Live webchat: Sarah Waters

The author will be joining us for a live webchat on Friday 15 July between 1 and 2pm. Post your questions now This week’s live webchat by very popular request is with Sarah Waters, whose second world war novel The Night Watch was televised only this week . She sprang straight to the top in 1998 with her Victorian romp Tipping the Velvet , and wrote two more gems of sapphic Victoriana – Affinity and Fingersmith – before turning her gaze forward a century for the quietly impressive The Night Watch , which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2006. Her most recent novel was The Little Stranger , a haunted house story set against the postwar decline of the aristocracy and the birth of the welfare state. She will be online to chat on Friday 15 July between 1pm and 2pm . Feel free to start posting your questions now, so Sarah can have a full hour to answer, and log back in on Friday to join in the conversation. nattybumpo asks: Do you think that there can be too much sex in a novel and does the amount of sex in a book influence Lit Agents and Publishers? P.S. Congratulations on Fingersmith. It’s a once in a generation novel…. truly excellent! Sarahwatersreplies: Glad you enjoyed Fingersmith! Sex in fiction: I think that most agents and editors would agree with me that there should be as much or as little sex as is right for each individual story. Sex is a part of life, a rather visceral and compelling one, so any author telling a story of grown-up lives and relationships is probably going to want to depict it. But if a sex scene has been shoved in a novel just for the sake of effect then, yes, of course it can feel a bit gratuitous. I can’t off the top of my head think of a novel that does that, however. But I can think of lots of novels – Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library, Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised, for example – where the many vivid sex scenes feel absolutely right and necessary. henrytube asks: As an unpublished author, how worried were you about submitting a novel so full of sex (in the second half at least)? Were you at all concerned that you wouldn’t be taken seriously enough because of that? Did any publishers who rejected it suggest you try submitting to pornography-orientated houses? Were you confident that the literary quality would outshine the – ahem – let’s face it, in parts, quite unusual sex scenes? Were you ever told you were betting too much on the pornographic element? Or did you simply feel you were writing a story that should sell on its overall merits, regardless of the pornography? Although many adult stories contain romances, and more than a few feature sex, you must have been aware that Tipping the Velvet has a lot more than the average. sarahwatersreplies I wasn’t worried about it at all. I sent the rudest bit out as one of my three sample chapters, and none of the rejection letters mentioned the sex. (One thought the book was too long; another suggested that historical fiction might be going out of fashion – oh dear…) I have to say, I’ve never thought of Tipping as being pornographic, for the reasons outlined in my answer above: the sex is there because it’s part of Nancy’s story. She’s exploring her sexual identity and at the same time becoming a grown up, discovering what deeply serious fun grown-up sex can be. I wanted to write about the sex with the same relish and attention to detail that I wrote about eating oysters or going to a music hall. I don’t think the sex scenes are ‘unusual’, by the way. I don’t even think, now, that they’re especially rude. Shatillion asks: Do you ever write short fiction between the big novels and if so can we read it? If no, would you ever try? Oh, and I’m a massive admirer of all of your work. sarahwatersreplies: Glad you’ve enjoyed the books! But no, I never write short fiction. Apart from ghost stories, I rarely read it, either – it’s just too, well, short. I honestly wouldn’t know where to start. It’s like being a marathon runner or a sprinter – you need different writing muscles. (Though yes, I know, some writers can do both, damn their eyes!) Tarantella asks: I was screen-glued to the TV dramatisation of ‘The Night Watch’ – but it should have been twice the length, at least. Who made the call here and did you agree (or have any say)? This relevant to the BBC allegedly dropping/shrinking their investment in drama – what a dumb move… sarahwatersreplies: Glad you were glued. The adaptation has some wonderful performances in it, and it’s got a great look, and a great sombre mood; but yes, some extra time would have been lovely. Not at all my call: the BBC originally planned to do it as two ninety-minute episodes, then changed their minds. Very frustrating. And, to pick up a later question here: Anna MM was mesmerising as always but, no, she wasn’t my butch Kay. (Though there is a nice moment when she takes off her mannish-looking wristwatch before getting into bed.) She lost her lovely little butch friend Mickey, too. I think it’s just that mainstream tv and film don’t really ‘get’ butchness. Joannewalker asks: Help,Am plagued by the ambiguous ending to The Little Stranger! Was the Doctor actually the ghost/disturbance all along? sarahwatersreplies: Sorry! I get asked this a lot. Here’s a link to an article I wrote for the Guardian Book Club, which might help (a bit): www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/07/bookclub-sarah-waters-little-stranger?intcmp=239. translated asks: Dear Sarah, I’ve done a bit of googling and found that your books are published by Virago (uk) and Riverhead Trade (us). Hope that’s correct. Lots of well-known authors are published by Harper Collins or Fourth Estate, both owned by Murdoch. Do you think this kind of thing matters? Are you glad Murdoch doesn’t profit from the sale of your books? sarahwatersreplies: I do indeed think this kind of thing matters and, yes, I am glad. But I’m saying that as an established author: when you start off as a writer you feel so powerless and grateful – I would probably have sold Tipping the Velvet to Vlad the Impaler if he had offered me a publishing deal. And I can’t be too pious: I’m sure I’ve supported Murdoch’s empire in a thousand thoughtless ways. (I used to be an enthusiastic subscriber to Sky tv, for example.) But actually making money for him – that’s a grim thought. Liano asks: Hello! Would you ever consider writing a book that is based in Pembrokeshire where you (and I) are from? sarahwatersreplies: Ah, lovely Pembrokeshire. It was a fabulous place to grow up, and I still have very strong links with it – all my family are there. But I’ve never lived there as an adult, so I’ve lost touch with what makes it tick. I’d have to go back and spend some proper time there in order to write about it – maybe I will, one day. One thing I’ve always had a hankering to write about is all the UFOs that were supposedly spotted there in the ’70s – the so-called ‘Broad Haven Triangle’ – just writing those words makes me excited! I never got to see a UFO myself, and have been disappointed ever since. Fawley asks: When is your next book coming out. I can’t wait to read another one of your books as you are my favourite author. sarahwatersreplies: OK, the next book… I’m right in the middle of it at the moment, so it’s very much in my head. It’s set in London in the 1920s, and is full of lesbian passion and angst – great fun, especially after The Little Stranger (which, though I loved it, was a rather ‘flat’ book to write – mainly I think because of the slightly affect-less narrative voice). One thing that’s unusual about this new book for me is that I honestly don’t know whether it’s going to have an upbeat ending or an utterly tragic one. I’m normally a bit of a control freak as far as plotting is concerned, but I’m enjoying going with the flow with this one… Libertarianlou asks: One of my favourite things about your books is that your characters are rarely all good or all bad. Even seemingly villainous characters have moments of sympathetic behaviour or humanity. However Richard in Fingersmith is extremely horrible and I do feel like punching him at times. Do you pass moral judgments on your characters or do you just portray them in such a way as to accurately reflect human nature? What do you think of writers like Jane Austen whose narrative voice tells you plainly what to think of the characters by making jokes about them etc? How do you pace out your plots? They are always so perfectly timed and structured, it is almost mathematical. Have you ever read Carol (originally the Price of Salt) by Patricia Highsmith, as her style reminds me slightly of yours. Just curious. I think Affinity is possibly one of your best novels. Why do you think it received so much less attention than the others? Some people denounce Tipping the Velvet as “just erotica” or “just lesbian porn.” To me I think it IS largely a piece of great erotic fiction and I don’t see the problem with it being so. What do you think about that; do you think fiction always has to serve a broader point or is it ok to just be erotic sometimes? I realise TTV does have more to it than just sex but at the time I feel that is the best bit! Do you worry about being seen a predominantly a lesbian author thus detracting from some of the social comment in books about non-gender non-sexuality topics like poverty, property, etc? (I don’t think it’s an issue and think you tie these things together well anyway but I’d be interested to know what you think.) Is ownership of property meant to be a key theme to Fingersmith or is that me imagining it? Which character do you love the most, Sue or Maud? I change my mind everytime I read it. Is Mrs Sucksby inspired by any real historical figure? I have read that such situations were not uncommon in Victorian times. What do you think of the Harry Potter books? Can I buy you dinner please? sarahwatersreplies: Blimey – lots of questions here! To answer just a few: Yes, I love The Price of Salt. I’m a big Highsmith fan. If there’s one book I wish I’d written, it’s The Talented Mr Ripley. Affinity has its fans and detractors (as comments here reveal), but it’s probably the quietest of my novels – maybe that’s why it’s slightly slipped under a few radars? Also, I think the timing of its publication didn’t help it: it came out pre-2002, which was the year that my career began to take off, with Fingersmith and Tipping getting lots of attention because of shortlists and tv. Maybe if it had come out after Fingersmith rather than before it would have made a bit more of a splash? I dunno. No, I don’t tend to pass explicit judgements on my characters; in fact I do that less now than ever – I’m getting increasingly interested