Nick Lake is the author of “In Darkness,” a book for older YA readers and adults. Below is a complete transcript of his interview with Cracking the Cover.
Background — Have you always wanted to write? Why?
It’s the boring answer I’m afraid. I grew up in a house full of books, and my mum taught me to read before I went to school, so I was always reading. And I think from quite early on, I wanted to make one myself. Certainly from being a teenager, though I had a brief dalliance with poetry, which I bitterly regret. (All evidence has been destroyed.)
I’m fascinated by every aspect of books – the type, the printing, the binding. Everything. I actually have one of the thin metal plates that were used to print In Darkness – there are 32 pages on it, some upside down, and when it’s used for printing, the big sheet that it makes is folded up to make one of the signatures in the book. Those are the quill-like shapes you see if you look at a book from the top – the sections it’s printed in. I’m digressing – but my point is, I love books entirely – the stories in them, but also their physical form, everything that goes into making them, from the fonts to the copyediting. Being a publisher and a writer means getting to indulge that love completely.
Having said that, I bend my pages, especially on paperbacks, to mark my place, so make of that what you will.
Why write for young readers?
Interesting question. And the honest answer is I don’t really know. I guess, when I was going into publishing, which was the early 2000s, it seemed like children’s books were going through a real golden age. My then-fiancee, now wife, was an English teacher, and she got me reading Louis Sachar’s Holes, while I discovered books like Coraline and How I Live Now myself – books that, it seemed to me, were redefining what it was possible to achieve in a relatively short novel. And of course Harry Potter and His Dark Materials were huge, and I loved them both (my baby daughter is called Lyra), so all in all it just seemed like the most exciting place to be.
Then I actually became a children’s and YA book editor, and I suppose through doing that, for several years, it was almost like a creative writing course – by giving comments on other people’s stories, you learn a huge amount about writing. So it never occurred to me to write anything else. I wouldn’t have the first idea how to write a book for adults, though in the UK In Darkness is being published as an adult book too, which is kind of a thrill.
There’s something else, too. I feel that a lot of adult literature, leaving aside genre fiction, has (with some exceptions) become more and more focused on a kind of philosophical exploration of what it means to be a person, rather than on storytelling. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, but personally, I spent enough time on philosophy at university – I don’t want to read, or write, about someone having an existential crisis. Pedro Juan Gutierrez, a Cuban writer, says that the only proper subjects for books are death and love, the darker side of being human. I kind of agree with that, and I think it’s easier to do it when your characters are young.
Do you have any rituals? Do you write all day?
No, sorry! Well, I have a sort of ritual, which is that I have to get rid of my laptop and get a new one before writing a new book. It’s a stupid and expensive ritual. Other than that, no. I write on the train to work, because that’s the only time I can write (the aforementioned job; and the aforementioned baby) so it’s by necessity, not by ritual.
Where did the idea for “In Darkness” come from?
The first inspiration for In Darkness came from the Haitian earthquake – and seeing news footage of people being dug out from the rubble, days afterwards. That got me thinking about what it must be like to go through such an awful experience, but also about hope and darkness and the troubles Haiti had even before the earthquake… and Toussaint l’Ouverture, the great slave leader, because of course being trapped under rubble is a kind of slavery, and so is poverty, and my character in the darkness was a gangster from the slums, I knew that quite early on…. But, you know what, you should check out the video on the book’s website, where I explain the inspiration for the book (LINK) much better than here, even if I do look grotesquely fat (I swear I don’t have that much of a double chin in real life.)
One important thing to note: once the idea for the book popped into my head, I didn’t write it. It just flowed out, and I often didn’t know what I’d written when I finished each train journey and closed my laptop. That isn’t meant to be pretentious, or to disclaim responsibility for the book: it’s simply true. The story was just there, and I wrote it down. It was a really weird experience, especially because of course Shorty is kind of possessed in the book by Toussaint l’Ouverture, through the mechanism of vodoun. (At least, if you don’t read the novel as a dream, or as a spirit journey.)
How much research was involved?
I’m kind of wary of talking too much about research, because as a reader, I don’t like non-fiction, and for me it’s the story that comes first – the research bit doesn’t interest me, per se, except in so far as it helps to serve the story. But having said that, I wanted as much as possible in the book to be true and real, even though I had to simplify aspects of the Toussaint storyline, so yes, there was a lot of research – watching documentaries, reading books, going on Creole-language forums on the internet(I speak French, so can just about decipher Creole). Though I had sort of accreted a lot of the research over the years, because I’ve always been fascinated by Haiti, so a lot of it was just remembering things I’d read about before. We also had a Haitian reader quite early on who gave some invaluable feedback. I’m not Haitian, so it’s very, very important to me that the book should have an authentic feel, at least, and that the crucial things are right.
