"Success isn't for everybody. It's a personal question really, and it goes like this: what do you want?"
Imagine a 24 year old saying this. The man has firepower for sure. Apart from being talented, Wes is realistic, big-hearted and a humble guy. Team Okiedoks wishes him all the very best for his future pursuits. Lets know more about him.
1) What is your first memory of being inspired by writing (words in particular)?
I've always enjoyed words – their sound, their meaning – the freedom you have to play. I took a stronger interest in writing when I was a teenager, with news to bring, with things to say and a keen visual imagination. I tried my hand at filmmaking and writing poetry, before discovering that a novel was the perfect vehicle to fuse the personal and the political, the abstract and the heartfelt, the high and low of human life.
2) Who do you look up to in your field and why?
My strongest influences are Martin Amis and John Updike. Updike shares the style and fullness of Nabokov, but is more firmly grounded in the realism, the closeness to the actual of Saul Bellow. He writes wonderfully about Sex, God and Religion – the bigger issues. I like Amis's mixture of the demotic and the mandarin. He writes about low-life with the highest of style.
3) Tell us something about your writing career and your novel.
I'm twenty-four and having worked for some years as an editor and in literature development, it's a great, liberating leap forward to be publishing my debut novel, Shark. It's a certain shift in emphasis from an aspirational activity – from something you've done on the periphery, to a singular activity, one that preoccupies you, where the act of creation is overwhelming. The true vocation of a writer is to create - to shape experience.
4) What's the best piece of advice you have received from someone who is not a part of the writing world? Who has influenced you the most excluding your blood relatives.
I've not been lucky enough to have had any! Although I have looked at people, successful people, in business, in sport, in academia, and tried to see if there's any underlying clue to their success. And it seems what many of these people have in common is what Christina Aguilera calls her 'overarching mentality'. It's a general nervous energy, a dissatisfaction with everything you have already achieved and the desire to work, to learn, to improve and challenge yourself relentlessly.
There's an amount of selfishness and sacrifice needed to achieve. The bigger the achievement, the bigger the sacrifice is likely to be. This isn't for everybody. It's a personal question really, and it goes like this: what do you want?
5) Do writers vent out their way of life through their words as they are considered a perfect mismatch to practicality?
Writers, generally speaking aren't very practical. There's an old joke about how poets are terrifying drivers. But there is a great deal of practicality involved in writing too. To really succeed, it goes beyond the desk, you have to get out there and know where to send your work. You need to network. You need to keep up with the industry and what's happening, and where.
6) Does personal experience influence writing? If yes to what extent? If no, why?
It certainly influences my writing. I don't like to make a binary distinctions between art and life, life and art. My days often happen on the page, as part of a chapter, living child-like, in a realm of imagination. The things I find there may be directly relevant and useful for lived experience. And even if you're not writing realism, writers needs to keep their third-eye with them, have a reporters mind, to spot things, to see clearer. These observations will eventually appear on the page. Saul Bellow said his characters were 'great noticers' – I'd go beyond that and say that all writers must be great noticers too.
7) Does the writing field involve luck? If yes how would you define luck in the writing world ? If no, why?
Very much so, and I am glad you've suggested that! There's two levels to this. The first is a common misconception about how writers write – the intentionalist fallacy. That's to say that writing is a simple game in which an author expresses a sort of coded message within a text and a reader must 'uncover' it. That's only partly true. Writers find that characters appear, unplanned, but are completely necessary. Or a perfect sentence introduces itself to you, unannounced. Writing is improvisation. Much of it is willed, but much of it is trial and error, experience, and things that you simply can't explain.
The other area you need luck is in the 'real world'. Where you often need to be lucky to get your work in to a publisher at the right time. Or invited to a festival because you've bumped into somebody somewhere. You also need to be lucky enough to know people who will support you, who will believe in your writing.
8) Writers are unpredictable but most writers have something or other in common like being anti-government. So is there anything which you do like other writers?
It's hard to find commonalities about writers. They're a strange species. Though I do find that my favourite writers all share a penchant for 'bad politics'. The personal politics of Saul Bellow, John Updike, Martin Amis, Norman Mailer and JG Ballard have all been considered 'unfashionable' to say the very least.
9) When you write your novels or poems or articles, do you have a target audience in mind?
There's a lot of self-communion going on. A conversation between the levels of understanding in your own awareness. Although you do have to think of the reader too! I try to follow Christopher Hitchens' advice and address my words to an intelligent friend.
10) Our subscribers are mostly Asians and Arabs who want to know if it’s tougher for immigrants to enter the writing world?
It wholly depends upon which writing world. The British writing world is very tough, very competitive with traditional publishing models failing and a stiffening of social mobility. But there are initiatives, generally involving the British Council or the Arts Council that try to support internationalism, and links between cultures. I think those guys would be better placed to answer this question than me!
11) 3 things which the world doesn't know about Wes Brown?
My dad was a professional wrestler.
I don't have a degree.
I'm a synaesthete.
12) What do you feel about India? What comes to your mind when you hear the word 'India?'
From afar, it seems a very big and exotic place. The sort of place I'd love to visit, to really try and get a sense of the place, the culture. I grew up with many second-generation Indian friends and have had many friends who visit India, so it's always been in the background of my mind.
13) What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Read as much as you can. Write every day , try and master as many forms as you can. Even if you don't want to be a poet, playwright or a journalist, writing in these disciplines will enhance you overall as a rounded writer.
Note:- Wes blogs at http://wes-brown.blogspot.com
If you have a query for Wes, kindly email us at cs@okiedoks.com or d@okiedoks.com and we will pass on the questions. Alternatively, you can send your suggestions and feedback at the same email addresses.