Erica, let’s just begin by talking a little bit about who you are and what you’ve done.
Well, I am an author, a fiction writer, a journalist and an editor.
For many years, I was Literary Editor of The Times, so I ran the ‘Books’ pages there. That was my day job.
Then, I have also written three books: a book of short stories called Gravity, a book about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath called Ariel’s Gift, and a novel called Seizure. I’m now at work on a biography, so I have a wide range of the kinds of writing that I do.
Or a mixed bag, as you would say? (Laughter).
Indeed, a Jack of all trades.
Yes.
This week, we’ve been talking quite a lot about ‘Theme’ and at what point you start thinking about the thematic importance of what you’re writing.
My first question is:
How do you work with that balance between a theme and content?
For me, as a writer, I would have to say that ‘Theme’, while, of course, very important to the finished product of writing, is something that, for me, has to come in at a secondary stage.
I think the way that I tell stories and the way that I like to hear stories told, they have to be driven by character and action.
Theme arises from character and from action.
I think you often discover your theme when you’re able to take a step back from your story and look at what your characters are saying and what your characters are doing. Then, you may discover the theme of your story not having known it.
I say that because I think there can be a danger, if you think you know your theme, that you impose actions or dialogue on characters that perhaps are not natural to them.
Oddly, with writing, of course, you’re creating, but you’re also listening. You’re listening to your unconscious in part, so you have to listen to your characters and not force them to say things that they don’t necessarily want to say.
I mean, one of the things that I talked about with a previous interviewee, Katy Brand, was that experience of actually watching a character develop and take a choice almost unexpectedly as you write, and that being part of the pleasure of writing.
It’s part of what you’re saying that if you impose a theme on page one, then, possibly you’re caging your characters in and not allowing that space to develop where they can wander off and do something.
Yes, exactly. I think if you say, “I am going to write a novel about sibling rivalry,” you don’t allow the possibility that your characters, brother and sister or sister and sister, get on and something else happens.
I think ‘Theme’ can be something, if you’re not careful, that closes a story down, at least in the early stages of telling that story.
In the first draft, for example?
Exactly. That’s right. I think it’s really not something to worry about in your first draft.
Would you say that’s across the board with novel-writing and journalism or did you find that when writing journalism or non-fiction, the thematic consideration came in early?
Journalism and non-fiction is very differentto me.
I feel like, for me, it almost comes from a completely different part of my brain. I know that it looks the same, it all uses words, but when you are writing journalism, certainly, you’re really screwed if you don’t know what you’re doing at the outset of your piece. The opposite is true for fiction-writing.
If you are an investigative journalist, you are finding things out that will fuel the story you tell, but that’s something else entirely.
Absolutely, I think, the idea of ‘Theme’ can come in at an earlier stage, at a different stage, with journalism and non-fiction.
Also, journalism is quite a compressed form. Again, you know the story you want to tell. Usually, you have a very defined length. Someone else has said, “This needs to be 1,200 words“; “This needs to be 3,000 words.” That gives you a very different structure than anything you create yourself.
The book that I’m writing now - which is a biography of a man called Washington Roebling, who was an engineer, a soldier, a father, a husband and many other things as well - because it is a biography, I know the shape of the story and the shape of his life but, similarly, I think the themes, the stuff I’m really interested in and why I’m drawn to him… I’m working on the first draft. I think some of that won’t become clear to me until I finish that first draft and I read it.
And you almost have that overview of the life and what you’ve chosen unconsciously to focus on as you put it together?
Exactly. That’s right, because however different non-fiction or journalism is from fiction, it is all making choices.
Yes, and it’s you making choices as an author about what interests you, first and foremost?
Yes.
That’s something that we’ve talked about in early units: that you have to find what you care about first because, otherwise, no-one else is going to care about it.
That’s right.
If you’re trying to find a universal theme that’s going to appear, like you’re saying with sibling rivalry or whatever it could be, you’re playing it from the outside rather than the inside?
Yes.
I’ve also noticed that you’ve done a little bit of work with…
“A little bit of work”? You’ve written a show with oral storyteller, Abbi Patrix, and I was just wondering if, when working with material collaboratively in that way, the issue of ‘Theme’ became more important earlier on.
Yes, it did, is the short answer, but there are two reasons for that answer.
I have been interested in oral storytelling for quite a number of years now, probably more than 15 years, and the ways in which people told and sung stories before anybody ever wrote them down.
It was a great opportunity to create something with Abbi Patrix, who is a storyteller who is half French and half Norwegian, and lives in Paris.
We made a show called Pas de Deux and wrote it together so that it could be performed both in French and in English we created. One is not translated out of the other. We wrote them simultaneously together. Both of us speak both languages with varying degrees of accuracy, but enough to work this way.
