Opening Keynote
Opening Keynote Speech - And Then Came Fiction : 09.40 to
10.15
Sally Magnusson, broadcaster, journalist and
author
Broadcaster and journalist Sally
Magnusson has written 10 books, most famously, her
Sunday Times bestseller, Where Memories
Go (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) about her mother's
dementia. Half-Icelandic, half-Scottish, Sally has inherited a rich
storytelling tradition. The Sealwoman's
Gift (hodder & Stoughton, 2018) is her first
novel.
Sally Magnusson spoke about why, after a varied
writing and broadcasting career, she has become a novelist - and
why we need the imagination of the writer more now than ever. We
are delighted to have her permission to publish her talk in full
here.
And Then Came
Fiction
Sally Magnusson
I'm exhilarated to be speaking to you in
this new guise of mine as novelist. Honestly, I never thought I would be a
writer of fiction. I was one of these people who believed firmly
that if any journalist was misguided enough to think they have a
novel in them, that's exactly where it should stay - because
although we tell stories all the time (sometimes, let it be
admitted, whoppers), we're deep down too thirled to fact and
actuality to be naturals when it comes to
fiction.
Yet here I am. And having embarked on this
new direction with The Sealwoman's Gift - and very much with the help of publishers
and booksellers and all the people involved in the trade along the
way - I've made the joyous discovery that I love it. Whether I'm
any good at it is for others to judge, but I'm so thrilled to have
had the opportunity to make this shift relatively late in my
career. And AS a novelist I believe I'm engaged in something, in
this moment, in these times - as you all are - that is very, very
important.
I'll get to WHY I
think that a bit later. But let me take some time first to explain
how I got here.
Books - whether reading
voraciously the books of others or writing myself - have always
mattered to me. I did my dream degree at Edinburgh University in
English Literature. Nothing to do for four years but wallow in it!
My abiding regret is that I didn't do Scottish literature as well,
but I've tried to catch up since. At university I specialised in
19th and 20th century
literature, which meant reading an awful lot of usually very large
novels, and it's where I conceived my lifelong passion for Charles
Dickens: the great storyteller of them all, in my view, whose work
is such an unparalleled blend of humour, character, lyricism,
social anger and journalistic passion.
After Edinburgh
University I went into newspapers. I remember telling the man who
interviewed me at The Scotsman that I wanted to be a reporter
because I loved watching people and I loved finding the best words
to tell a story. And I remember he sniffed sceptically. "You do
realise you'll spend most of your time covering the finance
sub-committee of Edinburgh District Council?" Oh yes, I said, can't
think of anything better. At which he looked even more sceptical,
as well he might. But I got the job.
While I was
working on The Scotsman, a friend told me about a film that was due
out in a very few months' time about the 1920s athlete, Eric
Liddell, the Scot who refused to run on a Sunday. It was called
Chariots of Fire. "Sally, somebody really should write a book about
this guy," he said. "He went on to have the most amazing life in
China that nobody knows about."
So I got myself an
agent pronto, who got me a publisher, who said they'd be happy to
take a biography of Eric Liddell - BUT it would have to be a bit of
a rush job, because they would have to bring it out at the same
time as the film. 60,000 words all right? Six weeks OK to hand it
in?
It's a measure of
my ignorance of publishing realities and indeed longer form writing
that I thought, well, why not give it a bash: it's just a lengthy
feature article. My sister and I raced around Scotland interviewing
people who still remembered Liddell, including his lovely old
sister in Morningside, and I spoke on the phone from Canada to his
widow. We got some books on the Olympics and China out of the
library, and I flung myself into the Boxer rebellion and much else.
Only think what I could have done with Google and Wikipedia!
Basically I did tackle it as a mammoth journalistic assignment.
When I started actually writing and began to realise the
impossibility of the task I had taken on, my family all pitched in
to help. (That was after I had sobbed down the phone to my dad - "I
can't do this! And he told me to come home straight away.) In the
family home in Glasgow my father set up as chief sub-editor in the
study; my mother was at the kitchen table researching Japanese war
techniques; one sister took on a chapter on the history of the
Olympic movement (which I never actually had time to get to
afterwards, so her somewhat breezy gallop through the Olympics went
into the book intact); another sister did I can't remember what and
my teenage brother went round passing messages between us and
delivering copious quantities of tea, while I wrote everything up.
Somehow we met the deadline and there I was in 1981, an
author!
The Flying Scotsman, as it was called, did very well off the
back of Chariots of Fire and was my somewhat bizarre inauguration
into the world of publishing. A year or two after that I got
seduced into television and found myself in London, presenting
daily news programmes like Sixty Minutes, London Plus and Breakfast, before moving back to Glasgow in the
later 90s - because by that time I had also started having children
at a great rate of noughts. We'd outgrown our tiny Thameside
cottage and I was desperate for the babysitting facilities on offer
up here from my mother. (She kept sending me cuttings from the
Herald property pages through the post, which invariably started,
"Large family house available" and were coincidentally always just
down the road from hers.)
