"In March the running water of the valley is bitter, acid cold, as snow on the fells begins to melt and is brought down over chilled rocks and icy beds. It has in it all the breaking soul of winter, thousands of dying flakes in one long, moving water-coffin."
That's one blazing passage from Sarah Hall's most recent novel, Haweswater--a meditation on the earth-shaking changes in a poor farming village in England. She's our special guest this week, explaining how to research historical novels and survive as a fledgling writer.
Welcome to the first installment of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...
Jason Boog:
How did you support yourself while writing your first book? How did you balance your working/family life with this novel-writing process?
Sarah Hall:
It wasn't that daunting...
The thing about writing is it's a passion, a pleasure and a compulsion, and yes some days are hard, but it's the best thing in the world and that mitigates much of the anxiety and worry, and it has a way of influencing the practicalities.
Especially with a first novel - at least mine - it's usually un-commissioned so has to be a private labour of love, a gamble, an ambitious venture, and who knows what will come of it.
There's no industry context yet. This is the truest freedom probably ever experienced in the writer's life.
At the time when I was writing Haweswater I had twelve weeks off between a couple of crappy part-time jobs, and my (now ex) husband (but still good friend) was studying in law school, so things were pretty tight. It was touch and go whether or not the phone bill was going to get paid each month!
But hey, there were hours in the day, and it was better that spending free time watching TV, right?
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