Amazon Rising Star Q & A

When I became one of Amazon's Rising Stars in Spring 2009 I was asked to answer several question for Amazon's customers. Read both questions and answers here, or on Amazon


Can you sum up THE EARTH HUMS IN B FLAT for our customers in just one sentence?
The Earth Hums in B Flat is the story, both light and dark, of a young girl’s loss of innocence.

Your portrait of life in a small Welsh town in the 50s is so vivid – was it drawn from your own experiences?
My own childhood was so ordinary that I remember little of the detail. But some of the background to The Earth Hums in B Flat is taken from my own experience – the way children were perceived to have no feelings, and no-one explained what were seen as ‘adult’ situations to them; I think that was pretty general in the 1950s. Also the chapel did play a prominent role in people’s social life at a time when there was little else available – I remember the socialising more than the religion! But, the incidents and the characters in the book are wholly fictitious. The setting comes somewhere in-between: it’s a fictionalized version of the small town where I grew up.

The story is told from the point of view of 12-year old Gwenni Morgan . How easy/difficult was it to write from a child’s perspective? Did you have a particular inspiration for her character?
Well, long ago I was a child! – and although I don’t remember details, I do remember how I viewed life, how I invented explanations for things I couldn’t understand, how I didn’t even want to understand some things. And I remember how alive my senses were; I think children experience their senses more fully than adults – they feel and smell and see and taste and hear more acutely, and they still have their sixth sense. So, it wasn’t so much the child’s perspective that took me a while to find, but Gwenni’s voice. I wanted her voice to do more than just tell her story, and I decided to give her three voices that weave into and out of one another: there’s the voice she speaks with to other people; the voice with which she addresses you, the reader; and the voice she uses when she’s musing upon something, which reflects her interest in words and writing. By using these different voices I hoped to give the reader a fuller picture of the complex character that is Gwenni.The initial inspiration for Gwenni came from a snapshot that had been in my mind for some time before I began to work on The Earth Hums in B Flat, which was of a child with untidy red hair balancing on a chair with her arms outstretched.

You have been involved with books and writing for most of your life. Did you always harbour an ambition to write a novel? How long did it take you to write THE EARTH HUMS IN B FLAT?
I’ve always written, since I can remember. And I’ve started and discarded several novels along the way – none of them remotely like this one. But the urge to write never seems to leave you, and I decided to do something about it and signed up for an on-line Masters course in Creative Writing with Manchester Metropolitan University. In following the course I learnt a lot about writing generally and about my own writing specifically, and, more importantly, I gained the confidence I needed to carry on writing. The Earth Hums in B Flat was the result, and it took me three years to write.

What are you currently working on?
What I should be working on to the exclusion of all else is my next novel! It’s set in the period following the Great War – I’m very interested in history and the lessons it has to teach us. I’ve done much research and preparatory work, but I’m nowhere near as far on with the first draft as I’d like to be. Since before the publication of The Earth Hums in B Flat I’ve been asked to write answers to questions – rather like these – for various publications, to write articles about aspects of my writing, and to write short stories. I’ve appeared at readings and Q&A sessions, and done radio and TV interviews – all of which take me a while to prepare for! And I’m also working on a trio of books in Welsh for young children which are to do with another of my interests – how we can live in a sustainable way.

Can you tell us a few of your favourite books/the books that have influenced you?
I believe that every book I’ve ever read, in Welsh and English, has influenced me in some way. When I was young there were nowhere near the numbers of books written for children that there are now, and I strayed into adult territory quite young. I read voraciously, indiscriminately and uncritically. If a book drew me into its world I didn’t care about anything else. In a way, reading was a drug to protect me against the banality of everyday life. Since then I’ve come to realise that the books I enjoy most are the ones where the voice of the main character colours everything, and where that character is flawed and not necessarily entirely likeable, but arouses my empathy. One of my favourite books is Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play, about a troupe of medieval players, which also has a perfect first paragraph; another is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, where what the butler makes of what he sees is heartbreakingly wrong. Yet another is Caradog Pritchard’s Un Nos Ola Leuad (translated into English as One Moonlit Night) where a man looks back at his childhood in a way that sends shivers down my spine, but makes me laugh as well. I enjoy reading poetry, too, and the very clever The World’s Wife, by Carol Ann Duffy, has a plethora of women’s voices that speak out strongly – I often re-read some of the poems. I also love crime stories that have a flawed detective as the main character - Fred Vargas’s Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, and Arnaldur Indridason’s Erlendur are two favourites!

Do you have any tips you would offer to anyone looking to write their first book?
I can only tell you the way that works for me: write your first draft from beginning to end without going back to tidy it up. That way you have a complete novel to work on, and when you are at that stage – use strong verbs, use all your senses, edit and edit, cut and re-write until you have something as closely resembling the voice and the novel in your head as you possibly can.



Return to Writing from Amazon Rising Star Q & A