The Process:
Q: How many drafts of Star
of the Sea did you write? How long did it take you to go from first
word to the last edit?
A: I wrote up to forty drafts of some
chapters and perhaps only three or four of others. The opening preface was a
sequence for which I wrote only a few drafts because it presented itself to me
more or less as it appears. The concluding chapter and some other sequences
took a lot more work. Yeats says that all poetry comes from “the foul rag and
bone shop of the heart." I believe that’s where novels come from, too.
Q: What
was the hardest part about writing the novel?
A: Finding an
architecture that would work. I think the challenge of art is to make what is
difficult look easy. I wanted to make Star of the Sea, which is a very
complicated story, a page turner. To that end, I used some of the techniques of
Victorian fiction: cliff-hangers, chapter headings, illustrations, melodrama.
My hope was that it would be a book that would work by a kind of osmosis, that
the reader would absorb whatever it has to say about politics and history and
sexuality without even noticing. One of my most beloved novels, Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights (mentioned in Star of the Sea) has a structure that is in
fact extremely complicated, but the reader doesn’t notice. That book was a kind
of household god to me when writing Star of the Sea.
Q: Did you
craft your story in order by chapter (or did you focus on one character's plot
and then cut it up and piece it back together)?
A: I wrote the
beginning, and then the end, and then I stopped writing and designed the shape
for the whole book before I wrote very much more.
The Form:
Q: Did you write the novel with
a goal of social commentary or was that aspect a natural development throughout
the writing? Did you intentionally write the novel to critique laissez
faire and Free Market principles?
A: I wrote the novel in the
hope that it would be an involving experience for the reader, and, hopefully,
that it would be beautiful, even though its subject matter is dark. I think the
first duty of a novel is to be beautiful. I dislike novels that set out with
social commentary as a goal. We don’t go to fiction for that, but to be touched
and moved. If I feel a novelist is telling me how to think, or how to vote, I
immediately switch off. That is the worst form of sentimentality: manipulation.
Q: How did the form develop?
Did you start off with an idea of a book within a book, the changing POV and
form, or did that evolve gradually? Or did you make a decision halfway through
and go back and change it?
A: I started with the picture
of Pius Mulvey that is presented in the opening preface, and then I had an
image of the reader watching the action unroll from various points of view. And
so, I constructed the book around that general image: that the reader is not
sitting in the audience, receiving the authorial pearls, but is glimpsing the
far more interesting things that happen as the kaleidoscope turns. I wanted it
to be a book that would argue with itself.
The Characters:
Q: Do you trust any of your
characters? How did you see the purpose and function of your characters'
unreliability?
A: I think Captain Lockwood is
a reliable narrator (I am very fond of him), and almost everyone else is
unreliable to some degree or another.
Q: How do you know that you can
add in your humor into grim situations and still have it be believable for the
characters to act like that?
A: As a reader, I think a dark
story needs to have humor here and there, otherwise it becomes unreadable and
therefore a waste of everyone’s time. Star of the Sea would be a truly awful
book without its moments of levity and lightness, for example the Dickensian
buoyancy that I hope happens when Mulvey goes to London. Those moments sort of
puncture the heaviness of the background, I hope.
Q: As a writer, some of the
characters we love the most can be the ones who should be most hated (as a
reader). I'm wondering who (if any) is/was your favorite character to develop
in Star of the Sea?
A: I couldn’t distinguish
between them in that way. I was fond of all the characters, to some extent.
It’s important, when writing a villain, to find something to like in him or
her. And it’s equally important to show the flaws of your heroes. The person in
the book for whom I feel the most empathy is Mary Duane, but I have a human
sympathy, for want of a better phrase, for everyone else.
Q: These characters are so
fully realized: what is your best method and advice for getting to know your
characters so completely?
A: A writer needs to know
absolutely everything about a character. You don’t reveal everything, of
course, but you do need to know it. Then, you cut. The more you cut, the more
believable the character becomes. It’s one of the loveliest little miracles of
fiction.
The Plot:
Q: What made you decide to
reveal both the murderer and his victim immediately, in terms of creating
suspense and momentum? So, if the plot is no longer "who gets killed"
and "who is the murderer," what do you see as driving the plot and
the story?
A: The momentum of the ship’s
journey. Some of my favorite novels are stories about journeys: As I Lay Dying,
The Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses, even The Catcher in the Rye. A journey always
infuses a story with a kind of investment because we want to know at some
fundamental level if the protagonist(s) ever make it to the destination. Think
about some of the oldest and most lasting stories our culture possesses: the
Greek myths, the bible stories, the Canterbury Tales, the Native American
folktales. Life itself is a journey, a metaphor acknowledged by every form of
storytelling from high literature to the popular song.
Q: How many of these conflicts
in the characters' lives just appeared naturally as the book "wrote
itself" versus ones you knew from the outset were essential to the story?
A: It’s hard to know. I would
say, from memory, that it was fifty-fifty.
Miscellaneous:
Q: Do you like the novel? Have
you tried to reread it as if you were not the author?
A: Yes, I like the novel. I am
very proud of it. I wouldn’t say that I have tried to reread it as though I
were not the author, because that is obviously not possible, but I tried to
write it as a reader, as I always do. The most important person in any novel is
the reader, not the author. I dislike novels in which the author is too visibly
present. A novel should never EVER be about the author.
Q: Pius Mulvey very much
embodies music in this story. Are you yourself musically inclined, or did you
seek music out to help develop his character?
A: I thought of each of the characters as having a
sort of private sound track. It’s something I always do when constructing a
character. I believe music is the highest art form, the only truly
international language, and all prose should have musicality.
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