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INTERVIEW WITH SARAH WATERS
Tuesday 11 February 2003
The author of Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith answers the questions you have emailed. |
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Louise in London:
How and where do you write? Do you believe like Graham Green that 500 words a day is enough? Is writing about routine and 'showing up at the page'?
Sarah Waters:: Every writer I know has a different writing routine. Some of them write into the small hours of the night. I have to treat it as a day job so more and more I am getting like Graham Green and aiming for 500 words a day. On the whole I have tended to aim for 1000 words a day but it's only by treating it like a job that I get anything done. If I waited for inspiration I might wait forever!
Janey in Glasgow: Was the transition from academic research and writing to fiction writing difficult or easy?
Sarah Waters:
I found it a very liberating process because when you're writing academic work you're dependent on footnoting your work and suddenly to be able to give all that up and just make things up and create a world rather than do a critique of somebody else's work, was fantastically liberating.
Susan in Cardiff: How do you know when a book is finished? You mentioned on Readers and Writers Roadshow that you planned one of them out and then it's like painting by numbers. So does that mean plot supersedes language?
Sarah Waters:
With the three books I have written so far, increasingly the plot has dominated at the start because I have had to work it out in advance of writing anything at all, and then it does feel a bit like painting by numbers. But having your plot worked out doesn't necessarily mean that you know your characters.
For me, especially as I have written so far in first person narratives, getting to know my characters' voices is something that has emerged for me as I've written and often comes as a surprise. A plot is only really a skeleton, and everything else in terms of voice and characterisation you learn as you go along and that's the exciting part!
Fiona Wood:
Is there ANY chance of a sequel to Tipping the Velvet?
Sarah Waters:
I very much doubt it .. And for me my characters only exist to serve the project of a book, they never really exist for me beyond that.
Indira Patel:
I would like to know if you have a say in how your books are dramatised?
Sarah Waters:
I didn't with Tipping The Velvet and there are plans to dramatise the other two novels, but I can't foresee me having a role in that process and to be honest, I've never really wanted one. Having written a novel, by the time I've finished, I've already moved on to the next book. Also, when you write a book you're too bonded with the book itself to be able to cut it, to have that ruthlessness about editing it.
Anna Stafford:
Which book did you most enjoy writing and why?
Sarah Waters:
I loved writing Tipping The Velvet and it was enormous fun to write. It was fun to write because I wrote it in a sort of professional innocence and I didn't have a publisher or an agent when I started. I just wrote it for myself and galloped through it. Fingersmith was fun in a different way because it had all those diabolical plot twists and I really enjoyed that. Affinity was an awful book to write!
Dee Newman:
Now that Andrew Davis has made Tipping into a TV drama is there anything that you would like to take from the TV to the book or vice versa?
Sarah Waters:
One thing that struck me was that people often say they found Nancy in the book rather passive. But Andrew's Nancy, Rachael Stirling, made Nancy a much more spirited character and in retrospect I might try and bring more of that to the book if I were writing the book again.
What you lost through the TV adaptation was a slight emotional depth, because if it's all playful you maybe lose a bit of the darkness as well. There were bits of the book, when she's renting on the streets, it could've been done in quite an erotically charged way but of course, they played it for laughs really. But at the same time if was a very positive portrayal of lesbian sex.
It could have been quite a serious exploration of a gay underworld and they could have had a lot more of a queer, erotic charge to them.
There are a couple of scenes where Nancy takes Florence to a gay pub and in the book, it's the other way around. I still would've preferred to have kept it that way because the whole point is that it's Nancy's sexual education in the book and its crucial she gets that from Florence rather than initiating Florence into a queer world. I felt it was maybe something to do with the mainstreaming of Tipping, that actually mainstream culture can handle coming-out stories but actually to present grown-up lesbians in a grown-up lesbian world of their own was too much. They had to have it that Florence was all innocent.
Kelly Housby:
Are there any plans to adapt Affinity or Fingersmith for the screen?
Sarah Waters:
There are! Andrew Davies has written a screenplay for Affinity and wants to turn it into a feature film. Apparently, it's just been sent to Roman Polanksi but he doesn't want it! And Fingersmith, there are plans to adapt it for TV.
David Allardice:
Do you get annoyed at always being described as a "lesbian writer"?
Has it been a conscious decision to reduce the explicitness of the lesbianism in order to attract a more mainstream audience?
Sarah Waters:
Somebody suggested to me about a year ago that I might have made the decision to tone down the lesbian-ness and that I might have been asked to do that by my publisher. But actually, I was quite horrified that anyone would ever think that I would! Having written a lesbian romp I wanted to do something different and it just happened that lesbianism ended up being more or less incidental in Fingersmith.
Having said that, it's still very much part of my creative agenda. For that reason I don't get annoyed being described as a lesbian writer because the opposite is to be in the closet. We should be at a time now when a book can be labelled a lesbian book and still find a wider audience.
Kayla:
I absolutely loved Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and have just started reading Fingersmith. I was wondering if there are more wonderful books on the horizon at all?
Sarah Waters:
It's still at a very embryonic stage even though I've actually spent quite a long time working on it. It's not plot driven like the other books and is much more impressionistic. It's literally in pieces! It's set in the 1940s just after and during the war and it's about women's lives in 1940s London.
Nicola Johnson:
Having been nominated for numerous awards this year, and winning at least two of those; do you feel any more pressure when writing, given that people's expectations could be increasing and especially now that you're leaving behind the Victorian era with book four?
Sarah Waters:
Yes, I do feel that there's much more pressure on me and the books. Firstly, this idea that there's a sense of expectation. It's terrifying and exciting! I just have to try and shrug it off, because if you try to write to this expectant audience, then you'd just find it impossible. I have to try and get back to my own little world that I've been writing out of for the past seven years.
It's been a great source of anxiety leaving behind the Victorian era and leaving all those Victorian props behind that are real crowd pleasers. To strip all that away and just be writing about relationships is scary! But I think I need it as a writer. Having moved to the 40's I'd like to maybe stay there for another book and the 50's seem quite appealing, so I am slowly creeping forwards.
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