Ep. 209: Matt Haig on Literally Writing the Multiverse

Matt Haig is the author of the internationally bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, along with six novels, including How To Stop Time, and several award-winning children’s books. His work has been translated into thirty languages, and his brand new book is The Midnight Library. 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

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Transcript

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:16:00] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #209 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron and I am thrilled you are here. Today, I get to talk with the amazing Matt Haig about his new book, The Midnight Library, which I fell head over heels in love with. It is about books and libraries and the multi-verse, it’s got a little bit of everything and he writes with humor and kindness, and I just love his work and it was delightful to talk to him. So that is coming up. You have that to look forward to. 

[00:52:00] What is going on around here? Well, for the first time in many years, I am still ahead in NaNoWriMo national novel writing month. It is the 12th of November as I record this and I’m a couple of thousand head, this doesn’t happen. This doesn’t happen to me. Usually by now, I am three or four days behind and I kind of do the whole giving up thing that I have talked about in the past, saying, well, I can’t get 6,000 words a day. I guess I lost NaNo. This month though, I went into it with the intention of every day is a new day, every day, 1667 words. Again, that’s my goal. I tend to write books quickly, but not usually my books take about two to three months to write not one month and right now, actually I am taking two months to write a book. My goal is to be done by the end of December. However, I’m going to win NaNo on the way that’s one of my goalposts is winning NaNo with 50,000 words. And I, I honestly tried to remember and I meant to pull it up and then I forgot. I can’t remember if I talked about my alpha smart last week. But you know what, if I did, I can talk about it again. An alpha smart, is basically just a keyboard. It is a keystroke emulator. So it’s a, the big plastic keyboard that looks like one of those, you know, TRS eighties that we had in the eighties, I guess, I guess it was eighties, maybe early nineties. I can’t remember. That we would plunk on and it looks like you should be printing it out on dot metric paper. But what it does is you type on it. You can’t do anything else. There’s no internet, there’s no nothing. You can just type and see four lines at once it runs on AA batteries, it lasts forever.

[00:2:38] And then when you’re done typing, whatever it is, you’re typing, you just hook it up to your computer and you hit send, and then it types it for you. Kind of like a player piano. You get to watch your words on roll across the screen. And while it types quickly, it still takes, you know, 5 or 10 minutes to download what you’re doing. So you got to walk away from your work and, and it feels good to walk back and say, how many words did I get? Oh my God, I got 2,400 words in an hour. That’s fantastic. So, the alpha smart has been helping me immensely. I have set up a NaNo routine, which I haven’t done in a long time. And it’s a little bit new to me because the office part is due to me. It’s a Neo too, for those of you curious they don’t make them anymore, but you can get them on eBay.  

[00:3:23] I go to my little desk right here, the desk that is not my work desk that I’m sitting at right now. It’s just a 90 degree turn from where I am, but I get to look out to the street. I light a candle. I put my headphones in. I listened to calm and soothing jazz, do not mock me. It works. And I’ve been playing with this book. I’ve just been playing every day that I started to not enjoy the writing, I’ve back up and I say, okay, what’s fun. What is fun? How can I throw something into the mix here that goes along with her character arc, but ups the stakes, I need more high jinx. I need more fun, and surprise, and excitement. And it’s working. It’s, I’m really, really having a good time playing with this book. So that has just been a joy. It has been a long time since I worked on a first draft. I’ve been revising for the last seven or eight months, I think on, a couple of different books. So this is, this is fun. I’m enjoying this first draft. And I just wanted to share that with you. I hope that if you are doing NaNo, if you are behind throw out the behind number. Today, you need to get 1,667 words, and tomorrow 1,667 words. And if you’re short at the end of NaNo, you can either say, oh my gosh, I have 40,000 words. I’m an amazing person. Or if you want to win, you can sit down and have a terrible day of writing, terrible words and get 10 or 15,000 words. You can do that too. Me, if I miss it, I will just take that as a miss and, and a good number of words, but I don’t think I’m going to miss it. I think I’m going to make it.

