This week, The Book Diner features an excellent interview with Elizabeth Baines which took place in 2014. I was fortunate to meet when Elizabeth when Unthology 5 was launched alongside Welcome to Sharonville by Unthank Books in Norwich back in June. Elizabeth is a critically-acclaimed author whose skills stretch across forms – from stories, novels and and novellas to plays and literary criticism – so it was very heartening for me to talk to her and realise much of our writing methodology is the same, including entering into a trance-like state and not wanting to move for hours! Down-to-earth and endless fun, I think you’ll really enjoy this week’s interview, especially her rather firm approach to the Inner Critic!
Welcome to the Book Diner! Can we take your order – coffee, tea or soda? Eggs sunny side up or over easy? Home fries, French toast or biscuit?
Sounds lovely! Any porridge? (We Celts need our porridge.)
When did you realise you were a writer?
Age 5. Always was a big-head. [Uh, oh, here comes trouble!]
Are there particular symptoms you think people should look out for if they suspect they may be coming down with Writer Syndrome and do you think there is any cure?
It’s that walking into lampposts thing (head in the air, mind elsewhere). There’s nothing you can do about it, you just have to watch with compassion and hope they get themselves safely to a desk. [I actually bumped into a lamppost as I was getting out of a taxi the other day – what a stereotype I am!!]
Can you tell us about your latest project?
Nope. What if it’s a load of rubbish and never came to anything? How foolish would I look then? [She has a point.]
Where do you generally draw your ideas from?
Generally it’s a case of the ideas getting me – something will just grab me, something I witness, or something someone says to me and then I’ll be its total prisoner until I’ve turned it into a story.
Generally it’s a case of the ideas getting me – something will just grab me, something I witness, or something someone says to me and then I’ll be its total prisoner until I’ve turned it into a story.
Can you talk to us about one or two of the characters from your latest work? How do your characters emerge?
My latest publication is the story ‘Clarrie and You’ in Unthology 5. The characters there are two sisters, Olive and Clarrie, very connected to each other, but very different from each other and with a lot of tensions between them. The story is based on something someone told me. The characters are a huge mish-mash: partly my impression of the people as the story was told to me, partly other real people I’ve known whom I could see in the situation and partly out of that huge multiple-personality cupboard that all writers keep at the backs of their brains.
The characters are a huge mish-mash: partly my impression of the people as the story was told to me, partly other real people I’ve known whom I could see in the situation and partly out of that huge multiple-personality cupboard that all writers keep at the backs of their brains.
Is there a particular theme or message you’d like readers to take away from this story?
Well, the thing I was obsessed with in the writing of the story was the uncertainty of things, how we have to live with it, but can’t easily live with it. But if that doesn’t come across and people read it simply as a story about a secret and misunderstandings (which it also is), then that’s fine by me. Once you let go of a story, it’s other people’s really to interpret as they see fit.
What kind of writing process do you have? Are you very disciplined in terms of having a set work routine and doing a lot of planning, or are you more of a pantster? (You fly by the seat of them – Zinkologism.)
Oh, yes, I’m a real Puritan: up at my desk by 9 am and stuck fast there till I’m done, which could be the evening … But, no, I’m kidding, it’s not discipline, it’s just obsession. I forget to go to the loo …[I do this too – I go into a trance and resent bodily functions and needs interrupting me when I write!] I do plan my stories, but in a kind of loose way: I think of my plans as nets with holes I can escape through if I see a better way …
Do you write longhand or on a computer or both? Do you believe that writing method makes a difference to style?
Up until last year you would find me talking in interviews about the creative connection between the brain and the wrist (pretentious, moi?) and the feel of actually drawing your story if you write by hand, but then my handwriting got so bad and when I sat down to write my most recent piece, which was novella length, I simply couldn’t face trying to interpret the scribbles when I came to type it out and for the first time ever I wrote the first draft on the computer. It was a pretty straightforward story, though, and I’m not sure it would work with the more elliptical stuff I usually write. So in a way, it could be connected to writing style …
How do you approach research?
Irritably. I hate having to interrupt the flow of a story to get bogged down in facts. Facts, for God’s sake! And so distracting. Best not to do it, I find, until you absolutely have to. Get the thrust of the story down as much as you can before the facts start doing the thrusting.
Best not to do it[research], I find, until you absolutely have to. Get the thrust of the story down as much as you can before the facts start doing the thrusting.
How do you deal with autobiographical elements in your work? Do you worry about offending people or baring your soul too much?
What do you mean, autobiographical? Not me, guv, it’s fiction.
What’s your editing process?
