Hailed as the ‘most original crime writer in Britain’ and widely compared to Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis, Will Carver’s imagination knows no bounds. Here’s what inspires him … and, of course, his darkly funny, twisty new thriller Upstairs at the Beresford.
You hear about these people who knew from birth that they wanted to be an author.
Not me.
Sure, I secretly wrote poetry through my teenage years. I still do. But my love was with film. I watched EVERYTHING.
I still do.
Then I found theatre. I loved Shakespeare. I read anything by Brecht. And Berkoff. And all that Kitchen Sink stuff. For me, nobody wrote dialogue like David Mamet. That’s still the case – even though Aaron Sorkin clearly has a gift for it.
I thought that maybe I would become a playwright.
And, somewhere inside, I still do.
I was reading Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding and Mike Gayle when I went to university. I thought I might fit in well with that ‘lad lit’ crowd. But I had never really thought about writing a book. I didn’t have a writer out there who was producing novels that made me think that it was the medium for me.
But that changed when I read Fight Club.
I had no idea that you were even allowed to write a book like that and it opened up an entirely new world for me. I think it’s a book that catalysed many writers to action.
Choke clearly had an influence on the support group idea for Psychopaths Anonymous, though I wouldn’t come up with that idea for another twenty years. The opening of that book also has a very similar feel to the opening of Hinton Hollow Death Trip, where the narrator is talking directly to the reader and telling them not to even bother reading the story.
Chuck Palahniuk has, of course, been a huge influence on me. And it must be able to be seen in my writing because I do get compared to him … frequently. And I’m, obviously, okay with that. It’s not that I’m trying to copy his style, it’s just that his books let me know that writing can have style.
Hemingway was the first writer that I devoured. By that, I mean that I read one book and then read only him until I had consumed everything he had written. First was A Moveable Feast. This was a fascinating glimpse into that time in history where many writers and artists were living and creating in Paris. I moved on to The Old Man and the Sea, which isn’t even a hundred pages but so much happens.
This really affected me. The prose was so sparse. There were no drawn-out descriptions. Somehow, he could write, ‘The room was dark and cold’ and I felt like I knew exactly what that room looked like.
When I write things like this post, I can get stuck in waffle, but when I write my fiction, I like to keep it laconic. Every word has to count. No fluff. No bluster. Short sentences. Short chapters. Make the point. Paint the picture enough that the reader fills in the gaps.
Hemingway said something like, ‘The beauty in the movement of an iceberg is that two thirds are underneath the water.’ It’s a beautiful way to describe his style of writing and something that I always consider in my own. This is certainly something I do when I create vignettes of my characters.
My third and final influence is Charles Bukowski. I’m such a cliché, right? Angry, young(ish) man likes Palahniuk and Bukowski. Shocker! Well, yes, they do tend to go hand-in-hand. And maybe I could have put Hunter S. Thompson in there to make the biggest hackneyed statement but his work didn’t really affect me in the same way.
I did with Bukowski what I had done with Hemingway. I read Post Office and completely fell in love. Then I read all he had written. His writing is so raw and dirty. No punches are pulled. I like that. It feels like the lightest of edits has been performed in order to maintain the writer’s voice.
And what a voice.
Bukowski was also a fantastic poet but his poetry, like his prose, is unflinching in its simplicity. Much like Hemingway, he doesn’t try to complicate things. One of my favourite things that he ever said was that ‘An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.’
That’s what he did. I think it’s all he knew how to do. As a writer, I try to tackle some tough subjects in my books but put them across in a way that they can be thought about and understood. Bukowski is always in mind when I’m doing this.
So, these are the three biggest influences on the way I write and the things that I read. There are, of course, writers that are fantastic at creating characters or setting scenes or crafting a plot but when it comes to the actual art of putting words on a page, Palahniuk, Hemingway and Bukowski are my go-to guys.
There is a truthfulness to the writing that binds them.
Raw. Sparse. Stylish. And honest. With an added ‘fuck you’.
Upstairs at the Beresford, by Will Carver, is out today.
