‘We spend most of our time somewhere that isn’t now’

Time is a central theme in some of your books which I love – for example The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Sudden Appearance of Hope, 84K, and The Pursuit of William Abbey. Can you sum up how you see time, our psychological relationship with it, and whether that's particularly important to you?

I'm going to answer this with my environmentalist /historian hat on: I think we often see time in quite a limited way, often based, I suspect, on a sense of scarcity, and quite frankly a fear of age and death.

There's nothing quite like living in a neo-capitalist world to give you the sense that there's not enough time to do all the things you should do. I'd argue this begins even as a child, when you start getting homework for exams, revision for GCSEs, for A-levels… not for the joy of learning, but while being told that your whole life will be over if you fluff this, and the sands of childhood – of 'freedom' – are already running out. Time must be focused, honed, used, rather than appreciated and enjoyed, because it is so scarce.  

By the time people hit parenting age, I think this is even more apparent – especially for women, who are still expected to shoulder the majority of the childcare in a society where provision for young kids is minimal and costly, while also supporting a family regardless of economic hardship. It is common to hear parents report that they don't have time to do anything – see friends, pursue interests, even have a quick shower in the morning – and time becomes an enemy, because it is so fragile and scarce.

Our lives are given a clock somewhat shaped by capitalism and patriarchy. Do exams; get a well-paid job; get promoted; get married; have kids; get another promotion; retire comfortably etc. In that sense, time is a cultural experience, in which the experience of time that, say, an A&E doctor or a hustling trader on the market floor has, may be an entirely and utterly different from the experience of a farmer in Wales, an incarcerated person serving time, or the family of an oligarch on a yacht in the Med.

Then that fear of age and death comes in?

Yes – we get a bit older, and suddenly time is starting to run out in another way, because death is ticking down the clock on our full stop. And being as we are, shockingly bad at talking about death as a society, our relationship with time becomes fearful. There may be less to do – we may have longer days – but we also have fewer opportunities and the only destination really in mind is the end, because we are dreadful as a society at engaging with and talking about our elder years.

And of course, when you experience a sense of scarcity, it is incredibly hard to think beyond the next few weeks, or the next few years, let alone the next few decades. Hence it is incredibly hard to imagine the climate crisis as a reality in 20 years time, and even harder to take action now on it. This isn't an unfair psychological response, I think. 

A bit like using the scientific method as a tool to overcome natural observer bias, we rely on governments to think beyond for us, to engage in that kind of future planning. But again, so many of our politicians are only thinking ahead in five year, personal bursts of scarcity and gain, instead of in 30-, 40- or 50-year contemplations of time as abundant, inevitable and impersonal in its march.

Do you think time is always a thread, or hub, in fiction writing? Could any decent author operate without properly considering how time manifests, psychologically?

I think the answer is probably yes, time is always a thread in fiction writing, and writers probably do have to think about how it manifests, though in writing 'thinking' can be anything from spending nine months in deep contemplation, to just sitting down at a keyboard and seeing what happens if/when a joyful flow state emerges and time itself loses all meaning in the moment.

That isn't to say that writers don't muck around with time. Time travel is the most obvious example, but also emotional time is a fairly useful concept and tool to a scribbler. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, for example, swells forwards and then backwards through time because that allows the emotional story to land. 

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladwell is a simple linear love story, set across a map of time and space that hops around all over the place. The emotion is direct and linear, and it is the emotion that gives the story its beginning, middle and end. The actual experience of physical time around it is largely irrelevant, so long as the emotion is consistent.

In your books, it's as if you're playing with different scales of time… the lives of Harry August, the crawling pursuit of William Abbey. Does a lot of the tension, the psychological interest for the reader, come from stretching and contracting time?

There is a narrative sine curve related to time that I suspect is often best expressed by looking at books and films about war.

If you picture say, a World War One drama, there's often a recurring narrative pattern. A scene may begin in a trench at the moment of going over the top, and everything is chaos, fear, speed, momentum. The style of writing may change to reflect this intensity, ranging from the almost inhumanly sparse (i.e. 'Shot. Dying. Didn't think would die. Damn.') that leaves no time to experience emotion, because there is no time available right now to do so, to the frenetic madcap dash of words and sentences, in which full stops become sparse because everything is moving too fast, too violently for there to be contemplation.

And then, of course, it stops. Because if we've learned one thing from high-octane action movies, it's that they only really land emotionally if for every burst of violence there is stillness, a moment to catch your breath. So perhaps your narrative now moves from battle to a place where birds sing and the sun shines, and everything slows down. 

