As a child I loved animal stories, Greek myths and legends, sci fi and fantasy, particularly those that combined all of these, such as the Narnia series, The Lord of the Rings, Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, and C S Lewis’ sci fi novels Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus. Also Eleanor Cameron’s The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet and Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books. As a teenager I loved George Orwell and read all his novels and essays as well as classic sci-fi (Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein), feminist sci-fi (Marge Piercy), classic crime (Christie, Conan Doyle), literature, history and science (the last two not fiction, I know, but still had a huge influence on my fiction writing).
Would you say your childhood and teenage reading has had a distinct influence on how you write fiction now, and why?
Yes, my reading has formed me as a writer, both as inspiration and at sentence level. I am lucky that the writers I loved as a child, such as Tolkien and Lewis, were classically educated dons with a mastery of the beauties and complexities of the English sentence. Reading their work was a rigorous training in style. Those writers wrote for the ear as much as for the eye; there’s less of that around now.
Those tales strengthened my passion for stories that freed my imagination but were believable and grounded in truths about human nature.
What did you do before you became a published novelist, and how did you come to write your first novel and get it published?
I’ve crewed on feature films, taught at university and worked as a policy advisor in the NSW public service. I have worked on my writing for many years, publishing short stories, essays and journalism as well as working on my first (unpublished) novel and my second, now published novel, WHEN WE HAVE WINGS.
WHEN WE HAVE WINGS took ten years to write, though of course I was not writing full time. It took me time to find my agent, who sold the book quite quickly to Allen & Unwin. Once Allen & Unwin bought the book there was a brisk process of structural edit, copy edit, cover design, proof read and then publicity and marketing in the lead up to publication, which took just over a year. I’m sure Allen & Unwin have put a lot of work into selling the book that I don’t know about.
How would you describe your style of fiction or your approach to writing fiction?
Hemingway said prose is architecure, not interior decoration. Up to a point I agree. I admire prose that is plain and clear, like Orwell’s; such writing is far harder than it looks. I like prose with flashes of startling beauty, as in A S Byatt’s work. I strive for those things at sentence level but put just as much work into character development and story structure. Structure is a rock upon which many fine writers shatter their novels. Writing fine sentences, while necessary, does not make you a good novelist, any more than well-made bricks make a house.
Is your first published novel standalone or part of a series, and what advantages or disadvantages does this present for you?
WHEN WE HAVE WINGS is a standalone. With the number of readers who have demanded a sequel, I do wonder if they will prevail upon me eventually. I already have a completely different story outlined for my second novel.
The advantage of a series is that readers know what to expect. That is also the disadvantage.
Have you found writing your second novel easier or more challenging than writing your first novel and why?
The challenges are different: there is the advantage of knowing that your agent and your publisher are waiting for the second book but there is also the time pressure. There’s ongoing anxiety over how well the first book is doing.
There is the desire not to repeat yourself, whether at the level of themes or even at word and phrase level. Most novelists will tell you writing novels never gets easier because each novel presents its own challenges.
Who is another novelist whose fiction writing you admire and why?
Rohinton Mistry and A S Byatt are two of the finest novelists in English and both write with uncompromising intelligence. Mistry writes in a clear, beautiful style; unapologetically prose, not would-be poetry. His characters and situations are effortlessly involving.
Byatt novels are full of ideas, stories, research and wild imagination tempered with discipline. She’s brilliant and some of her sentences are breath-taking. She fully explores the novel’s capacity to paint a broad canvas.
How would you summarise your debut novel in one paragraph?
In her launch speech Amanda Lohrey described the novel in this way: ‘WHEN WE HAVE WINGS is a dystopian fiction set not that far in the future when the rich are enabled through the marvels of genetic engineering to acquire wings and to fly - not occasionally, but routinely - and in the process they begin to form a kind of caste, a superior race or nation so that the divide between rich and poor grows larger and larger. And we are seeing the beginning of this process now. So the book is in fact a kind of political allegory about where the advances of science may take us, not in a hundred years or 150 years but in the next thirty to fifty years. So it’s not in that sense a fantasy novel, it’s not even in that sense a science fiction novel. It’s about an amazing dilemma that we are on the cusp of and that is creeping up on us in a way that we are unprepared for, that we are being ambushed by and that we haven’t even begun to think about properly, the intervention in the human genome and the manipulation of what it means to be human.’
How would you describe the appeal of this novel to readers?
Readers themselves have been doing a great job describing its appeal. Jane Campion told me: ‘this book made me imagine things I’d never imagined before’.
Many readers have described how they could feel themselves flying, as if they had their own wings. This is one of the great reasons to read; to experience a life you could not have in any other way.
Amanda Lohrey also said in her launch speech: ‘The thrill of reading this novel is that it’s about now; it’s ahead of you. It’s way ahead of the reader and you race to keep up with it, the exhilaration of keeping up with it is part of the joy of reading it. It is that rare thing, a novel of ideas that actually has a plot, that is compellingly readable in the way of genre fiction while having seriousness and depth.’
How would you summarise a chapter from your debut novel in one paragraph?
The first chapter, titled Flight, shows us the main character, a very young woman flier, Peri, discovering the body of her friend, another nanny. Peri is terrified and decides she has to fly away before whoever killed her friend comes after her. But what does she do with Hugo, the baby she cares for, the son of rich flier parents?
How would you describe the contribution this chapter makes to the novel?
This chapter was rewritten over and over right up to the final draft. This is because this chapter sets up the main plot dilemmas and some of the themes of the novel and it has to do this economically. It sets the place, the story and the character all while moving forward.
Author website: http://www.clairecorbett.com
No comments:
Post a Comment