Today you can find me on the English country wife … let me rephrase that—today you can find me being reviewed and interviewed by the quite lovely Debbie Skerten on her new and upcoming blog, The English Country Wife. Click on the snippet to read more!
© 2013 Gary William Murning
Well it took a little over 18 months from start to finish (including the time it took to write the 20,000 word outline) but the first draft of As Morning Shows the Day is now (fanfare, please) complete.
I put the final full-stop in place last Sunday morning (18th of July), sat back, looked out of the window, looked back at the computer screen and sighed. Approaching the ending had been tense. It’s a fairly large piece of work and, hitting the final chapter, I was very aware of just how pleased I was with everything that had gone before — and how vital it was, as ever, that I get the final few pages just right.
Did I manage that? I think so — I really do. I haven’t, as yet, read through the whole novel, but having read the final pages through a few times it’s very much the conclusion I’d originally envisaged. There’s still work to do, of course, but I’m extremely happy.
613 pages of nostalgia, quiet humour, characters I love, a plot and thematic development that’s subtle but not too subtle… I like it. A lot.
Two sample chapters of If I Never can be read here.
To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.
Whilst reading earlier today the report from last week’s Publishing Laid Bare Conference — a yearly conference on the state of the industry, set up by my publisher, Legend Press — I found myself focusing on one particular sentence:
The conference, once again, addressed some fantastic points (follow these links to read part one, part two and part three of the report), but this in particular is something I’ve been thinking of fairly constantly since the publication of If I Never.
The problem of invisibility and how it should be addressed, I feel, can’t be emphasised enough. Promoting one’s book is vital. This, after all, is the frontline product. But I feel that if we are looking to publish more than just one book, it’s also vital to build a sense of the person behind the work. An author’s name becomes recognisable through the finished product, of course (if we’re lucky enough to gain that kind of popularity!), but today we also have the benefit of various electronic media, as well as more traditional methods, which can be used to work and interact with people, to discuss ideas, to, when necessary, debate vociferously — and in so doing create a better understanding among potential readers of just who the author actually “is”.
It may not sit comfortably with some to think in terms of “brand”, or to consider themselves as part of the product — Gary William Murning™ feels a little odd even to me, a shameless self-promoter — but in this highly competitive business I’m not sure it’s something we can necessarily avoid. If you take what you do seriously as a writer, if you want it to be read by as many people as possible, these approaches must at least be considered.
(And, yes, okay — I’ll admit it; Gary William Murning™ doesn’t feel in the least bit odd! I actually quite like it!)
Two sample chapters of If I Never can be read here.
To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.
I’m delighted to announce the winner of the If I Never competition that was featured earlier in the year on the Struggling Authors website. The response, I’m told, was pretty good, with most entrants getting the right answer.
The question was: In If I Never, what is the name of Tara’s mother?
As many of you already know, I’m sure, the correct answer was Bernie or Bernice.
The winner is Lauren Rushton and her prize is to have her name featured as one of the characters in the next novel I write. Congratulations, Lauren — and thank you to everyone for entering!
Two sample chapters of If I Never can be read here.
To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.
I was recently fortunate enough to be interviewed for the rather excellent Newcastle Libraries website — definitely worth a look, even if you aren’t from the north-east of England — and thought I’d share a little of it with you here:
Which authors do you admire?
Many! I love large canvas fiction — writers who connect us to individuals by large-scale stories. Tolstoy is the obvious example, but it also applies to writers like John Irving, who has also influenced me.
Lately, however, I’ve been rediscovering Michael Ondaatje — the Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet. I read The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost when they were both originally published and then, as is so often the way, lost him for a while. At the moment, I’m reading Divisadero, and I’m overwhelmed, again, by the beautiful economy of his writing. I heard him say in an interview recently that, for him, writing is about deciding what can be left out rather than put in, and this together with this wonderful novel is making me reassess my own way of working. A good author always makes you, as a writer, want to improve on what you do, find new ways of thinking about the familiar narrative problems.
To read more, please click here.
This response is fairly typical. The staff of regional and national libraries are proving to be wonderfully helpful — buying in copies, taking flyers and letting their readers’ groups know about me. This kind of support is truly invaluable and hugely appreciated.
If you’re a library staff member or someone visiting from a readers’ group, please say hi — and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate.
Two sample chapters of If I Never can be read here.
