CULTURE CURRENT-William Boyd on a life in fiction that began with a lie

William Boyd has built a writing career that has ranged from bestselling spy thrillers to screenplays to "whole life novels" that follow characters from the cradle to the grave. The 74-year-old ​British author's work has been translated into more than 40 languages. His latest book, "The Predicament," is the second installment in an espionage trilogy and was published in paperback ​in April. The third installment, "Cold Sunset," is due out later this year. Some of Boyd's most famous stories have ‌taken on ​a life beyond the page. He invented an abstract expressionist artist he named Nat Tate — and, with the help of David Bowie, in 1998 managed to convince the art world he had really existed.

Speaking with Reuters from his home in West London, Boyd reflects on his writing process, the shifting economics of the publishing world, and why his next major project will stray beyond fiction. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get your career started? I shall never forget the day I got a reply ‌from an editor saying: "We want to publish the stories, but we want to publish the novel first." The only problem was that I actually hadn't written the novel. I was lying. And so I told another lie and said the manuscript's in a terrible state, I need to retype it, et cetera. And I wrote my first published novel, "A Good Man in Africa," in about three months of white-hot dynamism and sent it in.

It won two prizes, it got very good reviews, was picked up for paperback by Penguin and I was sort of off and running. Was it easier to get published then than now?

Well, I think for a first-time novelist in the 1980s, the British library system bought 800 copies of any novel ‌that was published. And so, a publisher in a way was covered. The whole literary landscape has changed enormously since. (Before,) you could lead a bourgeois life as a novelist, writing a novel every two years, a bit of journalism, maybe moonlighting in film or TV, but that life has gone completely. You're either selling books and making a ‌decent living or else you have to have one or two other jobs in order to be a novelist.

And there's AI too. Is that undermining the current generation of writers? I think human beings are so odd that their very oddness will make what they write seem distinct from any AI slop that is churned out. That may be a fond and sad wish of mine, but when I think of the novels I read, I can't imagine AI replicating their strangeness and idiosyncrasies and their nuances in a way that would convince me.

Long before deepfakes, you managed to fool the art world with your fictional biography of Nat Tate. What's the story behind it? It was April Fool's Day, 1998, and it still rumbles on today. It's thanks to (David) Bowie, I think, and his renown and his glamour and his connection with it. Bowie was a publisher of (Boyd's book ⁠about) Nat Tate and ​he wrote the blurb. He claimed to own a Nat Tate. All these things contributed to ⁠the incredible success of the hoax. Also, it was pre-Google, so it wouldn't have worked today.

The book's been translated into a dozen languages. I'm asked to curate exhibitions of Nat Tate. People write to me claiming to be Nat Tate. I may be writing a libretto to an opera about Nat Tate. I often say semi-facetiously that, when I'm dead and gone, I'll be remembered for Nat Tate and the fact that I wrote ⁠a few novels on the side.

And the artwork was yours? Yes, that's the remains of my dreams of being a painter. I am responsible for all the Nat Tates out there in the world. There are about maybe 20 or 30 in existence, all drawn by me. And in the book, I provided the artwork purporting to be the remains of Nat Tate's oeuvre.

How do you keep writing after ​so many decades? If you're lucky enough to be a writer and earn your living as a writer, then it's possibly the best job in the world because you're the ultimate one-man band. All you need is your brain and something to write with.

The fact that I'm here writing away in a house ⁠in Chelsea, as secure as anybody can be because of my writing, I just refuse to take that for granted. So that maybe spurs me on to write other things just so that I can keep the show on the road. I strive to make sure that it can continue until I fall off the perch finally.

Can you talk about your habit of starting with the ending? I always know how my novels are going to end before ⁠I ​start. I plan them in enormous detail and I hope — this is the theory anyway — that I make all my mistakes in the planning stage.

Sometimes, I've written the last paragraph of the novel before I start on page one because I know exactly what catharsis I'm after. Then I write with confidence every day towards that destination.

Did you have an ending in mind for "The Predicament," the second in a trilogy featuring the reluctant spy Gabriel Dax? I knew exactly what that tone should be because it ties in the whole novel and it's to do with the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The whole resonance of those last pages is infused, I hope, by that event.

What's next ⁠for you? I'm still very busy, writing films, television, plays, journalism. But as you reach the kind of last act of your writing career, you think, what will I do? I'm going to write a very long novel next, one of my whole life novels. But I've got many ideas for future Gabriel Dax novels, so I'm pretty ⁠sure that he will return after this big monster novel that I'm going to write next.

You've written ⁠a number of "whole life novels" that follow characters' lives from cradle to grave. Would you ever consider turning your own life into a whole life novel? I have published a kind of autobiography. It's called "The Mirror and the Road: Conversations with William Boyd by Alistair Owen." It's a book-length Q&A that covers my life and work.

Also, I have been keeping a journal since I was 19. A vast document now, over a million words, I reckon. It will never be published in my lifetime, but I find it a ‌useful and occasionally fascinating aide-memoire. It is extraordinary how much of your ‌life you forget or inadvertently reshape. So there is my autobiography in incredible detail, but it has only one reader. The perspectives expressed in Culture Current are the subject's own and do ​not necessarily reflect the views of Reuters News. (Editing by Yasmeen Serhan and Aurora Ellis)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)