It was at the age of seven that Margaret Atwood wrote her first book. “It was about an ant,'' Atwood told Weekend Review from Canada, “there was a beginning, an end and an illustration.
The start was immobile with the egg, then the larva and then life. But this is not how you should begin. You should start with something exciting that the reader should get into,'' she said.
So began the writing career of the veteran author, who has published more than 75 works — including novels, poetry, compilations, critical studies, screenplays, radio scripts and children's literature.
Atwood's work has been translated in more than 30 languages and she has also edited a number of books.
“I gave up writing until I was 16 — then I started again and never stopped.
My parents were into scientific things, my brother was a scientist, my grandfather was a doctor and I have two scientist nephews.
My aunt, who is 96, was a writer — she was the person who cheered me on,'' Atwood said.
Atwood grew up in the harsh landscape of the Canadian woods — more than 300 miles north of Toronto.
“I started writing when I was a child — as a lot of children do. In those days there was no TV and we didn't go to the movies a lot.
"I grew up in the woods and there weren't really any people to speak of — we went by boat; there were no roads; we were right in the woods, not even in a village,'' she said. “I started reading quite early — the accessible form was comics in the papers.''
Atwood was reading before she started school in the “deciduous coniferous forest that was harsh in winter''. It was her isolated childhood home.
Atwood's second novel Surfacing (1973) is set in her childhood home on a remote island in northern Quebec, where the protagonist grew up and returns to search for her father.
However, it was her first work of prose The Edible Woman (1969) that established her as a novelist.
The work explores metaphorical cannibalism through the main character, Marian, who feels that her body and self are becoming separated — the more she attributes human qualities to food, she is increasingly unable to eat.
Writers, Atwood says, were few and far between while she was growing up.
“No one was a writer. There were a few … but it was a hidden world of writers. They did exist but you had to search to find them,'' she said.
“If you are from New Zealand, South Africa, Australia India and of my generation — we were taught we were far from the mother country — namely England. In the West Indies you were taught that ‘A' is for ‘apple' but you never saw an apple.
“Great, good things were from somewhere else,'' Atwood said.
It was for this reason, she said, that writers in a young country without any tradition had to build it up themselves.
“My generation of Canadians found themselves not only writing but also publishing. There were a few publishers in 1960 but the number of books published by Canadians in Canada was five in the entire year.
"In the same year there were 20 poetry books: We were mainly publishing them ourselves and that was standard.''
She compared the Canadian experience to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne's (The Scarlet Letter, 1850), who wrote of New England with moral and Puritan themes, and Herman Melville (Moby Dick, 1851), writing approximately 40 years after the creation of the relatively young United States of America.
Human nature
“We will be writing about this as long as we're human,'' Atwood said when asked why her writing focuses on strong themes of human nature. “What would you suggest as a topic otherwise?'' she asked.
“You can try to imagine being a mountain and write about that but ultimately you can only imagine it.
Atwood cited the work of Alexander Pope. “Human nature, whether observed on a huge or tiny scale, comic or tragic — it's always human nature, why? Because we are human ,'' she said.
“You have to start interpreting it [human nature] in a larger way but you have to recognise that we drink water and breathe air. Will we always write? Not always. Sometimes it's reality TV, sometimes blogs, sometimes novels, sometimes ballet — there are many ways in which we can explore our primary interest.''
As a veteran author, poet, playwright, and journalist, Atwood offered advice about writing as an art.
“Just start in,'' she said. “I would say do some of it every day, no matter how bad you think it is. Keep your hand in.''
But Atwood herself sometimes doesn't feel like writing at all. “I started in 1960 — that's almost 50 years of doing it. I have days when I think I'm not going to write at all. [I think] oh I have to write? It's like going to work,'' she said.
“I have other days when I think: I really need another cup of coffee.''