morgan: So that’s quite an autobiographical novel, but with a kind of critical eye?

Charlie Hill: Yes, I mean, it wasn’t actually as autobiographical, I mean, I…the principal character in that was taken…was a composite, I suppose. Again, a lot of writers form their characters in that way, yeah, but there were elements of the lead that were autobiographical, I like to think it was the worst traits, because he isn’t particularly self-reflective.

So yeah, explicitly the politics that I’m talking about, there’s the rogue protest movement, and then it was the free-party movement as well, which was a response to the clampdown on New Age Travellers that the Major administration undertook in the mid-nineties and they brought in this really, really repressive piece of legislation called the Criminal Justice Act or the Criminal Justice Bill.

Not only was it repressive, it was like a very early precursor to the various bills that are being discussed at the moment, just to limit the right to protest. But it was also absurd because there was, famously, a clause in that was trying to describe dance music in legalese: and so it was like music ‘characterised by repetitive beats’ or something or other. And at the time when this came out, we were like, Well, it does describe dance music, it does describe Techno, it does describe House or whatever, but it also could refer to just about any musical genre under the sun!

And it was just…there was an absurd element to the bill. And so, I was fully on board with the people who were campaigning against this and the people who were taking direct action. And as I say they overlapped with the road-protest movement as well. But as I said, I wasn’t particularly interested, for whatever reason, in just writing a novel in which the heroes were involved in these sort of campaigns and in these actions and from these perspectives, I wanted to muddy the waters a bit.

Ann Morgan: Yeah, and muddying the waters, that’s a good way of putting it, because it’s not just in terms of subject matter that you do that, is it, formally as well, you’re quite adventurous. In 2016 you published Stuff, which is described as a ‘plotless novella’. And again, it’s that kind of almost writing against the grain, but writing against…almost, it’s a bit of an oxymoron in a way that isn’t it: a kind of novella, a plotless novella. It made me wonder what it is about how you balance that, if you’re trying to take on a form and then almost completely break it, where the idea for that came from?

Charlie Hill: I think that goes back to my second novel, which again, if I’m talking about writing against things, my second novel was…

Ann Morgan: Books.

Charlie Hill: Books. Yeah, and that was explicitly a satire. Explicitly writing against certain approaches within the mainstream commercial publishing and writing against the idea of a lot of sort of commercial fiction being of any intrinsic value. So once I’d done that, it wasn’t too far away from a manifesto book in many respects, there was plenty of elements that were declarative, and so once that was out there, I can’t then write anything….I have to sort of back it up. And so whilst I didn’t sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write a plotless novella’, because I don’t think you do that, anymore than, you know, I’d sit down with a blank page say it’s about time I wrote satire or it’s about time…I think you’re influenced by what you read, and books and the idea of writing against mainstream commercial fiction came about because for a while I was working as a reviewer, and I was being sent lots of books that were sort of mid-list, and were much of a much-ness in relation to subject matter and formal approach.

And that’s why I wrote, one of the reasons, I wrote Books, to write against that.

Ann Morgan: Books is a real…it’s a really enjoyable read for anyone who is a book lover or knows the book world at all because the main character, well, I say main character, there are a number of characters, but I suppose we start with Richard, the bookseller.

He’s grown a bit disillusioned, hasn’t he, and he’s actually very negative about the future of the book because eBooks are on the rise and he’s kind of, you know, thinks that maybe it’s his last year in the game because the sales are going down and down. He says something, now there’s always a risk in ascribing a character’s views to their author, but it’s something that you echo slightly in the Taj Mahal memoir as well.

But he says ‘Most novels have a formula, it’s just that some of them are more two plus two, than E = mc2’. And I was wondering, that formula that you talk about, can you tell us a bit more about that, what, how, where did that idea come from? How did you come to feel that about books?

Charlie Hill: Partly as I say, because if you’re reviewing books and you don’t have a profile yourself outside of the culture pages, then you just get sent stuff that other people don’t really want. So they’ll have a roster of critics; I was never a critic because I didn’t have the sort of the academic background to become a critic, I was always just a book reviewer. And so I was just sent stuff that wasn’t the pick of that month’s releases that I would review.

So one of the things that played into Books and the character of Richard was I noticed that there were far too many books over the course of about two or three years, that were essentially about a sort of twenty-summat/ thirty-summat bloke who was scared of commitment in a relationship, and then did a bit of boozing and then wound up either sort of happily ever after or really mediocrely off the rails, and it was like, Not another one! There was literally about half a dozen of them on the bounce, I’m not intending to be critical of other writers in any way, shape or form. Although quite clearly…

Ann Morgan: It’s more the machine of the industry, isn’t it? It’s what the industry is choosing to buy and promote and you know, push through, it’s that homogeneous kind of herd mentality that tends to play out.