I usually put a thing aside after a first draft and then try to come back to it as Mrs Average Reader. Then I read and reread drafts until I can hear no more bum notes. It’s amazing, though, how often you think you can’t and then you come back to it again … Sometimes I think a book is never finished. [Raymond Carver used to rewrite things after they were published!] When Salt reprinted my early novel, The Birth Machine, I was amazed how much of it made me cringe and want to make changes as I was going through the proofs. There comes a stage, though, when you just have to let go …
Name one book you wish you had written and explain why it’s fabulous.
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. It’s not just a book, it’s an experience, a plunge into the loss and longing of 20th century Europe, the displacement and fragmented identity, reality as a waking dream, the eerie collapse of time … It’s a book that gets under my skin and creeps into my skull and rings all the bells there. Wow.
What advice would you offer to writers just starting out?
Read loads. Immerse yourself in the greats and then put them aside and develop your own voice. Expect rejection, but don’t accept it: pick yourself up and try again. Be tough, but stay gentle. Keep in touch with your dreams. Watch the chocolate: you won’t be getting much exercise.
Read loads. Immerse yourself in the greats and then put them aside and develop your own voice. Expect rejection, but don’t accept it: pick yourself up and try again. Be tough, but stay gentle. Keep in touch with your dreams. Watch the chocolate: you won’t be getting much exercise.
What would you say are the toughest things and the best things about being a writer?
Toughest: no money. And no prospect of any money. Ever.
Best: you get to do what kids do all day long, stay inside your daydreams.
How do you handle the rejections and bad reviews all writers experience?
Spit, usually. Curse the blinkered so and sos. Have a biscuit. Then go back up to my study, determined not to let the bastards get me down.
How do you deal with the Inner Critic who likes to tell us our work is worthless?
She has a naughty chair in my study. When she gets off it, we have a big fight. Sometimes she manages to slam me one, but usually I can get her down with my knee in her back.
She[the Inner Critic] has a naughty chair in my study. When she gets off it, we have a big fight. Sometimes she manages to slam me one, but usually I can get her down with my knee in her back.
What are your feelings about the growth in self-publishing? Would you advise emerging writers to self-publish or pursue a traditional book deal?
Crikey, I don’t know! I hear different tales from all over. What I do know, from publishing a literary magazine, and from my experience as a 
writer with various publishers, is that publishing is all about the publicity (the words give it away, don’t they?) and the marketing, and if you’re going to self-publish you’re in danger of becoming a publisher rather than a writer. No point, after all, writing a book that never gets to readers (not for me, anyway). And, after all, the job of getting it to readers – editing, production, publicity, marketing and sales – is so big it’s shared in traditional publishing by several (salaried) people. So I wouldn’t approach it myself unless I found it absolutely necessary. But then traditional publishers are getting more and more chary and there’s something to be said for the emergence of another option …
Who has offered you the most encouragement and support in terms of your writing career?
All the lovely editors who’ve published my books and stories and the producers and directors who’ve put on my plays. My mum, I guess, but does she count? Of course she counts!
If you could fly off to any era on The Book Diner Magic Time Travel Banquette, where would you go and why?
The thing I’d love to do is experience places now old and established when they were new. So my own Victorian street when the houses first went up, eighteenth-century Bath, my grandmother’s cottage in Tudor times … But you’d have to keep the Banquette close by ready to fly: I wouldn’t want to get stranded any time or place where women didn’t have a say… [Blimey, I’m such a Bronte, I’d be dead of the Plague in five minutes or burned as a witch!]
If you could write anywhere in the world for a while, where would you head?
Upstairs to my own study. It’s the grain on my desk, it’s the wonky blind at the window, it’s all my things piled up around me, all the familiar triggers for going off inside my own head. Anywhere else, and I’m far too busy looking around me.
Do you like cats or dogs or both? (Writers are known for being pet crazy, so let’s pander.)
I like them both, but cats are better for writers because they don’t get pathetic when you forget to feed them through being so engrossed. They try to sit on your keyboard though … [Very true – they ask why you’re not writing about THEM!]
Complete the following sentences:
Life is… a hall of mirrors. I am… the woman standing among them. Writing is like … the door behind the mirrors.
Life is… a hall of mirrors. I am… the woman standing among them. Writing is like … the door behind the mirrors.
If you could choose to have a different creative gift, what would it be?
I would love to play music, but I can’t. Damn it.
What plans have you got for future projects and events?
I have a short story in a forthcoming anthology of ghost stories from Honno Welsh Women’s Press due out in the autumn. I’ve just completed a novella and I’m working on a novel.
Where can people find out more about you and your work?
My website www.elizabethbaines.com gives an overview of my work with links for purchases of my books and to stories of mine available online, as well as to my online articles and interviews.
Is there anything else we can get you?
No, that was mighty satisfying, thank you.
Do you have any questions for The Book Diner?
Where did you get such a brilliant chef? [A charmer, this one!]
Thanks so much for joining us – please call again!
Well, thanks for having me in your very swanky diner. I’m honoured!
We’re honoured to have you as our guest! That was really fun!
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