Maggie O’Farrell is the kind of writer I aspire to be. Her prose is poetic, but accessible. Her characters are complex (and the relationships between them are simply beautiful). Her stories read quickly, with an air of suspense. They are dramas, with hints of humor.
I read my first Maggie O’Farrell book last year–The Hand that First Held Mine. It’s one of my favorite books of the last several years. I just finished Instructions for a Heatwave and loved that one too. I’m officially a fan. After You’d Gone and The Distance Between Us are on their way to my house. I can’t wait to dive in.
On how her writing life began:
“I have a very clear memory of struggling with a story when I was about four or five. I asked my mother if she would write it for me and her reply made a huge impression on me. She said, ‘But if I wrote it it would be my story, not yours.’ It was a very astute answer, I think, as it spurred me to try harder. I’ve kept a diary since I was about nine and wrote stories during my teens. At university and in my early twenties I attended poetry classes, where I was taught by Jo Shapcott and then Michael Donaghy. These had a huge effect on my writing, forcing me to economise, to make each word pull its weight. I was 24 when I started writing what would eventually become my first novel, After You’d Gone.” (Source)
“I always had the urge to write. Not in the sense of wanting to be a writer, but just writing things down, getting words on a page. Graphomania, it’s called. I’ve always had a definite love of stationary products—I used to spend all my pocket-money on pens and notepads. I still do, in a way.” (Source)
On what she loves most about writing:
“I love the solitude and the secrecy of it – as well as the escapism.” (Source)
On nonfiction in her fiction:
“I don’t write autobiographically. Fiction is for me an escape, an alternative existence so I wouldn’t want to recreate my life on the page. There are elements of my life that filter into my books but they are usually recast and redrawn and reimagined to such a degree as to be unrecognisable to me or anyone else.” (Source)
On how she plans (or doesn’t plan) her novels:
“I have a quote by Picasso beside my desk: ‘If you know exactly what you are going to do, what is the point of doing it?’ I couldn’t imagine anything worse than planning every last detail of a book and then spending the next two or three years working through that plan. I enjoy the way your ideas for a book mutate and alter as you go along. I start – sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle – often without any idea how it will end. And if I do begin with an image for the ending in mind usually by the time I get to the end it’s all changed.” (Source)
“I don’t like planning. I know a lot of writers do. William Boyd, whom I admire hugely, is a meticulous planner. Usually I start out with an idea of where I want to go but at some point the characters take on their own lives and start acting in surprising ways.” (Source)
On doing research for stories:
“All books have hugely varying requirements, some need a lot more research than others. I think the research you do is a huge amount more than you really need to. It’s a ballast, you need it to give you confidence, as a springboard. I think that you should always throw out 90% of your research anyway because the worst kind of novel is one where you can see it weighted down with research. So you have to use research wisely. And the main enemy to good art at the moment is a good broadband connection. Actually, with the laptop I write on, I asked the guys in the Apple shop to disable the internet and they thought I was bonkers!” (Source)
On her writing process and routines:
“Even if it’s only half an hour, it’s like stolen time. I can’t have anyone else in the room and if the children come in, I have to stop. You need the real world to fade to be able to do it.” (Source)
“I write in Arial. It used to be Palatino but I write in 14 to 18 point Arial, double-spaced these days.” (Source)
“I take a lot of notes longhand in notebooks and usually when I write the book, I type it on a laptop.” (Source)
On the gestation time for her novels:
“Books are like babies in a way, they’re all completely different and they all have different personalities and require different methods of care. But usually it takes me between three and four years, something like that.” (Source)
On self-doubt:
“I don’t feel confident about anything. Every time you start a book it’s as if you haven’t done it before. You have to start from scratch.” (Source)
On dealing with criticism and writing for yourself:
“You can’t please everybody. You just need to keep your head down and do what you do. There are always going to be people who want to pigeonhole you or denigrate you. It’s just part of being published.” (Source)
“You don’t want to worry too much about other people’s responses to your work, not during the writing and not after. You just need to read and write, and keep going.” (Source)
“The only success or failure that interests me is whether I think the book has worked. You have to shut your mind to that stuff, to maintain the illusion that you’re just writing for you.The minute you start thinking about the people who like or don’t like you, it’s not going to be good because you’re second-guessing.” (Source)
On not reading reviews:
