Horatio Clare’s first book, Running for the Hills, an acclaimed account of a Welsh childhood, won a Somerset Maugham Award, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book.
His subsequent books include Truant, A Single Swallow (shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book of the Year), The Prince’s Pen, Down to the Sea in Ships (winner of the Dolman Travel Book of the Year), Something of his Art and The Light in the Dark.
Horatio's essays and reviews appear regularly in the national press and on BBC radio. He has written the children's books Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot (winner of the Branford Boase Award 2016 for Debut Children's Book of the Year) and Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds (2017). More recently, Horatio has written The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal.
Can you compare your children's writing with your other types of writing? I think that the voice is the same. The narrative voice I use in the Aubrey books is the same – me – the same voice in which I write the travel books. My father's very good with children and I once asked him how he did it and he said, 'I talk exactly the same way as I would to anybody else, I just watch for longer words.' I think it's the same. And then, because it's fiction, you get to do impressions, ventriloquise, and play with character... and I nick a lot of stuff from life and put them in the forms of ravens or owls. So, it's pretty homogeneous. Yes, I think it's the same thing.
Where does the seed of a story come from? Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot was the birth of my son Aubrey and the need to tell a story to him and about him. And also I found that I really wanted to talk about depression and it just came together in a wonderful way. There was no contract, I didn't ask anyone's permission, I didn't run it by anybody. I just wrote it, and I've never done that before. Everything I've done before has been to commission. That was the first one that was realised.
Aubrey seemed obviously set up for a sequel. Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds isn't such a clean, straightforward book: it's a bit of a mash-up (laughs). It's a structural failure. It was obviously about Brexit and immigration, and wanting to talk about a world without borders. I wanted to have a vehicle to do that, and I feel a bit bad about using Aubrey for that vehicle in a way. But there are one or two scenes – when the animals are arguing about where they come from – and that's good, I'm proud of that, but the book's a mash. It arises fairly organically.
Have you ever had to fight to keep in a scene or part of a story in a book? Yes. In Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, the publishers were OK with the scene where Aubrey's father attempts suicide, but they worried about the pills. I said 'whisky and pills', and they were worried that was laying out a menu. They were most worried about the drawing: that brilliant drawing [by Jane Matthews] of Jim hunched up in a foetal position on the moors in a torch beam, apparently dead. And that is quite an unusual thing to have in a children's book. I've been in the game long enough, though, to know that you must stick to your guns (and I so often didn't on the way here, and so I got covers I didn't want and titles I didn't want), but that one was worth fighting for... And it turns out that kids don't mind at all. Stuff they see on the television and on the internet dwarves all this. Jane is an amazing artist and she just gets me, so it really works.
Can you briefly explain the curious term 'Yoot' in your first Aubrey story? It came from a book by Patrick Marnham called Snake Dance, where he talks about the uranium that went into the first [atom] bomb and it came from the Congo. He traces it from a mine in the Congo that's still there (it's been capped), all the way to Arizona, where he comes across the Hopi Indians who have a snake dance which they do to control the lightning, because they're terrified of it. It's actually Addie Warburg's theory. He gave a lecture when he was more or less incarcerated for manic depression [bipolar disorder] on the shores of Lake Geneva. He said to his jailers, 'If I can give a really good lecture on this, you have to let me go.' They agreed and he did! He talked about the 'snake dance'. The Indians said that the lightning comes, but if we dance with the snake, we control the lightning. He used this phrase: The Universal Terror of Existence. It really lit me up, and I thought that is what it is. Because I needed to somehow personify depression, and I called it 'Universal Terror of Existence', so that was UTE and then I just needed to work back from there to make it a monster which was 'YOOT'. And of course the book's resolution is in the un-confusion of those homophones.
What book are you most proud of? Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot. It matters because it was the first time I felt like I'd brought off a work of art. Non-fiction doesn't feel very difficult in comparison: a chronology will emerge, and you'll get a structure (especially if it's travel – it's a journey). It's not hard, really. The hard thing is thinking up at what angle you're going to cut the world, and what line you're going to take or follow. The triumph of A Single Swallow was the idea. The book's a failure compared to the idea. I'm proud of Running for the Hills because I was relatively young and inexperienced [written when Horatio was about 28]. Obviously it suffers from a lot of first-book defects, but it gets there, and by the end it's pretty good. I didn't think I would top that but Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot was the first time I thought of myself as a writer.
