Getting Wasted with Allan Wilson

So here are the rules. Interviewer Keir Hind plays interviewee Allan Wilson at pub games, seven in all. If Wilson wins, he gets asked an interview question befitting a serious writer. If Hind wins, he gets to ask a pointless, trivial question for his own amusement. So we start with:

Game 1: Darts. Except darts can’t be played in any pub that could be found, probably because drinking and sharp objects don’t mix. Working with what’s available, game one becomes: Connect 4. (It was that or noughts and crosses).

Winner: Wilson wins easily here. So, serious question number one please:

KH: What made you want to start writing short stories?

AW: I started writing short stories because it was something that I thought I was quite good at. The real reason that I became serious about it was that I moved to Stirling and I went to university, and me and my pal, we were both doing an English degree – there were four of us in a flat, but me and this one guy, Kenny, were both doing English. And what happened was one time we were on the way home from the union, and he died, we were trying to swim across the River Forth. Mental, but we were both trying to swim across and then he died, and after that I looked at everything differently, including writing, including what I wanted to do in terms of jobs and all that – I re-evaluated everything I suppose. The book will be dedicated to him, and to my fiancée. I’ve been going out with my girlfriend since I was seventeen, so she helped me through all that. After that I just started getting serious about it and decided it was worth doing.

Game 2: Pool! It’s easy to find Pool.

Winner: This one goes back and forth. Hind takes an early lead, Wilson draws back, Hind clears all his colours but pots the white, Wilson finishes his colours but he pots the white too, leaving Hind with an easy shot on the black. Hind misses, leaving Wilson an easy shot on the black. Wilson misses! Hind pots the ball – a tragedy for the boy Wilson! One pointless trivial question please!

KH: Nonsensical trivia number 1: What is the best film version of a book?

AW: I’ll go with Fight Club, because I saw it before I read the book, loved it, and maybe when I was in my early twenties when I was quite an angry guy I wanted to be in a fight club, and I was kind of determined to find a Glasgow based fight club. But instead of fighting, I suppose I started writing.

Game 3: Not fighting, certainly, but we do find a pub that has Streetfighter 2 in it. Best of 3 rounds.

Winner: Mr ‘Fight Club’ Wilson wins 2-0. Proper Question ahoy!

KH: What kind of work pattern do you have? You work as an English teacher, so you’re dealing with some kind of writing all day. How do you then come home and write?

AW: I don’t usually, I tend to get up at four, half 3 even, and write before I go to work. I’m much better at writing before I do anything else. When the day starts, and there’s a lot going on, I don’t tend to write very well. So I tend to do most of my writing before 9 o’clock in the morning. In saying that, if I’ve got something on the go I’ll go home and write because I’ll have been thinking about it all day. I’ll write anywhere – I’ve written a story on a treadmill, I’ve been sitting waiting on buses writing stories, so I do write whenever I get the time. I’ve got one of those wee laptops, so I take it around and use it to write on when I get a chance.

Game 4: Snakes and Ladders proves to be available, so let’s get that over with. 

Winner: Wilson makes a fatal error here, because when chess pieces are used as counters, he chooses the terminally uncool White Bishop. Hind’s choice of Black Knight makes it inevitable he’d win, and he does. Trivia!

KH; Another teacher-related question: What’s the best book you teach?

AW: I’ll say a play. It’s Arthur Miller’s View From The Bridge. It’s a really great story about a down and out guy in his fifties who realises he’s wasted the majority of his life in a job he doesn’t like, then something happens which changes everything and it all goes wrong.

Game 5: Back to screens, as the contestants line up against each other at FIFA Soccer. Brazil (Hind) and The Netherlands (Wilson) are deadlocked until just before half time when Hind scores. Wilson equalises a little later, but after this no-one looks like scoring. Both contestants are wondering aloud whether a penalty shootout will be necessary, when Hind scores right at the death!

Winner: Final score Hind 2 (Bebeto 44, Bebeto 90) – Wilson 1 (R De Boer 54). Wilson, your boys took a hell of a beating! Trivia time!

KH: And speaking of beatings: Who is the writer you’d most like to fight. Not in a literary sense either. Real, proper fighting.

AW: [After much protesting and groaning] I’ll…. say…. Raymond Carver. I don’t want to beat him though, I’d want us to not actually hurt each other, and I want him to beat me, just so he’d say something, doesn’t matter what it is, just words of advice like something Mickey out of Rocky would say, just to make me feel better and inspire me.

Game 6: A retreat to the sedate world of draughts.

Winner: Wilson wins with astonishing ease. Proper question time!

KH: Who do you see as influences?

AW: Well, lots. But overall, over time, it comes down to the same people which are basically James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard, Alan Bissett, and then the Americans, so Amy Hemple, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, and of course Raymond Carver. Alexander Trocchi changed everything when I read Young Adam. Dostoevsky, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Agnes Owens, Chekhov…. They’re the main ones.

Game 7: At 3 games each, this is the decider: Table Tennis. 

Winner: It’s no contest as Wilson wins 21-15, with the score frankly flattering Hind’s appalling display. So the final question will be a proper writer’s one:

KH: What role does ambiguity play in your work?

AW: Okay. Well, for me as a reader, I always like to do the work. I don’t like it when the writer does the work for me, because it ruins reading for me. If a writer tells me everything I’ve got nothing to enjoy, I’ve got nothing to work out for myself, and it’s not a challenge. So in terms of writing I suppose I want that same thing to come across, that the reader has something to do, that the reader can be involved in some sense. I write the story as it comes though, it’s not planned like that. The thing with a short story, I suppose, is that a novel has room to explain things but a short story has to go on by raising some questions and the reader gets to join in and answer them.