Interview with Lisa Glass by Leena

Lisa's first novel, Prince Rupert's Teardrop , was officially released by Two Ravens Press last week, so I thought I'd ask her a few questions about the book and writing in general. The novel is a very unusual literary thriller: Mary's Armenian-born mother has disappeared, and Mary is convinced she's been kidnapped by a serial killer. Unfortunately, her mission to get her mother back is complicated by her own delusions and paranoia... (I reviewed the book on my old blog and transferred the review here .)

This is something I'm very curious about myself: where did the novel start? You have three characters whose stories could make a novel each. How did you go about combining the strands? Which was there first?

I started with Mary and her mother. I knew I wanted to write about that type of relationship. I was interested in women who are always the daughter, even in middle-age, and never the mother. And how that intense mother/daughter relationship can be love/hate: cycles of pulling together and pushing each other away. Then breaking those bonds. One character vanishing. A mother who had been there for every day of her daughter's life, suddenly gone.

The serial killer character (be he real or imagined, depending on who you talk to!) came later. I originally wrote him as a delusion of Mary's, but the more she believed in him, the more I did. At this point, I can't decide if he's real or not.

The chapter about the Armenian genocide is incredibly powerful, and must have taken a great deal of research. Were you ever tempted to write an entire novel on the subject?

That chapter did take a lot of research, and some of the things in there I'd heard first-hand from my nan, who survived those massacres. As there's some controversy about the genocide, I felt it was important for Mary to disbelieve Meghranoush and to question it. Versions of reality are important in the book, I think, and although I wanted to include some experiences of the Armenian genocide, I didn't want them to feel authoritative. I didn't want it to be propaganda. I wanted it to be powerful, but remain subjective. I think I am still tempted to write an entire novel on the subject, but I wonder if I am too close to it emotionally. It was very draining just to write one chapter on the subject, and each of the revisions felt painful. Since there's been so much in the news lately about the Armenian genocide, I can't help thinking there's bound to be a writer out there somewhere who's found a way to set it down in a novel.

The non-authoritativeness applies to the other themes in the book as well - the violence, the feminism. Mary bears a great resemblance to the age-old caricature of a feminist: a lonely, unattractive, man-hating and -fearing spinster; a modern-day witch, as it were... but that doesn't make her observations any less true. The feminism is hard to pin down, but it's clearly there.

Yes, the feminism is hard to pin down because Mary also dislikes women and children too, so her disapproval is cast quite widely. I took a class at uni called ‘Gender and Monstrosity', which had me thinking about representations of women and the idea of ‘femininity' and ‘the witch'. I think I decided then that I didn't want my heroine to be typically young, sweet and perky. I wanted to take someone with a difficult personality and write about her. I was also thinking about the taboo of mental illness and how isolation can make the lives of schizophrenics so much harder. So although Mary might look witchy, she'd doubtless see us as the goblins. And she'd probably disagree that she was feminist, and would claim to be solely ‘Maryist'. I think she is feminist though and I love the way that after her mental breakdown she stops taking shit from other people. In a way she becomes empowered once she's lost her marbles...

You live in Cornwall, and the South West of England really seems to come alive in PRT . How important is the South West in particular to you, as a setting? Do you think you'd find a similar connection with different places and landscapes?

I think place is hugely important. I find that place can also lead to plot. I remember visiting the War Memorial on Plymouth Hoe and being very affected. At this point I was deep into a rewrite , but I knew then that I wanted the memorial to be in the book, so I went home and wrote a very important scene…I do feel a deep connection with the South West. I'm proud to live here and I doubt I'll ever leave. My second book is strongly rooted in Newquay and again the places helped map out the plot. For some reason I feel I need to live in a place before I can write about it.

There are some great flashes of black humour in Prince Rupert's Teadrop , and your author bio says you eloped with your husband so there must be a little hopeless romantic inside Lisa Glass, too.

Yes, I am a romantic at heart. I'm also quite a cheery soul, so maybe that accounts for some of the black humour creeping through PRT.

You read widely, and seem to enjoy writing in different genres too. Do you approach every genre as a genre - with a different set of conventions and challenges - or do you just set out to tell a particular story and see where it takes you? Do you like to play around with genre expectations?

It's definitely about seeing where the story goes. I didn't even know PRT was literary fiction until my agent told me. I do read widely and love the idea of telling different stories in different ways. I hear you're supposed to stick to a genre, but I can't see myself doing that.

I know you're not only a prolific writer, but a prolific re-writer too - how do you get so much writing done? What's your daily routine like?

I do most of my writing at night, from 10 until 4, since there are far fewer distractions. Also, I think I'm more imaginative at night. I go through phases of living on very little sleep. Towards the end of a book I generally get no more than 4 hours rest, and rather than being tired, I become weirdly hyperactive. I can go on like that for a few months and then fatigue hits me like a punch in the face and I go back to sleeping for Britain. On rewriting, yes, that's true. For me it's always 5% writing and 95% rewriting. My first drafts bear no resemblance to the finished book. Thank god.

You've got an MA in Creative Writing. It's interesting because one often imagines these courses as churning out generic, bland-vanilla prose, which yours certainly is not. How important do you think the MA was for your development as a writer?

The MA was really important in that it helped give me the confidence to write. I'd never done any writing before the MA. No one on the course was writing literary fiction. We were a mix of children's writers, crime writers, chicklit writers, saga writers and fantasy writers. I mostly wrote horror. One woman wrote successful erotic thrillers and one of the blokes was there primarily to improve his lyrics, as he was the singer in a rock band. Since we were such an eclectic mix, we tended to try lots of different writing styles. It was a brilliant and fun experience, and it gave me the confidence to try writing as a career.

Is there anything you regret, or wish you'd known about writing and publishing before you started?

I wish I'd known how long it all takes. The submission process to editors can go on for months and months and it's often the same with agents.

Please recommend a good book. No, wait - recommend five. The more books the merrier...

The Eyrie by Stevie Davies. I've just finished The Eyrie and it's wonderful. It's set in Swansea (where I went to university) and I couldn't put it down. Again, it was the humour that hooked me. I love books that make me laugh.

The Observations by Jane Harris is a recent favourite. Such good fun and the phrasings are wonderful. It's similar to my second book, and it was a relief to find there were other Victorian romps being written and enjoyed.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. I studied it at university and I was hooked on all the different readings and interpretations. I think that probably fed into my first novel. In fact, the first piece of creative writing I ever did was a creative paper on TRB, which inspired me to do the MA.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (okay, technically 3 books). J.R.R Tolkien. It was the first book I ever fell in love with. I felt bereaved when I came to the end of the trilogy. I was about 12 and I read them over the Six Weeks school holiday. I've re-read them dozens of times since. I desperately wanted to be called Arwen. I still consider calling my firstborn Arwen, irrespective of gender...

Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor is hilarious. Another book I've read dozens of times. It's the only book that makes me laugh wildly on public transport.

(Many thanks to Lisa for the interview! Now, if you haven't read the book yet, I advise you to go to Amazon UK post-haste...)