Are there any sentences you've written that you could say you are proud of? One or two. I still like the opening of Down to the Sea in Ships. There are moments in Down to the Sea in Ships that I really like. It was the most wonderful book to do; I didn't think I would ever have more fun doing a book than I had doing that one (laughs). It was absolutely amazing, eye-opening, life-changing, and I'd just done a book about being on an ice-breaker [Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North]. It was only a small book, but the experience wasn't as miraculous somehow. I mean, it was extraordinary, breaking ice in the Gulf of Bosnia, but there's nothing like those great ships on the oceans. And yes, there are one or two lines in that which work, which are pretty, and true, and one or two in Running for the Hills, I guess. So yeah, every now and then, you hit it, and it normally is when you haven't really forced it, and it just kind of comes. I was going to work in Broadcasting House, I was on the number 19 bus and went through Parliament Square and it snowed and the snow on the grass on College Green looked like green hair on a white beast, so I nicked that and stuck it in Running for the Hills, and The New Yorker picked it out... and I thought, Yeah, got you... pulled you!
And do you ever surprise yourself as a writer? When I look back on stuff I've done, I think, How the fuck did I do that? I wish I could do that now! I suppose the cliché is that they're all failures, but sometimes you get really close to what it was that you were trying to say. And there were moments in Orison for a Curlew where that more or less happens. I mean, I love drawing portraits of people. I'm much happier doing what you're doing now: I much prefer to interview than be interviewed. When you get someone, even if what's on paper is only a version of the man or the woman, but when you get them, it's a wonderful feeling... because you're capturing life or a form of life, and that is hard, but it's kind of the job. And my captain on that first ship [in Down to the Sea in Ships] I fell completely in love with:
'The captain is fierce with bulk like a small bear. His skin is pallid, his beard grizzled, his teeth are tinged with alloys and gold.'
That came to me when I was looking at him – that was just obviously what he was. If you can put yourself in the position where you fall for something like that, then the writing's easy: it's the getting into the position that's the trick.
What's the best piece of writing advice that you've been able to use? Well, my Dad said when I was young, and I wanted to write, that I should read George Orwell and write like that. That simplicity, and that kind of clarity, and I realised later there's a moral clarity about Orwell: he unambiguously tells you all his failings all the time, which sets you up to take what he tells you as true as he can make it. I trained as a journalist in Newcastle, and they were very hot on getting it all down there [in] a notebook. But I think the notebook rather changes the dynamic, and so you either have to have enough time with a person so that they forget about the notebook, or you have to put the notebook away in the cabin... and just be with them, and just remember, remember, remember... and get back down there and write it down as fast as possible... and I do like to do that.
A friend of mine, Laura Barton, would just stand in front of somebody, and take it down as if she's painting them, but she's a wonderful presence, and there's something about her... she's got the trick of intimacy that makes people not really think about what she's doing. But with a man, it's different: men are much more guarded and wary. Everyone's media-trained now, so the sailors I was dealing with in Finland had all been briefed: they were all being careful, and it took a while for them not to give a damn (laughs), and then they got to trust you, to like you, and you wouldn't turn them over... which is an issue I suppose. I'd say to them, if you're going to be a significant part of the book, you can see the book before I publish it. In the end, because it was such a rush – the publication schedule – I didn't actually send it to them, but I thought I've done this long enough now that I've never made anyone unhappy with the portrayal... except for one neighbour in Wales who deserved it! (laughs)
You mention George Orwell. Who else do you most admire as a writer? I tend to admire books. A Moveable Feast [Ernest Hemingway]. I just think it is absolutely brilliant, particularly the beginning. I'm a lot less keen on the [F. Scott] Fitzgerald bit, although it's fine. It's a wonderful book. I think it's marvelous, truly marvelous, his picture of himself, and his love, and their love, and the way he puts in right at the beginning that we were young and foolish and basically it was all going to end, and you suddenly realise that you are going to read the end of something beautiful. It's so brave and fierce, I really admire that.
B.B. [Denys Watkins-Pitchford] is the ultimate [children's] nature writer, although I haven't read him for a very long time, but I refer to him a lot in my mind. He made such a huge impression on me. Ian Niall [John Kincaid McNeillie] who wrote The New Poacher's Handbook, was an amazing writer. I wrote a piece in The Spectator recently, where I said that most of us write from outside nature – about it – because nature is so denuded compared to what it was... but those guys were writing out from a huge understanding of it. People like Richard Mabey, Mark Cocker, Jim Perrin all do that, but they are naturalists – they are scientists as much as they are writers.
What about children's writers?