in emotional untidiness and moral mess, in the muddiness of even apparently positive currents, like love. But Richard/Gentleman was great fun to write, precisely because he was such an out-and-out blackguard! He gets some of the book’s best lines. (‘The fashionable couple on their wedding night’: that still makes me laugh…) Mrs Sucksby isn’t inspired by any actual historical figure – but yes, indeed, there were lots of real Victorian baby-farmers, some of them notorious for mistreating or even murdering the infants in their care. (One was Margaret Waters – eek! She was hanged in London in 1870.) The baby farmer cases reveal so much about nineteenth-century poverty, and about the desperate situations of women and unwanted children, they really deserve a serious novel, rather than the pantomime treatment they get in Fingersmith… Harry Potter – I only read the first one. Like many things in modern life – facebook, twitter, blogging, Lady Gaga – the whole Potter business has rather passed me by. I’m not proud of it. Dinner: why, that would be lovely, thank y– Yikes! Here comes my girlfriend! Gotta go! sharleenj asks: I consider The Little Stranger to be a lovely example of a psychological ghost story. Would you call it that? When you were writing Stranger, how much (if at all) were you influenced by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House? sarahwatersreplies: I love the Haunting of Hill House (and the rather terrifying ’60s film based on it). It’s got one of the great opening paragraphs of all time (‘…whatever walked there, walked alone’). And it was certainly an influence on The Little Stranger, to the extent that I kept it in mind while I was writing – along with things like ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ – as a paradigmatic haunted house story. ‘A psychological ghost story’ – hmm, depends what you mean. Is it all in the characters’ heads? No, I don’t think so. Does the haunting come out of their heads, or out of the heads of one of them? Yes, that’s more like it. I was less interested in ghosts whilst researching the book than in poltergeists and ‘phantasms of the living’: spectres as repressed energies, or as manifestations of psychic distress… slatternly asks: I’m also interested to know if there’s a time period you’d love to tackle but haven’t got around to yet, and if you’ve ever considered setting one of your novels in the present/the future? sarahwatersreplies: I’ve never been drawn back further than the Victorians, and I can’t imagine writing a novel set in the future – not at all, I just haven’t got the right kind of brain for it. But I would be really interested to see what would happen to my writing if I took on a contemporary setting… Maybe a contemporary ghost story? That does appeal. Not just yet, however. I think I’ve got another historical lined up for when I’ve finished the one I’m working on now. (To answer another question on this thread: I usually do have a dim sense of the book after next. The only time I didn’t was after Fingersmith – very unnerving for a while.) catshmoyne asks: If you had the ability to travel back in time and plant one of your novels in a bookshop in the historical period it is set in, which one would you choose and how do you think readers would react to it? sarahwatersreplies: What an interesting idea… I think it would have to be Fingersmith: it’s the one that would sit most comfortably alongside the sort of novels that inspired it, things like The Woman in White and Uncle Silas and Lady Audley’s Secret. But it would be under-the-counter stuff by Victorian standards, alas… And, of course, to 1860s readers all my historical and cultural details would be wildly off target – as if we were to read a novel set in 2011 that featured people saying ‘Top hole, me old china! I’ll just turn off this wizard Bay City Rollers gramophone disc and eat some spangles’ – or something… Michaelmack asks: Hello SarahI hope that you are well and that your brain is not too bamboozled by Granuaid readers! Affinity is one of my faves among your novels. It scared the bejaysus out of me. I remember being frightened to go upstairs to bed alone. That said I admire all your novels tremendously. So thank you for many hours of reading pleasure.I, like you, am a great admirer of the work of Elizabeth Taylor. Currently I am rereading A View Of The Harbour. What I would like to know is how much of an influence do you think Taylor is on your work? I sense her in The Night Watch and The Little Stranger in the way characters are seemingly emotionally restrained, in public anyway, in that typically British (of its time) way. Cheerio! sarahwatersreplies: Glad you’ve enjoyed the books! I take your night terrors as a great compliment. Yes, I love Elizabeth Taylor. My favourite is her first, At Mrs Lippincote’s. Oh, but they’re all good, even the less-good ones, if you know what I mean. She’s such a subtle and precise writer – often seen as a bit middlebrow and cosy, I fear, but really her books are quite bleak and sometimes devastating. She respects all her characters – I like that about her. She has a great grasp of subtle social and emotional currents. I don’t know if she’s been an influence on me, exactly (I wish she had been!) – but she was certainly a writer I read a lot of when I was writing The Night Watch, not just for period detail and idiom, but for her handling