Neither the children nor the broadcasting
proved particularly conducive to writing, but I did try to keep my
hand in, because I always just needed to have the word business as
part of my life. It's the way I've always processed experiences -
the good and the bad, the funny and the painful - by finding words
for them, imposing on the general chaos of life a sort of artistic
shape, making for myself, in effect, a story I can live with.
(That, interestingly, became all these years later one of the main
themes of The Sealwoman's
Gift - the way we all
need stories, in whatever form, to survive. You and I, folks, are
in the survival business!)
What that meant for me over the years was
writing about whatever came to hand. For a while I penned a
fortnightly column in the Herald about the laughs and trials of
having five children under the age of ten, which subsequently
became the book Family Life. A trip to Iceland with my Dad to trace
our ancestry became Dreaming of Iceland. An exercise I set the children one wet
afternoon in the Easter holidays to see if we could put our heads
together to make a story about the animals in the countryside round
our home gave me the germ of an idea for the Horace the Haggis books that would later
give me my first taste of fiction. Writing was a bit of an escape
in those years. Believe me, a haggis who gells his hair, a
vegetarian fox, a feminist mouse and a villainous farmer lightly
based on the (perfectly nice) HMRC tax inspector who'd just visited
me for a random check were exactly the antidote I needed to my more
sober shifts on Reporting Scotland.
Then there was the chance discovery,
reading the wonderful book Crowdie and Cream by Finlay J Macdonald, that URINE was
pretty much the chief ingredient in Harris Tweed - which got me
interested in all its other social uses and the truly fascinating
stories around them, and led to one of my finest publishing
moments: a history of this most useful product which went by the
name of Life
of Pee (Yann Martel,
each your heart out).
Subtitle: How Urine Got Everywhere.
So, as I say, writing was a bit of an
escape, a chance to engage with words in a bid to find different
ways of engaging with readers, to write stories, to take whatever
was to hand in my life at any time and have some fun with it.
People were kind enough to publish these books, and I
did have a lot of fun.
But something
changed when my mother developed dementia. Here was something very
much to hand again in my life, but writing about it felt suddenly
more crucial than anything I had conceived before. Once again I was
reaching for words to process my experience: the basis of the
memoir was a diary I kept, in a bid to, as it were, hold on to my
mother as the illness began to rob us (and her) of the person she
had been - the way she combed her hair and put on her lipstick, the
electric radiance of her smile. But it also became, almost without
my noticing at first, a manifesto about the kind of society we are,
or should be, what it means to be civilised, and the things we need
to face head-on if we're to find ways of caring properly for the
most vulnerable people in our midst.
That's the book that became
Where Memories Go: Why Dementia Changes
Everything, and for
me it marked a sea-change in my writing career. For two reasons, I
think:
Firstly, because
this time it wasn't the pleasure of a hobby that was driving me,
but an explicit, burning desire to change the world. I wanted
families caring for a loved one to read this book and know they
weren't alone; I wanted doctors and nurses and care home staff and
politicians and policy makers to read it and get an understanding
of dementia from the inside, and of how much of an individual
remains, even as the illness lays waste to that brain, and how that
person can be nurtured and kept connected if we only go about it
the right way.
And that meant
this was no longer an erratic leisure pursuit for me. I had to sell
books, I had to write to engage a (hopefully) large audience, while
also making something both beautiful and humorous enough to let me
feel I had done justice to my mother. So I put long and (as decent
writing usually requires) fairly agonising thought into literary
creativity. And, crucially, I found myself almost unconsciously
seeking out the techniques of FICTION to make this memoir engaging,
readable and, as I hoped, compelling. Every word remained true, but
in the telling of the story I tried to employ drama, scene setting,
dialogue (although I was careful not to put into direct speech
anything I didn't have a verbatim note of in my diary), selection
of incident and, as far as I could, the ruthless self-editing of
those cherished scenes and facts that were extraneous to the key
narrative.
You see where I'm
going with this. Looking back, it was the preparation I think I
needed for the next move into fiction.
I'm also pleased
that it became a Sunday Times bestseller in 2014 and, judging by
the thousands of responses I've had since, it HAS played at least a
part in helping to change both perceptions about dementia and care
practice. That, I think, is something that should be shouted from
the rooftops: the written word, the business we're all in, can make
a difference.
