Interview with Louise Wise of Wise Words
Tell us about your current book.
The Testament of Mariam is set in the first century, partly in the southern part of Roman Gaul, near present-day Marseille, and partly in the Roman-occupied province of Palestine, known to its Jewish inhabitants as the land of Judah. Mariam has fled her homeland thirty years before and settled in Gaul, since when she has closed her mind to what happened in her childhood and youth. Now she hears that the last of her brothers is dead – murdered – and the past begins to haunt her as she slips into her last illness. The story continues, weaving these two timeframes together, as Mariam’s past and present resonate with each other.
A rebellious child, unhappy in the restricted life of a Jewish peasant, she adores her older, gifted brother, Yeshûa. At fourteen she is betrothed to his friend Yehûdâ, but the marriage is not consummated, because Mariam and Yehûdâ both follow Yeshûa as he sets out in the hope of persuading people that they can find a new kingdom, a new dispensation, through kindness and love. ‘We were young. We were going to change the world.’ Ironically, Mariam feels they have failed, when her brother is crucified and she and Yehûdâ are sent by him into separate exiles.
The seed of the idea was a desire on my part to try to work out what the real man and his family would have been like, buried underneath 2,000 years of theology and church hierarchy. Jesus (Yeshûa is the Aramaic form) had sisters, although Mariam is fictional, and I wondered what it would have been like to be the sister of such a man. Mariam can never quite accept that he is divine and constantly tries to find rational explanations for events that others accept as miracles. This is neither a religious nor an anti-religious book, but an attempt to portray what it must have been like to live in an occupied country whose inhabitants never accepted Roman rule, but constantly rebelled, to be put down finally, bloodily, at about the time Mariam dies. I also found it intriguing that many of Yeshûa’s followers were women, at a time when a woman was expected to stay at home, under the total power of her father, until she was handed over to the control of her husband. Yet these women wandered the countryside and were present at the crucifixion (when the men had fled). In the years that followed, women were driven away from the centre of the church by the misogynistic church fathers.
The Holy Land has been a place of conflict for centuries – even millennia – and the struggles of 2,000 years ago set the pattern for what continues to this day.
Why that genre?
It isn’t a genre novel, unless you call literary fiction a genre!
What gives you the stimulus to write this particular genre?
This is the type of fiction I mainly read. I have nothing against genre fiction, it just isn’t the kind of thing I want to write, so I suppose you could say that the stimulus is that I write the sort of fiction I enjoy reading. Don’t we all?
Have you tried to write in another genre?
All my novels are literary fiction. The first three had contemporary, or near-contemporary, settings, but also strands from the past. This latest is historical, but it too has two time-lines, interwoven.
Is your book a stand-alone or part of a series?
The Testament of Mariam is stand-alone, as my previous novels have been. When my first novel (The Anniversary) was published, my editor at Random House was keen for me to write a sequel, but I felt that it was complete in itself. I had said all I wanted to say about that group of characters. I can see the advantages for both writers and publishers of series, particularly crime series, but I’m always eager to move on to something new.
Have your characters or writing been inspired by friends/ family?
No, not really. Though I think all writers draw on their own life experience, however much that may be modified and shaped in the course of writing. Our knowledge of people and their hopes and fears, our familiarity with the relationships between people and between individuals and society – all of these have to come from our own experience, but experience is transmitted and transmuted through the creative imagination to become something new and fresh.
How long does it take you to write a book?
How long is a piece of string? A lot depends on the amount of research involved, and I always seem to write things which require massive research! I’ve never completed a book in less than a year. Once the research and planning are completed, I have been known to write a first draft in six weeks. It’s the preparation beforehand, and the editing and polishing afterwards, which fill up the rest of the year.
Which comes first for you – characters or plot?
Always the characters. Generally the characters in an initial situation. The plot evolves as the characters evolve. I don’t write detailed synopses in advance, as I find that is the kiss of death to creativity. I know where I’m starting and I generally know roughly where I’m going to finish; I know a few milestones on the way. The rest develops as I write. Before I start each chapter, I usually note down (briefly) the scenes I want to cover in that chapter, though things can change in the course of writing.
How did you get into writing? Did you always want to become a writer?
Yes. I learned to read very early, at the age of three, and books and writing have been an essential part of my life ever since. I wrote as a child, became uncomfortably self-conscious as a teenager, then did a great deal of academic writing (lectures, research papers and the like). I also did quite a lot of journalism. Finally, I said to myself that I’d better make up my mind to get on with the creative writing if I was ever going to do it. The Anniversary was the result.
What mistakes do you see new writers make?
The commonest mistake is to try to write something perfect as soon as pen touches paper or finger touches keyboard. New writers will often worry away at that first chapter, or even those first few pages, going over and over them, without progressing. Eventually the words become almost meaningless, enthusiasm wanes, self-doubt overwhelms the poor writer. (And we all suffer from self-doubt.) The most important thing is to forge ahead to the end of the first draft. Never mind if you feel it’s rubbish. Finish it!
What advice would you give aspiring authors?
- Write the kind of book you enjoy reading.
- Read and read and read good writers.
- If you need to do research, do it before you start, but realise you may need to look things up later. When you hit such a point in your writing, make a note of what you need to check later (at the editing stage), but keep writing, unless the point is so crucial that you must look it up. However, don’t let yourself become distracted!
- Complete your first draft before editing and polishing.
- If you find it difficult to start each day, read through what you wrote the previous day. This will usually remind you of what you wanted to say next.
- If you find yourself truly stuck, either do something completely different – go for a walk or a swim, meet a friend for coffee – or else write something which is not part of your novel. Quite a good trick is to write a letter to yourself, complaining about the writing problem. Sometimes articulating it will solve it.
- It’s often a good idea to set your completed first draft aside to stew for a while, before you start editing. You will come back to it with a fresher eye. If ideas occur to you during this period, make a note of them for later use.
- Polish your manuscript until you cannot make it any better. If there are any passages about which you feel uneasy, you are probably, instinctively, right. Cut them or rewrite them.
- When it’s as good as you can make it, try to find some one who is not emotionally close to you to read it. You need someone with good literary judgement, who isn’t afraid to hurt your feelings! A writers’ group, an online peer review group, or a reputable literary consultancy are all possible.
- Have the courage of your convictions! Send it out to agents and publishers or self-publish. Remember that every great writer was once a beginner.
Good Luck!
Excerpt from interview with Louise Wise, 13 July 2010