How long did it take you to write?
The first draft took about six weeks. It poured out, like a trance. I touch type, pretty fast, so the story was really just limited by how quickly I could get it down in nine hours of train journey a week. Then, of course, there were several drafts – comments from agent, friends, other authors, editors, that Haitian reader. The whole thing probably took a year.
“In Darkness” has a driving intensity to it. How did you accomplish that?
Well, thank you!
This seems to be my stock response, but I really don’t know. I’m not making it up when I say that I wasn’t really conscious of writing it. That said, as an editor and a reader, I’m less and less tolerant as time goes by of florid writing, so I guess I was aware on some abstract level of wanting it to be tight and declarative, and for it to – for want of a better expression – be full of stuff happening, all the time. I don’t want passages of description, or long sections of dialogue – I want it to be brutal, and simple, so that the writing kind of shimmers with violence too. Not that it’s something I set out to do, I stress again. But if I had to say what I hope it’s like, that’s what I’d say.
Plus, on a simple textual level, I’ve spent too much of my life copy-editing, which means that I almost literally can’t stand to write things like ‘suddenly’, or ‘he said’, or ‘her heart pounded’, or basically any adverbs at all, so I’m generally excluding text more than I’m actually writing it down. I’m like a dentist who doesn’t look at his own teeth. I don’t even like quote marks, anymore. It’s a miracle any words end up on the page, actually. Probably I’ll end up writing shorter and shorter books that finally become just a white page, right at the end of my life, and me sighing, and saying, don’t you get it?
How does “In Darkness” differ as a published book from your first idea for it
On the one hand, not much – people gave some really brilliant suggestions for improving aspects of the story, but the bare bones of it have always been the same. On the other hand – I did change one really major thing, but it has to do with the ending, so I can’t really say what it is without giving quite a massive spoiler. Suffice it to say that the first draft was really, really depressing.
Why did you choose to have two main characters in two different times? How were you able to blend their lives together?
From the outset, from the moment I had the idea of a book about a boy trapped under the rubble, I knew that the story was somehow also about Toussaint l’Ouverture. I’d read about him at university, and I’d always thought it was a great tragedy that his story wasn’t more widely known, so he’d always been present in my consciousness – this amazing black leader, uneducated, who became a general of a slave army at the age of 53, having looked after horses before that on his master’s estate, taught himself to read, defeated the French army, routed the Spanish and British too, freed the slaves of Haiti, and ended up corresponding with people like Napoleon. He’s one of the most extraordinary people who have ever lived.
The problem was, I had this feeling that the two stories were linked, but I didn’t know how. I’d go on walks with my wife, and she’d get frustrated, because I was just totally absent, trying to work it out. Then it came to me: Toussaint died in a dungeon, underground, in the darkness. In other words, in a place very much like the place in which Shorty finds himself trapped. So you’ve got these two characters, one young, one old, both in a certain sense in the same place, and one of them is definitely going to die, but the other one, well, we don’t know. And the only thing that separates them is the membrane of time, which I think can be quite thin. So suddenly I had this key, this way in which the two stories merged, this beginning – with Shorty – and this ending – with Toussaint – and all I had to then was to take those two ends of thread and weave them together, and that was when the story took over.
How did your own life experiences play into “In Darkness”?
The most significant thing is probably the storyline involving Shorty’s father. As I said, I’m not Haitian, and I didn’t grow up in a slum, so I had to imagine what that crushing poverty might be like. I also had to imagine the earthquake. But an earthquake, of course, is a kind of shock, both physically and metaphysically. And what I do know about is shock. Because, like Shorty’s, my father died violently and suddenly, when I was relatively young (I don’t think that’s too much of a spoiler, when it comes to Shorty.)
Anyway, that’s been something that I think has affected every aspect of my life since then. It came out of the blue, like an earthquake, and it changed everything, and so in a sense you could say that In Darkness reflects that experience, even though on the surface it’s about something totally different. I kind of became a different person when my dad died, the way Shorty is changed by the earthquake, and also I think I’ve been trying to work it out in writing ever since, in more or less direct ways. (The book I’m working on at the moment does so even more directly.) So yes, that notion of bereavement, of the shocks and changes it wreaks, that was definitely there.
