Interview: Andrea Gillies
Andrea Gillies is the author of three books: the novel The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay, the novel The White Lie, and the non-fiction book Keeper, which won the Wellcome Book Prize 2009 and the Orwell Book Prize 2010. Andrea Gillies was born in York and currently lives in Edinburgh.
TCJWW: I really enjoyed how we get to know Nina’s story in small, vignette-like portions, going from the current to her past memories in The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay. What inspired the form in which you wrote the novel?
Gillies: I’m interested in the way the mind works, and how thoughts and memories aren’t sequential, and how they invest in each other and shore each other up, whether they’re accurate or not. Once we’ve convinced ourselves of something—something that happened, something we’re sure is true—it’s quite difficult to shift. This interest in neurology and memory dates specifically from three years spent as the caretaker of my mother-in-law, who had Alzheimer’s disease. I wrote a book, called Keeper, about the experience of living with her and with our extended family in a remote part of northern Scotland. I only really started writing fiction after that, and the experience was formative. The White Lie, the first novel, is about a family who tries to cover up a death that only one of them knows was a murder, and in the way it’s told it’s also about memory, in its themes a little, but in its structure a lot. Nina Findlay bears some of the same hallmarks. I was interested in the contrast between a woman unable to leave a tiny medical facility on a tiny Greek island—marooned in the present, in other words—and the thoughts that would come to her, recreating and reordering her past, during her period of convalescence. The memory sequence needed to go backwards in order to arrive at the roots of calamitous events in her life. It’s only by taking this journey, part of which is prompted and challenged by her doctor, that Nina sees clearly that someone she loved was actually always her enemy.
TCJWW: You've written an essay on the three Golden Rules of writing. Your first rule, not showing anyone your draft until it’s done, I find particularly interesting. What would you recommend to writers who always “read back”?
Gillies: Reading back stops us going forward, and with a first draft, going forward is the key thing. I can only tell you what works for me: they’re my own Golden Rules and won’t work for everyone, I’m sure. For me, it’s vital not to look back, but to press on. If I start to revise and edit before the story is even out, then I’m already hampering the blurt. The blurt is the name I give to the free, untrammelled voyage through the story that’s like a pre-first draft. It’s not even a first draft. It might not start at the beginning and end at the end. It doesn’t work from notes, either. In a way, the blurt is the writing of the notes, but it’s done in the form of a novel! Too many people get part way into writing a book and then they get stuck, and give up. There are usually two reasons: one is because they read back and think “This is garbage!” The second reason is that they can’t see how to develop the scenario and are already bored by their own voice. This is an over-critical, self-censorious reflex that women are particularly good at. The blurt gets us out of both problems.
Don’t get fixated on the rightness of the first attempt. First attempts are almost always dire. Of course they are. They’re the notes that stand in for the story. Story comes later, when your brain starts to work on the blurt. I start writing the blurt and let it take me in whatever direction it seems to want. (Don’t read back! Don’t start polishing! It’s only the blurt!) I go off on wild tangents. I write very fast and keep going. Keep going, keep typing, until you’ve written everything that’s in your head, and it’s empty, and you’ve arrived at an ending, even if it isn’t the eventual ending. Now, print it off and read what you’ve written. Get a red pen. Get a shovel and slash and burn. (But put all your deletions into a Deleted Text folder because sure as eggs are eggs, you will want to reinsert some of it later). There will be paragraphs in the text that you’re left with that will survive to the final draft, because they’re right—they’re even more right for being written fast and without over-consideration. They have vividness and immediacy. Perhaps put each of these "right paragraphs" onto a separate page and print all the pages. Now you have an abbreviation of the book you want to write. Elaborate from there. Don’t worry about doing it in the right order. Some days I don’t feel like continuing from where I left off. I might jump ahead. This is a fertile way to work. The brain, like the memory, doesn’t work in a straightforwardly sequential way. You might find—as I did with Nina Findlay—that some of the narrative looping you’ve inadvertently created is a good way to tell the story. If you’re in your narrator’s head, you will find, as I found with Nina, that you’re following her own thoughts in the direction they’re inclined to travel.