“You’ve got to write the story that you want to write, you’ve got to concern yourself with the things that interest you and I think the minute you hear someone saying ‘she’s very this,’ or ‘her images are this’, you can’t delete that in your head, you’ll hear it in your head when you sit down to write. What you need to do is write unconsciously for yourself, you’ve got to make the story the way you want it, not the way you think someone else might, or second guessing what someone else expects of you. So that’s why I don’t read them.” (Source)
“You need a lot of energy to get a novel finished. You need an ability to ignore everyone around you. It’s why I don’t read my reviews any more. I know a lot of people say that, but I really don’t read them. Will gives me a general feeling of whether they’re good or bad but that’s it. I don’t want to be influenced as to what I write in the next book, to hear those voices in my head when I’m writing. The idea of second-guessing your reader is dangerous, trying to please some notional reader looking over your shoulder, instead of just yourself.” (Source)
On each book as a learning experience:
“Always, at the end of every book, there are things you will be unsatisfied with, and still more things that later on you will realize were not right. But mistakes are part of what a book is. That itchy, dissatisfied feeling at the end of a novel is useful. It’s what keeps you writing and gets you writing the next one. It’s what keeps you learning.” (Source)
On writer’s block:
“I try not to be too precious about my writing, and I try to be willing to walk away from it for a few hours when something’s not working, to let things percolate a bit. I try not to hide myself away from life too much, because I think that’s a risky thing for a writer to do. The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there’s no such thing as writer’s block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.” (Source)
On inspiration:
“My inspirations come from everywhere. A conversation heard on the bus, something a child said, something you read. You shouldnt shut yourself off from anything. As a writer, you should say yes to as many things as possible for the experience.” (Source)
On being married to a writer (novelist William Sutcliffe):
“It’s very handy living with a writer. We’re very harsh with each other. He’s really mean to me a lot of the time, much harder than anyone else. But that’s what you need. You don’t need someone to say, ‘Yes, it’s lovely darling.’ You need someone who cares about you making an idiot of yourself in public.” (Source)
“My husband, Will, is my first reader and in many ways my most important. That initial reading of the manuscript is crucial and irreplaceable and you want them to approach it as someone in a bookshop might, not knowing much about it. So I’ve got into this pattern of not telling Will anything about the book I’m working on. He often knows nothing about the book I’m working on at all until I give him the whole manuscript and ask him to read it.” (Source)
On the benefits of time pressure:
“I think it’s dangerous to have lots of time on your hands as a writer. Time to pursue every little alleyway, to follow every single whim. I feel I’ve done my best writing when I’m stretched for time, when you’re most pressured.” (Source)
“Obviously with three kids life’s very busy and there’s a huge amount of time pressure, so the time when I get to write is usually when they’re napping, or at nursery or school or at night when they’re asleep. But I actually like working that way, I find that I work best when I’ve got a huge amount of pressure and there’s no faffing about and you just get down to it. I think if you want to do it, you’ll find the time one way or the other, by hook or by crook.” (Source)
On challenging the idea that motherhood limits a writer’s ability:
“For a while I used to listen to those whispers about babies costing you books, and Cyril Connolly’s loathsome quote that ‘There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ But it’s rubbish. Absolute rubbish. A huge amount of your work is done when you’re not at your desk. Knotty problems that you need your unconscious to solve. So it can be helpful to walk away and focus on other things and it can be helpful to be a bit harassed in your daily life, to be hungry for time to write.” (Source)
“I’m not saying it’s not hard, because it’s bloody hard, but that difficulty is good. I embrace it. My writing is tougher and better than when I had all day to daydream and faff. A huge amount of the work of being a writer doesn’t happen at the desk. With children, you’ve got this connection to another world.” (Source)
Fun facts:
- She was born in Northern Ireland in 1972, grew up in Wales and Scotland, and now lives in London
- When she was 9 years old, she contracted encephalitis, an illness that attacks the cerebellum (the part of the brain that governs motor skills). She was in the hospital for a month, in a wheelchair for a year, off school for two, and was told she would never walk again (which turned out to be false). “Her long spells alone nurtured skills she would need later as a writer: she read and made things up in her head.” (Source)
- She published her first novel (After You’d Gone) in 2000, when she was only 28 years old
- Writers she admires: Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, David Mitchell, Colum McCann
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