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DECEMBER 2011
Two things that might interest you.
First: If you live in London and are in town near Trafalgar Square, stop in at the National Portrait Gallery to see Imagined Lives: Portraits of Unknown People. It's a small room full of portraits the Gallery once bought that no longer have biographies attached - not too useful for a portrait gallery. However, they are gorgeous paintings and worth an airing, so they're on display, along with biographies and stories made up about them by me and other writers such as Joanna Trollope, Terry Pratchett and Julian "Downton" Fellowes. You can even hear us reading some of the stories if you go to the website. I wrote about this man:
I've called him Rosy because of his flushed cheeks. If you read the story, you'll find out why he's blushing. The stories have been collected in a book too.
Second: World Book Night UK is gearing up for 23 April 2012, and now looking for people to give away their favorite books from a list of 25. I am going to give away How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. For more information, go to their website: www.worldbooknight.org
NOVEMBER 2011
I realize I never followed up on my Ohio trip in July. Fabulous, though very hot. I did a lot of research, and yes, visited several quilt shops. I now have fabric enough for several quilts!
While in Oberlin, I had my picture taken at the spot where I first had the idea to write about the Underground Railroad for the new novel. I was at the ceremony where Toni Morrison unveiled a Bench by the Road, and it got me thinking. It's rare to have a plaque put up on the very spot and date where you have an idea! Here's the place and the plaque:
Then I went to a cousin's cabin in upstate New York for a few days to absorb the research and tear apart what I'd already written. That was fun. Also had a visit from a bear, who left this outside the door for me:
Lovely.
JULY 2011
Summer time and I'm off soon to Ohio to try and revitalize the novel I'm writing set there. Any Ohioans who see me in a diner with a stack of pancakes and the paper, tell me to get out and start researching! You may also find me lingering in quilt shops.
In the mean time, a favour to UK residents: help World Book Night choose the books to give away on 23 April 2012 by going to the website and telling us your favorite top 10 books. Everyone else is welcome to have a look too, it's an interesting place to be reminded of what great books there are out there. For instance, why has no one ever told me about The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde? Sounds like a must-read!
JUNE 2011
Here's a recent interview, which sounds more like me than most.
MAY 2011
Great Britain went a little berserk recently with the Royal Wedding. In our Dorset village there was a cake-decorating competition on that theme, and we won! Here's the result:
MAY 2011
Rosemary Cassidy Buswell recently sent me a photo of a very cool Land Art piece she made on a beach in northern France. Mary Anning would have loved this pebble plesiosaur. Nice one, Rosemary!
APRIL 2011
I did it! I ran the LONDON MARATHON to raise money for BREAST CANCER CAMPAIGN. Here I am in all my sweaty glory, with Big Ben behind me, SMILING because I'm done! Thanks to everyone who sponsored me!
January 2011
I am having an ascetic new year: no alcohol or sweet things for January, lots of training for the Marathon, and no events or writing other than the new novel. The plan is to cut back to necessities and be more disciplined. Running you heard about on the front page. More now on
WRITING: The new novel is about an English Quaker woman who emigrates to Ohio in the 1840s, settles in a fictional community near Oberlin (where I went to college, by the way), and ends up working on the Underground Railroad, helping runaway slaves escape to Canada. I am still in the early stages, and Honor Bright has only just arrived at her new home near Oberlin. There are so many questions to answer, but it feels solid, and right.
READING: I always read, but this time it's serious: I'm a judge for the 2011 Orange Prize for fiction, awarded to a book written in English by a woman. What a lot of reading! It's exhilarating but also terribly daunting, eyeing those stacks and stacks of books. Hard too to pinpoint why I like or don't like a book - so often it's simply a gut feeling that I can't explain. But as a judge I have to if I want to defend or criticise a choice. Longlist is announced in March, shortlist in April, winner June 8th.
So that is my winter of discipline laid out before me: lots of reading and writing and running. Happy New Year!
UPDATE: A good friend and fellow writer, Felicity Librie, has just published an interview with me here. Nice job, F!
December 2010
Yup, that's me, glamorous as always...drawn by my son!
October 2010
Why is October special? For me it's about the weather change (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). It gets colder and crisper and more focussed. October is the month of apples and gorgeous leaves. It's when nature begins to die and in its final flourish becomes even more beautiful.
If you are a creationist, October is, ironically, also the month in which God was meant to have created the world. According to Bishop Ussher, a 17th-century bishop and scholar who counted up all the years in the Bible, the world began on the evening preceding 23 October 4004 BC. Ussher's calculations make me smile. As Elizabeth Philpot says of him in Remarkable Creatures, "I had always wondered at his precision."
I am not a believer, but I can imagine the world beginning in October. Out of death comes life. Out of the melancholy of October there are indeed beginnings. I had my son in October. I first had the idea for Girl with a Pearl Earring in October. It is a good month in which to write.
