Diane Setterfield

My reading!

Thrilled. It’s the mark of a good story when someone wants to retell it. The casting is fabulous: Vanessa Redgrave and Olivia Colman, and you couldn’t do better than have Christopher Hampton write the script.

Where do stories come from? When I was a child I believed for some time that stories were natural phenomena, like trees and the weather, and that writers were merely scribes. I was only half wrong, perhaps.

Quite honestly it’s hard to say where the idea for The Thirteenth Tale came from. The book took three years to write and its real genesis was longer still. There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a gradual and slow accumulation of numerous small ideas.

Miss Winter’s voice was the first element that came to me. It grew out of my thinking about Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley character. On the surface of things, Ripley appears to be a quiet living, affable business man. Only he knows the truth about himself: that he is a psychopathic assassin. I had been considering what it must be like to know oneself to be one kind of person whilst giving in public the impression of being another kind of person altogether. I was moved by the loneliness such a person might feel, and in an exhilarating rush of inspiration (of which I wish there were more) I dashed down a piece that was later to become Miss Winter’s letter to Margaret.

Fairly soon after that, the idea that the book would be about twins came very firmly into my mind.

Then during the writing of the book other half-forgotten things came to mind. I had once had a dream about a house on fire. An ordinary enough dream, but it had haunted me with unusual persistence and it surfaced again now, seeming to want a role in the book.

Similarly I remembered that many years previously I met a man who told me he was a twin, bereaved at birth. He described to me how he felt before his parents told him the truth – for years he had the feeling of knowing something without knowing it. This too found its way into the tangle of the story.

It was like working out a very slow and complicated puzzle. How could all these pieces – and a thousand others – come together? What linked them? The main secret of the mystery came to me when I was walking home to the supermarket. I must admit, it took me by surprise and I was initially inclined to disregard it – Surely not? I remember thinking – but it imposed itself in a determined fashion.

From lots of different sources. There was an interview on the radio with Christopher Ondaatje in which he was asked what it was that hugely successful businessmen like himself have which ordinary people lack, and he replied that the question should be rephrased: what is it that people like him lack that drives them so. It got me thinking about workaholism, the reasons why people might become massively successful…

But I mustn’t forget the rooks! I moved house and now live near the Thames. Not far from me is a place where in winter you can see rook nests from the previous nesting season. To my mind the maze of leafless branches ressembled a brain, and the clots of nests got me thinking about brain events. I found my way to thinking about rooks and madness, rooks and fear, rooks and death… And then in summer there are the rooks themselves, laughing and dancing around the trees and they are so magnificently full of life! I was fascinated.

Things came together. I remembered a story my uncle told me from his boyhood about having killed a jackdaw without meaning to, and a friend told me about her ten-year old son’s sudden fear of death.

There were hundreds of small memories and details that combined to feed the book as it grew, but at its heart, most likely, is simply my own curiosity. I’m reluctant to accept that death is a mystery I cannot know the answer to. (At least, not yet. And I’m not in a rush to find out.) So I keep asking, knowing I can’t know, and my imagination keeps coming up with partial answers, half-answers, unanswers, anti-answers.

Yes. But I also thought you had to be extraordinary to be an author and that people like me did more ordinary jobs. So I considered working in a bookshop or a library but and ended up teaching French literature. By the time I was in my thirties I understood things better: it is books that are extraordinary, their authors are no more or less special than anyone else. Perhaps it helped that I once saw Val McDermid at a party. It was early on in her writing career, and I remember watching her closely and concluding that she was entirely normal. It was one more step towards the realisation that authors are just people who write and not a breed apart.

I sent sample chapters to four agents at once. Weeks and months later three of them sent me rejection letters, but it hardly mattered because by then Vivien Green at Sheil Land had asked for the whole manuscript, read it, accepted it and was busy selling it all over the world.

1. Before writing, spend several decades reading. (If this seems like a hardship then you may not have it in you to be a writer.)
2. Forget advances, bestseller lists, publishing trends. Just write the book you most want to read, whatever it is.
3. Find a handful of honest people who know what they are talking about and who are not afraid of hurting your feelings. Show them your work and listen to what they say.
4. When you have written the best book you possibly can, edit, edit and edit to make it even better.
5. Beg, scrimp and borrow to take your work on one of Arvon’s week-long writing courses taught by established writers. An early draft of The Thirteenth Tale caught the eye of Jim Crace at one of these courses, and the advice he gave me about getting an agent was pure gold.

This is an odd question, but people do keep asking it! I could do with three hands because although I work as standard on a laptop, I always have a pen and paper to hand for sudden ideas that come to mind, memos to myself, jotted lists of details to be worked in later.

Not really. I attended two week-long courses with the Arvon foundation, which were brilliant. The benefits were two-fold: firstly the contact with other apprentice writers, secondly feedback and encouragement with the established writers who tutored. Jim Crace was one of them, and when the writing of The Thirteenth Tale grew slow and arduous his positive comments kept me going when my confidence might otherwise have failed me. I had written them down and I taped them to the edge of my computer screen so they were always there to counter the self-doubt!

Creative writing courses are not the only way of getting a valuable apprenticeship. I have never regretted studying French at university. The practice of weekly translation into and out of French was brilliant for getting to grips with the divinely elusive and precise nature of language, for instance. And of course, doing my PhD I benefited hugely from reading and rereading the same few books over and over again (in my case it was André Gide), learning what happens deep in the engine of a novel.