Astrid Lindgren and The Brothers Lionheart: to start with the death of one of the brothers, and then to end with another one... you just think, Christ... and children love it, that doesn't put them off at all, yet it's absolutely heartbreaking. Richard Adams and Watership Down: a really political book, full of death. So wonderful, and brave, and funny too. A.A. Gill: I met him in Hay [Festival] and I interviewed him briefly. He was a lovely man, but fucking hell, when he gets it, he's so good. His essay about Germany, which was just extraordinary: he starts off like [Jeremy] Clarkson, it's all bashing the Hun, and by the end of it he goes to Buchenwald, and it's not, and you can only stand up and applaud really, because he nails it.
If, while you're writing, you have a problem, how might you resolve it? I had a huge one with Icebreaker recently, as I was on the last couple of days on the ship, and the fear came to me, butterflies in the stomach, the trapped bird, and I knew what was going to happen and, sure enough, the next three months were just suicidal depression really... and I had no choice but to just get it done. None at all. They'd deliberately given a tight production schedule and it was not breakable: there was a lot of money riding on it for them. And so there was no way round it, so you just had to sit there and bang it out... and you hate it, and it seems shallow and contrived and boring what you're putting out, and you crinkle up inside with shame of what's going to finally emerge, but you have got no choice but to write it. And that was pretty terrible. But you've got to say, I've only had two months, while Robert Macfarlane gets four years for his books! So it was my fault, I had two months... I took the money... and I had to deliver. And I did. And they didn't hate it, amazingly. As you get older, you think, OK, you've been here before. This is depression, and it does end. But of course it doesn't really help at the time. If anything, you think you're going mad. And that was just awful. Unless you go to a doctor, and this time I did go to a doctor, and she prescribed Prozac and that's your option really, and I thought, Fuck that, and Rebecca [H's wife] thought, Fuck that, as well, so I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't. I just bashed on through. Crack on, as they say in the North!
And what does that look like on the page, as you're just trying to bash through the work in progress? Well, you try and forget yourself. You try and think, This is really not about me. This is about the boat, the ship, the sailors, it's about Finland, it's about the publishers. That's what this is for. My lovely editor wants to know what this was like, and she wants to feel like she was there, and you have to do what you can. So you've got notes, so you get them down, try and thicken it, research it. I tend to research after the journey. And to an outsider, if you just looked at the screen, it wouldn't look bad. I felt it was rather more a long travel piece than a book at the time: I wasn't sure if there was enough material. That was what was really killing me... I didn't think I'd got enough, and that reviewers were going to say this was the most boring, shallow, hopeless thing... how dare he! (laughs). But I also think that, if you worry enough, it'll be OK. The really dangerous thing is not when you feel like hell, but when you feel great, and what you're writing is genius... that's when you fuck up! Much better to write it uphill, than downhill, I think. When I write travel pieces, I start really exuberantly, and I never send that version in.
Have you ever been tempted to write what you felt you ought to write? With Running for the Hills, I completely copped out. I delivered a manuscript that didn't basically have an end. Roland Philipps and John Murray sent it straight back and said it's great, but you've totally copped out. You need to tell us the truth about the end... so then I did! And I knew that would cross one of my mother's lines, but she was very understanding of it in the end.
But, no, not really. The bad thing is writing too much. So Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds is a fifth to a quarter too long. For some reason, I had an arc in my head where you have to fill all these bits in, you know, almost as if you have to write the pages to get to the end, and of course that is wrong... what you want to do is get to the end as fast as possible! So, if I was doing that again, I'd take a lot more of it out. Neil Griffiths, who I love and admire, said of Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, 'It's just a bit too long'. And I think he's right (laughs)... they can all come down. But you're lucky to find an editor who will see that and do that for you, or help you, or tell you to do it. And I had one with Icebreaker: Becky was brilliant and it was really well edited. With A Single Swallow she did what she could, against time pressure: an imperfect book. So, I do feel quite free when I write, I must say. I've lied a lot in my life as a person, but not on the page.
For your children's writing, is there anything that you find difficult? I think if the story is there, as it was with Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, and partly with Ladybirds, then it isn't difficult because then it's fun. The characters are fun, the voices are fun, the jokes are fun... all that's a total joy. The difficult thing is conception. If you've got the idea, you're fine, but if you're still kind of juggling two ideas two-thirds of the way through – as I was with Ladybirds – then you're not so fine. I found that very hard. I wrote The Prince's Pen, which was my first published fiction really. I spent ages thinking, How does it end? You lie there at night, and it's fun to wrestle with, as long as you're not up against a deadline. I mean, fiction is just much, much harder than non-fiction. Good non-fiction is hard, and it cannot be taught any more than good fiction, but it's not as difficult: it doesn't rely on magic so much. I really felt that Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot was a gift, and that I was the person who was going to write that book, and it needed to be done, and I've never really had that feeling otherwise. So, yeah, one book! (laughs)
What helps or stimulates your work? Well, how clichéd, but walking, travel, changing of scene... all of those things really help. Reading. You read A.A. Gill and then you have to write a travel piece, and you think, Yes, now I'm going to attempt this... He wrote a piece on Serengeti and I just had to do one as well and I read about a page of his – and it was such a pleasure – but I put it aside… in the end, it's insecurity, it's a need to do something I think I'm good at, and want to get better at. The point is, as a writer, you get much more respect and admiration and encouragement and time with people listening to you... much more than is justified by what you actually do. Our literary culture is amazingly generous and we still have this extraordinary respect for books and writers. It's not that I feel a fraud, I just feel that there's a bigger suit of armour than the body inside it, and that part of my job is to try and justify that.
