Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'm a writer, a novelist,
and I am an avid reader.
Since childhood, I have loved the world of books,
the world of storytelling,
the world of words.
And I'm particularly interested in the ways in which we share stories,
constantly folding in the experiences of others
into our own individual take on life.
Stories provide us the space to consider what it is to be us
and what it might be to be someone else.
This ability to share stories allows us to create a powerful kinship between us.
And the ability to share stories comes from the very simple fact
that we all share the capacity to imagine.
So I see life as an endless place of story,
potential narratives and novels gather anywhere human beings come together.
We are all walking stories waiting to be told.
Can I ask you to do something?
Could you just feel in your pockets,
or if you have a bag with you, could you just feel in your bag,
and take out an object.
It might be something really ordinary: car keys, wallet, bus ticket.
Generally, I find conkers in my pockets.
(Laughter)
It may be something you forgot you had or you thought you lost.
You might even be surprised by what you find in your pocket.
So if you could take it out,
have a look at it,
and then just cradle it in your lap, or hold it in your hand.
Thank you.
Albert Einstein said that the imagination is more important than knowledge.
What he simply means is that knowledge for its own sake is limited.
We need to use the imagination to make knowledge relevant to life,
to make meaning, which is what we human beings do all the time,
even out of really ordinary objects.
Consider the stories that could grow from an object held in the hand.
And consider, too,
the stories that grow from just a handful of words scattered on a page.
That's how novels start,
novels which can carry us into whole worlds of humanity
and different times and places and people.
And this idea about stories being available to all of us
is always in my head.
I'm constantly mulling it over in the big bowl of ideas I keep there,
that's always being stirred and simmered by my imagination.
This is what I want to talk to you about today.
I want to talk about what writing novels has taught me about the imagination
and how sometimes it takes courage
to believe in this innate power that we all have,
even when, like me, you spend a lifetime loving books and stories and words.
So why did I want to be a writer?
I suppose I grew up with books.
I was a child of rather Bohemian parents.
We were a gloriously noisy family of four kids and a vast menagerie of pets.
At one point, my mother had squirrel monkeys and parrots.
My parents were wildly imaginative restless dreamers -
make-their-own-rules type of people.
This is me quite some time ago with my father.
And this is me, clearly in awe of my beautiful hippie mother,
who actually made that poncho herself.
(Laughter)
When I was a child, we moved often,
following my parents' restless dreams and wild imaginative ideas and plans.
At one point, we lived in a ramshackle old house
in North Wales.
It was halfway up a mountain,
freezing cold,
so big it had a grand sweeping staircase straight out of Beauty and the Beast,
kitchen so huge, with large cooking ranges -
it would have been the perfect backdrop for Cinderella.
We lived in a dilapidated but very beautiful old watermill,
various villages houses, a farm.
One time my parents bought a boat for us to live on -
their very own Noah's Ark -
except they discovered the boat was not seaworthy,
and my mother discovered very quickly she wasn't a natural sailor either.
So that was short-lived.
But trying to rebel against parents who are naturally rebellious
is quite difficult to do.
So I did it by not wanting to live in unusual homes.
As a child, I dreamed of fitted carpets,
matching three-piece suites and lacy antimacassars,
perhaps a tall wooden clock at the base of the stairs
that ticked the hours, steadily, constantly
in the quiet hall of a calm home.
These days, my parents live very happily in a camper van.
They've traveled extensively around Europe in it,
and now with my father nearing his 80th birthday,
they can still be found driving about the roads of Great Britain.
When they were young,
they were entrepreneurial, hard-working people with grand ideas
and never quite enough cash to see them through.
At home, when my brothers and sister
were busy terrifying the ever-changing line of nannies we had to care for us,
I was a dreamer,
slightly forgotten, left to my own devices.
But I wasn't alone; I had many friends.
At this time, my parents were running a secondhand bookstore,
and our house was filled with teetering stacks of cardboard boxes
packed with musty-smelling, second-hand books.
My own bedroom was a warehouse for books too,
so many I could hardly get to my bed.
And here were my friends.
Here, with a never-ending chorus of voices
that spoke to me every time I opened their pages,
a vast library just for me.
In the beginning when I read books,
it was like being given a key to secret worlds.
Reading was a kind of wonder to me.
Reading felt like wandering through a vast forest
where the sunlight comes through the treetops like pale, gold dust.
I did not understand everything I read.
Censorship never entered my young life in any way;
I read entirely inappropriately.
(Laughter)
I also mispronounced words.
I skipped whole pages that bored or baffled me.
But I dwelled on the words I loved,
and I ran my finger underneath the sentences I loved,
whispering them out loud to myself.
Even right back then, stories thrilled me,
so maybe it was natural I become a writer.
But then, I was totally in awe of writing.
I imagined that you had to be somebody very special to be a writer.
I thought you had to have an extra big dose of imagination
to be able to do it.
And how on earth did you know whether you had enough or not?
Because back then,
I thought the imagination was something that was measured out to you at birth,
so you had it or you didn't.
And I was really afraid I didn't.
Later, after a disastrous school career -
very short-lived school career, I might add -
I went to art school.
This too was short-lived.
Then I sang in rock bands.
I worked with horses.
Mainly, I partied hard.
(Laughter)
And then I met a man who was very serious and very clever,
a kind of walking book of knowledge.
And I became very serious too.
We married.
We had two daughters,
and when they were babies, I went back to school.
I did a degree and then a master's and now have a doctorate.
