Hi Jill,
First things first I am sure there is a question
that you have always longed to be asked. Now is the chance. Ask your own
question and answer it!
I can only think of
questions I hope people won’t ask! Like,
‘How can you write about Bermuda when you’ve never been there?’
What is the genre you are best known for?
I’ve never been able to
fit my books into a genre. Wish I could, it would make them more saleable. But
that isn’t how it works.
was adapted into a TV show or a film, who would you
like to play the lead role?
This novella is linked
to my earlier novel, The Hatmaker’s
Secret, and tells the story of the hatmaker’s grandmother, Henrietta, who
makes a brief appearance in the novel.
Henrietta is of
Barbadian origin. Maybe as an older woman and at the end of her life with
make-up – Marianne Jean-Baptiste. For the young woman – Rhianna maybe?!
How do you get ideas for plots and characters?
Family secrets
triggered both The Hatmaker’s Secret
and The Saturday Letters. I was
completely unaware of having a black great-grandmother until my mother died.
Pictures of strangers led
to Alfie and Esther in A Place of Safety.
Facets of people who’ve
made an impact on me, but never the whole person.
Plot emerges from how
the characters behave, how they deal with their conflicts, dreams, obsessions
and what life (or me) throws at them.
Favourite picture or work of art?
So many that I’ll have
to cheat! I love portraits, trees, crows.
Once I would have said
Rembrandt, Vermeer, van Gogh.
But just now it’s
Ravilious – his picture Chalk Paths of
the Sussex Downs lifts my spirit.
Plus a moody
watercolour Welsh seascape by my husband and the Madonna del Parto by Pierro dela Francesca. We stayed several times
in Italy just down the road from the village where it’s kept and I would stare
and stare at the expressive faces of the pregnant Madonna and her attendants.
And of course wrote about them.
Was becoming a writer a conscious decision or
something that you drifted into (or even something so compelling that it could
not be denied?) How old were you when you first started to write seriously.
Definitely too
compelling to deny. I did it in secret from the age of 7 until adult. But I was
50 before I had ‘permission’ and
believed I could write. Got into fiction, at last, in my sixties and was
serious enough to claim the time and the space to write full time.
Marmite? Love it or hate it?
Love it. Don’t have it
often. Why not? But all I ever wanted when I was ill as a child was a marmite
sandwich.
Do you have any rituals and routines when writing?
Your favourite cup for example or ‘that’ piece of music...??
Just stepping into my
studio – no phone, no email – with a pot of coffee and my favourite mug.
If not at home, I need
a long view, preferably of the sea. But then again, I can happily write in a
certain sort of café (wooden tables, not too bright). Or with a log fire.
I promise I won’t tell them the answer to this, but
when you are writing, who is more important, your family or your characters?
Put it this way, unless
someone in the family is having a crisis, it’s my characters who keep me awake
at night.
Other than writing full time, what would be your
dream job?
Free-lance photographer
– trees, clouds and people.
Coffee or tea? Red or white?
Coffee, real, black, no
sugar. Red.
How much of your work is planned before you start?
Do you have a full draft or let it find its way?
I don’t plan. I have to
dive in – which makes for problems down the line, sorting chronology,
eliminating daffodils in September etc. If only I could make myself construct a
timeline earlier in the process.
Imagine that you could get hold of any original
source document. What would it be?
The slave register of
my 3 times great-grandmother in Barbados.
Have any of your characters ever shocked you and
gone off on their own adventure leaving you scratching your head??? If so how
did you cope with that!?
Yes! At first I tend to
think, that’s too extreme. But when I’ve gone with it, it’s been a key turning
point. And on reflection, I see that some part of my mind must have been
setting it up all along, subconsciously. For example, by the way I’ve arranged
the room or hints about a character’s past. The mind works in mysterious ways.
How much research do you do and do you ever go on
research trips?
Place is important so,
yes. I visit whenever I can, but I hate to fly which is limiting.
For the family-based
books I did a lot of online genealogy research and visited archives in Kew and
Gibraltar.
Research into issues –
e.g. assisted suicide for A Place of
Safety.
Learning about Bajan
dialect via Skype with a teacher in Barbados.
Fiction authors have to contend with real characters
invading our stories. Are there any ‘real’ characters you have been tempted to
prematurely kill off or ignore because you just don’t like them or they spoil
the plot?
No. But I have made
some (deceased) family members into baddies.
Are you prepared to go away from the known facts for
the sake of the story and if so how do you get around this?
Only trivial facts and
only involving family.
Do you find that the lines between fact and fiction
sometimes become blurred?
Yes. It’s the crack
between the worlds, the creative interface. If talking of history, what is
fact? We have dates, of course, but what happened on those dates is so
subjective, there are multiple versions. And never more so than in family
history!
Have you ever totally hated or fallen in love with
one of your characters?
Yes. Hated a couple of
baddies. Fallen for both a goodie and a baddie. And such good friends with one
character that I very nearly bought her a birthday card when I saw one that was
perfect.
What do you enjoy reading for pleasure?
Fiction, mainly by
contemporary women writers, but love Patrick Gale, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy
to name but a few.
What drink would you recommend drinking whilst
reading your latest book?
For The Saturday Letters it would have to be
tea as Henrietta helped run a Temperance café! But roll on the next one where
vodka would be most appropriate.
Last but not least... favourite author?
Impossible! Barbara
Kingsolver, Andrea Levy, Elizabeth Strout, Zadie Smith…
But if it has to be
one, today, Rose Tremain.
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| The author Jill Treseder |
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