‘If writers really talked truthfully about their process—questions like where do you get your ideas from— you would just get such bizarre answers.’
Our fourth instalment of the Conversations with Writers series occurred last Wednesday. The writer was Deborah Levy who spoke with Josh Cohen about the whole breadth of her work. Having reread her novels in preparation, Josh brought some wonderful questions and interpretations which helped to shape the course of the talk. Levy’s early writing was for the theatre, writing a number of plays in the early 80s, some for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her first novel, Beautiful Mutants was published in 1987 and her second, Swallowing Geography, in 1992. In the early 2010s, Levy published a number of short story collections and novels which gained critical praise and established her as a prominent figure in contemporary British fiction, with both Swimming Home (2011) and Hot Milk (2016) being shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. Her most recent novel August Blue, was published in 2023.
Josh began the discussion by asking Deborah if she was in fact writing one long novel. Recognising similarities and threads which run throughout her different novels and short stories. To which Deborah replied that although she was not in fact writing one long novel, she was always pursuing similar ideas, and imbuing each of her works with the same consciousness. Deborah admitted that she often spends months on the first page of her novels. Stating that:
‘The first page of every novel…that takes me forever. I can spend three months on a first page, because if the voice is wrong, if the mood isn’t right, if the sentences don’t pack in enough…[only] once I’ve got it, I can proceed’
The voice of the novel must be right from the outset. However, finding that voice, and trusting it also throws up its own problems. The voice of the text comes from Levy’s first thoughts, the initial feelings, ideas and impulses at the start of the writing process. Yet there is still a strong urge to want to edit and immediately change things if they don’t feel right. An approach which Levy puts down to her early experience working in theatre and hearing one of her lines, ‘die in [an actor’s] mouth’, making her immediately re-write it on the spot. So she had to cut out this urge to edit. Not that her first thoughts aren’t edited and redrafted, but they usually guide the book from the first few sentences.
From Swimming Home onwards, her writing process has been a battle between trusting first thoughts and wanting to edit them. Thankfully, trust has been victorious over the doubtful edit, and the spoils are a tightly structured, intricate work. Perhaps this battle behind the scenes produces the doubles which she describes as running through all her works: enigma and coherence, vulnerability and great power.
‘I kind of want the unconscious of the novel to leap through the pages’
This talk was somewhat different from previous ones in that the discussion was deeply focused on the precise craft of story-writing, and the distinct problems it throws up. Levy says that one of the things that really interests her at the moment is ‘this idea that there are no such thing as minor characters…There are no minor characters in this room, and so what do you do with that, in fiction?’. It is an idea which is so simple and true, yet so problematic and irksome a thought when writing a realist novel or memoir. As we need minor characters and extras for a reality effect, yet in reality, no person is minor. Indeed, this thought gnawed away so much that Levy felt one such minor character in Swimming Home asking for more lines, and that she had to stop him from becoming major.
The realist novel is a tricky prickly thing. Near the close of the conversation, Levy gave a wonderfully incisive description of her approach: ‘I’m taking apart the realist novel and putting it back together again, and inserting into it something spectral, uncanny, something I believe to be psychologically true. So I understand that the work has a strange shimmer.’.
For our next event we are excited to welcome our first poet in the series, Hannah Sullivan, whose poetry collection Three Poems (Faber 2018), won the T.S. Eliot poetry prize. The talk will be on the 23rd October, at the usual time of seven.
Words by Charlie Jameson