The second reason
for that book ushering in a kind of sea-change for me was that for
the first time in my career (with the exception of my three Horace the Haggis books, so beautifully
produced by Black and White), the same publisher stuck with me
longer than one book. Two Roads is a small imprint of the John
Murray Press, which is itself within the Hodder group - and here,
after all those years of publishing a book here, a book there, I
found a publishing "family" who wanted not just to print me but to
nurture me as an author. A publisher, also, who believed in tough
editing.
If I may be allowed to mount a hobby horse
for a moment, judicious editing is such a mix of bliss and agony
for a writer, but it's absolutely essential to a good book: I don't
think there's any piece of writing, by anyone, which can't be
improved by it. With all the many constraints publishers are under
these days, I strongly believe it's something that shouldn't be
stinted on, whatever other savings have to be made. And actually
the reason I came to Two Roads in the first place was because
Richard Holloway, who I know is going to be speaking to you this
afternoon, paid a most fulsome tribute to his Canongate editor at
the beginning of his masterful and moving memoir, Leaving Alexandria, saying what a pain in the neck it had
been (I paraphrase) but how much this book in its final form owed
to that editor's care and persistence. And I thought - that's the
kind of editor I want. When I tracked him down - it was Nick
Davies, at Canongate - begging him to read my Where Memories Go manuscript, I found he was just about to
take up a new job at John Murray Press. He read it, and of course
said it would require editing and some rewriting. Cue
disbelieving author! But once he got to the new job, he put me in
touch the publisher of the Two Roads imprint there (whom he also
assured me believed in strong editing) and that's where I happily
found a home.
In Lisa Highton at Two Roads I found not
just an energetic editor, but a publisher who believed in forging
meaningful personal relationships with booksellers and making sure I was part of them. That's
something I've really appreciated. I had a lovely launch the other
week at Waterstones in Sauchiehall Street for the novel, and I
can't wait to get to Mainstreet Trading in St Boswells, and
Blackwells in Edinburgh, and Toppings in St Andrews, and
Waterstones in Newton Mearns), who're all lined up in the next few
days.
Lisa was also the person who dragged me kicking and screaming on
to Twitter and forced me, on pain of execution, to have my own
website and do all the other self-promotional stuff I'm never very
comfortable with but which I've accepted because, at last, I'm part
of a team and I'd do anything (well, almost) for that team. Writing
is such a lonely activity - it's great to be PART of something.
Making an author feel like this is something that's in the gift of
publishers, big and small - and I can tell you it makes all the
difference in the world to how well we want to do for you.
Lisa believed we could make
Where Memories Go
work, even though a dementia book was
still considered a bit of a risk at that time. And afterwards she
proceeded to make me believe I could be a novelist. She kept insisting I write something
else, kept asking me for ideas, and when I told her I was
fascinated by the story of the so-called Turkish Raid in Iceland in
1627 (when 400 Icelanders were abducted from their homes by
corsairs and taken back to the slave-markets of Algiers), her eyes
lit up at once. When I said I didn't see how it could be done,
because I had no intention of learning Arabic and spending the rest
of my life in a library in Istanbul, she said, "Write it as a novel
then."
And then, when I
HAD written it and proudly presented my manuscript, what happened?
Encouraging noises but a firm (and, as I knew deep down, absolutely
correct) message: "We need more drama and emotion." Well, I'll pass
lightly over the gloom this threw me into - which only began to
lift when a couple of other writers laughed uproariously to hear I
had got cast down after one draft. "One draft?" spluttered James
Robertson. "Come back and complain when you've done
five."
And so I started
all over again, as I knew I had to. And in the course of that long
process of drafting and redrafting and burning the midnight oil, I
think, I hope, I learned the craft of a novelist: structure,
pacing, voices, leavening tragedy with humour, dark with light,
shifting viewpoints and so on. I learned - I hope - not to write
for some distant professor who would congratulate me on the depth
of my research (always a hazard for the historical novelist and
certainly an early risk for me), but to write for a reader much
like me, who wants neither self-regarding prose nor reams of
description for its own sake, but a darn good story which takes you
inside other minds and hearts in another time and place, and
reveals they were just like yours all along.
Anyway, thus was born The Sealwoman's Gift. (And may I also say how very blessed I was
during that time by getting a new agent in Jenny Brown, such a
wonderful and insightful encourager.) It's a novel set in the
historical framework of long ago, but addressing itself to the
age-old verities of the human condition: love, and grief, and
resilience, and redemption, and our eternal reliance on the stories
we tell ourselves and each other to help us flourish as human
beings. That last is why I feel so honoured to be dealing more and
more in the coinage of story. When all else has gone, it IS stories
that can save us.
So, I've found it
immensely invigorating, difficult (at times very difficult) and
ultimately rewarding to step out of my journalistic comfort zone
and start making things up - and to learn a new craft in the
process, one which I hope I can exercise and, indeed, improve on in
my next novel. Yup, there's another one. Inch by inch I've been
shifting the balance from "broadcaster and writer" to "writer and
broadcaster", to take me back full circle to where I
began.