[00:04:59] Nothing else really going on around here. So I will stop this update. I am just happy with how writing is going, and I hope that you are too. I hope that you come some place and tell me all about it. And next week I will do the drawing for the two books I talked about last week. I’m giving away, if you would like to enter to win either of those two books, CJ Cooke’s The Nesting or Becca Syme’s Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. You can go to RachaelHerron.com/Win and sign up there. So, I’m extending that for a week. So happy writing. Come find me. Tell me how your writing is going. And thank you for listening. Please enjoy this interview. 

[00:05:40] Hey, is resistance keeping you from writing? Are you looking for an actual writing community in which you can make a calls and be held accountable for them? Join RachaelSaysWrite, like twice weekly, two hour writing session on zoom. You can bop in and out of the writing room as your schedule needs, but for just $39 a month, you can write up to 4 hours a week. With our wonderful little community, in which you’ll actually get to know your writing peers. We write from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM on Thursdays and that’s US Pacific Standard Time. Go to RachaelHerron.com/Write to find out more.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:21] Well, I could not be more pleased today to welcome to the show today, Matt Haig. Matt, hello! 

Matt Haig: [00:06:26] Hello, Rachael. Thank you for having me.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:28] I’m thrilled to have you. I loved this new book of yours. Loved it, loved it. And I want to talk about that and your process of writing, but I want to give you a little introduction first. Matt Haig is the author of the internationally bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, along with six novels, including How to Stop Time and several award-winning children’s books. His work has been translated into 30 languages and his brand new book is The Midnight Library. I want to tell you a tiny bit of a story, Matt, for some reason, I got your book on net galley from our shared publisher and, and then I just forgot about it. And I realized two days ago that we had this interview coming up and I thought, oh gosh, I better dip into that book, but it’s a lib- it’s a book about libraries. And I just finished that beautiful book about libraries. And I don’t want to read another book about libraries and I realized I’d accidentally read yours, a month ago when I first got it. And it had it just seared in my brain. And for some reason I didn’t put the title with your name together. And it’s so good. It’s so fun. And I want to talk about this whole multi-verse idea, but first of all, can you tell us a little bit about your process and how you get all this writing done? Where, where, and when.

Matt Haig: [00:07:41] Well, yeah, I’m, you know, I’m not really a writer with a very predictable routine. It really fluctuates. I have months of procrastination, trying to form ideas, writer’s block, all of that stuff, staring at a blank word documents and not getting anywhere. And then at the other end of the scale, when I’ve got the idea, when I’m halfway through the novel, you know, seven days a week, all waking hours. I’ll just be there just typing away. So it’s kind of like a, kind of bipolar existence of one extreme to the other. And, I, you know, I sometimes think I need to have more of a sort of a rigid routine, but I actually think it’s kind of the only way I can work because I kind of need that period of procrastination. And I’m feeling like I’m unproductive limit. I’m not actually unproductive, but we’re so conditioned to think that unless we’re actively doing or physically creating in that moment, but it’s kind of wasted time and we still feel that in our lives generally, but certainly in our working lives. And to be a writer I feel like, you know, so much of writing happens when you’re not actually writing, when you’re just sort of like walking or you’re, you know, walking the dog or you’re out with your friends or you’re out in the garden or whatever you’re doing. And, yeah. I mean, so actually for me, when I’m actually stuck with my writing, I rather than just a plow through, I, I feel like the best thing I can do is to just sort of step away and do something else. And very often the biggest breakthroughs within a novel or a story happen when you’re not actually at your laptop, when you’re not in your word document, writing away 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:29] often when you’re not thinking about it at all, at all, at all.

