Ask the ON RULES Author: Nick Manning
"Keep going. Even when you are bored with your efforts and especially when you are bored with yourself."
Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Nick! Thank you for taking some time to answer a few of our questions. We are honored to feature your brilliant work in our forthcoming anthology. Please tell us a little about the piece that will be forthcoming in On Rules.
Nick Manning (NM):
Urban bike lanes signify so much. Race, gentrification, virtue (both the signaled type and the real thing), optimism whether misplaced or otherwise, intergenerational fury, hope and despair are all coded into the painting of white lines on roads. My husband and I are on opposite sides of the bike-lanes-everywhere debate and it has always seemed both important and appealingly trivial that we choose this to disagree about. I wanted to write a piece that hinted at the humor and the passion in the bike lane debates. The story emerged in the form of a fable – looking wryly at our strange passions and convictions, highlighting the follies and weaknesses that I suspect none of us can escape from.
JK: How long have you been writing, and when did you begin?
NM: I retired from the World Bank some ten years ago where I was the author of a large number of distinctly dry technical books and papers about governments and their dysfunctions. Since retiring, I have been experimenting with creative fiction – a very different type of writing but retaining my determination to be honest and unrelenting about ambivalent intentions, clashing incentives and hidden motives.
JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a writer/person?
NM: Keep going. Even when you are bored with your efforts and especially when you are bored with yourself.
JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.
NM: “He met women… their lives stretched so thin you could see right through to their end; saw the children, stunted and paled by their surroundings, bending to bad prospects.”
‘The New Life’, Tom Crewe.
This is a heart-rending observation from a protagonist who sees the cruelty and callousness of the world of his time, who feels that he must take action and who knows that his actions will amount to little but that that makes them all the more important.
JK: What are your thoughts (if any) about AI and the writing world?
NM: I’m as scared as anyone else. I fear the impact of a flood of bland, soulless prose – and I fear the insights that it might give us about ourselves when we realize that we do not care as much as we should.
JK: What keeps you going on the tough days?
NM: The advice above. Keep going.
JK: What are you working on now? Please share any links our writers can follow to read more of your work.
NM: I am completing a novel about the hunt for family. The protagonist is a fearful gay man who tries to assemble a family to replace the one that never worked for him. My aim is to track the evolution of gay men’s personal politics as AIDS challenged the proposition that industrial scale casual sex is liberating at a time when the rise to power in the UK of the hard right and the loss of faith in a caring welfare state made families all the more crucial for emotional survival. I hope that it poses some of the right questions about the nature of friendship, the challenges of interracial love, the difference between birth and chosen families and the dangers in assuming responsibility for other people’s kids.
Thank you, Nick!
I am a British gay man in my early 70s, living happily with my husband, dog and, sometimes, stepson in Washington DC and New York. There were many serendipitous steps between a remote rural childhood, an early career as a social worker in central London and my later work in international development.