To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing fellow Legend Press author, Josie Henley-Einion. Josie’s first novel, Silence, is “an examination of sexual violence and its repercussions. It questions the right of the media to scrutinise and pronounce judgement on a person’s life choices.”
Click here to read the first part of this interview.
5. You interviewed me recently for your blog – something I really enjoyed, by the way. You asked me whether I’d taken the creative writing course route and, whilst I wasn’t completely negative about it, I did make it fairly clear that it wasn’t for me. I now see, of course, that you have an MA in creative writing and would very much like to hear your thoughts on this. How did you find it?
Yes it’s great to be interviewed! I find that I often don’t know what I think about something until someone asks me the question and I can access my thoughts and bounce ideas around. Also, having interview questions to answer seems less self-aggrandising than simply blogging about these topics.
I loved the MA, but I understand that it’s not for everyone. I am an academic and having that certificate was important to me, to my self esteem as a writer as well as to further my academic career. It was also very good to have the community of other writers. Alys, my partner, is a writer and we do share a lot with each other but having a wider community is important I think. We both studied the MA together but at first we were in different groups. Writing can be such an isolating pastime, so it’s important to have compatriots. The course encouraged buddying and I’m still in contact with my buddy now.
The MA was conducted online and seminars took place in chatrooms, assignments uploaded to a forum for peer review. It was my first experience of chatrooms and forum posting, and peer critiques as well! All very exciting. It used to be that distance learning meant posting handwritten assignments but with modern technology all learning could have an element of off-campus activity. This was about 8 years ago so that was quite new and innovative of Manchester Metropolitan University, and we were the first cohort. There have been many similar courses sprouting up recently. They probably use podcasts and skype now. Blended learning is a very interesting area and I think that giving students control over their learning experience is a good idea, it promotes autonomy. There I go with the essay again!
Since completing the MA I have found writing sites which replicate that aspect of the course in terms of the community and peer review. Youwriteon.com was one that I was very involved in a couple of years ago, and I’ve recently joined Litopia. Although I still believe that if you want to learn something, the best method is to have a combination of teacher support and just going out there and doing it, if you weren’t particularly interested in attaining a paper qualification but were looking for the experience of honing your art in the company of other writers, the best thing you can do is to join one of these sites and perform some reciprocal feedback. They are free and it would give you the experience without having to commit to a course. I found that the act of critiquing someone else’s writing helped me to develop critical skills which enabled me to look at my own work with more distance. So as well as getting the feedback from other people on my work, I gained by critiquing theirs. It’s a win-win situation, so long as everyone is fair and respectful.
As well as working on the novel, the MA got me into studying the act of writing and the work of other writers, and got me interested in narratology that I was talking about earlier. We had academic assignments, which were interesting to do, and for my dissertation I studied e-books. I uploaded the final project to my website afterwards and it still gets a fair number of hits. A lot of what I said about e-books then is starting to come true so I’m quite pleased that I was able to do that study.
6. We also recently discussed the whole perceived/expected “political” aspect to our writing – me being a “disabled writer” and you a “lesbian writer”. I have a feeling that you, like me, don’t much care for being told what you should or shouldn’t write. Yes?
Absolutely! I work within such prescriptive guidelines with my academic work that when it comes to writing fiction I really want to be free. I hate to be told what I should or shouldn’t write as I believe that we should all be able to express ourselves as we feel. As with any other art form, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do what you’ve been told to do as a commission to earn money (and many would be grateful for the chance to do that so I try not to grumble). I see my fiction writing as the area in which I can work where I can really ‘be myself’ without thinking about the money, as, let’s face it, there is very little money in it for most authors outside of the big name lists. Legend are a great publisher for this as they don’t prescribe, which is rare I think! Like you said in your interview, we are lucky to be Legend authors. I can be a bit of a snob when it comes to this, in that I think that something written from the heart, and not formulaic market-driven pap, is far superior. However, if it’s going to make money, then most of the time it has to be the pap I’m afraid. I feel the same about most TV and I’d rather not engage with it.
In terms of the ‘issues’, I heard an interview with Meera Syal recently where the interviewer suggested that she must be pleased to be playing roles where her race was incidental to the character or story. I think it’s important to see minority characters in books and films where the story is not about them being a minority, only then can we say that we have a truly equal or egalitarian society. However, it is also important to see those characters within their minority setting and to portray the unique nature of their culture and the particular problems faced by people in this culture. Otherwise we will be heading towards a homogenised society where everyone is expected to conform to a set pattern. So what I’m saying is that we need a whole spectrum in art which reflects society as it is as well as having the opportunity to see it as it could be, utopian or dystopian, and how it was in the past.
