The golden hour with Maggie O'Farrell

Last night I went to a zoom talk with Maggie O’Farrell, hosted by the London Writers Salon in association with Arvon. For me, one of the things that makes her such a treasure is that she comes up with something different every time – spooky psychological suspense, memoir, contemporary and now historical fiction.

Her writing is so beautifully grounded in detail, and feels effortless, although I learned (from a thread her husband posted on Twitter, which I can no longer find) that she writes a book to the end and then goes back to the start and works through it – maybe twenty-five times – until it’s done to her satisfaction.

I don’t know how many people sat and watched her chatting away in her Edinburgh home with the late May sun streaming in the window, but it was a lot. She shared so many useful tips about her writing practice that I was scribbling away the entire time. Here are some notes I took, which I’m sharing here because it was the golden hour in more ways than one (and it seems like a good excuse to start a newsletter.)

On being an author

I never think about where I am [in the literary world] or how people perceive me. I completely ignore that side of it. I’m not on social media either, because I have three children and I need to put them first. The only idea of success I should grapple with is whether or not the book is working. Does the narrative have a pulse?

[She acknowledged that not all writers have this luxury, and she knows she is lucky in that she can let others deal with the marketing and sales side of things, and also that  every writer will approach this differently.]

All books are impossible

Writing books is a bit like having children – you need to learn it all again with each baby. With every book you need a new technique. It’s a learning curve and I try to set myself a challenge with every book to do something new, so I’m not just repeating myself. All books are impossible, but in some way they become possible.

On beginnings

Beginnings are very hard. You have to set out your stall on those opening pages – setting, character, voice – so I never start at the beginning. I just plunge in. With The Marriage Portrait I’d done a bit of research and I knew Lucrezia’s father had an exotic menagerie in the basement of their house, so I wrote about her seeing a live tiger for the first time. This was in lockdown so I wrote it while looking at one of my daughter’s Schleich tigers, which are very small but anatomically correct.

[Will note here for the German speakers that she pronounced Schleich perfectly.]

Coming up with the idea for The Marriage Portrait

After finishing Hamnet I didn’t know what to write. I had two books, one on each desk in my study, and I was working on both to see which one took flight. And then I was reading Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, which I do sometimes, and as I was reading My Last Duchess I looked Lucrezia up on my phone. As the portrait of her started downloading on my phone I knew I’d write the story she might have told. The Marriage Portrait just fell into my lap and blew the other two out of the water.

On keeping notes & planning

There’s a huge value in your instinctive mind when you’re writing. I always leave technical decisions to ‘the wrong side of the head’ because the narrative will tell me what it needs. For example I note what tense I am slipping into when I sit down to write and will change it if necessary. I once spent two weeks changing something from first to third person. That was a very dull two weeks, but the material was telling me what it needed to be.

I’m not much of a planner, but I have a general idea of where I want to go, but am quite open to the book changing my mind. When the book starts to misbehave it’s always a really good sign.

Not all of your work is achieved at the desk

I’ve had some big knots resolve themselves when I’m washing the dishes. Go for a walk, watch a film, see a friend and at some point a solution will come. I don’t spend many hours at my desk. If I sit for an hour that’s a good day, the rest of the time I’m with my kids or doing other things.

On writing memoir

I am a fairly secretive person, so it was a bit of a surprise to write I am I am I am [Her heart stopping memoir about her seventeen brushes with death]. It happened accidentally. I was writing longer pieces in the back of a notebook about all of my near-death experiences and then I talked to my editor and started thinking about a book. I only took one pound for it when I signed a contract, as I didn’t want to have to pay back the advance if I decided not to go ahead.

Memoir makes you think about the ownership of a narrative and how much you should tread on someone else’s story. I never wanted to write something that was a personal attack on friends or family; in my book people remain anonymous and my children are not named.

The most liberating part was coming up with the structure [each chapter is a body part related to that near death experience] and this allowed me to leave out things I didn’t want to share. If you write a chronological memoir you can’t skip five years, but with non-chronological snapshots you can hold back what you don’t want to include.

Tricks for writing historical fiction

I had a strict rule with Hamnet that I would not try to write cod Shakespeare, but I did restrict myself to vocabulary that has the same meaning now as it did in his time. To ensure this I went through the Oxford English Dictionary to check the words. I had to take out the word shambles, for example, because it meant a butcher’s slaughterhouse in his time, not a state of disorder.

For The Marriage Portrait I would do a five- or ten- minute Italian language lesson online before starting to write each day, to get the Italian grammar and syntax in my head. Music is also useful to cross the bridge into a fictional life.

A long time ago I used to go to a writing workshop with the poet Michael Donaghy, and he always said, ‘no ideas but in things.’ So you zoom in on details rather than the broad sweep of history, really zero in. That’s how characters and places and rooms from that time begin to feel real. I also walked about Stratford a lot when writing Hamnet, and asked about a thousand questions. I think there needs to be some kind of research where you get your hands dirty, so I planted a medicinal garden and learned how to fly a kestrel. To close the distance you need to do something that the characters did.

I’m Zoe Deleuil. I'm a freelance writer, author and copywriter. My psychological suspense novel, The Night Village, about a new mother and her unsettling house guest, is out now (and if you look closely at the cover you might recognise the building.)