Although Anne Donovan was not able to join our Faces and Places reading circles in April as planned, she kindly answered our questions. Read this interview to find out more about the author and Buddha Da including the use of Scottish vernacular or the voices in the novel.

Zsuzsa Rawlinson Why did you opt to write within the convention of realist fiction?
Anne Donovan I think I am most inspired by character and voice, so I tend to lean towards the realist.

ZsR How important is conveying the ’local colour’ (Glasgow) to you?
AD Very important. It’s my home and most of my characters are Glaswegian.

ZsR Everyday discussions of novels turn largely on storyline and character. Specialists talk more about plot or emplotment, i.e. not what is said but how it is said. How much attention do you give to form, formal arrangement, etc.?
AD A lot, though not in the initial stages of the writing. My usual approach is to let the characters and the story take me along, then look at its shape, making changes to improve the structure and pacing. After I had written a draft of Buddha Da I constructed a database with all the individual scenes in it, listing the narrator, the main incidents, the tone of each section, the pace and so on. Then I could see at a glance whether there were any places that needed to be changed, extra scenes written and so on, in order to make the book more balanced. I also use visual representations and spend a lot of time with big sheets of paper and coloured pens! But I have to write first before organising - I call it planning backwards.

ZsR The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is probably the most important decision that a writer needs to make. How do you settle the question?
AD With short stories, the voice and story almost always arrive simultaneously, often with the voice of the character telling the story. Occasionally I have changed the voice when a story wasn’t working, moving from first to third or vice versa. With third person, it usually seems obvious whose perspective to write from.

When I was writing Buddha Da I thought it would be a short story at first and had already written a section in Anne Marie’s voice before I realised that it didn’t feel like a complete story. I wanted to know more of Jimmy and follow his journey so realised I would have to write a novel!

I was then faced with the question of how to narrate the novel. I knew it couldn’t be written entirely in Anne Marie’s voice as there would be things she could not know of but I didn’t want to lose her freshness and immediacy. So I decided on the three-part narration, with each character telling the section of the story that was most appropriate to them. I liked this way of working as it enabled me to show the different perspectives on the situation. I think that is something which fascinates me - the way in which we tend to see things very much from our own point of view, not realising how they may affect those closest to us.

Initially I thought I would make a plan, which would give total symmetry to the voices but as I was working this seemed too artificial an approach and I simply wrote from the perspective that seemed most appropriate at that point in the story.

ZSR You seem to present mainly women characters. Do you feel more comfortable with getting their characters, voices, etc. 'right’?
AD In short stories I think that initially I was drawn more to the female voices, especially those of young girls or old women, not as a conscious choice but just that their stories seemed to come to me. With the novel I felt equally comfortable with the male character; in fact in some ways I felt more at home with Jimmy than with Liz.

ZSR Do you write by instinct or by cold experience or by both?
AD I am much more an instinctive writer. A lot of the ideas, characters and so on arrive in a very instinctive way, from the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. They are often a great surprise to me! So in first drafts especially I just write and don’t censor what comes out. I don’t write much from direct personal experience (it would be very boring for the readers if I did!) but I draw on emotions and feelings, though the events in the character’s life will be very different from mine. I hope the work has some kind of emotional, rather than factual, truth.
When it comes to redrafting, shaping, editing, I think you cannot be too conscious. It’s a different part of the process and I try to be as meticulous and critical as possible. I don’t claim to get this right but I do as much as I can.

ZSR How important feedback is for you? (Prizes, meet the reading public events, reviews, peer discussions,etc.)
AD I think it is very special to get feedback from readers. I am always particularly touched when people go to the trouble of writing to my publisher because they often explain in a very personal way what the book has meant to them. It is amazing to think of your work having these connections with people’s lives. It is also lovely to read publicly and to meet readers - these are usually very warm occasions.

I have been fortunate to have had good reviews - obviously it’s a lot harder when they’re not. And of course being nominated for a prize or receiving one is wonderful, both because it’s a great honour and because it gives publicity to the book and creates a greater readership.