September 2010
So I wrote 2200 words of the new novel, which has no title yet. It’s about Honor Bright, an English Quaker woman who emigrates to Ohio in the 1840s, makes a disastrous marriage, and ends up working on the Underground Railroad, a network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to freedom, usually in Canada.
I was relieved to write at last after many months of research, so jumped right into a scene on the first day that I’d been picturing for a long time. Second day I pulled the camera back, so to speak, to give background information. That was where I got stuck. There is so much the reader needs to know, and the temptation is to dump it all on you. But you would be bored out of your mind. You need action, showing not telling. You need me to hold back. But I need to know what this character is all about. By writing about her I get to know her better. So I have to write it, then put it aside, write real scenes where something happens, then weave all that information in. It’s hard.
Plus I had already done lots of research, but the moment I started writing I needed to know really specific things, like which ports along the south coast of England a ship can sail from for New York (quite a lot of them, as it happens), how long it will take (varies from 25-60 days), what the ship will be called (I’m going to make it up – more fun), and how do you get from Philadelphia to Cleveland in 1848 anyway? Have the railroads been built? (I spent a long day peering at railroad maps and reading timelines, then decided on stage coaches.) And that stuff isn’t even that important to the story, but I have to get it right for you, dear reader, or you won’t trust me.
I’m not complaining – this is a great job. But in order to get it to flow, I have to work very hard to thicken what starts as a thin soup. Now I have gone back to that first scene, and it is beginning to taste good. Of course, by the fourth draft it will have changed into a dish out of all recognition. But it is a good September start.
March 2010
I'm thrilled to say I've just signed a film option deal for my latest novel, Remarkable Creatures. It is with Galvanized Filmgroup, a small Australian production company. The film would be a joint UK/Australian production (the way, for instance, Jane Campion's Bright Star was). I think there's more chance of it being made this way than if it were with a big Hollywood studio. Now at work on the screenplay is the talented Jan Sardi (Oscar-nominated for Shine). It took 4 years for Pearl Earring to go from signing to screen, and that was quick. So, sit back and watch and wait...
February 2010
Reading in 3D
Over the last year I've often been asked what I think of e-books. I merrily made pronouncements - mostly sceptical - even though I had never used one. I have decided finally that I need to speak from a position of knowledge rather than speculation. So I borrowed a friend's Kindle and read Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. I already had it as a physical book, so I was able to read it partly on real pages, partly as an e-book.
Did using an e-book change my attitude? No. It confirmed what I'd already suspected: the only thing an e-book has going for it is its size. Hornets' Nest is a hefty tome, hard to carry in a normal-sized handbag and a little awkward in bed, whereas the Kindle is slim and easy to handle.That was also one of its problems, though: the Kindle felt flimsy and insubstantial, making the book I read seem flimsy and insubstantial too.
In fact, it was a fascinating experiment because it made clear to me that reading is a three-dimensional experience.When I read I'm not just taking in words on a page. Also affecting me is the geography of the two-page spread, where I can see more of the text than I'm reading. I can look ahead and notice dialogue coming up, or how long or short paragraphs are, or how someone's name is recurring a lot on a page.
And then there are the physical pages, the heft of the book that physically represents the heft of the story. I can literally feel how far I am into a story, when I'm halfway, when I have just a little bit left.
On a Kindle the screen is smaller than a standard page, so I was only ever seeing a couple of paragraphs. The idea of pages disappeared; the Kindle told me I was on, say, "locations" 5432-37 out of 12,789, and that I'd read 42% of the book. Such numbers were meaningless and left me floating, disconnected from the larger arc of the story. When I got to the thriller's climax I wasn't even sure it was the climax.
With a book, my brain automatically calibrates my 3D reading experience and mixes it in with what I'm getting intellectually from the words on the page. Hence my experience of the book is about more than just the meaning of those words.
The brain learns this early on. You see it when little kids are first learning to handle books. Turning the pages for them is as important as the words being read to them. It's about timing and spacing - words mixed together with physical movement. With an e-book you lose a lot of the physicality of your reading experience.
I suspect the Kindle, the Sony E-Reader, the Ipad, have been designed by people who don't read a lot. Me, I do read a lot, and I'm sticking with the Real Thing.
January 2010
New Year's resolutions time. I have come up with plenty I am sure to break shortly, but two are about my literary life.
1. Read one book from the library each month. In England the library service is stumbling, with use down and book stock decreasing. I owe a lot to libraries - it's where I got my books as a child, I used them when I was a reference book editor (in my life pre-writer), and I use them lots for researching my novels. The best thing I can do for them is to start taking out books from them again.
2. Write a paragraph about each book I read, saying what I thought of it. A friend gave me a notebook last year for this purpose (thanks, Felicity!). I keep track of what I read here, but after a year or two I forget what I think about a book, and and it's useful to have a record to look back over.