Matt Haig: [00:09:33] Yeah

Rachael Herron: [00:09:33] Just- 

Matt Haig: [00:09:34] At all. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:34] it lands on you full. Yeah 

Matt Haig: [00:09:36] Oh, that’s lovely. Yeah. The loveliest moment. I mean, it’s lovely in one sense, it’s frustrating that you can’t, you can’t ever, by definition, you can’t create those moments, but what you can do, you can switch off. And sometimes I feel like I don’t want to get to sort of pretentiously psychological or philosophical, but I- I’m, I’m a great fan of Young. You know, rather than Freud, I mean into Young. And in, in, in the red book, which was only sort of like published this century, because it’s all his scribblings from his psychotic episode, he writes about the spirit of the times, and the spirit of the depths. Being the two side of human nature. By the spirit of the times, he meant being so plugged into politics and what’s happening in the world and the world around you and the external stuff and the spirit of the depths is a sort of deeper existential human truth of view. And I feel like nowadays we’re so tilting towards the spirit of the times. And we’re so lost in the spirit of times, whether it’s like the latest American presidential debate or whether it’s you know, Coronavirus or whatever catastrophe, there’s so much to distract us in, in this kind of “hell-scape” that we, we, we feel we’re in, that we’re fed through Twitter and rolling news and all of that. And which yeah, we have to engage with. I’m not saying we don’t have to engage with that. We obviously have to engage. We have to get angry. We have to get organized about the world and stuff, but at the same time, we shouldn’t neglect another truth, which is the sort of inner truth of ourselves and the sort of what he called the spirit of the depths which you know, I’m quite into, as an idea. And he said, he thought, if you tilt too far one way or another, you end up with neuroses and going a bit mad. And I felt like collectively we’re so plugged into the spirit of the times. There’s a kind of collective madness is happening from all the world, BS that we’re, we’re surrounded by. 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:38] So then, if you’re, how do you honor the spirit of the depths in yourself? On a daily basis if you’re not actually actively deeply in a book. 

Matt Haig: [00:11:47] Well, books are one way, to do, if you’re reading a book, you know, I actually sort of like to step back and sort of meditate, I feel like books now are probably more valuable than ever in terms of giving you that sort of meditative space, where they’re interactive in a very deep sense, but they’re not interactive in the sense that you, you feel obliged to give them a Facebook Like or,

Rachael Herron: [00:12:09] It’s really interesting that you say that though. I agree completely. And I’ve been reading some rather heavy stuff lately and, and I find myself with a reaction when reading it, that I need to do something with that information. I should probably highlight it. I should probably copy it onto a card. I should probably share it 

Matt Haig: [00:12:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:26] with data. And I think that’s the spirit of the time affecting the spirit of the deep, instead of just reading, taking in and thinking. You know, 

Matt Haig: [00:12:25] Yes

Rachael Herron: [00:12:26] the, the spirit to move is so present. 

Matt Haig: [00:12:38] Yes, absolutely. And I, I hate that about myself. Like when, when I, when I have a thought and I can’t just let it be a thought and I’m trying to shape the thought into a tweet in my head. Like- 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:51] Yes, there’s nothing- I have done this during yoga. I have done this during meditation. I actually took myself off Twitter for about six months to see if I could break that thought cycle. It wasn’t anything about the time I was spending. I wasn’t spending too much time, but my brain forming tweets around my life was unacceptable and it actually did break it.

Matt Haig: [00:13:10] Yeah. Oh, that’s good. Yeah, I’m learning. I mean, what I’m doing now, prompted by my partner is to actually have like Sundays completely devoid of screens, not TV screens. I watched, like we watched with the kids, we watched some like it hot on Sunday and we watched an old classic movie or something, but to switch off from, you know, phones and laptops and emails and, and they’re designed to be so addictive and to play with our sense of guilt. I think like, for instance, like, you know, the fact that people can see when they’ve seen a message. I thought you feel like you have to respond to that message or you’re a bad person, but to actually have freedom to not get back to emails, to not get back to text messages to just, you know, I, I’m now religious- because I’m someone who finds balance hard unless I sort of like set a day in my calendar and say write, and some days I don’t do it at all. You know, cause if I say I’ll just do 20 minutes it ends up being two hours. So if I just say write, I’m not doing that at all. I find that easier than just having 20 minutes. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:21] I love that. I want to try that someday. Maybe not this week. 