TCJWW: What is your process like when developing relationships between the characters? You mentioned how you write down your ideas on a sheet of paper as an outline. Does this happen gradually or do the ideas come instantly to you?
Gillies: I make characters talk to each other. I put them in rooms, or in scenes I know I want in the novel, and I let them loose. I allow them pages and pages of freedom to say what they think. They reveal themselves in what they have to say. Some of this conversation is purely therapeutic and is cut in the edit, but it has shown me who they are. Luca, in Nina Findlay, is a specific example of a person I only got to know when I made him talk. When I started writing the book, I had no intention of making him the man he became. He showed his complexity in the way he spoke to other characters, not just in what was said, but in how different his tone was with different people. Character and plot are so interdependent that allowing the people in the book to express themselves in their own way often begins to determine the twists and turns of events themselves. I got to know the people—who at the beginning only existed as a hastily drawn family tree—by making all of them talk to everyone else. Lines from Hamlet sometimes come to mind:
Rashly— And praised be rashness for it: let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
The divinity that shapes the characters’ ends is the writer. I get to show how character affects outcome, and how events shape character. I get to provide justice and injustice. As long as the outcome is emotionally satisfying, things can go badly wrong and still seem right.
TCJWW: Which part of the book did you enjoy writing the most?
Gillies: It’s a quirky choice, because ordinarily the beginning, once you’ve cracked it, is the most satisfying to do: a good first chapter lays out the story and invites pages to be turned to see how the "problem" of the story—no matter how apparently unproblematic—is resolved, even if that’s just a potential romance. But in the case of Nina, I most enjoyed writing the section at the hospital in which she begins to have one revelation after another. It’s fun to mislead your readership, (which I do in the book in several ways), and then at a key moment, to show them they’ve been led along the wrong path. Nina turns out to be wrong about almost everything: her mother, her father, her friend Luca, her husband Paolo… On top of which, she is misled by events at the Greek clinic, and so there’s a second level of enlightenment that takes place. Specifically I enjoyed writing the section in which she’s pottering about the hospital on her crutches and is getting even small facts absolutely wrong; there is comedy in that, intended to play against the darker sorts of revelation she’s undergoing. It occurred to me when I re-read the text for the American edition that Nina Findlay has something in common with Emma Woodhouse, of Jane Austen’s Emma. Emma Woodhouse is a young woman who thinks herself wise, who is confident she understands her own context; she feels in control of events, and casts herself in her narrative as the heroine of it all, and is shown to be wildly wrong. Nina is quite similar in some ways. She realizes she’s been an idiot—and then the question the reader needs answering is: will she be able to translate her new self-knowledge into happiness?
TCJWW: Are there any challenges that arose while writing the book? How did you overcome them?
Gillies: Every day is a challenge, when you’re writing a complicated book with a non-linear timeline. The looping narrative is a tricky one, in terms of keeping all the plates spinning. Very careful final editing is needed, when you’re jumping about in time. Fiction housekeeping! People have to behave consistently, in the way that they would at the time: things mustn’t be known or acted upon that haven’t happened yet. The other challenge, if writing about a person who hasn’t always behaved well, is to maintain sympathy for that character. This can only be achieved by showing them behaving well in other areas of life, and rounding them out, and when there’s a lot of plot happening, there isn’t always masses of space to devote to this rounding. Often it comes down to details: little details that furnish the personality. Nina’s eczema, for instance, tells a story in itself, when you also hear that she was a socially inept child, closer to her mother than to other girls.
TCJWW: Are you currently working on other projects?
Gillies: I’m on the final edit of a novel called Skylark, which is the name of a grand house in an English cathedral city—an invented house. It’s about the Carmichael family, headed up by a well-known writer, George Carmichael, and his unhappy wife Sara. What happens is that a friend of one of their adult children is invited to the big family Christmas, prompting events that affect all their lives. Tolstoy said “All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” This is the stranger comes to town story.
