Marlon James was this year’s distinguished author for Writers@Grinnell. His novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings” received the Man Booker Prize in 2015. The S&B’s Mayo Sueta sat down with him to talk about writing and reading.

The S&B: What inspired you to pursue writing?

Marlon James: I think what inspired me initially was reading novels and finally coming across novels that made me go, I wanna write this. Like, there are tons of books you read and go, That’s a nice story, but there are things you come across that make you go, No I wanna write, … I want to do for somebody else what that book, and in my case sometimes comics [did for me]…

Taking classes and just reading more authors and trying and failing and just realizing how important stories are … to people. And after a while, I also realized that it was the only thing that made me happy. … Even just for having done it. Even when I didn’t make a cent from it, I was more happy having written something than earning whatever money. … It’s almost like I woke up one day and realized, Oh crap, I’m a writer.

The S&B: Does your job teaching inform your writing in any way?

MJ: It affects my writing in that I’m always around creative people. And the great thing about teaching undergrads is that they’re just creating for creativity’s sake. Which if you’re … as old as me, you’re rarely doing. You’re thinking about audience, you’re thinking, Will this sell? You’re thinking, Who’s gonna read it? Whereas they’re just expressing and sometimes that’s a reminder to me [as to] why I’m doing this. It is art, too.

Also I learn from my students. … It was a student who came into my office one day, … crying because he was so tired of people linking metal illness to crime. Which is something that every cliché story does. … To look through his eyes and to see what he is seeing everyday … made me realize that I have to be more careful with how I create characters and I need to learn more, but I learned it from my students, I didn’t learn it from other writers.

The S&B: Why do you read?

MJ: Because I wanna have more than one life. … Terry Tempest Williams said that, she said that about writing, I say that about reading, I wanna have more than one life, I wanna have more than one adventure, I wanna be more than one person and I wanna experience other things including the bad things. … I wanna experience heartache, I wanna experience bigotry, I … would also wanna experience bliss and joy and family and I have a lot of that in my own life but … I think part of being human is letting these other stories in your life. … Reading books can change your life. Especially with someone like me, it’s …your first experience of the world. For some people it’s their only experience. … I, also on a very basic level, just love stories. I just love being told something or reading something and being transported to a whole other world which might as well be just like mine but not. And that in itself is super fantastic. You open a book and go, Where am I gonna go today?

The S&B: What is it like writing about Jamaica while living in the U.S.?

MJ: There are good things and bad things about it. The good thing is that you get perspective because you have distance and I don’t just write about Jamaica, I write about Jamaica in the past. … Some of them, like in my last book, I experienced it, but to a huge extent it’s stuff that I haven’t experienced, … stuff that I need perspective to write about. … The thing is you can also run the risk of being out of touch. I think people forget that. … Even though I am here [in the U.S], when I’m not in dialogue with Jamaica, I cannot write about it. So it’s a double-edged sword.

The S&B: I read that when you started writing “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” it started off as a story about one character. How did you develop it into a story with so many different perspectives?

MJ: Each character for a while wasn’t a new character in a novel, each character was a new novel. … For a long time, I didn’t think I was writing a multi-character novel. I thought I was writing these failed single character novels. … It wasn’t my idea that it was a multi-character novel, it was my friend Rachel’s idea. I had dinner with her, I was panicking, I don’t know whose story this is. And she said, Why do you think it’s one person’s story? And she said, Go back and read “As I Lay Dying.” And that was the big eureka moment. … You know, most of the turning points in my novels have always been some outside person says some random thing, and I go, Here we go.

The S&B: Who do you go to when you’re stuck?

MJ: My first defense when I’m stuck is usually reading. … You know if I’m stuck there are writers I can talk to … usually other writers — actually other artists. Because Rachel is a dancer. And most of the people I go to tend to be creative people who are actually aren’t writers. … How does a choreographer solve this problem? How does a musician solve this problem? And sometimes that can be a break through [that you haven’t even been] thinking about because you’ve been thinking too much like a writer.

The S&B: I read that your first book was rejected 78 times. Why did you keep with the book?

MJ: The thing is I didn’t keep with the book — I actually destroyed it. We’ll back track a little bit. I didn’t realize it was 78. … It’s not like I was counting. … It wasn’t until after a while I stopped to go, how many of these have I sent out? And that’s when it hit me that it was 78.  So of course that hit me like a battering ram … like, damn, that many people said no. And actually I didn’t save the book, I got rid of it. I destroyed it. … I deleted it from every computer I could delete it from. … I was at a workshop and this writer demanded to see my work and I was like I don’t write books anymore, I’m not a writer, and everybody who was in the class was like, he wrote a novel he just doesn’t want to show you, and she says she’s not leaving Jamaica until she gets it, so I go scrambling to find this book that I deleted and I found it in an email outbox from years, years, years ago. … Two lessons from that: One, never destroy your work, and two, listen to people but believe in your work because you may come across a period in your life when you’re the only person who does. And sometimes people are right. But can 78 people be wrong? Yeah, 78 people can be wrong.