Matt Haig: [00:14:24] It’s a scroll free Sunday. Well, I know, I know there’s always a reason though. There’s always a reason. There’s always seems to be a, the news seems to be getting exponentially bigger. You know, it’s always something. And I suppose, like, with you in California, you’re thinking, well, I need to, I need to be plugged in because I need to be knowing about wildfires. I need to be knowing about this, that the other and 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:29] Can I open the windows today? 

Matt Haig: [00:15:34] Can I open the window? Yeah. Has the zombie apocalypse happens yet? Are we there? Yeah, so it is, it’s, it’s a, it’s an addictive kind of world we’re in and we’re all trying to make it better, but we all have a sense that maybe, maybe we’re just contributing to, to it in our own way, you know, I never, Twitter’s the thing I’m really ambiguous about because I’ve spent so much time vending on Twitter, venting about politics, venting about personal life, venting about mental health. You always have the underlying suspicion that in trying to make it better, are you actually making it better? Are you contributing to the noise divisiveness? I don’t know. So yeah, more spirit of the depths. That’s what I’m sharing. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:29] And more spirit of the depths. Amen. Amen. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? 

Matt Haig: [00:15:34] Biggest challenge. Well, I have a lot, I think indecisiveness. I’m I, I don’t really get proper writer’s block as such. I’ve always got something to write. I just don’t know if it’s any good or if that’s the idea I should be choosing. So I found my biggest challenge is having that barometer of knowing this is a story I should be writing. So I’ll have a lot of ideas in my head about all, obviously be a varying quality of varying interest if I wrote them. But I have, I- I’m quite bad in the initial stages of working out, which is the one that’s going to have legs, which is the one that’s going to be the most interesting. And so I actually have to write quite a chunk of it and ended up often abandoning quite a lot of writing because until I’ve written it, I don’t know. So I wish I was a bit better at that. So my- yeah, about challenging actually knowing what’s going to resonate initially before writing. I think I’m quite good as it goes on. I’m quite sort of self-critical and I, I, you know, that famous sort of polished detective I’m quite good at knowing when things aren’t working and I’m not shy to sort of scrap things or abandoned things or chop a chapter. I, I’m not scared of, you know, I don’t get too precious about it, but it’s just that, that initial thing of having different ideas and knowing which direction to go at the start is it takes me frustratingly long to get there as it did with The Midnight Library and my previous novel, had sometimes it takes me a while to go

Rachael Herron: [00:17:05] What is your biggest joy when it comes to writing then? 

Matt Haig: [00:17:09] Biggest joy actually is when you’ve got the idea and you are on the first draft and you are literally the only person who has read your work and that is the thing, but that, that is pure writing to me. And that’s the aspect of writing. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve never have had a novel published in your life or whether you’re Stephen King, that is writing. You know, that aspect every writer has that you know, the stuff outside it and stuff to do in a publication, that’s a bit that fluctuates in degrees and that’s where, how popular you are or what your Goodreads ranking is and all of that. But the actual act of writing itself, I think you have to keep a love for that, for that first draft feeling when it’s flowing well. Obviously there’s times you just want to bang your head against the wall. It’s frustrating. But when you, when you kind of, when things are going right or when you surprise yourself, like you’ve imagined something you haven’t planned to imagine, but you’re just taking a left turn here or something. I think, I think that’s the moment where it feels like a really sort of fun activity, almost like a sport, I guess, sort of fishing and you’re finding new stuff that you didn’t have before, you know. I, I’m a bad editor in terms of when the editors involved and maybe you get the notes in and I really respect my editor. My editor’s very wise person and gives me good notes. But I find that process, it feels really like work and it feels like you’ve got a job in that that sense, but there’s moments in a, in a good first draft where it doesn’t feel like work and you’re sort of really enjoying it. And you almost can get into like a little trance state when you’re lost in your own daydreams. And, and that’s the stuff that always stays good. You know, you, you get, you know, a little bit as you get a little bit more well-read and a bit more well-known, I think the neuroses ramp up a little bit around publication and you think, well, what are you going to say? And, Oh, that’s amazing. I’m going to get a New York Times book review, but then you’re just like, well, what they’re going to say, this could be devastating and so all those stupid things that shouldn’t be problems, which are privileges, but, but you turned them into problems and yeah, but the actual the calming thing for me, and actually, the way I cope with having a book come out and be criticized or not criticized or whatever it is, the way I cope with that reaction, which is they’re all on set. Even the good stuff is unsettling. That’s what, that’s what I’ve discovered about my mind. I find even, even praise can be unsettling because you get too lost in that outer, you know, going back to the young you’re too plugged into the art. So the way to sort of calm and center yourself is to just sort of hide away and start writing something new. I think. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:45] Hiding away in the writing is really wonderful. And I feel like writers have this gift that we’ve been giving- given during this pandemic. They do have a place to go and lose ourselves in a really, really deep way. Can you share a craft tip of any sort on writing?