I have mixed feelings about being a ‘lesbian writer’ or my books being ‘lesbian books’. On the one hand I really don’t like to be put into a box and I wouldn’t want this label to put anyone off reading my stories. I am so much more than a lesbian! I have so many other interests and avenues to explore. On the other hand, I went through a phase in my reading as a young adult where I only read lesbian and gay books and would only look on this section in a bookshop. My loss, I later realised, but this makes me realise that in not marketing myself as a lesbian author, I would risk losing a niche readership. The LGBT community is very supportive and loyal, so this was as much a marketing decision as any assertion of my gayness or individuality. There is a similar kind of debate that goes on about authors not wanting to choose a genre. The authors hate to be seen as genre-restricted as this somehow seems inferior but the booksellers and readers really appreciate knowing where the book should sit on the shelves! In Wales I went on the Welsh interest shelves which was possibly due to my name, the book setting or me living in Cardiff, but I imagine that it will migrate to the LGBT section, if there is one.
I think Sarah Waters has obtained a happy medium in this, in that she has always been a lesbian author and her first books were lesbian books, but these have transcended into the mainstream and are received as literary fiction. She did receive some flack for her latest book The Little Stranger (which was bloody fantastic by the way!) because there weren’t any openly gay characters, and there were mutterings among the lesbian community that she’d sold out. I disagree, I think that she’s enough of an icon to not have to push the lesbian agenda in every book and writing about non-gay characters was logical to the plot in this case. There’s no point shoe-horning a gay character into the story just for the sake of it. That would be trite. That she has written a book narrated by a straight man demonstrates more acceptance of the lesbian writer as a valid and equal contemporary to other writers than if she only wrote lesbian niche books. Sarah Waters is an historical novelist, a mystery writer, and a lesbian, and she waves the flag superbly, but some people do seem to want her to be only lesbian which is a shame.
I have written several children’s novels which I find quicker, easier and more pleasant to write than an adult novel. One of the reasons for this is that I have a young son who loves reading, another is that most of my writing buddies are children’s authors due to the BBC competition. I also don’t tend to draw a distinction between children’s and adult fiction, and often read children’s and YA books myself. Although my usual themes do sneak in, the sexual elements are more toned down when writing about children than in my adult writing. However, I don’t believe that I’ll ever be published as a children’s author now that I have a name as a lesbian writer, unless things change drastically, I publish under a pseudonym, or I become as famous as Jeanette Winterson who has written a lovely magical children’s picture book. I am not being defeatist and will continue to write children’s stories because I love them, but I think that the modern publishing world obsession with branding authors, and the problematisation of visible lesbian relationships as non-suitable for children’s space will prevent my children’s stories from finding their true audience. This is a shame as there are many children living in lesbian headed families who are not disturbed by their parents loving each other, only by other people’s horror that this should be the case.
7. Your short stories have been featured in the Legend Press Short Stories Reinvented Series – Seven Days (2007), Eight Hours (2008) and in the forthcoming 10 Journeys (2010). Would you like to tell us a little more about the featured stories? I’d also be interested in hearing how your approach to writing short fiction differs from writing long fiction – if it does.
They do look impressive when you list them like that. It’s great that I’m in the 2010 collection and I’m looking forward to seeing the other stories and authors. My story in Seven Days was Sunday, about an elderly lesbian living in a residential home and reminiscing on her life. The remit of the competition was to write a story which took place in a single day, so I played a trick with the reminiscing in that I was compressing the whole of this woman’s life into one day. I had originally thought of this story years before when I was working in a nursing home. I thought of the tedium that the people there went through, how they must be so bored and were probably lost in their own pasts and cut off from others. The Legend competition asked for 9000 to 12000 words which is quite long for a short story so it needed a meaty plot. When I read the remit of the single day, this was the idea that I picked from my ideas bag. At the time I was writing a lot of short stories and entering a lot of competitions, determined to get somewhere. Out of nineteen submissions in three months, this was the only one that bit.