There may be the same number of pages given to battle as to the slowing – 30 seconds may have passed in 50 pages when at war, and nine months may pass in 50 pages now you're at peace. The style of writing expresses the experience of less experience, if that makes sense. When no longer being threatened with imminent death or violent, life-changing injury that requires a constant assimilation of information, sense, feeling, time stretches out.

Narratively, a reader understands this, because it's just the experience of being human. We understand how a moment of fear may linger forever, whereas a quiet place of stillness may seem to have lasted in the moment as long, but then be gone in a blink of an eye. One lingers in our memory, the other fades. Our brains are not being forced to work overtime, not forced to form new predictions or make decisions every second – and our experience of time is highly mitigated by that very simple physical process.

And of course finally, if you were to extrapolate this logically through the image of war books/films, the other thing that makes this contracting and stretching of time is this: that we know that at the end of stillness, there is likely to be another battle. The ending of a thing also gives it necessary meaning. It doesn't matter how long or how short that time period may be, whether it's centuries or a few days – the expansion, contractions and a sense of a destination are necessary to give each other meaning and weight. 

Similarly, it seems to me that time and memory give each other meaning and weight. For example in your character, Hope, as the girl that nobody can remember. Is that how you see it?

Yes, I do fundamentally see time – at least our human experience of it – as being linked to memory. Just from a purely physics point of view, time is either so scientifically hard to define or so much more vast than we can possibly imagine, that the only way to really look at it from a human perspective, is narratively. We put ourselves at the centre of our universes, which means we also centre our experiences of time in memories, however wobbly and unreliable they may be.

Have you ever come across actual psychological research which has helped you in your writing?

It's not psychological per se, but I have a lot of affection for cognitive neuroscience. In recent years Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made was a mind-boggling read that has changed my perspective on basically everything, including writing and our perceptions of time. (In fairness, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Why Does E-MC² was also pretty mind-blowing in terms of understanding time – but very definitely a physics book.)

I have an autism assessment tomorrow morning, and have become increasingly aware while doing the reading on ASD prior referral how different neurologies can relate to time. I run emotionally a lot cooler than many of my peers – it's a running joke that I am not aware of any emotions until they're at 8/10 – and consequently, I don't form as many strong emotional memories. In pure cognitive science terms: I am less likely to make consistent predictions of the world, less likely to reinforce them over time, less likely to draw upon them when moving through life. 

Thus my memories are, if not exactly weaker, then certainly less in the foreground, and thus my experience of time is potentially altered.  It can make for a more exhausting experience of the present – predictions serve as good time-saving cognitive devices – and I can struggle to remember what I did with my days courtesy of not forming strong emotional memories of say, writing a book. But at the same time, it does aid in finding basically everything I see and hear in this present moment absolutely fascinating, which sensory experience does, I'd argue, change the experience of time.

I've read that you like your London walks, and your books often have vivid descriptions of the sensory history of a place… perhaps you're concerned that we forget these things, that we live too much in the present?

Honestly, I think the Buddhists have pretty much got this one nailed: living in the present is a pretty solid choice for a decent life. That's not to say ignoring the past or the future – far from it. Being in the present, for me, is about making conscious decisions now with the awareness of all that went before and the thought of all that could come next, without getting lost in stories and hypotheticals.

We spend most of our time somewhere that isn't now. As we walk down the streets – and I do love me a long walk – our minds can get lost in mulling and replaying memories of the past, stuck in loops of mulling and repetition. While this can be helpful for processing, every time the brain replays a memory, that very memory itself is altered, changed, and we create stories out of our realities – simply because stories are easier to remember than sensory data. Those stories change who we are, but so often that can lead down a path of regret, anxiety or even denial as to the reality of how we came to be where we are, or what this present even is.

Likewise, we can get lost in thinking about the future – about what if, and what could be. Again, these are powerful tools, incredibly useful for humanity as a whole, life-saving even, to be able to look and plan ahead. But when over-used it again can lead to anxiety and rumination: what if I fail this exam? What if I fluff this date? What if, what if? Being in the past and the future too much can lead to paralysis.

So, yeah, I do have a lot of time for the Buddhist sentiment that now is what matters. Being aware of now. Letting the sensory input of now be as important as the predictions we're making of tomorrow, or the ruminations of the past. If I have sensory descriptions of a place it's because you cannot walk through the world without seeing the past, but seeing it now. Particularly in a city like London, the past is still vivid and present, now.