A single favourite author? Impossible. But here’s a list of favourite books and authors:

Rose Tremain (Music and Silence is one of those novels I still keep thinking about even though I read it twenty years ago.)

Rohinton Mistry (everything by him! I was reading RH when I got the news that The Thirteenth Tale was to be published and thank goodness I had something this strongly engaging to plunge into. Reading gave me an opportunity to forget the drama going on in my real life.)

Philippe Claudel (Grey Souls is among the best crime novels I’ve ever read – and Claudel is not even a crime writer!)

Jim Crace (Quite simply this man is a genius. Should one person be allowed to be so gifted in his style and so intelligent in his thinking? Not only that, but he talks the best sense about writing I have ever heard.)

Hilary Mantel (You don’t need me to tell you about Hilary Mantel. But when you’ve read all about Cromwell, go back and read Fludd. Or her memoir, Giving up the Ghost.)

Carson McCullers (Sometimes when I’m reading my fingertips go numb. I think it’s because I’m so intent on reading that all the blood is going to my brain. The Ballad of the Sad Café did this. And The Heart is a Lonely Hunter made me gasp aloud. There aren’t many to match Carson.)

Wilkie Collins (I won’t hear a bad word spoken about melodrama. My sister got hold of The Woman in White somewhere when she was about thirteen. I had stand by patiently watching her read, so engrossed, so intent… I couldn’t wait for her to reach the final page so I could grab it off her and have loved Wilkie Collins ever since.)

Beverley Nichols (1950’s Noël Coward-esque writer about village gardens and gardeners. When I’m ill or suffering from overwork, his Merry Hall books are the ones I reach for. They are not for everyone, but if you like gardens, cats, and have a strong stomach for whimsy, Beverley is your man. Otherwise, steer clear.)

Andrew Miller (Last year I read Pure. I just kept smiling all the time. It wasn’t the subject matter that made me do it, just the joy of knowing that a human being had written something this wonderful.)

I’ve so enjoyed writing this list. I wish I could go on for longer. I would mention Erik Fosnes Hansen, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet quartet, Fred Vargas. And Colette. Not forgetting the pleasures of the books published by Persephone… And I haven’t even started on non-fiction…

I aspire to be like Jim Crace and put in a regular working week: 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. I admire this workmanlike approach. But I don’t seem to be able to stick to it, not least because books seem to need more and less time at different times of their development. Towards the end thirteen or fifteen hour days are not unusual. But at the beginning I frequently stop early and head off for a long creative walk. Sometimes the ideas come, sometimes not.

(Sometimes I read when I should be working. Not often. But the temptation is always there.)

I am sure my writing has been affected by my study of French in a great number of ways and not only by the literature. There can be nothing to match the practice of translation for deepening understanding of one’s own language. And I suspect an expert might be able to discern behind my English prose style the occasional shadow of a French linguistic structure. (Quite often if I am not sure how to phrase something I try it in my mind in French, then come back to English. The instant translation/retranslation exercise seems to free things up and I can usually see what I need to do to sort it out.)

As for the literature, how could it not affect my writing? For reading is without doubt the single most important factor affecting my work. When I was writing my PhD (very slowly, over seven years more or less) I read and reread half a dozen works by Gide. This kind of reading – intense, obsessive, constant – lays down rhythms in your mind that cannot easily be eradicated, and frequently when writing I am struck by phrases that have a distinctly Gidean cadence.

The most visible instance of Gide’s literary influence on me is perhaps in the title of The Thirteenth Tale. Gide liked what you could call the Chinese box effect (he wrote stories about authors who wrote stories about authors…) though he called it ‘mise en abyme’. I was fascinated by this structural device, but wanted to use it in a more traditional mystery novel, hence the missing thirteenth tale which gives my book its title and is a recurring device within it.

I can’t see that there will. I suppose it would technically be possible to give Margaret another mystery to solve, but I would struggle to motivate myself to do that because my interest lies so strongly with the psychological and emotional journeys of my characters and in that respect I think her story is complete.

I have two younger sisters, but no twin. The only element of The Thirteenth Tale that I consider to have grown out of my experience rather than my imagination, are the descriptions of reading – although I am not a Margaret. I do love the books by dead authors she so delights in (the nineteenth century has always been a favourite period) but I also like contemporary writing and more experimental fiction – the kind of thing in fact that Margaret’s father likes to read.

That could take some time to answer! But let me try to put it briefly. Both novels are concerned with death, but The Thirteenth Tale deals with the theme in a mystery novel, where Bellman & Black is a psychological ghost story. Both novels have at their heart a character who is struggling to cope with death. The Thirteenth Tale contains a lot of twists and turns, and is full of cliffhangers, whereas Bellman & Black – which is shorter – is more linear. There is a greater sense of inevitability, of the slow building to an inescapable climax. And Bellman & Black is a psychological drama that takes place in a mill and moves to a retail emporium in Regent Street. There is a lot of activity and energy; there is money to make, power to be harnessed for profit. It was interesting to set a ghost story in the hustle and bustle of the work place. The world of The Thirteenth Tale on the other hand was a domestic and familial one – and I loved writing that too!