Following the publication of Seven Days, which was very exciting – my first publication in book form – Legend quite quickly announced the competition for the following year. Again it was a single character and a long wordcount, but this time a single hour. I rose to the challenge and selected a sleepless teen, the hour being between 5 and 6 am. I find that this is the situation in which time passes so slowly and so much can go on inside your head. Actually I was lying awake worrying about what I was going to write for the competition when the idea came to me! I wanted it to be a very different story from Sunday, and made the character young because of this. My story was selected to be the first in the subsequent collection, Eight Hours.
I entered the 2009 competition, which resulted in the publication of Nine Rooms (I wonder if you can guess what the remit for that was?) but my story didn’t get selected. So I was quite apprehensive this year after entering the 2010 competition as I realised that there is never a guarantee. Again it was a longer wordcount than the usual short story but slightly less this time at 7000 words and the remit was to write about a journey. It could be a physical or metaphorical journey and I chose both. I often think it is the case that when you undertake a physical journey, another transformation can take place and this is what I was attempting with this story. It is a gradual realisation on the part of the narrator and the reader but it culminates in a quite disturbing climax. Well it disturbed me to write it anyway! This is another of those times where I realise that I have attempted to avoid the usual themes but they crept in surreptitiously anyway. I could be irritated about that but I actually like the way it unfolds, and the fact that the violent element wasn’t intended or deliberately placed probably makes it more effective. The launch for this book is set to the end of May and I hope to go down to London for this and meet the other authors. This is all part of the fun and does make some good pictures for the blog.
How I approach writing short fiction? It used to be that I just started writing whatever came into my head to write and it would either become a short story or the synopsis of a novel. I’ve also written a few plays. Some story ideas are better suited to different mediums and I can usually tell within the first thousand words or so whether the story is going to be condensed enough to stay short or whether it requires more wordage. I tend to write shorts now only for commissions or competitions, so there is nearly always a remit and a minimum/maximum word limit. The approach becomes more similar to my academic writing in that I am working towards a specific goal which is easier in many ways. I have tried to use this approach with my novel writing as well and did succeed with a short children’s novel I wrote last year. But I would rather not write to formula, that’s the snob in me again. I think the trick is to get my own formula to work with, where I’m comfortable enough with the restrictions while leaving myself plenty of scope. So far the Legend stories have worked well and I’d like to write more shorts in future.
8. And your literary influences? Favourite writers? Did they shape you as a writer?
Oh so many!! When I was growing up the only children’s books I had access to were written by Enid Blyton. I progressed from Bimbo and Topsy (lovely dog and cat) through Pip the Pixie to The Secret Seven and Famous Five. Mallory Towers gave me an unrealistic expectation of boarding school. Although as a teen I was beset by white middle-class guilt and tried to distance myself from these books, I have more recently rekindled my love for Enid. She was my first influence and if seen as a product of her times with her own set of problems, then she can be respected for her plotting and productivity. Other than Enid Blyton, my biggest reading passion as a child were comics – Beano, Dandy, Topper, Whizzer. I’ve got a massive collection of annuals which now reside in my son’s bedroom and are loved all over again. The first book I began to write was when I was eight in an exercise book, including illustrations. It was about a group of children who broke out of a children’s home and went wild. In retrospect I can see that it was heavily influenced by Enid Blyton and the Bash Street Kids but it was all my own work!
As I got older there were very few ‘teen’ books in the UK. I read US authors Judy Blume and Paul Zindel, both of whom were also great influences on my writing. These were my first ‘issues’ books and they made me realise that it was okay to write about bullying and problem parents. While I was reading Dickens and Shakespeare in school (and enjoying these but resenting being told I had to read them), I gorged myself on this American teen lit. I also went through the local library’s trashy shelves of westerns, detectives, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, Sherlock Holmes, anything I could lay my hands on. I was still writing but only for schoolwork, I didn’t start to write with a view to publication until I’d left school.
I started to get into British sci-fi, especially John Wyndham and Douglas Adams. I loved novels and short stories alike and read Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. I think these and John Wyndham’s short stories have been my biggest influence in the shorts genre because I don’t seem to be able to write a short without a twist or hidden plot. Most of the authors I loved were male which might say something about my tastes or the fact that the female authored books available for me to read were the sort of romance or horse books that I would rather have died than be caught with. I think I read one Catherine Cookson because I’ll try anything once. In my late teens I discovered the feminist and lesbian books that had been excluded from my environment and suddenly felt as if I’d come home. Marge Piercy, Fiona Cooper, Suniti Namjoshi, Margaret Atwood, too many to name. I went through a period of only reading female authors including literary classics, political and non-fiction but also a lot of trashy lesbian romances and detectives. This was when I really started to write with the intent for publication.
