Ask the Author: Paul Tudor Owen
Answered Questions (6)
Paul Tudor Owen
I don’t get writers’ block very often – which I think comes from my journalistic training. If I want to get from A to B in a chapter, and I’m not quite sure how, I can just get there in a pretty straightforward way, move on to the next thing, and come back to that bit later. I don’t sit there agonising over it.
But I get very distracted when I’m working at home – start watering the plants, or organising my books – there’s a cliché isn’t there that a writer’s home is very tidy because instead of sitting there working they’ve been distracting themselves every few minutes by gradually tidying the place up.
When we were living in New York we only had a small apartment, and it would have been pretty antisocial of me to try and take up all the space writing. My office was in a WeWork co-working space and it meant I could book other WeWork rooms in offices around the city. I would go from WeWork to WeWork and work in all these different offices with different views. It was a great way to see the city. It was great to feel immersed in New York in my writing and to be seeing the sights of New York out of the window as I was working.
But I get very distracted when I’m working at home – start watering the plants, or organising my books – there’s a cliché isn’t there that a writer’s home is very tidy because instead of sitting there working they’ve been distracting themselves every few minutes by gradually tidying the place up.
When we were living in New York we only had a small apartment, and it would have been pretty antisocial of me to try and take up all the space writing. My office was in a WeWork co-working space and it meant I could book other WeWork rooms in offices around the city. I would go from WeWork to WeWork and work in all these different offices with different views. It was a great way to see the city. It was great to feel immersed in New York in my writing and to be seeing the sights of New York out of the window as I was working.
Paul Tudor Owen
There are those books you love reading because you enjoy spending time with the characters in that particular setting so much. I remember as a teenager racing through Another Country by James Baldwin and thinking these musicians, actors and writers living their turbulent lives in 1950s Greenwich Village were just the coolest people in the world. Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, again in New York, that was another one for me at that age – he would be unbearable to have round for a cup of tea now though.
You’d also have a memorable afternoon with the cloistered university students in Donna Tartt’s Secret History – there’s that fantastic line where Henry is “quite startled to learn from me than men had walked on the moon … ‘How did they get there? When did this happen?’”
You’d also have a memorable afternoon with the cloistered university students in Donna Tartt’s Secret History – there’s that fantastic line where Henry is “quite startled to learn from me than men had walked on the moon … ‘How did they get there? When did this happen?’”
Paul Tudor Owen
Sometimes I’ve had to remind myself to sit back and appreciate that I’ve finally achieved this ambition that I’ve had for so long. I remember sending off my signed contract to Obliterati Press from the Guardian office in New York, where I worked at the time. It was early in the morning and I had to get it over to them quickly before I started another very busy day. I stopped for a second and forced myself to think: “You have just signed a publishing contract – you’re going to be a published author!” But then I had to get on with my work.
Seeing the book on the shelf in a real-life bookshop was another one of those moments. It was in my local Waterstones, where they had made it a recommended book, and there was one of those lovely handwritten reviews from one of the members of staff underneath. It said: “This extraordinary debut novel combines a crime story, evocative portrayals of New York, and Egyptian mythology. Beautiful prose makes this a ‘must read’.” It felt great to stand there and read that.
All my friends and family coming out to support me on the night of my book launch – that was a really great moment too.
Seeing the book on the shelf in a real-life bookshop was another one of those moments. It was in my local Waterstones, where they had made it a recommended book, and there was one of those lovely handwritten reviews from one of the members of staff underneath. It said: “This extraordinary debut novel combines a crime story, evocative portrayals of New York, and Egyptian mythology. Beautiful prose makes this a ‘must read’.” It felt great to stand there and read that.
All my friends and family coming out to support me on the night of my book launch – that was a really great moment too.
Paul Tudor Owen
I think there are really two main lessons I took from the whole process of writing The Weighing of the Heart and getting it published. One is that you can’t take no for an answer. You’ve got to keep trying to find an agent, a publisher, keep trying to get your book into the shops, trying to promote it. Nobody else is going to do it except you.
Having a book published by a small publisher, it’s your own responsibility to do a lot of the marketing, and that kind of relentless self-promotion practically goes against your nature as a British person. So the way I deal with it is just to channel my inner American and think: how would a New Yorker handle this? They would say: here’s my book, it’s brilliant, you should read it. If Instagram had existed in F Scott Fitzgerald’s day, he would have been posting pictures of himself and Zelda reading his novel in the pool at the Ritz complete with a bouncing gif of a shark with books for eyes…
The other lesson is to just keep writing. Don’t get disheartened. If you’re good, there will come a point when people are interested. And the best thing you can do in the years until that happens is write as much as you can, keep improving, keep experimenting, keep practicing. And then you’ll be ready when that happens. It will all have been worth it in the end.
