Jane Davis: Life Imitating Art
This week - as I'm on holiday in Italy - there's a guest post by the wonderful novelist Jane Davis. Her first novel 'Half Truths and White Lies', published by Black Swan, won the Daily Mail first novel award; 'I Stopped Time' and 'Funeral for an Owl' are among my favourite reads. This month, Jane has a new novel out in print and e-book form - 'An Unknown Woman' - so I asked her to tell us about some of the strange events that happened while she was writing the book.
‘If we are what we own, who are we when we own nothing?’
Words Pulled From a
Burning Wreckage
Thoughts on the
writing of An Unknown Woman
A
novel, wrote Henry James for an 1884 magazine article, is “a direct impression
of life.” An
Unknown Woman is probably the most
personal novel I have written to date.
In 2013, I took the decision to
cut back on paid work, which meant selling the car and ridding myself of a lot
of material baggage. The book is in part an exploration of how material
possessions inform our identities. I wanted to tackle the subjects that are relevant to the life
I am living now, which bears little resemblance to the life I imagined for
myself when I was a child, back when my father told me, “When you’re an adult,
you can do exactly as you like.” I consider what it’s like to be childless when
the majority of friends have children, even when childlessness is a positive
choice; the extension of youth into what was previously thought of as middle
age; the feeling of being cut off from adulthood.
The action begins with my main
character, Anita, standing outside the house she and her partner have lived in
for fifteen years and watching it burn to the ground. It is very recognisably
my house. My partner and I joked about
how I might be tempting fate. But it was just
a joke. We are not terribly superstitious – although I must admit that we’ve
had more near misses in the last year than I’m comfortable with. (There may be
some truth in the saying, “You attract what you think most about”.)
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| Author Jane Davis |
Then in February 2014, three
months after I finished chapter one, my sister and her husband lost their house
and practically everything they owned to the winter floods. She lived on the
island on the Thames that you can see in the first photograph in this article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2555658/UK-weather-16-areas-South-warned-flooding-danger-lives-Armed-Forces-battle-save-homes.html.
Over a year after the event they are stuck in limbo, living
in a rented house with what little they managed to salvage, still waiting the
planning permission to start rebuilding their home - and with it their lives. This
shattering event made me question if I should abandon the project. I was
writing about an imagined scenario that had become a reality for someone very
close to me.
Of course, the same could be said
of any book I have written - or may write in the future. My favourite
description of fiction is that it is ‘made-up truth’. But the shape of the book
I was writing had to change. The other day, I stumbled across this quote: “The
writer’s job is to get the main character up the tree, and once they are there,
to throw rocks at them.” While Anita finds one hell of a lot of rocks flying in
her direction, I chose my ammunition more carefully than I would have done
otherwise, replacing a few sharp flints with smooth pebbles.
This certainly wasn’t the first
time I have substantially altered the focus of a book during the course of its
writing. I’m afraid that anyone who imagines that words show up in the eventual
order that they appear on the page of any novel is, in the majority of cases,
mistaken. In some ways, the novel in its final form is an illusion. The rabbit
pulled out of the hat – or in this case, the few things rescued from the
burning house.
Since I don’t plot, my process
tends to be very organic. The pivotal moment of a novel may not actually reveal
itself until several edits in, or until an editor comments, ‘I see the point
that you were trying to make.’ As author Roz Morris says, sometimes it takes a
reader to hold the mirror up to your work.
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| Novels by Jane Davis |
With my historical novel, I Stopped Time, I introduced a
present-day strand when I realised that I would be unable to say everything
that I wanted to in the voice of my main character, model turned photographer, Lottie
Pye. And so, the revised premise became the story of how the reclusive Sir James
Hastings discovers the mother who abandoned him when she leaves him her
photographic work in her will.
With A Funeral for an Owl, it was while I was ironing out flaws highlighted
by a structural editor that I
discovered another major issue: I had failed to take account of the fact that
it was thirty years since I left school. The behaviour of two of my main
characters, both of them teachers, would have been illegal under current Child
Protection laws. The stupid thing was that all of the information I needed was
available on the local government website, had I realised. Then it struck me
that there was a huge opportunity to be had. I could change the focus of the
novel: what kind of boy would it take to make two teachers put their jobs on
the line? And it gave the plot a new momentum.
In the case
of An Unknown Woman, the fire quickly
becomes the least of Anita’s problems. It is the psychological fall-out and
what happens when she is stripped of her armour that drives the narrative
forwards. She has to find the answer to the question, ‘If we are what we own,
who are we when we own nothing?’ And the
answer is that we are not the same. But, as with the altered plot of a novel,
there can be positives.
Over to you:
Have you ever substantially altered a novel during its writing? Or have you
ever written about a subject, only to have something similar happen in your own
life?
Author Biography
Jane
Davis lives in Carshalton, Surrey with her Formula 1 obsessed, star-gazing,
beer-brewing partner, surrounded by growing piles of paperbacks, CDs and
general chaos. She spent her twenties and the first part of her thirties
chasing promotions at work, but when Jane achieved what she’d set out to do,
she discovered that it wasn’t what she had wanted after
all. In search of a creative outlet, she turned to writing fiction, but cites
the disciplines learnt in the business world as what helps her finish her first
120,000-word novel.
Her first, Half-truths and White Lies,
won the Daily Mail First Novel Award and was described by Joanne Harris as ‘A
story of secrets, lies, grief and, ultimately, redemption, charmingly handled
by this very promising new writer.’ She was hailed by The Bookseller as ‘One to
Watch.’ Five self-published novels have followed: I Stopped Time, These Fragile
Things, A Funeral for an Owl, An
Unchoreographed Life and now her latest release, An Unknown Woman.
Website www.jane-davis.co.uk
Twitter
@janedavisauthor
Buy ebook from Amazon http://goo.gl/EaiKXW
By paperback from Amazon: http://goo.gl/8AnAz7
A fascinating post that has definitely hooked me into several of your novel plots, Jane! Those shots were a chilling reminder of just how severe the 2014 floods were, and we forget that people who make headlines may still be battling with the fallout long after their story has faded from our collective memory.
ReplyDeleteLife has not imitated art for me - so far - but when I tipped one of my characters off a ladder, to meet his death while painting an upstairs window, I didn't give a thought to the fact that, from then on, I would feel an eerie tap on the shoulder every time I saw my husband up a ladder...