And there are other things that have happened in my life, that I can’t go into, not because I want to be mysterious, but because they involve other people. And I guess those things, those unpleasantnesses, made me feel very strongly that other people shouldn’t feel unpleasantness, whereas of course, in places like Haiti, countless people are experiencing horrors infinitely worse than anything I ever have or ever could. And that combined with this sense of outrage that I’d always had about such things, probably from this incredibly inspiring teacher at my secondary school. I went to school in Luxembourg, and did history in French, and it was taught by a teacher who was an ‘ancient soixante-huitard’, who had protested the French atrocities in Algeria in 1968. And he taught us all to utterly reject preventable suffering – to find it absolutely unacceptable that in this day and age there should be famine, or torture, or children dying from preventable diseases. I mean, in the slums of Haiti, BEFORE the earthquake, the corpses of babies were regularly found on rubbish heaps. And I know that I’m at risk of turning this into a Beauty Pageant speech, but these things are simply not to be tolerated, I think.
Of course, I have no practical skills whatsoever; I’m the kind of effeminate boy who read books all his youth. But I’m a writer: my response to the earthquake was to write.
How has your writing evolved from when you first started until now?
As above – I think I’ve got less florid and more pared down! I hope so, anyway.
Did you have a favorite book or book that really resonated with you as a young reader?
I don’t know that I had a favourite book as a child – I loved all books. I don’t really remember much from actual childhood – though I know I loved Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl. Then, from about 10, I would take books from my parents’ shelves – totally inappropriate things like Raymond Chandler mysteries, or the James Bond books, or, less inappropriately but perhaps inappropriately for my age, Joseph Conrad or Dickens. I wasn’t bothered about genre, I’d read anything – and it’s the same now.
So I was one of those kids who graduated very quickly from children’s books to adult books. I don’t say that in an arrogant way; I just don’t think there was the choice that there is now. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, when there was such a wave of realism in children’s fiction, and still so many children’s books (in Britain anyway) that dealt with the Second World War, which I obviously thought was a terrible thing to have happened, but it didn’t seem incredibly relevant to my life either. All the books were about kids finding a buried German bomb, or someone whose parents were getting divorced. When it’s a choice between that, or Philip Marlowe investigating a murder, and bantering with glamorous women in a clever way while wearing cool clothes and holding a gun, I think the choice is obvious.
Now, of course, kids are so lucky. I say kids – I mean young adults too. Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Across the Nightingale Floor, Mortal Engines, Twilight: I would have kissed your feet if you’d given me those books as a kid.
What do you hope readers bring away from your book?
There’s a line on the back of the book, ‘sometimes, on the other side of darkness, there is light’. I think that for me sums up what the book is about. Awful, awful things happen in it, but there’s hope, too.
What are you working on now?
I’m just about to deliver it to my publishers, actually. It’s another one-off: this time it’s about a teenage girl, half American, half English, whose father is very rich. He buys a yacht, to sail them around the world, and they get captured by Somali pirates. So this time it’s from the Western perspective, told in first person by the girl –which actually I found far more difficult. I mean, how much of modern slang do you incorporate into the teen girl’s voice? I ended up re-reading How I Live Now, which is just the most perfect book ever written, to see how it’s done, and if I can pull of something a tenth as good I’ll be thrilled. And I gave it to my wife, who tweaked it, and assures me that the girl Sounds Like A Girl.
Anyway… Of course, the girl, Amy, I don’t know why I’m not just telling you her name, so OK, her name is Amy. Anyway… Amy falls in love with one of the pirates, and that doesn’t go smoothly. But also she’s grieving, and we learn why, and that’s a really important aspect of the story, and there’s a fairytale element too, because her stepmother is on the yacht too. But I love dual narratives, so we also learn some of the life story of this pirate she falls for, and there’s some Somali folk lore sprinkled in there too… and hopefully a growing sense that, not to get too political, these pirates we see as so bad might not have a huge number of choices in terms of alternative careers or sources of income. I mean, Somalia is a country essentially without infrastructure or a social safety net of any kind whatsoever. Just saying. Also (see above) lots of Stuff Happens. People get shot, navy helicopters arrive, there are stand-offs… And it builds to a Big Denouement.
That’s all I can really say about it.