Matt Haig: [00:20:00] Craft tip

Rachael Herron: [00:20:01] Yes!

Matt Haig: [00:20:04] Right. Okay. Craft tip. Well, this is possibly, you know, it’s a very subjective craft tip, but I, 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:13] The best kind.

Matt Haig: [00:20:14] Well, I am into breaking certain rules and the rule, you know, a lot of unwritten rules cause books look a certain way often. And, you know, in terms of like chapter lengths, a chapter length tends to be in the average novel, I don’t know between 10 and 20 pages and that’s sort of like a given and I sometimes do that, but sometimes I like to actually see a book and the page as a visual thing, as well as something you just read, I’m quite a visual person. I don’t actually see it as a visual thing. So I actually kind of like short chapters. So what I did with my very first number, when it wasn’t working. I, it was about 12 chapters long. I broke it up into something like 120 chapters. I scattered it and playing about with that and seeing certain paragraphs as, as sort of standard individual things. Really helped me understands what I’m doing. So I think my main craft tip is just kind of forget, in some ways that books have been written before. And you’ve got this story to tell. With the English language and you’re, you’re, you’re forgetting in, in, in, in some sense you’re forgetting the other books exist and you’re thinking, how best do I tell this particular story? And you forget about conventions in terms of how long chapters have to be, or how long paragraphs have to be or how you, you just communicate it. And it doesn’t mean you have to be sort of like overly pretentious or do something incredibly artistic or write poems halfway through the page or anything like that. It’s just, I think it can help clear the communication if you’re, if you’re, you know, uniquely doing it as you, how you want to communicate. And so, and also it’s a trick. I think, cause we all like to feel that we’re turning through the pages fast and the one psychological trick you can make that happen. If you’ve got a lot of white space in your book, they are going like that. They are turning the pages very fast. And it’s a nice feeling because I don’t know about you, but I don’t like that feeling of going to sleep halfway through a chapter ending, you know, I like that feeling of finishing a chapter 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:27] See and I’m, I’m the anomaly but I love to stop right when I’m really enjoying something, I’ll stop in the middle of a sentence during the crisis of a book and put it down and say, Ooh, I’m gonna do that later. 

Matt Haig: [00:22:38] Okay. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:28] No one understands.

