Joanne Horniman
Joanne Horniman on writing My Candlelight Novel
After writing Secret Scribbled Notebooks, I knew that there was more of the story to tell, so Candlelight is told from the point-of-view of Sophie, the older sister of Kate, who narrated the earlier book. I think I liked being in their world so much that I wanted to immerse myself again. And Sophie, being older, remembers more than Kate– I felt sure she’d know the true story of their mother, even though I didn’t know it myself when I began writing. The book begins six months after Secret Scribbled left off.
Sophie came very naturally to me, as we share a certain way of being and of looking at things. She lives in her head, her constant companions are whichever writers she happens to be reading. She’s slothful, bad at housework, badly groomed, and her underwear is pretty much on its last legs. And she’s a writer. This is her book – and it’s very much a book about reading and writing.
But despite my great ease with her as a character, this novel took much longer to write than its earlier companion. I always spend a fair bit of time tootling around at the start, and I’m never quite sure where to start. Because I’m a writer who’s not very plot-driven, I like to entice my reader in – I want to start at a point where something is happening. But in the end I began in a very low-key way, which was Sophie walking her baby round the streets of Lismore very early one morning. After all, pushing a pram is a quintessential activity when you’re a mother of a young child.
And then about mid-way I got stuck. I had a character, Maggie Tulliver, whose role and purpose I wasn’t quite sure of. She looks so much like Sophie, is twenty years older – is she the mother who abandoned them? I didn’t know for a long time. I had to think about what sort of messages I was giving about motherhood, and about what I felt was the truth in their situation.
Maggie Tulliver was such a difficult proposition for me that I spent Christmas one year whipping her out of the book entirely (not the way most people would spend Christmas, but writing tends not to acknowledge holidays). I left Sophie sitting in the kitchen alone for several months (wondering, probably – ‘But wasn’t I in the middle of talking to someone?’ – pity the poor heroines of half-finished novels who must live in limbo till the author gets it together again). I was unable to go on, until I decided that the book lacked something without the dreaded Maggie Tulliver, and had to slowly write her back in – I’d trashed any electronic record of her, and if you’re going to have to re-type you may as well re-write.
One of the most difficult and time-consuming things about writing is making things up. Sometimes it’s easier to put yourself out there into the world with your characters – to that end I sat in (with permission) on some classes at the university in Lismore where Sophie attends. This was extremely useful – so many little details to record, so many conversations to listen in on. In my mind I put Sophie into the situation and imagined how she’d react. And being a nursing mother means a certain amount of leakage taking place – for that I drew on my own experiences years earlier, when I lectured at that same institution with a young baby.
And the content of the course Sophie was taking to some extent determined various threads – the possibility of writing being ‘female’ in style; and Jane Eyre’s ‘red room’. I realised that in Secret Scribbled Notebooks I’d given Sophie a red room – had I subliminally remembered that part of Jane Eyre? a book I’d read so long ago and had almost forgotten. I love the way when writing that the perfect thing for your book seems to come your way at the right time – or is that only illusion – the pattern-making part of our minds that is what novel-writing is all about?
Spotlight:
by Joanne Horniman
Sophie is a 21-year-old single mother and this beautifully written novel explores her relationships in all their surprising and sensuous complexities. A companion to the award-winning Secret Scribbled Notebooks.