And to get back to
what I alluded to at the start, in doing so - and here's where I
think what we're all doing is so important - I feel I'm sort of
raising my standard on the battlefield of words and literature, and
joining you all on a very important crusade. And this is how I'd
define it:
One of the skills I had to learn how to
deploy creatively, first in Where Memories Go and then in the novel, has been
EMPATHY.
One of the most
heartbreaking things about my mother's illness was seeing the way
it affected her ability to empathise with the experience of others
- previously one of her most pronounced and loveable
characteristics: her world gradually shrank to herself. But she had
the excuse of a brain disease. The rest of us, in our
self-affirming social media groups, our self-righteous What's App
communities, our ever-ready-to judge environments, even just our
hurtlingly busy personal and professional lives, have less excuse.
But the world shrinks around us all the same, if we're not careful,
even as it appears to be becoming larger. I believe passionately
that it's our artists, our novelists, our poets, our short story
writers, our most thoughtful and incisive non-fiction writers, who
can remind us what empathy is. It's the writer's stock-in-trade to
imagine her or himself into other lives, by taking us there and
commanding us, the reader, to stay and, at the very least,
understand better. Maybe one day someone will even show us how it
really feels to be Donald Trump. And that writer, if I may attempt
a riff, might have to be a woman.
Now, hear me out!
There was an article in the Guardian just before
Christmas by John Boyne, suggesting that the problem with literary
fiction has been that male writers are too often obsessed with
creating a reputation rather than telling a story that will engage
the reader. Like most generalisations, that can be shown to be
patent rubbish (just thinking, off the top of my head, of Graeme
Macrae Burnet and so many other wonderful writers). But there's
also - especially as regards some of the so-called giants of
literature of earlier decades - more than a grain of truth. One of
John Boyne's points was that women have the breadth of imagination
to evoke the experience of men better (as he believes) than men
have with women. (Again, huge health warning, but it's an
interesting argument.) Here's what he says:
"It's in their depictions of
both genders that female writers have the edge. I've grown weary of
reading novels by men that portray women in one of four categories:
the angelic virgin who manages to tame some quixotic lothario who's
spread so many wild oats that he has shares in Quaker; the
pestering harpy who nags her boyfriend or husband, sucking all the
fun out of his life; the slut who eventually gets murdered as
payback for her wanton ways; the catalyst who is only there to
prompt the man's actions and is therefore not a human being at all,
just a plot device. I find female writers are much more incisive in
their writing of men, recognising that several billion people
cannot be simply reduced to a few repetitive
strains."
Now, as someone
who dared to imagine herself into the mind of a Moorish
slavemaster, a Lutheran priest and a renegade Dutch sea-captain
among others, I found that immensely reassuring! But my point here
is not to make glib sexist swipes, but to say that whoever is
writing it, ambiguity and complexity are at the heart of the human
condition and now, more than ever, we need writers to remind
us.
George Saunders, accepting the Booker prize
for the astoundingly empathetic Lincoln in the Bardo last year, talked about having
faith in the idea that what seems
other is actually not
other at all, but just "us on a different day."
He said: "In the US we're hearing a lot about the
need to protect culture. Well, this tonight IS culture, it's
international culture, it's compassionate culture, it's activist
culture. It's a room full of believers in the word, in beauty and
ambiguity and in trying to see the other person's point of view,
even when that is hard."
I think we might also claim to be such a
room today. Which in a way brings me back to Donald Trump, or to
what he symbolises. For the liberal intelligentsia, among whom many
of us would, I imagine, count ourselves, he is probably the
quintessential "other". Commission that book, someone - not
Fire and Fury but something different, something more
akin to Shakespeare's Macbeth perhaps, that only the subtlest of writers
and the most expansive of imaginations could conceive - and that
would be the book I'd read. (Besides being gloriously controversial
and probably landing you with a law suit!)
What I'm trying to stress is that we are
the custodians of empathy. We are the gateway to otherness, to how
it feels to be someone else, to believe something else, to act in
ways that might actually horrify us. The best books take us to
these places; they invite us to step inside for a while and allow
our minds to be expanded by the experience. Not to assent
intellectually or morally, but to be that person for a while. It's the mark, I
believe, of civilisation - the ultimate guarantor of culture. And
if books don't continue to do it, I'm not sure what else
will.
Anyway, on that
note I'll stop now. Long live stories, is what I want to say. Long
live the written word, and the publishers who believe in it and
nurture their authors to produce it, and the booksellers who press
it into the hands of readers, and the agents who help their weary
writers up again and again when they're down, and everyone else
engaged in this great labour of love and faith.
And huge thanks to
Publishing Scotland and the Booksellers Association for inviting me
here.