Questioning everything
SF Said talks to Jake Hope about his latest book, Tyger, and its nine year inception. He talks about how reading is the first step in the creative process, and why writing is a continuation of that process.
AUTHOR SF Said sees his position as a reader as integral to his writing. He says: “I wish I could claim to be some kind of instinctive genius who knows everything. I’m not, I’m a reader who has taken one more step and started to write the kinds of stories I would love to read myself.”
These books include Varjak Paw, The Outlaw Varjak Paw, Phoenix and his latest novel, Tyger, which has been nine years in the making. Tyger is an exceptional story about the powers of imagination and perception. “I wanted to challenge myself to make things like writing and art as exciting and thrilling to readers as the martial arts were in Varjak Paw. Can I make a scene where we design a poster as exciting as a fight scene? It’s quite a challenge to set yourself.’ Adam and Zadie in Tyger learn to use the powers of perception, imagination, and creativity. He says: “I feel these are strong superhero powers. It’s just they are powers that we all have potentially – all of us can perceive imagine and create. It’s my attempt to make superpowers that are real.”
8 PEN&INC. Return to the tiger
The novel grew from a tiger character who first appeared to SF at the time he was working on Phoenix, his third novel, a science fiction epic. “When I was writing Phoenix, in very early drafts this giant tiger would appear next to the main character. Having a giant tiger on a spaceship didn’t quite work. It felt awkward and wrong, but I loved the tiger. I asked the tiger could you just wait over there; I’ll finish this book which is obviously about the stars and space and then when it’s done I’ll come back to you and there’ll be a whole book just about you.”
SF describes how the tiger settled down until the seven years it took to write Phoenix, was over. “The tiger just rumbled and said don’t forget you promised I would have a book. All I wanted to do then was work on the tiger book. The tiger feels real and independent of me. I’m always very sceptical when writers talk about their creations as having some kind of independent life that feels ridiculous generally, but that’s how it felt.” SF describes how much he enjoyed
Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia and Bagheera the panther in The Jungle Book but how different tiger felt from these from the outset. As a keen reader, were there any books which particularly influenced Tyger’?
“Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses sequence was very important in terms of thinking about other worlds and alternate histories – how the history of the world could have gone differently.” For similar reasons, SF feels that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials was also an important touchstone. He says: “The whole history of children’s literature plays some part in everything I do because I read a lot, particularly of children’s books and comics and graphic novels. When you are writing, everything you’ve ever read or watched or listened to, every story you’ve ever taken in, in some ways gets blended up inside you.” One thing that SF says always remained constant and stable was the tiger itself, saying: “There was always a tiger, everything else evolved and developed, but the tiger was pretty much the same all the way through.”
Spring-Summer 2023
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