Matt Haig: [00:22:39] So that’s like, yeah, no, I get that as well. It’s like, you know, about Keat’s quote about the Unkissed Lips. It’s kind of like that moment of like to come. Yeah, I get that too. I get that too. But, I saw a program once, I can’t remember what it was, but it talks about the difference in skyscrapers between New York and Chicago. And it said that like in New York, the skyscrapers were all sort of crammed up together in Midtown. It’s very sort of cramped together, whereas in Chicago, the space around the skyscrapers and, and because the space around the skyscraper’s, you actually pay more attention to the individual structure of the skyscraper become more iconic. So, I think maybe an introvert, because my dad’s an architect or something, but I like the idea of a chapter being right. Like you can create space around it visually and you actually draw more attention. So you can take a line out of a chapter and you wouldn’t notice it in a chapter. But if you, if you turn that line into an entire page on a page venue, you’re suddenly, your attention is drawn to that. So I think there was a line somewhere in the book. And I don’t break up my books like that until the end, but I sometimes think, Oh, if I, if a line comes at a key moment, I think I’ll just turn that line and just put it on its own page and then yeah, so it’s a lot of that stuff, but yeah, 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:57] I love that

Matt Haig: [00:23:58] it’s not, it’s not, it’s definitely not right for every book, but for me, 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:00] But for playing. Yeah. 

Matt Haig: [00:24:02] Like being playful. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:03] I love that. What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way? 

Matt Haig: [00:24:10] Oh, okay. Well, the realization, I don’t know if this is the right answer to this, but one thing that changed for me as a writer is I used to have a writing room and then now I don’t have a writing room. I like literally write on my sofa and write with my laptop. And I actually think I write better and more productively, now I don’t have a writing room.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:38] Why? Why is that?

Matt Haig: [00:24:40] I don’t know. And again, this is very subjective. This is very me, this is not the universal. I think it’s because as soon as I have a writing room and it’s an office and it feels like it’s work, I go into work mode and I feel like for creativity, it helps to be a bit in play mode. And so if I’m on my sofa and writing, I actually like, and I’m also a writer who kind of likes a bit of background noise because I have tinnitus. So I have ringing in my ears all the time. So I- it’s not, it doesn’t, it doesn’t swap my life or anything. There’s lots of times I don’t hear it, but if it’s total silence, I’ll be aware of ringing in my ear. So I’ve got conditioned to having background noise and we’ve got kids. So there’s often a lot of background noise, but interestingly, when we bought a house here, I bought it because it had a shed in the garden and I thought I was going to be like Roald Dahl, 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:32] Heck yeah

Matt Haig: [00:25:33] Who famously had had a shed and walk out to his writing shed. And that didn’t happen, and that wouldn’t happen and the trouble is, in, in a cold rainy day, when you just want to get up and be warm in your pajamas, you wouldn’t go out to the shed. And, yeah, writing on the sofa has been the thing. I think, I think you can look at my books. If you look at my early books that were written in a writing office versus the books that are written on the sofa, they’re more enjoyable, the ones that are written on the sofa, because I was probably enjoying myself.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:06] That’s fascinating. So I wonder, I wonder if you are, if you’re Uber fans who have read every single thing you’ve ever written online. 