of the third-person narrative – she seems to move effortlessly between perspectives, and I really struggled to get the hang of that. And yes, that restraint, with it all going on under the surface… ’40s films were great for that, too. Casablanca, Brief Encounter… roseyposey asks: Have loved all your books but The Night Watch in particular. I kept thinking of the Well of Loneliness while reading it – also a favourite. I’d love to know your thoughts on it, and whether The Night Watch sits as almost a companion piece to it? (Also – thanks for talking part in this, have had a rotten day so far at work but my lunchtime has been great thanks to reading this thread!) sarahwatersreplies: At least it’s Friday… The Well of Loneliness: I haven’t read it for years, and must re-read it now that I’m working on the ’20s – but yes, of course, its shadow stretches a long way, and it’s hard to write a butch lesbian character without invoking the spirit of Stephen Gordon. Actually, Hall’s short story ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’ was probably more of a reference-point for The Night Watch. And the really rather fab The Unlit Lamp is proving very inspiring for my new novel. legerdemain What are you reading at the moment for research, and for pleasure? sarahwatersreplies: For pleasure – well, one thing I’m doing is working my way through the novels of Muriel Spark, in chronological order. Such a treat! I’m about halfway through. I’m being struck by what an oddly gothic writer she was – not in the obvious (ie my) way of creaky doors etc, but in the sense that there’s a mildly hallucinatory quality to her books – secrets, unhealthy relationships etc… I also just read Tim Pears’s Landed – a mavellous book, I can’t praise it too highly – I read it twice and it made me cry both times. For research – I’m reading lots of Virginia Woolf, which is fabulous. Novels, diaries and letters – every observation so brutally perfect – she’s got a mind like a skewer! But I’m also reading middlebrow fiction from the ’10s and ’20s – authors who were fantastically popular in their day but very unfashionable now, like Warwick Deeping, and Robert Hichens (who’s unexpectedly rather wonderful, with lots of ‘women on the edge of a nervous breakdown’-type female characters). ronsonol asks: Flaubert famously read and took notes on hundreds of sources to prepare the historical background of l’Education Sentimental and included practically none of this material in the finished novel. I found the Little Stranger to be a similarly successful exercise in conveying the texture of a period without giving a history lesson. Can you say a few words about your research for this book and whether you felt the same anguish as GF over how to stop the quiet personal lives of your characters being swamped by the facts you had to manoeouvre them around? Did the supernatural element help in balancing out the weight of the history? sarahwatersreplies: I do a lot of research for my novels, but I’ll always get to a point where my characters and their stories take on a weight and a substance that makes me want to leave the research behind for a bit; and after that, when I do more research, its much more focussed – the story drives the research, rather than the other way around. There are always wonderful nuggets that you wish you could use, and can’t. If you try and shoehorn them in it never works, they stand out because they haven’t emerged organically. And yes, in The Little Stranger the supernatural element did help, because in lots of ways the world of Hundreds Hall was quite detached from its period – it became a sort of generic ‘haunted house’, obeying rules of genre rather than of history – if that makes sense. Capell123 asks: I think it’s fair to say that, in the crudest possible sense, ‘not a lot happens’ until a good part of the way into The Little Stranger, and yet I was still unable to put it down despite my accursed modern attention span. Do you think that as your skill as a writer has increased, you feel more able to bend some of the perceived rules of modern fiction, ie ‘open with a bang and don’t risk losing your reader?’ Fingersmith, for example, got to its true intrigue a lot quicker. sarahwatersreplies: I was worried with both The Little Stranger and The Night Watch that there wouldn’t be enough to keep a reader interested until the ‘pay-offs’ arrived – ie the spooky stuff in one, and the wartime drama in the other. But I wanted both to have slow-burner starts: in TLS I felt we really needed to get to know the characters before anything odd started happening to them, and in TNW the point of the first part is that the characters are all ‘stuck’, all jaded and static. I didn’t feel like I was bending any rules – the books just had to be that way, in order for them to tell the stories I wanted to tell. Sorry – not very articulate! I actually find beginnings hard; I think I’m much better at endings. I look at Muriel Spark and she’s so nimble and economical; my narratives lumber along, full of phrases like ‘and then’ and ‘that morning’ and ‘on the Friday of that week…’ At the same time, I do like a leisurely pace, both as a writer and a reader. I like to feel I’m entering a whole narrative world, full of physical and emotional detail. Sarah Waters Fiction guardian.co.uk

Posted by on July 15, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.