Charlie Hill: Yeah, and at the same time as reviewing books like that, I was working at Waterstones, at front of store in a very busy high street branch in Birmingham city centre. And I was looking at, again, a slightly different element of the industry, but obviously it is all connected to what you just said, the sort of titles that are in the ‘three for two’, and it was like…the ‘three for two’ offers where you just get multiples in and you know… So we had a little bit of autonomy, we could select a few books and have, you know, get in two or three copies and have them face out, tucked away at the back of the shop or whatever.

But the front of store, the big piles of books, they were predetermined because they were chosen by buyers according to the relationship that Waterstones had with the publisher. And it was just, at one point, it was like, why would…I don’t know, again, it was the lack of formal variety, the lack of risk taking, the lack of…yeah! All of that in these ‘three for two’ books.

Ann Morgan: Yeah, it’s funny that, that story of the kind of lone twentysomething guy, because I remember that being a moment as well. And it doesn’t seem to be so much the case now, there is not such a glut of those kind of novels now.

Charlie Hill: I don’t know enough about what is the equivalent today because I’ve spent probably the last ten years catching up on reading that I never did when I was in my teens or in my twenties. Partly because I didn’t really have a sort of formal education, and partly because I was reading this stuff in the newspapers, which I’ve kind of moved away from. I don’t go into Waterstones and look at…I walk past certain things. So, yeah, I’m not sure what the equivalent is today to that particular, it was a genre I suppose, wasn’t it? But I mean, I imagine there is one.

Ann Morgan: Yeah, sure. There’s a real sense of the ridiculous that runs through your work as well. Like, the humour is massive and bathos as well, you’re always undercutting either your characters or yourself in your memoir because it’s in very short sort of snippets, isn’t it, the memoir?

And often the section will end with you pulling the rug out from under yourself, shooting yourself down in quite a funny way. Has that always been a key part of how you tell stories, what stories are for you, having that thread of humour running through?

Charlie Hill: Well, it sort of only occurred to me as I was writing the memoir that this was…there’s a theme developing here. But then you start to sort of question ‘why?’ An obvious answer to that is nobody wants to read about somebody just bigging themselves up or false modesty or anything. It’s just like, why? To me, it’s not particularly interesting, and you’re certainly removing the possibility that anybody might find it funny as well if you treat yourself too seriously.

You know, it’s like, who’s interested in that? Why? I don’t know. And, what humour? You know, how is it possible to wring humour out of a situation in which you are the hero or the, you know?

Ann Morgan: But there’s a real sweetness to it too, because I mean, something that I think sets it apart from Books, and you can see the development as a writer that you…with the Taj Mahal, there are real moments of sweetness, often actually dealing with your encounters with strangers or particularly people of the opposite sex. I mean, there’s a very sweet description of when you’re a teenager on a bus and you catch eyes with a girl and then get off the bus and then sprint to try and catch it two stops down the line. And there’s this lovely wistfulness with it as well, which goes kind of with that bathos, but is a softer side. Whereas in Books, because it is a satire really, there’s a harder edge I think, and it’s funny, it’s very funny, and I really enjoyed reading it, but actually there’s a real sense that with, I Don’t Want to Go to the Taj Mahal, there’s a greater range of emotion being played out there and humour’s part of it, but in a slightly softer way.

Charlie Hill: Thanks, that’s a very nice thing to say. Yeah, I think there are elements of Books, although I said, it was quite declarative that, you know, I was doing things the voices, so, the different characters, you know, I was writing about the angry bookseller in an angry voice, and I was writing about the contemplative professor in a contemplative voice, and I was writing about the terrible artists in a terrible artist voice.

Ann Morgan: They come off really badly, actually. I think of all of the characters in the book, they’re the ones that get the shortest thrift. They don’t have any kind of leg to stand on by the time you finish with them, do they, I mean, they are ridiculous.

Charlie Hill: Despite that level of technical chops, if you like, I think that the simple difference, or one of the simple fundamental differences between Books and Taj Mahal is just, I’m just a better writer now. And you know, and it may be that it’s a consequence of getting in touch with…or it may well be/have been the subject matter, I don’t know, or it may have been my reading.

Again, you know, in between writing Books, when I was writing against terrible fiction, I then decided, Okay, I’m no longer going to read terrible fiction, I’ll be reading what I want to read and I’ll be educating myself almost. And so if you’re writing with that as your principal influences, you’re going to be improving as a writer. I just think, I have improved; I did improve, as a writer.

Ann Morgan: You went in 2016, you did an MA in Creative Writing, didn’t you, and it’s funny because, I mean, in Books there are some snide comments about creative writing MAs and things, and do you… how did you find that as an experience? Was it a useful thing to go through, a useful process to go through, or what was your impression of it?

Charlie Hill: Absolutely, I had some excellent tutors and I enjoyed interacting with the other writers. I approached it with a degree of trepidation, partly because, as you say, I’ve got this kind of slight…I had this slightly sort of jaundiced view of creative writing being taught.

