What the Struggles of the Booker Nominees Can Teach Us about Creativity

As I write it is just a few hours until the result of this year’s Booker Prize is announced. The winner will take home £50,000 for the best English language novel of the year, but it is the prestige attached to the award which will change their life. Of the six authors shortlisted, three recently admitted in an article in The Guardian to the struggles they’d had in writing the books that may now transform their careers. I found their honesty reassuring and their strategies for overcoming their struggles instructive - not least because I’ve often found myself in similar pickles.

Maggie Shipstead, nominated for Great Circle, a novel about a female aviator and the actor who plays her decades later, was ‘lost and mopey’ before she began her shortlisted book. She’d started what she’d thought would be her third novel only to have it die on her, 100 painful pages in. Shipstead explains, ‘Uncertainty about what to write next always feels like it’s about to crystallise into never writing again.’ While stranded deep in this malaise she happened to glimpse a statue of the pilot Jean Batten outside Auckland airport. The image stayed with her and became the spark for Great Circle. It’s funny how it’s often at the moment when all seems lost, when we’re just about to give up and walk away, that our muse chooses to bestow inspiration upon us. The musician and artist Brian Eno refers to a complete lack of inspiration as ‘the abyss’; it’s only when he casts himself off into the abyss and resigns himself to not working again that he becomes, in his own words, ‘suddenly alive again’.

I’ve come to realise that one should be wary of any artwork that arrives fully formed without demanding some emotional cost. Nominee Richard Powers tells how he ‘hit a wall’ during the writing of Bewilderment, despite being locked down in the Great Smoky Mountains with acres of wilderness around him and apparently the perfect conditions for creativity. ‘My characters weren’t coming alive, and I knew that something was wrong with my plot. When I can’t write, it’s usually a sign that I shouldn’t be writing.’ And so he went out for a walk. Every day for a few weeks. And it was on one of these walks that he experienced a mystical encounter. He felt the presence of a small boy; a small boy who would turn out to be his story’s central character.

Great Smoky Mountains national park, Tennessee. Photograph: SeanPavonePhoto/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Margaret Atwood, a previous Booker winner, has spoken about how walking is central to her process too: ‘Walking leads to rumination, and rumination leads to poetry.’ A recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology entitled ‘Give Your Ideas Some Legs’ found that on average we are 60% more creative when we’re out walking than when we’re sitting at a desk.

Damon Galgut, shortlisted author of The Promise,* which recounts the decline of a white family during the transition out of apartheid, made his creative breakthrough when he stopped work on his novel altogether to undertake a film script commission. Though the screenwriting project wasn’t fulfilling in itself, it provided him with the central conceit of the book – that the narrative voice could be a character in its own right, ‘like the camera in a Fellini movie … observing, commenting, mocking, wondering.’

To arrest a creative project midway through sounds, on the face of it, like the worst thing you could do. Yet for Galgut it changed the whole mood of his endeavour: ‘From that point, the writing took on a freedom I hadn't felt before. I could jump between multiple points of view, I could even break the fourth wall and address the reader directly. But why stop there? I saw other walls to knock down, and I'd found my hammer. No other writing experience had given me this kind of deep pleasure. Who knew that vandalism could be so much fun?’

Galgut’s experience is reassuring for anyone who has to temporarily put on hold their magnum opus to pay the bills with a more mundane project. Without the temporary shift of gears into a different medium he would not have hit upon the authorial device that has made The Promise so widely admired.

No matter your medium there is much to be learned from the experiences of this diverse bunch of writers. And it’s gratifying to know that even those at the very top of their game, in line for one of the world’s most prestigious prizes, can find the process of making just as hard as the rest of us.

I recently finished reading Manifesto, On Never Giving Up, by 2019 Booker Winner Bernardine Evaristo, a memoir of her life as a black woman and a writer, full of hard-won insights into the creative process, as well as her own tricks for getting out of a rut. I’ll leave the final word to Bernardine, a call to arms for anyone bringing an idea into being right now …

‘Be wild, disobedient and daring with your creativity, take risks instead of following predictable routes; those who play it safe do not advance our culture or civilization.’

* The eventual Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize