Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
writing is so intensely time consuming and private an
activity there shouldn’t be much time for gurus and
classes to attend in universities. I don’t think writing
can be taught … you can be given pointers … be told
to read certain books etc. but the only discoveries the
writer makes are going to be solitary ones on the page.
I see writing as an existential act, an axis between how
you live your life and literature, the idea that you can
institutionalise that scares me. It’s also a matter of time,
it might take you ten years to find your style, the idea
that a uni professor of creative writing can bring out the
old stylistic KY jelly doesn’t convince me.
ZS: Do you think writers have a specific role in society
to educate or agitate or produce art, or are they just doing
a job like anyone else?
AW: FI COMPUTER
I think intelligence should be legalised, I think, as the
poet Robin Robertson says, writers write for the void.
I feel I make lonely cries and sometimes someone
hears me, a writer can only follow the needs of the
creatures of their imagination; if writers are going to
write to formulas, be it the 19th-century English novel
or Soviet socialist realism (or Chinese) they will be
doomed to artistic failure though they might flourish
with royalties.
ZS: A.L. Kennedy recently brought out a book of
poetry, and Irvine Welsh made that record. Have you
considered forms other than prose with your writing, or
BUY Alan Warner books online from and
been tempted to a complete change of medium?
AW: Well I mess around with oil and acrylic painting on
large canvas. Abstract stuff. I’ve done a few on empty
cigar tubes and I collect out of date credit cards so I’m
going to paint on top of them. I’m doing one on top
of Airfix models I’ve stuck to the canvas, I melted all
the Airfix models into eerie shapes with a blow torch.
I reckon they should sell for millions. I’m interested
in other forms of writing. I’m working on an original
screenplay and I publish the odd poem.
ZS: Do you think that in the future people will have
stopped reading books, that attention spans will have
decreased so much that everything has to be in visual
and auditory fragments? Or that everything will be
virtual and interactive?
AW: I HOPE COMPUTER HAVE ZERO ROLE I THE
FUTURE SORRI THIS LAP TOP HAS REALLQUIT
ALL THE KEOARD IS SEIZED TR TO SED THIS
MADA MADA DO SED OUT A SEARCH PARTY
Nah, you don’t have to switch books on or log on,
the tactile immediacy of a book in your greasy palm
will never die. That doesn’t mean people will read
good quality literature though. I don’t think the book
is under serious threat, but literature is. People have
been sounding the death of the book for too long, when
cinema became huge in the 1950’s people predicted
the end of the novel but movies actually lead to more
novel reading. I think the “dumbing down” in culture
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