Having a book published by a small publisher, it’s your own responsibility to do a lot of the marketing, and that kind of relentless self-promotion practically goes against your nature as a British person. So the way I deal with it is just to channel my inner American and think: how would a New Yorker handle this? They would say: here’s my book, it’s brilliant, you should read it. If Instagram had existed in F Scott Fitzgerald’s day, he would have been posting pictures of himself and Zelda reading his novel in the pool at the Ritz complete with a bouncing gif of a shark with books for eyes…
The other lesson is to just keep writing. Don’t get disheartened. If you’re good, there will come a point when people are interested. And the best thing you can do in the years until that happens is write as much as you can, keep improving, keep experimenting, keep practicing. And then you’ll be ready when that happens. It will all have been worth it in the end.
Paul Tudor Owen
I’m currently working on a new novel, which is essentially about this current phenomenon of lack of trust in the media, in authority, fake news, conspiracy theories.
It’s set in New York again but it’s going to be set in the 1970s when New York was a sort of crime-plagued hellhole. That was the kind of New York that I first fell in love with as a kid through films like Taxi Driver and Mean Streets.
To me that was a time when New York felt so exciting but also so gritty and I really wanted to sort of conjure up that New York in my writing. It’s about a failing newspaper journalist who starts looking into conspiracy theories about the moon landings and he starts meeting these conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landings were faked. And as he gets drawn into deeper into the world he sort of finds himself against his better judgment starting to believe some of their paranoia.
Unfortunately I’ve just missed the 50th anniversary of the moon landings, but hopefully I’ll have it finished in time for the 60th.
It’s set in New York again but it’s going to be set in the 1970s when New York was a sort of crime-plagued hellhole. That was the kind of New York that I first fell in love with as a kid through films like Taxi Driver and Mean Streets.
To me that was a time when New York felt so exciting but also so gritty and I really wanted to sort of conjure up that New York in my writing. It’s about a failing newspaper journalist who starts looking into conspiracy theories about the moon landings and he starts meeting these conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landings were faked. And as he gets drawn into deeper into the world he sort of finds himself against his better judgment starting to believe some of their paranoia.
Unfortunately I’ve just missed the 50th anniversary of the moon landings, but hopefully I’ll have it finished in time for the 60th.
Paul Tudor Owen
I can trace the idea behind The Weighing of the Heart back to the obsession with New York I'd had since I was a teenager. It felt like all these great novels and films and songs I loved were set in New York – The Great Gatsby, Mean Streets, Simon and Garfunkel. It felt like a place where anything could happen, it felt like a great crucible of art and culture where anyone who was anyone either came from or had made their name or had depicted it so memorably.
And that led me to study American literature and American history at university, and the third year was a year abroad, and I went to the University of Pittsburgh, and that was when I was able to visit New York for the first time myself.
And walking those streets, all the unmistakeable iconography of New York around you – the fire escapes, the yellow cabs, steam rising from a manhole, the skyscrapers, the rivers – it just felt like I’d walked into one of those books or films that I’d loved.
And I not only wanted to live there, I wanted to be part of this great tradition of depicting New York and romanticising it.
And when we did move there, I’d already written quite a lot of The Weighing of the Heart, so in some ways it really did feel like life imitating art.
I used to enjoy walking the same streets that Nick and the other characters in the book would walk, visiting the galleries and restaurants and streets that they visit in the book. There’s a real apartment block on the Upper East Side, just across from Central Park, that I used as the model for the Peacock sisters’ apartment block.
I’d wanted to live there for so long that I did sometimes wonder if this was really happening. I remember when I was a kid watching an episode of Red Dwarf, the sci-fi TV sitcom from the 90s, where the lead character, Lister, gets hooked on this immersive virtual-reality computer game called Better Than Life. And in the game he thinks he is living in Bedford Falls, the town from It’s a Wonderful Life, and he loves it and he doesn’t want to leave. And sometimes after moving to the US I got a bit worried that I was in Better Than Life, that I would wake up and I’d be still a teenager in Manchester reading The Catcher in the Rye, fantasising about New York.
The book's other key inspiration came from an exhibition I went to a few years ago at the British Museum called The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, which told the story of what the Ancient Egyptians believed happened to you when you die.
As I learnt from the exhibition, the Ancient Egyptians believed in a ceremony called ‘the weighing of the heart’, something in some ways similar to the Christian idea of St Peter standing at the gates of Heaven, deciding whether or not you have lived a worthy enough life to come in.
In the Ancient Egyptian version, Anubis, the god of embalming, presides over a set of weighing scales, with the heart of the dead person on one side and a feather on the other.
If the heart is in balance with the feather, you get to go to the afterlife, which they called the Field of Reeds.
But if your heart is heavier than the feather, you get eaten by an appalling monster called the Devourer, who has the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the back legs of a hippopotamus – three of the most dangerous creatures that Ancient Egyptians could encounter.
To the Ancient Egyptians, the heart, rather than the brain, was the home of a person’s mind and conscience and memory, which was why it was the heart they were weighing.
And, intriguingly, one thing they were afraid of was that the heart would actually try to grass you up during this ceremony – sometimes the heart would speak up and reveal your worst sins to Anubis at this crucial moment. You could prevent this from happening by keeping hold of a little ‘heart scarab’.