In my early twenties I made a quest out of educating myself with classic texts, mainly because I didn’t have the money to buy new books so was borrowing, stealing and buying second hand. I was writing and writing but not really getting anywhere at this point. There was always a novel on the go but I didn’t seem to be able to get past the first few chapters before I’d lose interest and move on to the next project. I think that part of the problem was that I didn’t take my writing seriously enough, probably because my partner at the time didn’t value it, or me. When Alys and I got together eleven years ago, I finally had the space and encouragement to write and it took off from there. Our son was very young and I read a lot and wrote a lot and it all came together. During this time I was reading a lot of children’s authors, sci-fi, fantasy, crime and historical fiction, classics, again anything I could get my hands on. Having a child to discover reading with, I went for children’s classics like Black Beauty and Treasure Island. I was finally able to buy new books without feeling guilty and, Alys being a big reader, I had a vast collection at home to choose from. I also read some of Alys’ favourite books that she recommended and this way discovered all sorts of children’s and teen fiction that I’d missed due to my own prejudices against ‘girl’ stories as a child.
When I’m writing I try not to read too much fiction as the style can be influenced. I tend to read a lot of non-fiction lately so a novel is a treat for me. My favourite authors now are Terry Pratchett, Sarah Waters and Alexander McCall Smith. I try to keep abreast with the latest literary and bestseller books but will never get through the exponentially rising number of books that Alys puts on the shelves. The biggest influence on Silence was Sarah Waters, not for style but audacity. The success of Tipping the Velvet made me realise that the world was ready for explicit lesbian sex in a non-pornographic setting, as incidental to the actual story. For a long time I’d had a desire to write a ‘real’ lesbian novel, about real lives and real relationships with all the ups and downs, which in my experience have as much to do with friendships, careers and cats as sex. I never imagined that a book that didn’t prettify the lesbian experience would be accepted for publication due to it falling between lesbian invisibility and the move to promote positive images to combat prejudice. Finally we are no longer invisible, although I do get criticism from people who seem to think I should just shut up about it (well, why don’t they shut up about their heteronormative lives?). Finally we don’t have to pretend our lives are perfect to avoid people saying that lesbianism is a mental illness, although this still happens as well.
9. Finally – following on from the last question – your Desert Island Book? You’re shipwrecked and, before the ship goes down, you get to grab one book out of the rather well-stocked ship’s library. This book will be your only companion on a blob of sand in the middle of a vast ocean. What will it be?
That is the simplest question. It would have to be a book entitled ‘how to survive on a desert island’. I may seem like an ivory tower kind of person but when it comes to surviving a harrowing experience, I’d like to think that I’d be very practical. If that book had already been taken by the person who went before me, I’d have a great deal of difficulty in deciding between Terry Pratchett and Sarah Waters.
To visit Josie’s website, click here.
Buy your copy of Silence here and check out Josie’s short stories in the Legend Press short story collections.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing fellow Legend Press author, Josie Henley-Einion. Josie’s first novel, Silence, is “an examination of sexual violence and its repercussions. It questions the right of the media to scrutinise and pronounce judgement on a person’s life choices.”
1. Your first novel with Legend Press, Silence, was published back in 2008. Was this the first novel you wrote?
No it wasn’t! It hardly ever is, from what I can gather from other authors. The first novel I wrote to completion is a trashy lesbian detective novel which will remain unpublished for a number of reasons. I wrote a lot of stories as a teen and in my early twenties and also began a number of novels but this one was the first that I finished, and wrote it when I was thirty. Following that I wrote a children’s novel for a BBC competition which was shortlisted and got optioned but never published. I believe that this novel has potential but will probably never get published due to it coincidentally having too much similarity to Harry Potter (I say coincidentally because I’d never heard of Harry Potter when I wrote it and hardly anyone else had either). Sigh. The experience of being shortlisted (six out of 4600 entries) spurred me to taking my writing seriously which was when I decided to study for an MA in Writing. I’m also still in contact with the other finalists who are my writing gang which is great. It was during the MA that I wrote Silence. Since then I’ve written another two novels to completion and started countless more!
