Writers, Start Your Engines

In an excerpt from the forthcoming collection How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe with Philip Oltermann, British crime novelist Jake Arnott (The Long Firm, Johnny Come Home) says that what gets his creative juices flowing is a photograph of his grandmother, the dancer:

This picture has followed me around for the past decade and a half. I've hung it in the kitchen of wherever I lived. Maybe because I remember her cooking, fixing an early evening gin and tonic, telling stories. It’s a photograph of my grandmother in Paris, sometime in the late 20s, when she worked in a nightclub as a showgirl. I remember finding it with her as she was sorting out a chaotic bundle of memories. She pointed out that the costume was for a burlesque number that had a hunt theme. Note the stylised riding cap and gloves, the kinky, fur-trimmed boots, the diamanté riding crop. It could have been taken when she was at the Moulin Rouge or the Folies Bergères--she worked at both between 1927 and 1928. ...

I love this picture because it catches her at her most glamorous. When the writer’s life seems at its dullest, I can remind myself that I’m in show business, too. That she lived so much and wrote down so little has perhaps been a provocation to me. One day I’ll tell her stories. When I’m good enough to do her justice.

Also included in this excerpt, which appears in The Guardian, are remarks from Jonathan Franzen, Jay McInerney, Jane Smiley, and Michel Faber. Read them all here.