Benjamin Wood on the Creative Life Force

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Benjamin Wood about his Booker-longlisted novel, Seascraper.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: What is your experience of the creative life force? Toward the end of the book, your main character Thomas has a dream, or a vision, where he is handed a song, basically, and it comes through in I guess what you could call a dream. And he said something like I’m not sure who wrote it, him or me. I swear to God, the song was there. Already written, tune and everything. And I have talked to people who feel like creativity is just coming through the subconscious. What’s your experience of that?

Benjamin Wood: It feels like, to me, creativity is this – I don’t know what label to put on it – but it feels like when it’s going well, it’s this sort of vast collective consciousness, and I am, you know, a guy with a radio, turning the dial, tuning into it and trying to tune into it day after day. Sometimes I might hear a crackle. Sometimes I might hear a voice and it disappears. And then on some days, you turn the dial on the radio and it’s playing Mozart and you just hear it. You hear and it just flows through, and it doesn’t come from the act of trying to hear it, or you’re not doing anything different, but it’s like a frequency that you tap into that allows you to get things onto the onto the page, or if you’re writing music, to find a chord sequence. I think that most of the creative people who I’m inspired by and have read about and have watched documentaries about or have met and spoken to have the same experience of creativity as that. It’s never felt like a cerebral exercise to me; it’s always felt like an emotional exercise. And you know what happens to Thomas in the book is that I really wanted to put down in a story how it can be. For example, one of the most perfect pop songs ever crafted, one of the perfect songs ever crafted “Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney fully realized in a dream, to the extent that he woke up in the morning with the tune in his head and he rang around everyone he knew to say, What’s this song? It’s incredible. Like, I didn’t write it. Tell me who wrote it, because it’s in my head. And nobody could say where. It’s like, well, you must have written it. It’s like, no, it was in a dream. So surely, after weeks of bringing everyone around and asking, you know whoever turned out, but it just arrived fully formed in his mind, and then he all he had to do was write the lyrics. And that’s where Paul McCartney’s genius came in, because he found the most perfect lyrics out of his own experience and his own talent to attach to that melody and that the melody and the lyrics together create this song which is moving and pure and truthful, and has connected with billions of people, I would say, you know, over the course of its life. And that came to him because one night he went to bed and in the morning, he woke up and it was there. You know, other songwriters have had similar experiences.

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Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in Merseyside. Seascraper is his fifth novel. His previous works have been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Book Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the RSL Encore Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. In 2014, he won France’s Prix du Roman Fnac. He is a senior lecturer in creative writing at King’s College, London, and lives in Surrey with his wife and sons.