I recently listened to an interview with Sid Fleischman on the Litopia podcast, who used the phrase ‘nothing was wasted except the paper’ when referring to an early novel that he destroyed without publishing. I’m not sure I’d have the courage to destroy my first writings but that trashy detective novel will serve as a reminder to me if ever I become too arrogant about my abilities! I see those early novels as valuable experience and agree with this ‘nothing is wasted’ concept, especially as Jackie (one of the main characters of Silence) is a writer and goes through similar experiences with the formulaic writing.
2. Recently, you mentioned to me that your own experiences have had a pretty direct impact on your writing. Would you like to tell us a little more about this?
I was bullied pretty badly and I was quite badly behaved myself as a teen and had some extreme encounters, so I tap into these experiences as a resource. I think that every writer does, either deliberately or unconsciously, and especially in the early parts of their writing careers.
One of the reasons that I think the lesbian detective novel I wrote is pretty awful is because I’ve never worked as a detective or been involved in any related work, like police work or journalism. The scenes that do work well are those involving lesbian social life. One of the ‘rules’ of writing that people talk about is ‘write what you know’, in other words that you should write about things of which you have a knowledge and understanding. I generally don’t like writing rules and would never try to be the writing police, but at least when starting out I thought this one sounded quite sensible. After all, it would be bloody difficult to write about something of which you have no idea. Of course, there’s research and once you’ve done the research then it becomes something of which you do have a knowledge and understanding.
When people ask me how long it took to write Silence, I usually quote the three years of the MA (plus another three years of attempting to get it published, and editing each time before resending). But I also say that I’ve been writing this book all my life. There is a hell of a lot of me in there, but only people who know me very well can work out which bits are fictional and which aren’t. What I really mean though is that every time I pick up a pen or open a Word document to begin a new story, no matter what the topic, characters, setting, or intended audience, I always seem to write the same basic story. The same themes come through: the outsider who is or has been bullied or abused, taking revenge or making some sort of statement and often destroying themselves in the process. Domestic abuse and sexual violence usually rear their ugly heads. It used to annoy me and was one of the main blockers that stopped me from seeing a project through to completion. But there came a point where I decided to embrace it and thought, well if this is my ‘brand’ then so be it.
Silence started out as a sort of ‘writing as therapy’ project where I thought I could get it all out of my system and then go ahead and write ‘proper’ books (like trashy detective or sci-fi) but then ahead of me came the misery memoir fashion and I realised that this was what I had written – a fictional misery memoir. I quite like thinking about all the different ways I can make a story miserable yet still readable. That may sound perverse but what I mean is that I find it a challenge to put my characters into impossible and awful situations and then see how they deal with them. I really wouldn’t like to think of myself as jumping on the misery memoir bandwagon, and my life is hardly as traumatic as those who get turned into ghostwritten books, which is why Silence is fictional. I see it as a challenge to come up with a completely new and different story each time I begin to write, which explores the same themes and issues. There is a niche in this and people do want to read about others’ suffering, as expressed by misery memoirs and before this ‘true crime’ going back via Shakespeare to Greek Tragedy. I think the critics of the misery genre often forget this natural aspect of human nature. The point is not to be gratuitous, as with anything else in literature. Use of gratuitous suffering in a novel just becomes another form of pornography.
3. Something I found myself thinking about a lot whilst writing my next novel was, how autobiographical is semi-autobiographical? Once we commit to including some part of our lives into the work, it’s sometimes – I found – hard to know where the fiction starts and ends, as bizarre as that may sound to some. Did you find that difficult? And how do your readers usually view it?
I believe that all writing is autobiography and all biography is fiction. The boundaries are too blurred to make distinct divisions. We have to decide what to leave in and what to miss out when we write a story or when we tell an anecdote about our own lives, and in doing this we have already created a narrative. As writers we are probably more aware of this, and more self-aware, than most people, but everyone constructs these narratives on a daily basis. Children pick up how to tell a story very early in life, so that they know the formula and conventions and can tell you what happened to them in the park today with a perfect beginning, middle and end, hero and protagonist and other elements common to the stories they hear every day. It’s part of our socialisation.
