Interviews

Frances Hardinge was born and grew up in Kent, England. From the age of four she dreamed about being a writer. Frances studied at Oxford University and was the founder member of a writers’ workshop there. Her writing career was launched after she won a short story competition. Shortly after winning she wrote Fly by Night and showed it to a publisher after pressure from a friend, the writer, Rhiannon Lassiter. Fly by Night won the Branford Boase Award.

In this interview Frances talks to Nikki Gamble about her second novel, Verdigris Deep.

Verdigris Deep is quite different o your first novel. When I was reading it reminded me slightly of Alan Garner’s Owl Service, not the style but in the way that places seem to have their own spirits which affect the protagonists of the story and partially in the relationship between the three children.

Yes, I was very fond of Alan Garner.

Do you agree that every original work of art reaches back to the art that has gone before?

I think very much so. I know that if I start to look at any of my phrases and if I start to look too hard at any of the themes and the characters I use, I start to be able to chart them back to influences that I obviously wasn’t considering while I was writing. I actually try not to do this because one can go staringly insane, and not to mention convinced that one is completely derivative and probably go and hide in a hole somewhere.

 I don’t think it is derivative in a simple way but that it is true that single works of art do not exist in a vacuum. Allusion and intertextuality just add to the richness of the work.

Indeed. But it’s also part of the general authorial paranoia. This fear of accidental plagiarism or the basic realisation that one’s just rewriting the books one loved.

Well, they say there are only 7 stories...

Verdigris Deep has taken the theme “beware of what you wish for” and added a neat little twist to it - the wish being a curse. Did the story start with the theme?

The funny thing is, originally, a very long time ago, I took up the basic idea of the well witch and wrote a short adult story, an adult short story. I was not completely happy with the outcome – although I liked the themes and wanted to use them, it didn’t seem to quite hang together. With hindsight, the main characters were wrong. As soon as I started to think of it in terms of a children’s book and as soon as I conceived the characters Ryan and Josh, they grabbed hold of the corners of the story and ran off with it.

 It’s all very well having a theme, but you’ve got to get the characters right...

 If your characters are not capable of taking your plot and doing surprising things with it, then there’s something wrong with them.

How did the three children surprise you then?

Well, to begin with, I had a fairly good idea about Josh’s development, though some of his vulnerability took me by surprise. The way in which Ryan and Chelle manage to pull things together, of their own volition, was quite pleasing and again, took me somewhat by surprise. I knew that they had to do it, I just never quite knew when or how they would. In the end it just seemed to proceed out of character. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. It’s fascinates me, how characters take on a life of their own when you’re writing them.

 The book is very atmospheric and there’s a strong sense of places having some, kind of, spirit, particularly old places. Is visiting places important to you?

 I certainly have an acute sense of places having a personality and atmosphere. My spatial awareness is, frankly, not very impressive: I have to carry around maps. But I do have a good eye for details and I pick up on atmosphere of places. And I have a fascination with old, neglected places that have in some way fallen between the cracks. Places, like Magwhite, which are a little bit broken, a little bit disreputable, and aren’t the, sort of, old place that has been beautifully mowed and has nice little signs explaining why it’s important.

Are there particular places that hold a fascination for you, and maybe inspired Magwhite?

Well, there’s one particular place that did inspire Magwhite, which is somewhere that I used to walk to in my lunch hour. It was a shortcut that we would take you alongside the canal. We would walk out of this business park, and all of a sudden we were in these strange little woodland paths running along the canal side with swans and supermarket trolleys and graffiti and bridges by Brunel: a strange mixture of, of genuine beauty and slightly offbeat neglect. It was a thin strip of countryside, a little place with blackberries and something that was clearly a bit of an underbelly in the middle of Reading.

Canals are particularly fascinating, though many of them are being rediscovered and used for recreational purposes. Time seems to travel at a different pace on the canal, you can travel all day and cover just a few miles though you feel that you have covered a vast distance.

And they are another world often slightly lowered from the land around it, so you just don’t see it. Basically, you can be driving along a road about 50 yards away from this little strip of canal world and you’d never know it’s there.

Your eye for detail is something that definitely comes through in your writing. Do you record observations in a notebook?

 I do always carry a notebook around with me, if I’m on holiday or if I notice something unusual, I will just note it down. I will note down all the little details that have struck me, any phrases that come to mind and so forth. When I’m travelling, I always carry a journal and I try and note down anything interesting day by day, which has stood me in pretty good stead, but also  there are some things that just impact upon the mind so strongly that when you are trying to evoke a sense of a place, the sensory elements just come to mind.

Yes, I've noticed that  your writing is multi-sensory and in particular the sense of smell is frequently referred to.

Smell does evoke a sense of place quite strongly. Funnily enough, one of the sensory elements I have to remind myself about is actually temperature, because my personal sense of temperature is extremely poor. I don’t tend to notice it. So I often have to remind myself to include such things so that my characters aren’t similarly afflicted.

The love of language and wordplay evident in Fly by Night also permeates Verdigris Deep. You obviously have fun naming your characters.

 Perhaps it’s a result of having read too much Dickens at an impressionable age but I love naming characters. Some of them have extravagant names, but these are, generally speaking, the characters that have a little more pretension and it’s even shockingly possible that some of them might not be using their own names.

The children have fairly ordinary names but finding the right name for them can be just as challenging, can’t it?

 Yes, it can. Basically it’s just listening to the sound. Josh was pretty much always Josh because it sounded right. As soon as I knew what Chelle was like, her name followed.

 Was she a character before she had a name?

 In the short story I mentioned earlier, there was an adult female character, but one who was very different and had another name. But at the point where she started to form in my head, she came with the name.

All three children are from less than happy homes – do they need to have this in common in order to experience this special adventure, and to make the bond between them stronger?

 I think they do. They bond because they exist in families where they are a little uncomfortable. Obviously, Ryan’s problems are not ultimately as severe as the ones faced either by Josh or Chelle. Ryan’s journey is basically him breaking out of a role that has been set within the pattern of his family and re-establishing another.

 Verdigris Deep is much pacier than Fly by Night and the tension really builds to the climatic point. Do you approach the plotting in a different way?

The plotting was different in two respects. The first one was, for Fly By Night I actually had a chapter by chapter plot map effectively, at the very start. I wrote the thing and then ended up changing lots of it. There were four lots of rewrites, so that, in particular, there’s the middle section got rewritten repeatedly and extensively. With Verdigris, there was less rewriting and a strong sense of the overall skeleton of it, but the chapter by chapter stages weren’t quite so meticulously planned out beforehand, and there were certain points where I was reaching certain bridges while still wondering exactly how we were going to cross them. It only became clear to me that there was going to be a flood when I was about halfway through writing the book. But it all worked out, basically.

Early on in the book, Ryan says that you need to look at the world from all angles, so you are not taken by surprise. I also got a sense there’s a bit of Frances Hardinge saying that too.

 I think that’s a fair cop, when I was a small child, I did hang upside down and look at the world upside down because it looked, sort of, interesting. I’m fascinated by the possibility of seeing, even simple things, in a myriad of different ways. To a certain extent, in doing so my impulse tends to be more, kind of, gleeful than a desire to protect myself. There’s a little element of both, and I always like that little point at the start of Notting Hill, where the person who ends up being King is seeing two of his friends walking on ahead of him in their tailcoats. He suddenly notices that the back of their tailcoats look like dragon’s faces, and so he can never take them seriously again afterwards because they just look like little dragons walking backwards. The world’s fascinating and beautiful and full of unexpected dragons walking backwards.

Thank you Frances Hardinge for talking to Write Away.

2008-01-05