Matt Haig: [00:26:14] Well, the ones, yeah, the ones where I was in a sort of uncomfortable chair. Well, it’s something I massively changed. I massive, I mean, I’ve, I’ve written quite a few books and a lot of sort of them are seriously unread books that no one really read but my first three books, well, the first one did okay in the UK, but then the second, third didn’t lose as well. And they were so bleak. And it’s so interesting because now if I’m criticized, as I sometimes get criticized by reviewers in the UK, they will always say the same thing. They’ll say, Oh, you know, it descends into sort of optimistic platitudes or become like a, sort of like a Facebook wall of, they always say that same thing. And I’m not actually uniquely proud of that because, well, first and foremost, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not a snob about inspirational quotes. If someone can say something in a simple way, even if it feels a bit clichéd, it’s simple, clear expression to someone else that offers some comfort. I don’t, I don’t see what’s wrong with that, but also, you know, I, I, the writing that I’m ashamed of having written was when I was younger and I thought that to be a writer, you kind of had to reflect the bleakness and pessimism of the world. And, you know, I, I literally wrote a book called The Possession of Mr. Cave, which got very well reviewed. No one read it at all, but reviewers read it mean I really liked it because it was totally miserable. And literally everyone died in it. It was just a terrible, don’t read that book. And anyway, you know, about had no optimism or no sort of happy platitudes, and so they’d say, and I reached a point and I don’t know what happened in my thirties, but I thought if you’re contributing somethings of the world, why be ashamed of putting some sort of hope inside it or some optimism inside it? I’m someone who genuinely in my twenties, I nearly died because the pessimism, because I was suicidally depressed and depression gave me pessimism. And that pessimism wasn’t real. Yes, I know we live in a screwed up world, but so the voice in my head that depression was giving me was like, Oh, you will definitely be dead by the age of 25, your partner will leave you. This will happen. Nothing good will happen. Dah, dah, dah, dah. You know, that became like a sort of Fox news of the brain, which was just as beaming with sort of. Beaming with sort of tire of cycle of, of stuff. And so, in a, in a way optimism was more authentic for me, optimism was, and not only that, even if pessimism and optimism are equally inauthentic, only one of those things is useful and that’s optimism. Pessimism is not psychologically useful. So optimism, you have to, you have to have some hope. And instead, what I try and do now is take a pessimistic such situation or a person in a bad place, or a terrible situation, like a suicide, a woman between life and death or whatever. And try and then find the hope inside. And I think that’s a bit more useful. And, and I know it’s a bit weird to talk about novels having a use, but I feel like, you know, why not offer something as a human communicating to another human? That got some, 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:21] You know it’s perfect- perfect segue into the book. Will you please tell us a little bit about what the book is? Saying 

Matt Haig: [00:29:27] Yes. Sure. The Midnight Library is a book about a woman between life and death who finds herself in this infinite library. And all the books on the shelves are different versions of her life if she had lived it a different way, and she’s someone who’s full of regrets. So one of the book, which is the book of regrets reminds her of all the things and decisions she’s made that she regrets. So she now got a chance to undo those regrets and live in a different, try out these different existences with the help of a librarian; Mrs. Alum is God-like librarian and she gets to see if the grass really is greener in the life where she was an Olympic medalist of a life, where she was a rock star or a glaciologist, or owns a vineyard or whatever. So she can see, and some of those lives obviously is grass isn’t greener, some of those layers are perfectly fine, but maybe not right for her. And she has to work out the best way to live. 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:20] And it is beautiful. And wonderfully written 

Matt Haig: [00:30:24] Thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:30:25] Dragged me through. Generally, I start the books and then I only finished them if they drag me through and it just dragged me through beautifully. So, what you’re exploring in this book is really the idea of multiverses, right?

Matt Haig: [00:30:39] Yes

Rachael Herron: [00:30:40] Of every choice that we do not take creates an infinite number of multiverses. Do you, do you believe in that? 

Matt Haig: [00:30:47] I do, actually. I think that’s a good scientific basis for believing in that. There’s a, a book by, I think he’s American, a guy called Brian Green who wrote a book called The Hidden Reality about how all our, current scientific thinking leads to the idea that are multiverses, they might be different kinds of multiverses like there’s a uni- some people believe in universe beyond the universities and others believe that the multiverse is right inches away from us if you’ve just done a different thing. But yeah, I, I, I, I do, but I also believe that we have the power to always enter a new universe within our own timelines and the, by the things we do. And I find that a very empowering thought because it can be a bit of a sort of depressing thought to think, Oh, there’s always better lives out there, but to actually realize you’ve got the power within your life to not necessarily become a billionaire or a rock star or whatever, but to actually, you know, suddenly within the same situation, within the same people in your life to actually have a totally different outlook opponent and I think that’s very helpful. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:49] What you did with your book too, in the framing of it, using the books as the device to display that, I thought was so approachable and understandable because I often think about the multiverse and get very confused and stuff, thinking, and then pick up Twitter. But it allowed me to think of it in another, in another way. It’s an infinitely branching library and it’s all hers. And I just want to say that I recommend it to anyone, especially anyone who likes books, did you have Mrs. Elm yourself? 

