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Last week I wrote about Lucy Caldwell's thoughtful and intruiging new novel The Meeting Point. I'm fascinated by how and why people write, and Lucy was kind enough to agree to answer some questions. Here they are.
Lucy, I've read that you wrote your novel Where They Were Missed when you were still at university, and I wondered when you first knew that you were going to be a writer? and what were the first things you ever wrote?
Hi Harriet, that’s right. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. If I had to date it precisely, it would probably stem from when I was thirteen: we were studying Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? and for homework we had to write an extra chapter. I chose to write an alternative ending, and I became so absorbed in the task. Yeats is quoted in the novel, and so I borrowed my mum’s Collected Poems and fell in love with Yeats, with the wildness, the melancholy – thirteen is probably the perfect age to discover Yeats. I think I worked harder at writing that chapter than I had at anything, ever. And that’s when I knew, properly, that I wanted to read and write. I began my first novel in my first year at university when I saw an advert in the student paper asking for submissions for the May Anthologies. The Mays were famously how Zadie Smith was discovered, and I decided to write a story. After about 10,000 words the deadline was drawing near but it was showing no signs of stopping, and I thought: oh my goodness, I’m writing a novel. I entered a self-contained extract, and it didn’t even get long-listed, let alone short-listed or published. But the story and characters existed by then; there was no going back. So I kept on, in the evenings, after I’d finished (or more likely abandoned) my essays, and by the time I graduated I had a first draft of the novel, which I completed during an MA at Goldsmiths.
What is the genesis of a writing project like, for you? What comes first -- plot, characters, setting or something else?
It’s rarely something so tangible – not at the very start, anyway – it’s often a feeling, a mood, an atmosphere, that persists. Like when a snatch of lyrics or tune gets stuck in your head and won’t go away... It might be a line of poetry – with my first novel it was Louis MacNeice’s “Selva Oscura”, which begins, “A house can be haunted by those who were never there, / If there was where they were missed”. It might be a photograph, or a dream, or some other strange and striking image. And the longer you spend with it, the more it coalesces, grows, becomes something, like characters or plot. I’ve learned that you just have to follow your intuition, however odd or irrational it might seem. There’s a compulsion to it, too: a feeling that the thread you’re following is taking you somewhere more real and compelling than the day-to-day world around you. Edna O’Brien puts it perfectly when she says that the desire to write comes from “an intensity of feeling which normal life cannot accommodate”. I’m unhappy when I’m not writing.
You're someone who, perhaps rather unusually, is both a novelist and a playwright. Is there ever a moment when you aren't sure if something will be a play or a novel, or is it obvious from the start?
At the same time I was writing my first novel, I was taking part in playwriting masterclasses led by the wonderful dramatist Chris Hannan. When I moved to London to take up a place on the Goldsmiths MA in Creative & Life Writing, I joined the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme. So I was always doing both things simultaneously, and I used to find it quite perplexing when I was asked that question, about switching form. I thought of myself as a storyteller, and it seemed natural to me to move quite fluidly between forms – going on no more than a sort of instinct as to whether a spark of an idea was a play, or a short story, or a novel, or a radio play. I had as my role-models Edna O’Brien, Sebastian Barry, Samuel Beckett – a lot of Irish writers work across multiple forms. But increasingly these days, the more I write, and the more I learn about each form, the more I realise how essentially different a play is to a novel – or the written word to the spoken, or heard. The key is being completely in control of the form you’re working in. A novel is much more reflexive, interior – whereas a play is not about what the characters are saying so much as what they are doing. A play is about action, and the dramatic subtexts to that action. Those are fundamental differences. And now that I’ve realised that, I can no longer write both at the same time. Sometimes it takes me weeks, even months, to switch from playwright to novelist, or vice versa. The curse of self-consciousness! But I’ll continue to write across forms as long as I can. I still seem to have that instinct, to know if an idea is a novel or a play. I’m not sure how, or why it works... and I don’t want to look at it too closely, in case I paralyse it. I seem to need both forms. If I’ve been writing a lot of prose, I long for the dynamism and collaboration of theatre. But often when I’m in rehearsals for a play, and it’s all so crazy and public and various, I crave the solitude of novel-writing, of having and holding that whole secret world inside you.