And I think that that is partly to do with the fact I just perceived that there were too many courses. Yeah, I approached the course not knowing what to expect, but also aware of the aforementioned contrary streak and stubbornness and kind of wilful disregard for authority in many forms, one of which would be obviously lecturers, which is a nonsense really. And it quickly became apparent that it was nonsense and that I was going to have a very enjoyable fulfilling time, which I did.

Ann Morgan: Yeah, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it, because I think I can understand some of that suspicion in the sense that I remember having similar feelings when I went and did mine. You know, was this going to be a…just part of the industry, this machine, churning out novels that were all very similar and that served the market rather than serving whatever the higher goal I thought I was supposed to be trying to do as a writer.

Which actually it makes me wonder, because in Books, and also a little bit in Taj Mahal, there’s a bit of discussion about what the role of the writer is. And various people come out with statements, some of them grand, some of them less so, about what writers do. Richard said at one point, ‘I believe fiction should make people snort and dribble and blether and gibber and hustle and ogle and fart. It should confront the terrible truths of the world’. And I was wondering, what do you think writers are supposed to do? What’s your…you said about complicating the battle?

Charlie Hill: Yeah, that, well, actually, oddly enough, it has always been that. It has always been to write, I suppose, to write against something initially, but that is part of the same thing. You take a side on which you might 99.9 per cent of the time identify with, and then you say, ‘Why might I not?’ And you try and pick holes in your own sort of belief systems. So you start off by doing that, and I thought that was the job of the writer, and I still do to an extent, but I also think that we may be entering a time in which there needs to be, or there possibly should be, a shift in attitudes.

If you’re a writer who is politically engaged, or who fancies himself to be politically engaged, I think there are certain subjects now about which we shouldn’t really be seeking to complicate the battle or to pick holes in, I think there are certain subjects that if we were to write about them now, we need to be slightly less nuanced; which goes counter to everything I’ve thought up until this point.

I’m thinking specifically or particularly I should say, just about climate change, and I wrote a piece for Writers Rebel, which is the Extinction Rebellion site for writers basically, it’s only about eighteen months ago, if that. And it was full of this sort of nuance and da, da, da, and I was trying to pack an awful lot in, and it was published, and it was an alright piece, and I’m quite happy with it, and all that sort of thing, but I would do that differently now. So this is a recent shift, it’s been over the course of the last eighteen months.

I was talking to a visual artist about a collaboration, it was about 2016 and she was German heritage, and we’re talking about Trump and we were talking about Brexit and we were talking about other sort of shifts: political shifts, societal shifts, cultural shifts. And then this subject came up and it was like: you know, do we now need to be a little bit more upfront, a little bit more forthright? Do writers need to, when they address certain subjects, be slightly less nuanced, and slightly less…try slightly less to see both sides or to play devil’s advocate, and just come out and be a bit more…do you know what, right, I think, enough is enough.

And it’s very difficult, I haven’t actually succeeded in writing things like that yet because it kind of bores me and it doesn’t particularly make for interesting writing. It’s just something…as I say that Writers Rebel piece when I’d done it, I thought, Do you know what, why am I interrogating the position? Do you know what I mean? I’m writing for the website, so obviously, I have sympathy for the actions of Extinction Rebellion, and I think there are very good reasons to have those sympathies.

Why am I then…but my instincts are still to interrogate that position and to interrogate and to sort of look at climate change through almost a contrary sort of thing. It’s like: No, come on, but as I say, I haven’t actually got around to writing anything that hasn’t complicated that yet, but hopefully I will.

Ann Morgan: Yeah, so you started off from writing a novel that kind of approached campaigning and political activism with a critical eye, to moving towards a position that maybe with certain topics there isn’t a place for that. That it has to be a little more forthright in how you approach it, maybe?

Charlie Hill: Yeah, absolutely. I just wish there were more examples of good art and good writing, that I could draw on and I could be…you know what I mean, because to me, that’s still a circle I’ve got to square. Is that right?

Ann Morgan: ‘Square the circle’; I think that sounds right, yeah.

Charlie Hill: I think so, yeah. So if I’m going…is my just mistrust of oversimplification of everything really in relation to fiction, it doesn’t just have to be oversimplification of the big, the supposedly big, subjects. It’s oversimplification of, you know, to go back to the mid nineties, it’s oversimplification of tropes in terms of relationships, you know what I mean, and all that sort of thing. And it’s never really appealed to me, but at some point, it’s a circle I might have to square.

Ann Morgan: That was Charlie Hill talking to me, Ann Morgan. You can find out more about Charlie’s work on the Royal Literary Fund website.

RLF outro: This episode of Collected was recorded and produced by Ann Morgan. Coming up next time, Royal Literary Fund Fellows confront rejection.

We hope you’ll join us.