Matt Haig: [00:32:20] Yeah. Mrs. Elm is a bit of an amalgam, but I definitely had an English teacher who was a bit like Mrs. Elm, like who seriously got me into books or something that weren’t just things that are bad to be sort of worthwhile and do me good. But there is a, a proper thrilling life enhancing entertainment medium like cinema or whatever else it is. And yeah, she was one of those people. And, my grandmother, actually, my grandmother died when I was quite young, would often take me into the forest, you know, finding things that you’d know all about the forest. And she just seemed full of infinite wisdom. So a bit of her in that as well.

Rachael Herron: [00:32:57] I had a Mrs. Craig, my, my grade school librarian. She taught me how to crochet inside the library. It was wonderful.

Matt Haig: [00:33:03] Oh, very good. I love libraries as spaces that are more than just books. They’re important as a space, like town center libraries, they are spaces that don’t just like us as a consumer, but they like us, for us, you know, and we don’t have many of those spaces that are kind of like secular churches aren’t they.

Rachael Herron: [00:33:22] Yes

Matt Haig: [00:33:23] Aren’t just about money, and then we’re not a wallet to them. We are, you know, something beyond that. I think, one thing I think America does far better than Britain and Europe is value libraries. I think you, you really play, you know, our libraries are being decimated and underfunded and closing down and the last sort of areas that where we need to be more deprived areas. It’s very hard to find the library now. Whereas I felt like libraries certainly are still very much center of the culture of America and that’s something 

Rachael Herron: [00:33:55] the center of book culture, but they’re also turning into a, a social safety net center, as well as, as the social safety net is cut from other places, then we’re forcing these libraries to, our librarians must become social workers and mental health experts and, and all of this. And so I, 100% agree with you, but I wish we would also give some more money, always more money to libraries. Oh, I live in, you know, I mentioned in Oakland and our library system is amazing. And what I can do is I request the book I want, I’m usually the first one to request it. And that means they buy it in E-book and they send it to my Kindle and the author gets paid and I get to read it for free four days later, you know it’s, Oh, it’s the best ever. 

Matt Haig: [00:34:43] Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. Yeah. Unlike certainly in our country, the debate around libraries was often says, well, the internet has made it irrelevant because we can access all this information and we can answer 

Rachael Herron: [00:34:52] What about the books? 

Matt Haig: [00:34:53] What about the books? What about that four dimensional space that you can go into and the fact that it’s, it’s the kind of thing that glues a community together. Isn’t it? You’ve got a library. You have hospitals, you have a church, but you have a library at the heart of it. And yeah. So, you know, we’re not quite in the state, America’s in with leadership, but our leadership. Yeah. But we’ve had, we’ve had over 10 years of a conservative government that have been not good for culture and communities at all. So, yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:35:23] I think if, if we weren’t, if we were not collapsing over here, we’d be spending a lot of time commiserating with you. But 

Matt Haig: [00:35:27] yeah, I know

Rachael Herron: [00:35:28] but I’ll find ways.

Matt Haig: [00:35:29] so American to be absolutely the best, even after being the worst. 

Rachael Herron: [00:35:36] You know it is, it’s embarrassing. All of it. All of it isn’t fair.

Matt Haig: [00:35:38] I know.

Rachael Herron: [00:35:45] Thank you so, so, so very much for doing this with me. I really appreciated talking to you. I really loved reading the book so much so that I forgot it was your book. And I didn’t want to read this other guy’s book about libraries. Because it was yours. 

Matt Haig: [00:35:56] Thank you, Rachael. It was a joy.

Rachael Herron: [00:35:57] No need for any more library books. It was beautiful.

Matt Haig: [00:36:01] That was a joy. And I hope that hopefully in some post-COVID happier future, I’ll meet you in Oakland or San Francisco and we’ll have an event and that’d be good. 

Rachael Herron: [00:36:09] Absolutely. That would be wonderful. Okay. Thanks man, take care!

Matt Haig: [00:36:11] Cheers, Rachael, bye!

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.