Imagine like there's no tomorrow

For good or bad, I’m here because I’ve got a bug that I can’t let go. I like to tell stories, especially longish ones, with twists and turns like there’s no tomorrow.

A few ‘stranger than fiction’ events in my life spurred me on. In short, there were three near tragedies, and one real tragedy. They informed me to do what I love, which is to put pen to paper.

The near tragedies took place in Brazil when I was a foreign correspondent more than a decade ago. They were: the ambush and killing of a special unit of the federal police (which I had travelled with two weeks earlier), the explosion of a space rocket on its launch pad that killed 21 people (which I had visited a few days earlier) and the crash of an airplane (which I had flown on just before) in the sea after it failed to hook on to the wire while landing on an American aircraft carrier.

This is not much compared to war correspondents, for whom I have the highest respect on earth and who risk their lives so that we get the news. I took risks but I didn’t head into war, even though something terrible happened after I visited each place.

I was a young, and pretty unwise, foreign correspondent when those three incidents happened. They all took place within just a couple of months of each other – and I never really thought about them until a real tragedy struck several years later: the sudden, unexpected death of my wife.

That made me seriously stop and think, mostly about what was most important to me, which was my family and being an author. So I moved to the country, away from distractions, apart from my fruit trees and grapevines. But I thought more and more about the strange randomness of those events. I couldn’t explain any of them to myself. The only plausible outlet was storytelling.

Since then, I have learned, or perhaps relearned, the importance of close observation and the linkages of events: perhaps I had missed something, or didn’t contemplate enough in my early journalism days. But things are flowing now. Most of all, I’ve remembered the importance of shoe leather in writing: walk around a lot, observe and talk to people endlessly, connect the dots.

Another lesson that has come back to me is this: use all your senses in writing, not least smell. If you think about it, how often do you see a writer sum up the smells of a scene? Hardly ever. Yet describing smell can provide a sense of presence like nothing else, nobody can dispute that you were there. Perhaps there had been a whiff of a cigarette at that launch pad when I visited; that was given as a possible explanation for why the rocket fuel exploded later.

To me, observation and real experience are the backbone of good writing. In the countryside where I now live, observing everything around me for three years helped me find all the background and context needed for my latest book, ‘The Caramel Vineyard’. I packed the pages with everything from the yapping dogs on the dusty country roads to the fantastic local sense of humour, which I’ve concluded can only be a coping mechanism for the brutal heat that hits this place every summer.

“Get me a bloody dentist now!”

The key is to pluck out little memories, or events, that lodge somewhere in your brain, which could be useful in a future story. Say you met someone on a Greek island during an Interrail holiday in your youth, who fell over and broke their tooth in half on the marble floor of the hotel after a few too many ouzos. The thud of the fall rings in your ears and you hear screams of pain and loud shouting: “Get me a bloody dentist now!” Well, I did witness that, and it did make it into one of my books (I shall not say which one).

I did the same in my other books too. To complete my psychological thriller, ‘Scuffle’, I walked a mountain. And my first book, ‘Adriana’, is about modern-day slavery in Brazil and is based on my trip with the federal police that I mentioned earlier. I included the deaths of the police team that travelled after me in the book.

I’ve also learned the merits of patience: the passage of the seasons, the subtle shifts in weather (especially the arrival of the first humidity at the end of summer). Perhaps looking after plants – I have grapes, lemons, oranges, olives, apples and pears – has taught me the most. Fruit takes a year to ripen for the next harvest, about the same as it takes me to write a decent book.

I try to stay away from opinion, not least because there’s so much of it around these days. But ultimately, I’m actually coming to believe that with enough practice, opinion is what eventually transforms into, or becomes, an author’s ‘voice’. I guess if you’re good at it, it eventually comes naturally.

But for me, before all of that – the observation and research and experience – comes imagination. I always had a rich imagination: I thought I could fly and had invisible friends – that sort of thing – when I was young.

So in my last book I decided to let rip. I even planned some of the storyline around the wildest, most amusing scenes I could think of. But hey, that’s imagination!

I have a sneaking suspicion that my subconscious pushed me to use as much imagination as possible this time around. Because maybe, or actually very likely, the single best way for writers to bullet-proof ourselves against AI is to let our imaginations run wild. Who knows, we could even be in a race against time to keep our imaginations alive, before AI kills it in all of us (and future generations). It is possible, you just never know.

So I’m an all-out believer in the human touch, in my own ‘biological intelligence’, which gives me my unique ability to imagine and observe. When I think about it, it’s strange how little that term is actually used these days, as if we’re embarrassed about it, or that it’s some kind of old-fashioned, dying fad. One thing is for sure, ‘biological intelligence’ is everywhere in nature. Lest we forget.

What I would most love to see is a world in which non-AI artistic output gains a premium over the machine rubbish that is coming our way. Maybe, just maybe – since we’re a shrinking bunch – the laws of supply and demand will eventually push demand for our stuff sky-high. We can only hope. In the meantime, I’ll continue authoring as long as my imagination allows.