Author chat: Elizabeth Buchan
Author chat: Elizabeth Buchan
Ahead of her appearance at this year’s Clapham Book Festival, we chatted with local author Elizabeth Buchan. Discover what she’s most looking forward to about the festival, hear the secrets of her writing process, and check out her top three tips for aspiring authors…
What are you looking forward to about this year’s festival?
Having been in on its inception, it is wonderful to see that the Clapham Book Festival is going from strength to strength. I love it when the buzz builds – who will appear, is the sale of tickets going well, will everything go smoothly? I am particularly looking forward to interviewing Lissa Evans about her latest novel, A Small Bomb at Dimperley. A dedicated admirer of Lissa’s, I am in awe of her ability to summon laughter and poignancy in the same sentence.
Tell us about your writing process?
I learnt early that I was never going to dash off a novel overnight and I must wait for the central idea around which the novel is written to arrive. When it does, it always demands that I write two or three drafts, each time getting to know the material better.
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What do you love most about doing the research?
Nothing beats being on the ground – in Prague, Rome or Paris for example! But it is the discovery of the left-field fact during the process of reading around the subject which gives me infinite pleasure and inspiration. One of those moments was during the writing of The New Mrs Clifton which is set in Clapham in 1946 and I managed to get hold of a set of maps which showed exactly which houses had been bombed and what type of bomb fell on them.
How do you develop your characters?
They take their time and I’ve learnt not to hurry the process. I wait for them to begin to speak to me – which is usually during the night. Or first thing in the morning. That ‘whisper’ in my ear directs what I then do with them on the page.
When did you start writing?
I had my first published piece in a school magazine which set me on the path. However, I decided to wait until my children were through the baby stage and I could see my way to giving up my job in publishing before embarking full time with writing. I felt my way into the process by compiling a book of limericks for children, helped by a childhood friend who was blind and had a brilliant feel for rhythms and nonsense. He has since died and I like to think it contains his elegy. I followed this with a biography of Beatrix Potter for children before I embarked on an adult novel set during the first French Revolution – which, of course, necessitated a trip to Paris. Why would it not? Two sharp, vivid memories stand out from the that trip. Seeing a guillotine blade in the museum and a letter written in prison by Marie-Antoinette pricked out on paper with a pin.
What would be your top three tips for aspiring authors?
Do it. No amount of displacement activity will get a book written. Build your writing muscles as you would build your physical ones at the gym. Write every day, no matter how few words this may be. Understand how you work. For example, are you an owl or a lark? If the latter, plan to write in the earliest slot you can arrange it. Sometimes, writing can be hard and dispiriting and it makes sense to play to your strengths and comfort zone while at work.
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What would you say are the main challenges as an author and how do you overcome them?
Keeping going when you feel daunted, or you’ve had a bad review, or publication day passes without a fanfare (many, many authors remark on the latter). Finding your voice is also crucial. That requires hard thought, continuous and wide-ranging reading and a search within yourself to unearth what you are trying to do.
What is the best novel you have ever read?
Impossible to decide. Novels lend themselves to different periods of your life. At university, I was obsessed by Fontane’s Effi Briest and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Later, I fell on Anne Tyler’s An Accidental Tourist and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. But my lifelong companion is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Gothic thrills, a love story and a declaration for all time that the poor, plain and insignificant have fully as much soul and feeling as anyone else.
What are you reading at the moment?
In Memoriam by Alice Winn: an astonishingly powerful and moving debut which mines the horror of the First World War – ‘Two of his men killed themselves in the night. Ellwood felt no sympathy for them, They were going to die anyway…’ but also explores the power of loving someone, and the redemption that comes from loving.
Where are your favourite places in south west London with a literary connection and why?
There are so many but if forced to choose it would be Number 14 Northside where Graham Greene lived from 1935-1940
Clapham Book Festival will be taking Place on 12th October 2024. BOOK TICKETS HERE
Elizabeth Buchan’s latest novel is Bonjour, Sophie (Corvus, £17.99)
