Mark Haddon’s Swimming and flying: an extract

Some years back I volunteered to help with an experiment at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford which involved having my brain scanned while I watched a series of seemingly random images flashed up on a screen. Some were clearly meant to be neutral, others highly stimulating in one way or another. I remember a bath towel dropped on to a wooden floor, which was the most wonderful shade of turquoise. I remember pictures that were meant to be pornographic but which had clearly been taken from a copy of Mayfair c. 1972 and were therefore antique and oddly charming. Soft focus shots of the Tennis Girl soaping herself in the shower after a sweaty match. I remember a photograph of a horrifically mutilated human body followed by a picture of a tiny silver cake fork which was one of the funniest things I have ever seen, as if something had gone slightly wrong at a tea party.

One of the joys of teaching at Arvon is seeing that lightbulb come on over a student’s head when they realise what all half-decent writers realise eventually, and what some very good writers tragically forget later in their careers, that it’s not about you. We all start by trying to get down on paper as accurately as possible the wonderful ideas and images in our heads. Sooner or later, however, we realise that readers can’t see the wonderful ideas and images in our heads and therefore have no way of judging how accurately we’ve described them, and don’t give a damn anyway. It’s what’s on the paper that matters, period. Does it entertain? Does it move? We don’t matter. We have to make ourselves small, we have to make ourselves vanish, almost.

On my first Arvon Course I did a workshop in which I handed each student a card with a location written on it — ice cream van, lighthouse, brothel, crypt … I then handed each student a second card upon which was written a rule to which they had to stick rigidly while writing about their location — for instance, exactly four words per sentence, every sentence in the second person singular, no letter ‘E’ … Chris Thomas, who had never written anything creative in his life, got ‘Bathroom’ and ‘Every sentence in the negative’.