I would say two things about this show. First of all, quite a few of the stories in it, and really all of them as it’s a sequence of stories linked together, come from traditional narrative. We weren’t making up stories. Although we were altering them and we were changing them, we had source material where we could do, at the outset, the process I was just describing of looking as if you’re looking at a draft and saying, “What is this story about?”
Well, we had our stories, so we could choose stories that had the theme that we were interested in which, loosely speaking - it’s called Pas de Deux.- are stories about coupling and uncoupling; doubles; mirror images; two people, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman and sometimes two brothers, coming together, coming apart.
Those were the stories we were looking for in searching for source material. Then, we wanted to recreate them in an original way; and a way that would both take in Abbi’s voice, which is the voice of someone who mainly tells stories which are not written down - and he’s a very striking and original performer - but also, because he wanted to work with me, he did not want my voice to disappear but to come through in the writing and in what we created.
As I say, the chief reason that theme came into it was that, in a way, because we had material we were working from, we could say, “This is our theme, however loosely we define it. This is what we’re going to do.”
So that was a very different process.
I can imagine as well, with the language issue, there had to be an element of staking out where you were meeting in the middle, where that language connected, and where your different points of cultural reference connected.
Actually, to stake that ground out became important to be able to contain what you were creating, otherwise, it could have coupled and uncoupled in all sorts of directions.
It could have, although I think in my undertaking to write it, because I think we felt, and feel, that we understood each other as artists, the original material that I wrote, I wrote for Abbi. I didn’t write it for anybody else, and I don’t really envision…
So, it wasn’t quite an act of ventriloquism, but I was thinking how I would channel my natural inclinations through what I knew, and I know pretty well now, what Abbi does.
That helped a lot. I wasn’t trying to force. I wanted to speak through him. I wasn’t fighting against him. I didn’t want him to sound like me or different.
Well, what’s interesting about that, then, is that, in a very practical way, it comes back to what you were saying at the start. It was that that was still about character.
Yes, absolutely.
There was an element of the consideration of what storyteller, Abbi, would or wouldn’t say.
Even though you could be thematically stronger, that was still the main concern.
Yes, but I couldn’t have done that…
I think of all the storytellers I’ve listened to, and I’ve been fortunate to listen to a great many really wonderful storytellers. I suppose when I first heard Abbi, years and years ago now, it wasn’t so much, when I think back, that I thought he was better than other storytellers, but I can’t really explain the sense of recognition that I felt in listening to what he was doing. It doesn’t surprise me that we understood each other and were able to work together.
Almost find this third voice?
That’s right.
There are many other people I admire and respect. I don’t know. Maybe I could find that, but I had a sense years before it happened, and so did he, I think, as soon as he starting reading my work, that it would be possible.
So there was a common ground there through performance and writing before you started doing it, which is really interesting.
Oh, absolutely.
I think we can nearly wrap up now. I was just going to ask you for a little bit of practical advice.
How would you deal with people who felt that they were actually overdoing that thematic consideration?
Because one of the things we’re talking about in this course is how people can think about writing in different ways.
Some people are much stronger with that initial sense of character. Some people have an idea of an overarching story that they want to tell.
So if, in a first draft as a writer, someone is getting caught up in the thematic weight of what they’re trying to say, how would you advise them to just pull back from that and avoid falling into that trap?
I guess I would advise them, and this might go against their instincts, that it’s not bad to try and push against your own instincts because, sometimes, your instincts as a writer and as an artist…
I think you always have to challenge yourself, and to just fall into what is easy for you is not necessarily the best way.
So I think if you look at your draft and you feel that it’s overburdened by stuff you feel obliged to tell, you have to pare that back and think of how you can show it. Look again closely at the characters you’ve chosen and the characters you’ve created.
What are they saying? Why are they saying it? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? Are they really doing what is organic in every scene?
Look closely. Make a diagram. Make a list. Step back from it.
And one of the things that I often do when I’m writing, and it connects, I guess, to storytelling and oral literature… Say it out loud. Speak your dialogue out loud. Speak all your writing out loud, but particularly, I think, with dialogue. If you make yourself say what your characters are saying, you will find out whether it should be said.
Yes. Often, actually, when I feel that something isn’t working, and it’s excruciating, but I often record it. I record myself speaking it and then listen back to it because there is something that happens when you hear rather than when you look at the page. You can’t really hide from your own clichés, can you?
That’s right. No, you can’t. They jump out at you. (Laughter).
It’s much better for you to spot them. (Laughter).
Exactly, than other people. Quite.
That’s what I would say.
Great. Thank you very much. Thank you for talking to us.
My pleasure.