What's the writing process like for you? Do you enjoy it? How disciplined are you? and when, where and how do you write (pencil in a notebook, straight onto the computer or what?)
There are moments when it feels like after days, weeks of mining in the dirt and dark you hit a seam, and that’s magical. Another way of describing it might be like a lightning rod, or a medium – suddenly the story is streaming through you, and you’re just the conductor, all you have to do is transcribe what the characters are doing and saying, and it’s simple, and indescribably exhilarating. But those moments are very rare. Most of the time, it’s a long, hard, demoralising slog. It feels so arrogant, sometimes, thinking that your pitiful words are worth other people’s time, and most of the time what you do manage to write is always a pale shadow of what it was before it was written. You just have to keep going: putting one word in front of the next. That’s where the need for discipline kicks in. It’s easy to write when it’s going well – you feel like you’re flying, and hours pass without you noticing. It’s during the dull, uninspired times when you have to drag yourself to your computer that it’s useful to have a routine. I try to write early, before checking my emails, listening to the radio, getting dressed, or in any way engaging with the world. Perhaps you’re closer to your subconscious then, the ego’s defences are lower. I’ve learned tricks over the years – like Hemingway’s, of always leaving a sentence or a paragraph unfinished, so it’s easy to start. Or Joan Didion’s, of retyping the previous day’s work. Little things which can ease you in, get you writing without knowing it. If it takes off, I’ll keep writing most of the day. But if it doesn’t, I’ll stop at lunchtime, maybe do yoga or something active, then spend the afternoon reading or doing my emails or preparing lessons or marking assignments (I teach on a Novel-writing MA, which keeps me on my toes). The hardest thing to learn is when to push yourself, and when to ease off, and accept that it’s just not happening today, and that it’s ok, and tomorrow might be better. Learning your cycle, too: after I finish something, I always feel completely flat, uninspired, as if I’ll never create something again. And you have to just go with it, recognise that your batteries need to recharge, that you’re at a low ebb but things will get better.
I’ve just realised I haven’t answered the last part of that question. Straight onto a computer, always! I never learned how to do joined-up writing, and so a pen-and-paper can never keep pace with my thoughts in the same way.
How much of a researcher are you, and what form does your research take?
I love research. Sometimes it’s the best part of writing – when you can just read, freely, following up ideas or sudden whims, without really knowing what you’re looking for. But I really believe that these days, there’s an over-insistence on needing to write about what you know, or have experienced yourself. The imagination is a powerful muscle. In his essay “The Art of Fiction” Henry James talks about “an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience.” It’s a brilliant essay: I always give it to my writing students. “It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience,” James insists, “to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might savour of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative--much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius--it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.” Isn’t that a wonderful way of putting it? I see research as preparation for writing a novel, time to explore and let ideas take shape. Or it’s like scaffolding: utterly necessary for building something, but it needs to fall away as the structure takes shape, otherwise it gets in the way.
Where did the idea for The Meeting Point (a young missionary family on a visit to Bahrain) originate from? Had you already visited the country?
When I was seven years old, my uncle took a job in Bahrain, and that Easter, we went out to visit him. It was a short holiday, but a memorable one. We camped for a night in the desert and in the morning had to shake out our shoes for flesh-eating camel spiders; we watched a train of fifty camels cross the sands; we drove out to visit the Tree of Life – the only living thing for miles around, thousands of years old. We pretended to dive for pearls at the King’s Beach, where soft drinks were given away free; we cheered on my uncle as he tossed the caber at the ex-pats’ annual ‘Scottish Games’ (and came third); we marvelled at the fake grass matting that came right up to the edge of the swimming pool at the American Club, because in summer the heat of the paving stones would blister bare feet. We chased lizards in the evenings as the grown-ups barbecued, and raced my cousins’ bikes up and down the dusty path of their compound. I hadn’t thought of it in years: but when I started turning over the first ideas for The Meeting Point, Bahrain started coming back to me. At first, I didn’t make the connection. The novel, at that point, was a glimmer of an idea about a minister’s wife who loses her faith – it was as vague as that. There was a child, too, who was somehow important, but that was all I knew. At the time, I was preoccupied by the daunting task of writing about a minister when I didn’t go to church, and never had done. So I hardly noticed how much I was dreaming of Bahrain, or how often memories of that holiday would suddenly occur to me. Then one day, I found myself at home in Belfast searching through old boxes for photos of that Easter when I realised: the novel wants to be set there. As I started to research, it made perfect sense. Bahrain, whose ancient name was ‘Dilmun’, is mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh – it’s Paradise, the land of the gods, the place Gilgamesh goes to search for immortality. In ancient times, the island of Bahrain/Dilmun was a very sacred place – a necropolis, where people used to send their dead in boats to be buried. Some scholarship even suggests that Bahrain may fit with the description in Genesis of where Eden was located. So it made perfect sense that my novel about paradise found and lost, about faith and love and temptation and betrayal, should be set there.
