Ali Shaw, award-winning author of The Girl with Glass Feet and The Man who Rained, is preparing for the publication of his third novel, The Trees. He has a degree in English Literature and has worked as a bookseller and at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, so he will feel right at home at Blackpool Central Library on July 2. He chatted to Sandra Mangan about his work.
Tell us a little about The Man who Rained?
It’s about a young woman called Elsa, who leaves New York after the death of her father. She catches a flight to a far-flung and isolated place called Thunderstown, there to try to make sense of herself. Instead she meets a young man, Finn, who has a storm trapped in his heart. That’s not a metaphor, he really does have a storm trapped inside him, and it manifests when he’s elated or melancholy or grieving. He’s watched over by a foreboding elder of the town who does all he can to stop Elsa and Finn from crossing paths. It’s a love story, but also a tale about the struggle to find your place in the world.
How long have you been writing?
I’ve been making up stories for as long as I can remember. My mum says I never stopped inventing them, even as a little kid. Lots of my earliest memories involve mistaking imaginary things for reality. I remember digging for dragon eggs in the playground, and hurling myself from the top of the stairs because I thought I’d turn into a sparrow.
What inspires the ideas for your books?
Ideas just seem to drop into my head like stones into water. The hardest part isn’t having them, it’s choosing which ones have the potential to become good stories. My ideas always begin as images. When I wrote The Girl with Glass Feet, which is about a girl who transforms into glass, the image of a pair of transparent feet just arrived very vividly in my head. I was on an escalator in Reading train station, so I have no idea what prompted it. I only knew that they were a real person’s feet, not those of a sculpture, and that there was a novel to be written about them.
How do you go about researching your books?
My novels have so far been set in imaginary backwaters of the real world. St. Hauda’s Land, the island chain in which The Girl with Glass Feet is set, is based on a mixture of remote Arctic islands and the countryside where I grew up. Thunderstown, where The Man who Rained takes place, is based on parts of Wales and Arizona. Much of my research involves learning more about such places, raking my own memories as well as reading those of others. I compile portrait photographs of residents past and present, and try to study as much local folklore as possible. It helps to think of the imagination as a kind of cauldron, into which all this stuff gets thrown. I let it bubble away for a while, then see what the stewed results taste like. Because I’m inventing settings, I don’t have to recreate things as faithfully as other writers, but I still want them to feel like they could exist, somewhere out there.
How do you go about plotting a story?
As I mentioned earlier, my ideas always begin with an image. Mulling over that image leads to story ideas and characters, which I then try to piece together into something that makes sense. I try to keep everything rooted in that initial idea. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but generally speaking if I can’t draw some direct link between the image and the plot idea, I decide to leave it out. Nowadays I plan a great deal more than I used to, but to begin with I just tried to feel my way towards the structure of the story.
What part does drawing play in your writing process?
I do a lot of drawing, and always have done. I’m a very visual person, so it’s natural to look for ways to bring the two together. Sometimes I directly illustrate something I’m writing about, in order to build a fuller picture of it. Other times I’m superstitious of doing that, and would rather only conceive of things in words. It’s similar to when an actor’s face replaces the one you’d first imagined, after you’ve watched a film adaptation of a book you’ve read. Drawing something you’re imagining can sometimes lock it down too neatly. With that in mind, I often try to draw stuff that’s a step away from what I’m writing about. I drew a lot of cloud monsters while writing The Man who Rained, even though none appear in the book. They seemed like the sorts of things that belonged in that novel’s visual universe.
Are you a fiction reader? Who are the writers you admire?
My favourites are probably Franz Kafka and Cormac McCarthy, although the latter is so good he sometimes makes me want to hang my pen up.
Are you a disciplined, nine-to-five person, or do you prefer to go with the creative flow?
At the moment I combine writing with looking after my baby daughter, so she tends to dictate my working hours! That said, I’ve always tried to stay disciplined and treat writing as a job you have to stick at, whether you feel like it or not. I tend to find that my best work is the result of lots of redrafting and head-scratching. I’m not sure I’d ever write anything publishable if I waited for the moment to be right.
Do you have any advice for would-be writers?
Do everything you can to get in touch with your subconscious. It has better ideas than you do, and probably a clearer understanding of what compels you.
Have you visited Blackpool before?
It’s been a while, but I used to live in Lancaster and came down a few times during those years. I’m really looking forward to being back there for Wordpool.
What’s next for you?
My third novel, The Trees, will be published by Bloomsbury in a few months’ time, and I’m already hard at work on another one. The Trees has been the most ambitious thing I’ve written to date, so my job is to try to top that with my next project.
Tell us a little about The Trees?
The Trees is about an enchanted forest that appears in the blink of an eye, all over the world, overgrowing and destroying everything that stands before it. It’s as if several centuries of ruin and natural reclamation have happened in an instant. The story follows a hopeless, cowardly Englishman whose estranged wife is in Ireland. He sets off on foot, through the woods and the devastated world, hoping to save both his marriage and himself.
ELEVENSES WITH ALI SHAW, Brunswick Room, Blackpool Central Library, July 2, 11am. Tickets £3 (£2.50 for library members). Inc pastries, coffee or tea.
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