Interview: Mark Watson - Man of letters

Published on Monday 2 August 2010 15:46

Stand-up Mark Watson tells LEE RANDALL how a neat Scrabble move inspired his third novel

• Watson says his latest book, Eleven, is 'like a bleaker version of It's A Wonderful Life'

EM Forster urged, "Only connect," but, argues Mark Watson, we're already connected in ways we can't even imagine. This is the intriguing premise behind Eleven, the stand-up comic's third novel, which was inspired by disappointment and Scrabble. Yes, the board game.

Watson has built a career around testing himself. His marathon Fringe gigs - 24 and 36 hours - are legendary, and he's embarked on a ten-year project to try to reverse the demeanour of a lifetime by embracing optimism. So when a novel he'd spent years writing was rejected by his then-publishers, Watson, now 30 and a new dad, challenged himself to bounce back.

"I'd spent two or three years writing and putting a lot of love into a different novel and felt the only way I could get over the disappointment was to write something else really quickly. My aim was to feel like I was creating again, rather than wallowing in the disappointment."

Eleven introduces Xavier Ireland, a radio agony uncle. He's an Australian whose impetus for self-imposed exile only becomes clear as the novel unfolds. Without spoiling the surprise, I can say it hinges on a tragic accident that prompted him to flee, change his name, and pull up his emotional drawbridge. When the red broadcast light goes off, Ireland simply refuses to engage.

"The idea of communicating with a lot of people for a very short time, in a very limited way is something I'm used to myself," says Watson. "A lot of disjointed relationships make up my life, and it's very important to see some sort of structure. Things like Facebook and Twitter - the more ways there are to get in touch with everyone you ever met, the more I feel like life is full of transitory contacts. An hour or ten minutes can radically change your or their relationship with the world, but there's a danger that you could change it in a bad way. Eleven is about someone who has come to feel he's likely to make things worse for people if he gets involved."

Watson weaves a large cast whose paths cross in unexpected - but on reflection, logical - ways. There's a TV presenter who ends her affair with an Italian waiter when it is nearly exposed because a therapist quits her job in a huff after an estate agent mouths off to her, which he did because he received an abusive text message meant for someone else, because the sender's regular phone was stolen by a fat kid who wanted money to join a gym. As the mesh tightens, the threads lead back to Ireland, who failed to intervene on seeing a neighbourhood kid being attacked by bullies.

"It's like a bleaker version of It's a Wonderful Life," says Watson. "I've always loved its central premise that everyone is important to everyone else in the world. But the flip side is also true - every bad thing you do, everything you don't do, also has an impact. I wanted to explore the idea that everyone's connected, and at the same time show that events have their own weird momentum, so it's hard to say what really causes things."

Like his creator, Ireland is an ace Scrabble player, and the character's name came out of a game-changing move, when Watson played "xi", and not only cleaned up in points, but experienced a lightbulb moment.

"Eleven's not a number with any personal significance. But it seemed like there was a parallel between an innocent looking thing like that word, and events. I was seduced by its multiple meanings - for a start, the life force, in Chinese, and eleven in Roman numerals - and that it's a Scrabble word. Then I thought, could I have a character with those initials? When I came up with the idea of reinvention, I was able to use an improbable name, and started to mould everything else around that."

In Scrabble, as in life, a tiny change can make a huge difference. Watson agrees. "Specifically, the idea of being able to swap your tiles. It's a waste of a turn. I'd never do what the player does in the book, and swap all my tiles and keep doing it - this idea that you'd keep gambling until something good comes up. Xavier's approach is more like mine. If you do gamble, it's in a pretty measured way and you try to avoid doing anything as dramatic as that."

If he's that cautious, then why does he set himself endless challenges? He half jokingly chalks it up to narcissistic attention-seeking. "I have a very strong sense of time passing and always want to mark each year and phase of my life. It does come down to either attention-seeking or an enormous desire to do big, grandstanding gestures."

We talk about making one's mark, and he reveals he can't comprehend any definition of success involving retirement.

"Surely if you're in a creative field you'd feel kind of redundant if you stopped. Assuming you're mentally composed, you'd think you would write your best stuff in your seventies and eighties, because you've accumulated life experience. I feel that I was meant to be an author and I accidentally became a comedian."

In fact, I tease, he accidentally became aWelsh comedian, because the Bristol native began, rather whimsically, performing with a fake Welsh accent, and it stuck.

Laughing, he says, "Yeah, that was kind of a real accident. That was something I never intended to pursue for so long. You could say almost my entire career has been a series of strange accidents that I then made the best of."

• Eleven is out 11 August, published by Simon & Schuster, 12.99. Watson's Unusually Enjoyable Book Launch, the same day, is free and participants should meet outside the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, 2pm. His stand-up show, Do I Know You, is on until 30 August at Assembly Hall on the Mound at 10:30pm.