I am interested in narrative theory and narratology, how narrative shapes our culture. We have a self-replication of culture and the narratives we construct become our truths so that the memory of an actual incident becomes blurred by the stories we have told about it afterwards, or the lens through which we viewed it at the time. We might see today’s world knowledge as a construct of the stories that are being told us by the government and media, which at some point in the future we will see in a different light as we are beginning to now view the whole ‘weapons of mass destruction’ period. Even though at the time it was blatantly obvious to some that there were no WMD and it was a smokescreen for a financially and politically motivated invasion that had been planned for some time, we told each other the story of WMD and we came to believe it. Endless debates, discussion and jokes centred on WMD and so it has become part of our history.
On a lesser scale the same thing can happen in our own lives when we may have believed a certain ‘fact’ about our parents for many years only to find out that we had misinterpreted something early on, or even been lied to, which shaped the whole picture. In my teens I was lent a book which detailed the number of historical figures who were gay. I was overwhelmed by the lies and cover-ups which led to young people like myself believing that being gay was extremely rare and destructive. Sorry, this is beginning to sound like an academic essay! I do find the area of life writing interesting, but I am more interested in fiction which mimics life writing – as I have done with Silence – as it is easier to manipulate from the author’s point of view. This has a healthy history in the novel, with fictional memoirs such as Fanny Hill and Tristram Shandy being popular in the early days of novel experimentation.
With my readers I get different reactions. Some people assume that it is basically autobiographical and react to me as if I have had all of the experiences that I put my characters through. This can be a bit annoying, for one thing they might be pitying and patronising and another that it makes me think that they don’t see me as capable of writing fiction. Others assume that because it is a novel it is purely fictional, and as I’ve worked with abuse survivors this is how I have gained an insight. Most people just don’t ask! I think that reflects how people generally react in our society when faced with an abuse survival story – they would rather not talk about it. The complexity of the reality is that I don’t even know all of the details of which bits are directly from my life and which are projections of my life, amalgams of character or what could have happened. I can’t be specific unless I am asked very specific questions. If someone pointed to a particular passage and asked, did that happen to you? I might be able to describe which bits came from me and which bits are fictionalised. There is also an element of the blurring of my memories which makes it more difficult!
Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is autobiographical but it is also fiction, even with the main character being named Jeanette. I would not have named Jackie Josie, and I deliberately made changes to her physically and in characterisation because I thought that she was too close to being me. I am probably more like Jimmie, Jackie’s partner. I did briefly consider putting in a cameo character of myself but decided against it. Too many J’s!
4. You have an academic background in psychology and linguistics, and have worked in health and social care. Having a layman’s interest in psychology myself, do you think this and your health/social care background help you understand/sympathise with the characters you create more effectively? Or do you avoid thinking about such things too deeply when you’re writing?
I try not to let my academic interests and concerns take over my fiction writing as the fiction is designed to be entertaining first and informative as a bonus extra. At least that’s how I like to read and presume that most readers are the same – not wanting to be lectured to. I do find that my background helps me to understand and empathise with people generally, but it is an unconscious thing so it’s not something I’ve nurtured specifically for my writing. I think that the biggest influence in having a health and social care career background is that both Jackie and Jimmie are working in these kinds of jobs and having an insider knowledge helps to make it real. My latest story is set in academia which reflects my current occupation of PhD student. As with what I said above about the themes and issues that keep creeping back into my writing, I just let it flow. Past experience tells me that if I try to force myself to write something different than what comes naturally then it won’t happen and I’ll get frustrated. So I allow it to happen and I’m interested in the results almost as if it were written by someone else. It’s not quite automatic writing but sometimes it feels as if I’m channelling the ‘inner me’ so that I’m often surprised at the resultant story. That probably says more about the disassociation between the real me and the public/surface me than it does about my writing! I write in a stream of consciousness style because of this, but only for the first draft – the dross does get edited out.
Part two of this interview will follow shortly. Watch this space.
To visit Josie’s website, click here.
Buy your copy of Silence here and check out Josie’s short stories in the Legend Press short story collections.
Now available—THE LEGACY OF LORNA LOVELOST Click here to buy THE LEGACY OF LORNA LOVELOST
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THE REALM OF THE HUNGRY GHOSTS is now available through Amazon and all good bookstores. Click here to buy THE REALM OF THE HUNGRY GHOSTS
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CHILDREN OF THE RESOLUTION is now available from Amazon and all good bookstores. Click here to buy CHILDREN OF THE RESOLUTION
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IF I NEVER is published by Legend Press and is now available from Amazon and all good bookstores. Click here to buy IF I NEVER
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