And my husband decided we should sell up and move to France.
I packed up my boxes of books,
and as long as they could come with us,
I saw no reason not to do what he suggested.
So we bought an old stone farmhouse in South West France, high on a hill.
It had bats in the bedrooms,
swallows flew in and out the holes in the walls.
There was only electricity in two downstairs rooms.
It had running water,
but that was running everywhere -
(Laughter)
down the walls, through the holes in the roof.
My parents were so proud of me for embarking on such a crazy adventure.
(Laughter)
The plan was for me to sit among the sunflowers
and write a novel
while my husband renovated the house.
But things didn't happen that way.
My idea of writing a novel kept getting pushed to one side,
and I ended up focusing on practical matters.
I mixed concrete.
I learned how to repair a roof.
I became extremely adept at emergency plumbing.
I learned how to replace beams -
all sorts of building work.
My daughters went to school and learned French,
and I learned French too.
After about a year, we put in a kitchen,
and I cooked my very first meal that wasn't cooked outside on the barbecue.
It was a real cooked-in-a-kitchen meal,
and we sat down at the table to celebrate,
and the bats flew a victory procession around our heads.
And then, bit by bit, the bats moved out to the barns
and the swallows did too.
The pine martens and the owls stayed in the roof.
The sun shone,
and I did not write my novel.
Lizards basked on the terrace,
and we dug a big hole and put in a swimming pool.
I was on my way to getting the calm and ordered home
I'd always dreamed of since childhood.
We'd done so much building work, and there were still things to be done,
but it was pretty, pretty good.
And then on my birthday, I got a surprise present.
It was in the yard, big and bright and beautiful.
This is a cement mixer, ladies and gentlemen,
for those of you who don't know.
The moment I saw this, I knew it was time to do what I really wanted to do.
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come,
and this one had.
I knew I had to sit down, trust in my imagination
and write the novel I really wanted to write.
So that's what I did:
sat down with my computer,
and I trusted in my imagination,
and I began to write.
But having the confidence to follow your thoughts and dreams
can be quite difficult.
Every time I sat down to write, I found I could begin the story,
but then I stalled because, obviously, I didn't know what was going to come next.
And not knowing felt really frightening.
I had to find a way to learn not to be afraid of not knowing.
So,
I trusted in my imagination,
and I found that if I trusted in my imagination,
I could begin to write, slowly, what I didn't yet know.
And life is like this too.
When we don't know is when we should let the imagination step in.
Because when we don't know,
the imagination can allow us to form new ideas and perceptions.
So actually, I learned that not knowing is a great place to be.
Not knowing is when the imagination takes off its coat, rolls up its sleeves,
tells you to go stare out of a window for a while
and then lets you get on with things.
So I wrote from what I knew,
and slowly, my imagination allowed me to write what I didn't know.
I wrote the story of a woman
who has to leave her home to start a new life in a new country.
I was a woman who had done just this.
But my story was historical fiction;
it was set in a time before I was born.
It's about a Polish couple
who are separated by the Second World War and reunited six years later.
So my main character was a war refugee.
She'd come to Britain in 1946
to be with her husband and start a new life.
I imagined that she was a real person,
so I imagined that she had told me her story,
and I was just writing down what she told me.
When I wrote,
I found in the words that I gathered and stitched together into a story
all the truths about life as I understood it at that time.
And this happens when we read too.
Emotional truth can come to us
when we believe in the power of our imaginations.
And when we connect with fictional worlds,
we cannot help but learn about ourselves and others.
So I finished my novel.
It was translated into 16 languages,
and it sold on bestseller lists in many countries around the world,
and I went on, and I wrote a second novel and a novella.
And it wasn't easier to write the second book or the third,
because every time I sat down to write, I didn't know what I was going to write.
But what I had learned
was that my imagination would come to my aid
and that if I began by writing what I knew,
my imagination would allow me to write what I didn't yet know.
So what have I learned about writing novels and the imagination?
I've learned that the imagination is a resource available to us all
and that we all have it, and we should enjoy it.
It's a power that flames and burns in all of us,
so enjoy it.
Enjoy unlimited access to your imagination
365 days a year with no billing plans or renewal dates to worry about.
I've learned the imagination
is the most precious, built-in appliance of the human heart,
and we all have it,
and we really should trust in it.
Can I ask you to do something?
Can I ask you to look again
at the object you've been holding in your hand so patiently for me.
And can you look at it imaginatively?
Can you think about how it makes you feel?
Does it make you think of another person?
Does it make you think of another time?
What color does it make you think of?
Now imagine what stories the people sitting next to you
might be holding in their hands.
Because this auditorium, right now,
is filled with stories waiting to be told.
And can I ask you, also, at some point,
to share your story with somebody today?
Maybe even write it down.
And remember that if you trust in your imagination,
the words will find you.
I've learnt through writing and reading that we can be time travelers,
that we can share memories and experiences between us
through our own capacity to imagine.
And stories don't belong to their tellers.
So the story I told you today is your story too, even when it isn't.
If I've learnt anything about writing novels, it is this:
that if anything can unite us - if anything truly can -
it is our capacity to imagine.
We should celebrate all the ordinary and the extraordinary ways
in which we share our imaginations and connect with others.
It's our imagination that can bring the forgotten past and the unknown future
into our present, right here, right now.
So we should all be alive to the stories that are waiting to be told,
even the ones we carry in our pockets.
Thank you.
(Applause)