Reasons for Writing (Rankin, Part 2)

Ian Rankin brought so many perfect sound-bites to BBC’s Imagine that I didn’t exhaust all my notes in one post.

He drew from his father’s outlook, a ‘wonderful liar’ who could turn the smallest nick in his knee into a bullet wound. 

He spoke also about writing as a way of making sense of the world, and more specifically his own childhood world, which was often messy, incomplete and with many unanswered questions.   

On paper, he discovered that he could make things happen the way he wanted them to happen. But it didn’t provide answers: “Each book is another small failing to explain that [the world] to myself. And so I have to start again.”