::mslexia author method::

The Andrea Levy Method
From Interview no. 25

• Start from where you are: your own memories; the memories of your relatives, friends. Your job is to weave a tapestry of the Caribbean immigrant experience (you used to be a weaver). Each book you write is a different part of that tapestry.

• Get chatting (you’re good at chatting), teasing out anecdotes, until you home in on a few bare patches on your tapestry (a landlady taking immigrant lodgers, for example; Jamaican volunteers in the RAF).

• Your best thinking is done on the edge of sleep, at morning or at night. You start to fixate on your mother arriving in England and being befriended by a white woman in a boarding house.

• This is the worst bit: knowing what your book’s about but nothing about its pattern or its characters. The pattern is especially important to you – it must not be linear and it must be different to all your previous books.

• Draw some lines on a sheet of paper and list the main things that happen to your two characters and their husbands. You have no idea what these characters are like or how they met. It’s chaotic and vague and you hate that. But it’s chicken and egg. You can’t decide on the pattern until you’ve started writing, but the writing is agony until the pattern emerges.

• To cut through the impasse you make a rule. You must write every day, but you must not spend more than an hour writing. It works. The words start flowing. The stiches build up.

• You’re beginning to get excited, then you realise you have to research the Second World War. This is alarming: you’ll have to interview old people about their wartime experiences. And where on earth will you find them? You begin with your hairdresser, whose father belongs to an ex-servicemen’s association.

• You progress by fits and starts: writing then stopping to research as you need to. A set of box files to hold background notes on each character becomes essential.

• The characters are your next problem. They are cardboard cut-outs from Central Casting. You have to rewrite scenes over and over until their individual voices can be heard.

• Now you’re into the book, fate rewards you with gifts to enrich your research: an obscure book about aircraft; a one-off TV documentary; friends of friends with priceless tales to tell.

By now you’re writing scenes in longhand at your local library, returning to type them up and ‘iron them out’ on your computer, then reading them aloud to your tactful husband. You’re on the home strait at last.

Your best thinking is done on the edge of sleep, at morning or at night. You start to fixate on your mother arriving in England and being befriended by a white woman in a boarding house.