Does that drive you then? Well, it does help. When I first started, my friend Richard Cole said to me, 'The point is not to dazzle us with the advances in your book sales, the point is to keep doing it and get better at it'. I sit down and if it's going moderately well, or just going, I really love it – I really enjoy it. The act itself. People say you don't want to be a writer, you want to have written them. But not me, I really like the typing. I don't find it hard. I like sitting in front of the screen.
For a first draft, say, do you write longhand or type? Notes, longhand. And so scenes can be longhand, but really I type it onto a computer. That's the way the book gets made, and I do multiple versions, so I experiment. I know a poet who doesn't. He writes it onto a screen and then he'll just change stuff, but he doesn't save early versions... so if you fuck it up and it all becomes a mess, that's too bad. He says he likes that danger, he likes the risk (laughs). Good isn't it? That's an amazing method. So he has a first line or a feeling that he gets, and he writes it, but he writes it to find out what the last line is... he doesn't know that. And an element of that is true for me, too. I knew with Yoot, roughly, that it was going to end on the moors, but I didn't really know. I kind of knew the ending but I didn't really know what it was going to look like, but you write to find that out.
So, you're a pantser [writer who flies by the seat of their pants] rather than a plotter? To a degree, yes. For Running for the Hills, I made a list of thirty scenes. I knew they were going to be in it. They were just one line each, so it was thirty lines on a piece of A4 paper. And then I just wrote them, and tried to jigsaw them into order. So there's a degree of planning. And with travel, it's easy, because it tells you: it's chronological basically. The best piece of advice I've ever been given was Rob Ketteridge at the BBC, and I was in the middle of writing Running for the Hills and I was having a horrible time because I thought I was selling the family silver off cheap, and Rob said, 'All we're asking H is that you give a true account of yourself.' And that was like a light going on! I thought, That's fair enough, because that is all they're asking. I can do that, and that's what I've absolutely stuck to.
What are your expectations of yourself as a writer now? As a performer – the public side of things – I'm good at it, so when you perform, you give them the best hour that you can. If there's only five kids there, it doesn't bother me. If four of them buy the book, fantastic. If one of them buys the book, fine. I don't care, that isn't my problem. It's not about that. I thought when I started that I wanted fortune and glory, and to get laid. Writing was a wonderful thing and the fact that it could be a part of those things was my secret inner life, but actually, no. I got a letter from Robert Macfarlane who is wonderfully kind and generous with his time, and it was such a sweet, encouraging note, and I thought that's what I'm in it for... these wonderful people who I really admire, thinking it's good. And yeah, [it's great if you write] a classic that will stand the test of time. But it doesn't matter if you don't. The point is that you try. Have some fun and do some teaching along the way. I'm lucky in that I love the teaching side which is inherent in mid-list writing. If you're a bestseller, you don't have to do it, but even they do it. I really enjoy it. I love the act of listening to people, to kids.
Finally, what's so special about writing for you personally? It's incredible good luck to find something that you love that you can get paid for... that's what's amazing. And I love it, now, because I bring my son Aubrey to these festivals and we have fun. He gets it. We're here to do a show. Even if there's only two people, we're here to do a show. It's being part of it.
And, for travel, you can take people. I took them all to Tanzania for the Financial Times. I made a thumping loss on it, but we paid about three grand for a thirty grand holiday, and those sorts of things you don't think of at all when you start, but they are great. You earn it, because it's feast and famine, and there are times when it's the most useless job in the world... I have a decent brain and I'm quite good at organising, I was a good producer... and then I look at my friends, who are doing incredible stuff, and they all live in million-pound houses, and we are just not in that world... and I think, fuck, I should never have left the Beeb [BBC]... but I'm glad I did!
Link to Horatio's website: Horatio Clare
Horatio's agent: Rogers, Coleridge & White
Publisher (for Aubrey books): Firefly Press