The storms are barrelling across the Atlantic, the nights are drawing in, so it's time for some more exclusive short stories and another set of podcasts. We'll be hearing from tony lashden, Rolli, Laura O'Meara and James Young in this Autumn set, but we start with Mark Haddon and his short story The Vickers House.
Haddon explains that this story came from "a fascination with houses".
"My father was an architect," he says, "and houses are a way of thinking about the world for me."
As a boy, the author remembers spending time alone in his room.
"Because that room was very much mine," he recalls, "the thinking seemed to happen within the room, rather than in my head. Rooms now are not just physical spaces, they are ways of thinking."
The Vickers House returns to a time when friends were "almost given to you on a geographical basis," he continues. "If someone lived a few doors away and you went to the same school and you were in the same year, you had to be friends. It was a curse. Or a blessing, depending on who that person was."
For Haddon, the constraints of village life make it the perfect setting for fiction.
"Being painted into a corner is a very good way of generating stories," he says. "If you can say at any point during a story 'And with one bound, I was free,' then you don't really have a story."
Tension and paradox are at the heart of fiction, Haddon argues, from the state of mind he falls into just before sleep which is "both very loose and very precise" to the combination of "grandiose self confidence" and "savage self criticism" which the creative project demands.
Writers must be as specific as they can, he continues, but they still "have to tap into something mysterious and strange, and make connections which are weird and unexpected, but nevertheless right".
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