Interview with Jane Rusbridge

Q: Jane, it was such a pleasure to meet you last week, thanks so much for coming along to the Tea Rooms and an even bigger thank you for a copy of your book, ‘The Devil’s Music’. I know you left me so I could write, but I couldn’t help but start reading your book and then was completely unable to put it back down. Fortunately, I’m still on track I think for my rewrites for my deadline with a prospective agent for my book on Friday! Can you tell me about your opening lines and chapters? How did they read in previous drafts and how did you decide on changes to get you to a point where you thought they were right?

A: Thanks, Helen. So glad you didn’t put THE DEVIL’S MUSIC on the cosy fire that flickered beside you in the Tea Rooms…

The opening changed more than any other section of the novel. It was always the weakest bit in previous drafts, not because of the line by line quality of the prose (I polished that until it was blinding) but because it was too static. There were way too many getting-to-know the character scenes. With a flawed, possibly unsympathetic character like Andrew, my protagonist, I had to find a way of encouraging the reader to empathise. In early drafts, I wasn’t succeeding.

It wasn’t until I spent an hour with Helen, my editor at Bloomsbury, an hour which convinced me she understood the novel better than I did, that I was brave enough to cut eight thousand words or more from the beginning. Tricky, because there were all sort of details I had to pop in somewhere else. I highlighted all of them in pink. That was the easy part.

In theory, I knew all about the essential ‘hook’ to pull the reader in. In practice, not until Helen suggested it might be a good idea to use a snippet from a scene right at the core of the novel – where Andy, then about 9, is left in charge of his baby sister on the beach while his mother and sister go to fetch ice creams – did I manage to apply the theory to THE DEVIL’S MUSIC. Why I hadn’t seen it before, I don’t know – lack of experience? This is really my first novel; there are none under the bed.

So I wrote it, the memory which has haunted Andrew all his adult life, which gives him nightmares. It’s less than two pages and it took weeks. Weeks. In between times, I was busy with my highlighter and cut and paste, but I picked and picked and picked at those two pages. They had to work really hard: they had to show how the balance of Andy’s life had been upset, and they had to pull the reader in.

Q: I’m very grateful to Isabel Ashdown, one of your fellow alumni from the Chichester University Creative Writing MA, for introducing us. What made you apply for the MA and how did you find it helped you develop as a writer?

A: I started writing at 35, a mature student on the BA at Chi Uni. I had a job and small children, so took 6 years to complete the degree part time. I loved it! All of it, the reading and the writing of essays, the inspirational teachers and the all talk about books, books, books. But I especially loved the creative writing. To my complete surprise, I won the university Philip LeBrun prize given to the student with the highest mark in creative writing. That prize gave me the confidence to apply for an MA. I thought, maybe I can do this, just maybe!

I studied the MA part time too. I was a beginner and studying part time gave me a chance to develop as a writer and as a reader. The course pushed me into areas of experimentation, particularly with short stories and poetry that I wouldn’t have tried on my own. I didn’t start my novel until right at the end, when I wrote the first 3 chapters for my dissertation. For me, the MA was an excellent way to learn the craft and, with high level work-shopping, to develop critical editing skills. The old argument that you can’t teach creative writing seems to ignore this aspect of writing, the craft.

Q: In the book there are the lines that hold the title: “I hold my breath and close my eyes. Grampy tells me about the Lapland witches who tied wind knots to sail by. Whistling is the Devil’s music. It might make a storm come.” Was ‘The Devil’s Music’ always the title for the book? How did it come about?

A: For a long time, the title was Left Over Right and Under. When the novel was almost finished, several people said they didn’t like it much. These were people whose views I respected: I needed to pay attention. So, not knowing what else to do, I re read the climax scene in the book. With short stories, reading through and underlining anything, a word or a phrase that might make a good title sometimes works.  I can’t remember what else I underlined, but I liked The Devil’s Music straight away. I found, when I was re-drafting, the new title gave me focus, too. At a fundamental level the novel isn’t about knots, as the first title implied, it’s about ‘a storm’ which almost wrecks a family, a series of events which a little boy believes he has brought about by whistling.

Q: Knots are a big theme, and fascinating one in the book. I felt they held things together when things were falling apart, were objects of beauty that traditionally we think of as functional, and tied together present and past. Where did the idea for knots come from and how did you research them?

A: I was in the uni library one day looking for something else and I came across an extract, written in the fifties by the child psychologist, Winnicott, about a boy who was ‘preoccupied’ with string. He tied things together. Although Winnicott doesn’t specifically mention them, one thing led to another and knots soon became central.

And research: early on I bought a second hand copy of THE book on knots – huge and fat, now very well-thumbed and filled with post-it notes – The Ashley Book of Knots. Clifford Ashley writes beautifully about knots, as though life without them is something not worth contemplating. I had to pay to quote directly from Ashley, but it was worth every penny!

Q: As an aspiring to be published writer I am particularly interested in how authors get from putting their words down to seeing them printed and bound on the shop shelves. What’s your story?

A: I started sending poems and stories out to competitions once I started on the MA. It’s a good way to toughen up and learn perseverance. I also learned that if it’s any good, your work only has to land on the right desk, at the right time. Make the writing better. Keep sending it out. Make your own luck.

For one competition, the prize was a week’s Arvon course.  One of the teachers was the Australian writer, Kathryn Heyman, who liked what she saw of my shambolic novel and later emailed to offer mentorship – an enormous privilege. Kathryn can teach: she energises a room the moment she walks in. She can also write, and I would love to write as well as she does. You don’t often find one person with both those skills in abundance.

