This is an Earth where the legends of the deep are true–where the people of the ocean are as real and as dangerous as the people of the land. This is the world of intrigue and betrayal that Kit Whitfield brings to life in an unforgettable alternate history: the tale of Anne, the youngest princess of a faltering England, struggling to survive in a troubled court, and Henry, a bastard abandoned on the shore to face his bewildering destiny, finding himself a pawn in a game he does not understand.
Yet even a pawn may checkmate a king.
Let's get to the interview, shall we?
-What was the hardest part about writing In Great Waters?
It
was a difficult book to write, really; at the time it felt like I was
trying to ride a thrashing snake. The reason, in retrospect, was that it
was ambitious: it was entirely different from the first book I'd
written, it had two protagonists rather than one and the action took
place in two different locations, and I'd started them in such dire
situations it was hard to think of where to take them next! On the other
hand, the more I write the more I realise that that's the only way to
do things: if you don't keep challenging yourself your brain gets bored
and produces bad results. It was a hard book to write, but I think it's
the better for it.
I
don't draw inspiration directly from life, so I can't exactly point to
any tidy influences. It was more that I started writing them and they
gradually started clicking for me. I began with Anne's story, and it was
going okay but not brilliantly; I originally conceived of Henry as a
secondary character, but when I started to plan scenes with him I
realised I'd have to think about what his life before Anne was like just
to make him feel real to me. So I began sketching out some background
for him, and it suddenly all came alive at once: Henry felt incredibly
real and his life was unfolding on the page all over the place. I
realised he needed to be a central character, which meant changing my
plans for Anne; I went back to her and started over. Often the best way
for me to get a character to come alive is to have a single sentence
that sets the pace for them; I found one for Anne, which was 'Erzebet's
intermittent attention dazzled Anne' (which I slightly rewrote in the
final draft): that seemed to set her in motion, and from there, I had
them both. If I drew inspiration from anywhere it was probably from
having done a lot of snorkelling as a child: I knew what the underwater
environment feels like and it seemed to me that you couldn't grow up
there and not be shaped by all the differences. And I watched a lot of
nature documentaries about dolphins and whales. I tend to conceive of
characters as molded out of their environments and pasts, so once I had
those images and a few sentences to get them going, it just went from
there.
Well, I moved house in the middle of writing In Great Waters,
and since then I've had a baby and my then-study is now his bedroom, so
it moves around. I started the book writing on anything - my bed, the
garden table, my lap on the sofa - but it's not a very secure way to do
it; what I have now is a desk with a favourite tablecloth that gets set
up wherever I am. I like to make my writing environment colourful, like a
playroom. It's funny: most of the time my favourite colour is green and
much of my house is decorated that way, but for a writing environment,
it has to be reds and yellows. Green is too peaceful, I guess, whereas
reds and yellows are energising and warm. Right now I have my little
desk, made out of scrap wood by my father, covered with my colourful
tablecloth, set up with decorations on the walls: postcards from the
Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibitions and a bunch of
shadow-puppets I made myself. The main thing I'd say about a writing
environment is that it needs to feel right to you, and preferably fun.
Sometimes I put up a postcard on the door with a picture of
old-fashioned penny candies spelling out the word 'Sweeties' in sugar
letters, just to encourage myself to get in there.
I'm
going to give some advice that's counter to what people usually tell
you: don't worry too much about getting feedback. Not at this stage. I
don't think that 'finding your own voice' is the right way to put it,
because it sounds like you're looking for something outside yourself,
but you need to learn to hear your own voice, and that's not
always easy to do when you have lots of other voices giving their
opinions every time you write something. What I did when I was learning
to write was to sit down and write practice pieces, just several pages
non-stop on whatever subject had caught my fancy without worrying about
turning it into anything I could showcase; most of the time it just
turned into mood-pieces and that was fine, every now and again it turned
into something that could be made longer. That's how I wrote my first
short story. Of course, if you do show your work to someone and they say
'For the love of mercy please use punctuation,' don't turn around and
yell 'How dare you stifle my voice!', but writing is basically a
solitary activity and you learn a lot by feeling things out in
solitude.
It's
a Biblical quotation; you can see it in the opening pages. Since
religion is a major element, a Biblical extract seemed appropriate, and I
liked the idea of being 'in great waters' since the characters'
situation was so much dictated by having no choice but to live their
lives in a big political arena - in great waters, so to speak.
No;
I can't write and listen to music at the same time. If I'm writing in
the zone, I don't hear things very clearly, and music's just a
distraction. I will sometimes put on something ambient; I had a DVD of a
fish tank that I used to put on in the background, just tropical fish
swimming around to the sound of bubbling water, and that helped relax
me. Nowadays I often put on the website www.naturesoundsfor.me, or something natural-sounding that's easy to ignore once I've started. Music's a separate area for me, though.
Oh,
that's a tricky one! The trouble is, novels are very seldom a single
idea; they're more an alchemical reaction between lots of different
ideas that you manage to assemble in the same place. I started thinking
about it because of a joke my husband made: he said, 'Okay, you wrote on
werewolves, why don't you write the next book about mermaids?' I said,
'Ha ha, very funny.' Then I said, 'Actually...' and started thinking
about it and noodling about with writing exercises. I added Venice just
because it seemed like a logical thing to include. I was trying this and
that, and after a while he pointed out I'd been watching some
historical documentaries at the same time and talking about the family
dynamics, so that's where the rough concept came from: putting the two
ideas together. On the other hand, a lot of the aesthetic came from
swimming, snorkelling and scuba-diving, as I said, which was just
something that had been a big part of my childhood. The rest of it ...
different places, really. When it comes to ideas, I think a novelist's
most useful skill is not so much coming up with the right ideas as the
ability to spot the wrong ones before you waste too much time on them.
Until I had the two central characters properly alive in my mind it
wasn't really an idea for a novel so much as a vague primordial soup of
possibilities; once that happened, it started to feel like a book I
could actually write.
Thanks so much for the interview!!
-Jackie
Lovely interview! I'm really intrigued by this one. I'm going to add it to my TBR list!
ReplyDeleteThanks! It's on my tbr read list also (:
DeleteThanks for stopping by
Jackie