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| Interview with Beryl Bainbridge by Debbie Taylor Beryl Bainbridge has writers’ block. (You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after 17 novels she’d have got the hang of it?) The problem, it seems, has been the title. It has taken her two years to get it right. For a while it was called The Might Have Been: a perfectly good title; nicely intriguing, with a hint of her trademark wry humour. But she wasn’t happy with it. So the rest of the book had to wait until she was. ‘I can’t go on to the next line until the previous one is perfect,’ she tells me. ‘So, of course, the first page is the hardest of all.’ She seems rather proud of this fact, as though such a level of perfectionism is a virtue. But it’s clearly a source of anguish as well as satisfaction. Later she will refer to the writing process as ‘terrible’ and ‘painful’. ‘I’d rather do anything else. It’s horrible. And it doesn’t get any easier.’ We’re sitting in her much-described terraced house in Camden, where – accustomed to its impact on new visitors – she’s been letting me poke about a bit. There they all are: the fabled buffalo in the hallway; the life-sized plaster saints in the kitchen; the Hitler dummy in the bedroom. The new book (a detective novel set in the Seventies) is now called Dear Brutus. But she still hasn’t started it properly, because there are other decisions to take, about voice and structure, before she can launch herself into the writing (see The Bainbridge Method). Perfectionism is not the only problem… For the whole interview, read Issue 19 » Subscribe! Go to » Beryl Bainbridges's Method |
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For more on BERYL BAINBRIDGE, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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