ZSR Literature in Scotland seems to be thriving . What is the literary scene like at the present moment as viewed from within?
AD Yes, it does seem very exciting. There are many books by new writers and also so many wonderful new books from highly respected Scottish writers. This past year alone, for example, AL Kennedy and James Kelman have published superb novels. There is a depth and breadth to what is happening at the moment, a range of writers, from newer to more established, all producing high quality work. In addition to the prestigious Edinburgh International Book Festival, there are many other literary festivals and reading groups which are promoting Scottish writing, as well as Creative Writing courses.

This year the first Man Booker International Award was presented to Ismail Kadare in Edinburgh. It is wonderful that such an award came to Scotland, rather than is usually the case to London. I hope that the vibrant literary scene will mean that more such events happen in Scotland and that some will be in Glasgow!

ZSR Favourite book? Favourite character in a book?
AD The book that meant most to me at a very influential age (about twelve/thirteen) was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte which I have reread endlessly. However Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon is another great favourite and Chris Guthrie, the heroine of Sunset Song is one of my favourite characters in literature. She is earthy, strong, loving and totally herself.

ZSR Major literary influence?
AD This is very hard, as I think that influences are often unconscious (and in fact the writers I have sometimes been compared to are ones I have not read much at all!). I admire writers I think of as having some kind of passion and purity in their work, writers whose prose style has something special about it - for me they would include Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Emily Bronte, Tolstoy, George Eliot - not that I imagine I can write ‘like’ any of them, more that they are some kind of marker, a star to light up the way.

ZSR When did you know that you had a ’knack’ for words?
AD I learned to read very quickly and was an obsessive reader. By the age of seven or eight I loved to write stories and illustrate them, so it was an early passion. I don’t know if it was a knack, but at primary school when we had to write stories, mine were certainly the longest in the class!

ZSR Why did you opt to write entirely in the Scottish vernacular (dialect words and phonetic spellings, etc.)? Might it not make your book relatively inaccessible especially for non-native speakers of English?
AD I never thought of that when I was writing. I wanted to produce something that had some kind of truth to it and had written a number of stories in a more conventional English voice which did not work at all. Then I started to write from the perspective of a dyslexic girl whose voice was very Scottish and somehow it rang true. Hieroglyphics was the first story I had published. After that I wrote a number of other stories in similar voices, though I always try to write in the voice which is right for the story so a number of them are in English voices and one is narrated by the same person in two voices - one is her Scottish child’s voice and the other is the English voice she uses as an adult. In Scotland there is a tendency for people to move in and out of different voices depending on who they are talking to and the situation they are in - you hear this all the time.

But to answer the question about whether this might make my writing less accessible for non-native English speakers I think you have to remember that when I started writing I could hardly envisage being published at all, let alone that people outwith Scotland would be reading it! However it has been very gratifying that the work has travelled and there has been a lot of good feedback from other countries. The fact that Buddha Da has been shortlisted for prizes such as the Orange Prize which is international, is great recognition that these voices can travel.

ZSR Is it possible to be seriously influenced by Buddhism if you belong to the western tradition as Buddhism exists in the context of a quite different tradition and civilization?
AD This is an interesting question which I don’t think I’m well qualified to answer, not being a practising Buddhist, but I’ll just make a couple of points.

There are many people who have integrated the main ideas of Buddhism and put them in a western perspective, and for some people it is easier to follow a spiritual practice different from the one they were brought up with. While some Buddhist ideas such as reincarnation, seem strange to many westerners, there are others which are very suited to current western thinking (like the need to adapt to an ever-changing world, to manage our emotions and so on). I think there are some practices in Buddhism which anyone, of any culture, might find helpful. For example, there is a lovely meditation practice called the Meta Bhavana, which helps to cultivate loving kindness. However there may sometimes be a tendency among some westerners, to put eastern traditions on a pedestal, as though the east is much more spiritual and so on, which is not necessarily helpful.

If I can quote from the Dalai Lama: ‘Buddha himself .. told his followers to accept his teaching after due analysis and not merely out of respect and faith.’ Since it is a tradition which encourages a questioning and critical approach it seems to fit in with western thinking.

June 2005