With Kathryn’s help – working under the Gold Dust scheme – six months later, although my novel was not quite finished, it was accepted by 2 agents, both recommended by Kathryn. I chose Hannah, at Rogers, Coleridge and White because she instantly put me at ease. It just felt right. Hannah and I worked together to complete the ending and then she sent THE DEVIL’S MUSIC out to publishers. Bloomsbury were one of the first to show interest and when they offered me a two book deal – that’s when I really felt lucky!

Q: The reader only learns the name of the mother character in the book at the postscript. The scenes from her point of view are told from 2^nd person for the rest of the book. I loved this approach – I knew her, I was her as a result of the “you” effect of the 2^nd person narrative. I felt like I met her formally in the postscript – really powerful. How did you decide this approach?

A: I could write an essay on this! But I’ll try not to…

At first, the 2^nd person was one of those things which evolved without any conscious decision. I was playing. I had never written in the 2^nd person so it was an experiment, with the very first section I ever wrote of the mother’s voice. I felt immediately that the reflective intensity and introspective quality was right for a woman who has ‘lost’ herself, and is also lost to her child.

But it’s no secret 2^nd person can put readers off instantly. I had to consider that. Towards the end of the novel writing process, I had a crisis of confidence and began rewriting the whole thing in 3^rd person, to be ‘safe’. I didn’t get far; it was totally dead. There are good reasons for using 2^nd person; it is right for this novel. I just had to get on with it. Have more courage. It was such a relief when my editor at Bloomsbury liked the use of the 2^nd person, I could have cart-wheeled around the room!

And her name: again, initially not naming the mother wasn’t an active decision. It was simply a rather strange side-effect of writing in the close 2^nd person. Someone in a workshop asked what her name was and, although I had written many scenes from her perspective and knew her inside out, I had no idea. I hadn’t even thought about it. When I did, I realised that leaving her unnamed for most of the novel would echo her loss, in the stifling confines of her marriage, of a sense of identity.

Q: Andy and Sarah live unconventional lives. Are they missing something, searching for something, or are they being true to themselves?

A: Interesting question. I think Sarah is being true to herself. She was great fun to write – all that energy. In fact she almost wrote herself! Sarah says what she thinks. She’s not afraid.

Andrew – the man, as opposed to the little boy, was very tricky to write, the hardest of the three main narrative voices, not because he is a man, but because his head is filled with knots. He doesn’t allow himself to think about much else, because knots are what help him survive. It’s not his fault, but he’s missing something. However, there is hope for him!

Q: Where did this book start? Where was the seed of the story? Was it Elaine, the damaged child? Michael, the overbearing, cruel husband and father? Andy, the intuitive, intelligent and self-possessed child?

A: The book started with Andy, the child.

After reading that first, tiny Winnicott extract in the library, a little boy ‘haunted’ me. I saw him, head bent to his ball of string, tying furniture and cushions together in a room. I worried about him. So I went back to the library, searched for and read the whole case study. It made me extraordinarily angry! Recently, I reread the case study and can’t logically understand where this anger sprang from. It was to do with the supercilious tone, the language used (phrases such as ‘mentally deficient’), Winnicott’s paternalistic assumption that he was ‘right’. I’m guessing some of the anger was because Winnicott’s theories clashed with the character I had already begun to imagine, the boy I was ‘seeing’. I wanted to give that boy a voice. I wanted knots to save him.

But the key that unlocked the story was Elaine, the baby damaged during a difficult labour.

Q: You managed to control the cover image of your book – a notoriously difficult thing for an author to achieve. Not only that, the image is a photograph that one of your daughter’s took. How did you achieve this?

A: I did know I would have only marginal say in the cover design, and I accept this is because the marketing people match a debut novel cover to the covers of books by similar writers. It was only when I chatted with my editor and discovered they were considering a photographic image that I metamorphosed into a pushy mother and asked if they would consider my daughter’s photographs. Helen was very good; she didn’t roll her eyes or say, ‘Oh no, here we go’ – although she probably felt like it.

So, my daughter, Natalie, read the pivotal scene of the novel. Then she took a length of rope, an old bucket and my friend Karen’s two boys down onto West Wittering beach and took lots of photographs. Together we chose about 12 photos, Nat edited them and we emailed them off. I heard the same day from Helen, because she loved them all. But everything has to pass through the ‘Marketing Test’, and we had to wait quite a bit longer to hear the final news.

The art department at Bloomsbury actually designed the cover – the colours, the lettering and layout – but they’ve used 3of Nat’s images (www.nmfoto.co.uk) on the hardback and 4^th on the paperback, so we’re delighted.

Q: If you were a fish, what sort of fish would you be? I’d like to be a clown fish. Not only are they cute and fun, but I like that they are symbiotic with anemones, a fascinating animal in itself. I also am tickled by the fact that if you put an immature pair of males in a tank together, the dominant one is likely to change into a female. Kind of turns things on its head, doesn’t it?!

A: No hesitation, I’m going to be a seahorse. Small, with an elusive, magical quality, they are unique and mysterious. Plus, they are inept swimmers (same here) and prefer warm, shallow water (ditto).  They can die of exhaustion in storm-roiled seas (I do need to get to the gym sometime in the next 10 years). And I like their individuality. Did you know each seahorse has its own coronet, different in detail to all other seahorse coronets, just like a human fingerprint? Amazing.