Religion, faith and its loss are important themes in the novel. Are these ideas that have always preoccupied you?
I was interested in writing about faith: what faith is, and what it means to have it, and to live your life by it, and to lose it. So my characters had to be missionaries because they had to believe (or to have believed) in something utterly, completely – more than themselves, more than life itself. I have always been fascinated by the idea that such faith, such certainty, is possible. Growing up in Troubles Belfast, the child of a ‘mixed marriage’, as it was termed – one parent Catholic, the other Protestant – my sisters and I were never christened or baptized, and never went to church. In spite of this – or perhaps because of it – I was always fascinated by religion, and by different religions. And perhaps, sad but true, you can’t grow up in Northern Ireland without being soaked in religion. It’s in the atmosphere, in the daily discourse, to an extent that it just isn’t in England. In my teens, I corresponded for a number of years with a Buddhist monk living in a monastery in England; when I moved to Whitechapel in East London, near the famous mosque, I got to know Bengali families and children living on my street and developed an interest in Islam. In the novel, I always wanted to juxtapose Christianity with Islam because it felt natural, and necessary, to explore more than one system of belief. Showing Christianity and the activities of the Christian missionaries in an Islamic context was also important: it raises questions and doubts for Ruth that otherwise might not occur to her. It also ensured that no one point of view was privileged, or allowed to dominate, and that the novel doesn’t fall into dualities. As Ruth is losing her faith, and Noor is gaining or discovering hers, twining a thread of Muslim beliefs – in which Jesus exists, but as a prophet, not as the son of God – allows the possibility that there are other ways; that it is not a question of ‘either/or’. It’s back to those early Belfast experiences again: the clash between those two competing religions, Protestantism and Catholicism, and their associated ideologies, was in theory as stark and dramatic a clash as possible. Like that of Christianity and Islam, or West and East. But I have always been interested in exploring the meeting points, if you will, between things. Because what you learn, time and time again, in Belfast or Bahrain, is that people are people; they get on with their lives, with the minutiae of everyday living. I don’t want to sound sentimental: there are massive ideologies clashing in the novel. But differences don’t interest me so much as the attempts of my characters to negotiate those ‘either/or’s, and come to an understanding of ‘both/and’s. At one point, for example, Farid tells Ruth a series of aḥādīth, and at the end of the novel, it’s through one hadith that she finds the strength and will to carry on. That’s what I’m most interested in.
What writers do you admire, and who would you suggest people really ought to read?
Every writer should read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. And Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. And the Paris Review interviews. And every woman writer should read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves.
As for my favourite writers... Chekhov, Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Hilary Mantel. David Foster Wallace, JG Farrell, George Eliot. WG Sebald, Marilynne Robinson. Roddy Doyle, Dermot Healy, Dambudzo Marechera. Karen Armstrong, Marina Warner. Bulgakov. Nadeem Aslam, Rosamond Lehmann. This is just off the top of my head. Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Wole Soyinka, JM Synge, Marina Carr. Frank O’Hara, Czeslaw Milosz, Richard Wilbur, Louis MacNeice. Emily Dickinson. Oh – Yeats, of course. And – I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop there, Harriet, because they’ll just keep spilling out, and I’ll realise to my horror that I’ve forgotten someone very important. I daren’t even turn around to look at my bookshelves now!
Finally, what's next for Lucy Caldwell? are you writing at the moment?
I’ve had a novel published and a play opening within the same month, and so I’m pretty exhausted and uncreative at the moment! I hope to get some time away to regroup myself, and start working on something else. But you can’t rush these things. I have to trust that the next novel, or play, will surface when it’s ready, and when I’m ready for it.
Thanks, Lucy -- that's great!
