Running my software on your hardware…The wonderful wetware of Nicola Griffith

Caution: Explicit language and powerful sentiments ahead.

When I write, dear reader, I don’t want to build a careful tale for you to discuss with a smile in a sunny place, I want to own you. I don’t want to be The New TV Series, I want to be pornography: to thrill you so hard you’re ashamed but can’t help yourself crawling back for more.

I want to write a whole novel that invades you. I want to control what you think and feel, to put you right there, right then, killing and being killed, fucking and being fucked, cooking and starving, drinking and thinking, barely surviving and absolutely thriving. I want to give you a life you’ve never had, change the one you live.

How? I will take control of your mirror neurons. I will give you tastes and textures, torments and terrain you might never find in your real life. I will take you, sweep you off your feet, own you. For a while. For a while when you’re lost in my book you will be somewhere else, somewhen else, someone else.

I control the horizontal, I control the vertical. Sit back, relax, enjoy. When you’re done, take a breath, smoke a cigarette, figure out who you are now, and come back for more.

Nicola Griffith is the author of six wonderful, luminous books, at least two of which are among my favourite books of all time. Slow River and Ammonite are science fiction in the way that Ursula K. Le Guin’s work is SF: powerful intense fiction by an author working at the height of her talent to tell a story about characters so real, they’re people, not characters.

If you haven’t read Slow River and Ammonite, or, more likely, haven’t even heard of them till now, I urge you to read them and discover their simple, heart-stopping beauty for yourself.

She has also written three other novels and a memoir, none of which I have read yet. I intend to, soon, and have all four on order.

I’ll read anything by her. Because, like the greatest fiction, she doesn’t hesitate to let her own politics come to the fore in writing. Her sexuality. Her worldview. Her everything.

As the quote above spells out very clearly, she puts everything she is and she has into her writing. When you read Nicola Griffith, you ‘get’ Nicola Griffith. And that pleasure, of meeting a mind, a personality, a person, through the work, is what makes her writing extraordinary for me at least.

Because I believe in the same approach: Throw yourself into your writing, heart, body and soul. And all those other parts too, even the ones we don’t talk about in polite society. Because writing, the best writing, isn’t about being polite. Or about selling copies. Or garnering great reviews.

It’s a meeting of minds. And a writer owes it to the reader to show whatever he or she has at that point in time, through the mirror of that story.

To fire those mirror neurons in a way that causes sentient beings to twitch with empathy.

To feel what you feel, smell what you smell, see through your eyes–which in turn are seeing through the eyes of your characters, our people as I like to call them. To be them, if only for a while. A wonderful, delirious while.

If minds could have sex, it would be called fiction.

And, like Nicola Griffith, I’d like to promise you, my readers, that…

With my next novel, I’m going to run my software on your hardware. You’ve been warned.

Upgrade your hardware. It’s about to be run to max capacity.

Check out Nicola Griffith’s website and blogs here.
Read more about Slow River, Ammonite and her other books here.