I was spellbound by this ornate mythology, which had formed over centuries and millennia; I loved the way it was so familiar in its overall concept but so strange and unfamiliar in its details.
And I realised that the painting Nick and Lydia should steal should be an image of this ceremony, the weighing of the heart. It was so fitting, because the book is essentially about guilt and innocence; it’s about you weighing up as a reader how much you trust Nick as a narrator, and it’s about Nick himself and the people around him weighing up how much they trust him, what they think of him, what they know about him and his character. And without spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t read it, I hope that I found a way to knit all that imagery into the book effectively, especially towards the end.
Once I’d settled on this, there were a number of strange coincidences. At one point in The Weighing of the Heart Nick recalls a school trip to the British Museum, and it is suggested he might have stolen one of these heart scarabs that could protect you during the ceremony. I had written this scene but I wanted to get the details right, so I looked through the British Museum’s collection of scarabs on their website and identified the one that best fit the bill, and then I went down to the museum to take a look at it in person.
But when I got there and found the case where this scarab was supposed to be, the space for this scarab was empty. Instead of the object itself there was just a note on the wall that said: ‘Heart scarab (lost).’
It was another strange moment of life imitating art.
And that led me to study American literature and American history at university, and the third year was a year abroad, and I went to the University of Pittsburgh, and that was when I was able to visit New York for the first time myself.
And walking those streets, all the unmistakeable iconography of New York around you – the fire escapes, the yellow cabs, steam rising from a manhole, the skyscrapers, the rivers – it just felt like I’d walked into one of those books or films that I’d loved.
And I not only wanted to live there, I wanted to be part of this great tradition of depicting New York and romanticising it.
And when we did move there, I’d already written quite a lot of The Weighing of the Heart, so in some ways it really did feel like life imitating art.
I used to enjoy walking the same streets that Nick and the other characters in the book would walk, visiting the galleries and restaurants and streets that they visit in the book. There’s a real apartment block on the Upper East Side, just across from Central Park, that I used as the model for the Peacock sisters’ apartment block.
I’d wanted to live there for so long that I did sometimes wonder if this was really happening. I remember when I was a kid watching an episode of Red Dwarf, the sci-fi TV sitcom from the 90s, where the lead character, Lister, gets hooked on this immersive virtual-reality computer game called Better Than Life. And in the game he thinks he is living in Bedford Falls, the town from It’s a Wonderful Life, and he loves it and he doesn’t want to leave. And sometimes after moving to the US I got a bit worried that I was in Better Than Life, that I would wake up and I’d be still a teenager in Manchester reading The Catcher in the Rye, fantasising about New York.
The book's other key inspiration came from an exhibition I went to a few years ago at the British Museum called The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, which told the story of what the Ancient Egyptians believed happened to you when you die.
As I learnt from the exhibition, the Ancient Egyptians believed in a ceremony called ‘the weighing of the heart’, something in some ways similar to the Christian idea of St Peter standing at the gates of Heaven, deciding whether or not you have lived a worthy enough life to come in.
In the Ancient Egyptian version, Anubis, the god of embalming, presides over a set of weighing scales, with the heart of the dead person on one side and a feather on the other.
If the heart is in balance with the feather, you get to go to the afterlife, which they called the Field of Reeds.
But if your heart is heavier than the feather, you get eaten by an appalling monster called the Devourer, who has the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the back legs of a hippopotamus – three of the most dangerous creatures that Ancient Egyptians could encounter.
To the Ancient Egyptians, the heart, rather than the brain, was the home of a person’s mind and conscience and memory, which was why it was the heart they were weighing.
And, intriguingly, one thing they were afraid of was that the heart would actually try to grass you up during this ceremony – sometimes the heart would speak up and reveal your worst sins to Anubis at this crucial moment. You could prevent this from happening by keeping hold of a little ‘heart scarab’.
I was spellbound by this ornate mythology, which had formed over centuries and millennia; I loved the way it was so familiar in its overall concept but so strange and unfamiliar in its details.
And I realised that the painting Nick and Lydia should steal should be an image of this ceremony, the weighing of the heart. It was so fitting, because the book is essentially about guilt and innocence; it’s about you weighing up as a reader how much you trust Nick as a narrator, and it’s about Nick himself and the people around him weighing up how much they trust him, what they think of him, what they know about him and his character. And without spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t read it, I hope that I found a way to knit all that imagery into the book effectively, especially towards the end.
Once I’d settled on this, there were a number of strange coincidences. At one point in The Weighing of the Heart Nick recalls a school trip to the British Museum, and it is suggested he might have stolen one of these heart scarabs that could protect you during the ceremony. I had written this scene but I wanted to get the details right, so I looked through the British Museum’s collection of scarabs on their website and identified the one that best fit the bill, and then I went down to the museum to take a look at it in person.
But when I got there and found the case where this scarab was supposed to be, the space for this scarab was empty. Instead of the object itself there was just a note on the wall that said: ‘Heart scarab (lost).’
It was another strange moment of life imitating art.
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