On writing

‘That’s how I write: from place. And it’s the place itself that drives who the characters become, and how the narrative shapes itself.’

A lot of my trajectory has been determined by work. A lot of the influences that came into my work from radio, from Europe, from working in the music and sound poetry scenes in Europe, and a little bit of poetry, were also for making a living. So, I’m incredibly badly read now. And, of course, a lot of my life has been flying by the seat of my pants doing gigs.’

It’s a truism about suburbia that it’s defined by the distance between work and home. But that distance, for me, became a conceptual distance, and artistic distance, one that I thought I’d like to try and overcome somehow.

The impasse is a dead end, a cul de sac: a space to induce anxiety, even panic. The book I was writing had reached a kind of impasse.

I thought we’d be a good match, Miles and I. We share a background – we’re both writers, both country girls, both have the love of silence and horses and a tendency to romanticize these things. I recognize her ambition and I relate to her disappointments and her isolation. I thought the idea of fictionalizing her fictional autobiography, to fictionalize her historical self had merit.

This conversation between Elleke Boehmer and Meg Samuelson began in a book-talk seminar hosted by the Institute for Humanities in…

1. Living ‘Where do writers get their ideas from?’ This a question that comes up regularly for writers who find…

‘In such a moment, what, one wants to ask, is the purpose of stories?’

‘In hardboiled crime/detective/gangster films of the 1940s, there is often a scene where one character confronts another and hints at something unstated and highly menacing, but awesomely present in the air – usually leading to the utterance of the classic line: ‘Do I have to spell it out in words?’ This excellent phrase often comes to mind when reading the criticism devoted to almost every art form: film, painting, music, theatre, TV, sculpture. Because the dominant assumption, operative for a long time now, is that we do need to spell it all out in words – that our responses to creative works are only genuinely articulated, and furthermore legitimated, when we put them into ordered, written, rational form. ‘

‘For bad writers the idea of learning creative writing through education and training is unheard of. Learn? What do you mean learn? Good writing comes from the heart. This would be a completely unacceptable attitude in any other discipline. Would you try to perform brain surgery or replace a car engine or get into a professional boxing ring because you have heart? Nobody is denying that to be good at one of these professions you need to have a passion for them – but this is not supposed to be a substitute for education and training. Boxing is a particular area where I can draw some useful analogies because I was a fighter before I was a writer .’