Zoë Strachan joined our Faces and Places reading circles in early summer. Zsuzsa Rawlinson interviewed her.
I studied Archeology and Philosophy because I was interested in the subjects, rather than because I thought the degree would qualify me to do anything in particular. These interests have informed my work, perhaps particularly my first novel Negative Space where I was partly considering how the kind of existential crisis which I'd read about so often applied to male characters might differ when it was being experienced by a female character (who is also someone who never quite managed to surmount the mind-body problem). In taking the narrator, Stella, to the Orkney islands in the far north of Scotland I also wanted to put her in a situation where she could see the history of humankind - or more specifically of belief - laid out in the landscape all around her. She's grieving for her younger brother who has died unexpectedly, but she finds it hard to express that grief in the secular society of which she's a part (and apart from!). Instead she has all sorts of unhealthy misadventures!
It's not an exaggeration to say that it changed my life, firstly by putting me in contact with lots of other people who were writing, and wanted to talk about writing and share work. That was immensely encouraging and motivating, and it made writing my focus in a way it had never been before. I think I was lucky that I applied when I did - there were only 14 of us in the class, and they included Louise Welsh, Graeme Williamson, Laura Marney and Rachel Seiffert, as well as other writers that I'm sure will be published too in the future. We weren't at all competitive, it was a very supportive environment. We were taught by writers Zoe Wicomb and Margaret Elphinstone, and other writers such as AL Kennedy came to speak to us. And my tutor, Adam Piette, was both tough and inspiring. Now I teach part time on the same course myself. Of course lots of people don't believe that you can teach creative writing, but I know from my experiences on both sides of the desk that you can certainly draw people out, advise them, challenge them, help them make their work better.
There are certainly realist aspects to both my novels. Negative Space is completely located in the narrator's world, and I was trying very hard to represent accurately her internal monologue (in as much as you can be accurate with a made up person!) With Spin Cycle, and the change to third person narrative, I felt I had more liberty to experiment and so I don't think the novel is strictly realist, or at least it wasn't intended to be. I was interested in exploring circular patterns, how events might repeat themselves, and so various small (and larger) things happen which may not seem entirely possible or plausible. But that's part of the fun in imagining what goes on behind ordinary facades, like that of a launderette.
The place my characters inhabit is very important to me. At first I think it was unconscious, until I realised in my first book that I was deliberately trying to contrast city and country, and explore isolation in each context. I also became fascinated by small details too, the minutaie of day to day life, so maybe that helps. When I started Spin Cycle I didn't especially want it to be set in Glasgow, I hoped it would be more sort of universal than that. But the city elbowed in, bringing history (real and imagined), social issues, speech patterns - I couldn't shake it off so I had to just embrace it! Glasgow's that kind of place I think.
For Spin Cycle I wanted to model the structure of the novel on the process of a washing machine, which was a familiar, constant aspect of the characters' lives but also a metaphor. So the three characters are introduced at the beginning, quite separate from each other, then mixed together slowly. Towards the end of the novel the pace really speeds up, and they become tangled up together. You could even think about the extent to which the dye runs, how much they're changed by their involvement with each other - but I start to feel a bit silly when I try to explain that the structure was based on a washing machine programme so I won't strain the metaphor any further!
I really struggled with it at first in Spin Cycle. I tried to do the characters in first person, because I like the intimacy of it, but it just didn't work when I switched voices. With a little trial and error I decided on a kind of third person limited point of view for the main characters, and present tense for the framing sections and the customers who drift in and out of the narrative. I wanted there to be a sense of things continuing, even after the main characters had moved on (or not).
Up until now I guess I've just been more interested in women! But now I'm trying to write a novel with a male narrator, and another central male character, which is a bit of an adventure. I'm not sure how I'll manage to research it...
For me writing is an emotional and an intellectual process. It would become very boring if you only wrote from experience, but on the other hand, anyone who claims their work isn't autobiographical must be lying. It's just autobiographical in a more abstract way. But a lot of it is instinctive too. Writers often speak of "feeling" their characters or the story "going off" in unexpected directions and I like it very much when that happens. Obviously I don't believe the work has a life of it's own, but I like to think that there's a part of my brain which becomes so keyed into what I'm trying to write that it isn't a cold process.
With my work in progress I'm usually quite secretive, but my partner is also a writer so we share work sometimes, and I do love working with my editor. It's a privilege being read so closely. I like being asked questions at events too, especially if it's something I've never thought of before. Some people argue that prizes are a flawed way of judging literary merit but personally speaking I was absolutely over the moon when I won a Betty Trask Award! With reviews it's odd, because by the time the book actually comes out I feel quite distanced from it. Maybe that's a plus point, as I'm encouraged by good reviews and find it fairly easy to dismiss not so good ones. But the best thing of all is when a reader speaks to you or writes to say that your book has meant something special to them. That's a real honour.
Scotland has produced some amazing, world class writers from Walter Scott to Alistair Gray, James Kelman to Irvine Welsh. Our contemporary poets are fantastic: John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, Vicki Feaver, Tom Leonard... I could go on. At the moment there are plenty of up and coming new writers and we have lots of highly successful festivals not just in Edinburgh but Aberdeen, St Andrews, Wigtown, Inverness. This year Glasgow hosted its very first festival of writing called 'Aye Write!' At a grassroots level reading and writing groups seem to be flourishing too, and I think it shows real progress that writing isn't necessarily perceived as being elitist in the way that it might once have been for many people. Plus, there's always someone to meet for a coffee or a glass of wine when work's going badly!
This is the most difficult question to answer! I couldn't possibly pick a favourite. At the moment in Scotland though we're voting for our favourite Scottish book from a list of 100 (I know a similar thing is happening in Hungary). At the moment, from that list I'd choose The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I love gothic fiction, and this was such an amazingly forward-thinking book when it was published - maybe even the beginning of the psychological novel. Stevenson is such a beautiful stylist, and he's got a great sense of humour. He wrote a wonderful essay on the process of writing Treasure Island which I sometimes look up when I'm finding my work difficult. In Jekyll & Hyde I've always had a soft spot for Mr Utterson the lawyer, a noble man who "drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years". Very typical of a certain kind of Scot.
Again I couldn't isolate just one! I always think that the books you read as a child, that give you the passion for reading that leads to writing, are probably the most important influences. So those would include E Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett, CS Lewis, Tolkien, Susan Cooper, Tove Jansson. But then as a teenager I had the usual angst, and became very interested in existentialism. I still think Camus is a wonderful writer. I also discovered some Scottish writers for the first time then - Muriel Spark and James Hogg, and some writers who might be considered feminist such as Angela Carter and Leonora Carrington, all of whom remain favourites. When I started writing again as an adult, contemporary Scottish writers like Alan Warner were an inspiration to me.
I've always loved reading. Since I learned to read it's been my main hobby, perhaps because I grew up an only child! Reading so much made me love writing too. My first stories weren't very original, retellings of the stories I was reading, but then I remember writing a novel (a kind of adventure story with talking animals and so on) and having a thriving little publishing empire with magazines and newspapers, which were lovingly illustrated and came out in one edition only! Later on my school was quite encouraging of creative writing (it was part of the curriculum in English) and then my teachers and classmates seemed to think I had a knack for it. It was certainly my favourite subject. I always hoped to be a writer but I'm not sure that I ever thought it would happen. I'm very lucky that it has!
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