by Julia Green
Julia Green is the Course Leader on the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University, and has had three novels published by Puffin and three by Bloomsbury: Breathing Underwater, Drawing with Light and Bringing the Summer.
She lives in Bath.
Learn more about Julia and her writing with a brief Q & A.
When you were Emily’s age, what kind of books did you like to read?
When I was Emily’s age, I was reading books for A level English: King Lear and Measure for Measure by Shakespeare; contemporary plays like The Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Shaffer; novels by Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd) and D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers). I read Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen). I started reading the Romantic poets about this time (Keats, Wordsworth) and also poetry by Dylan Thomas, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. I loved Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle; Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger), and historical romances by Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy… I read widely, everything I could get my hands on! My parents loved books and our house was full of them. I had a brilliant English teacher called Miss Fox, and she suggested books to me too. We went to see a production of The Tempest by the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon and I was blown away by how magical it was. I’ve never forgotten it. I use quotations from The Tempest in my novel Breathing Underwater.
When you are writing, to what extent do you draw on your own experiences?
All my stories are a mixture of ‘real life’, closely observed or remembered, and imagination. Different combinations of the real and the made-up. I do use my experiences a lot, but always re-imagined. Memories, thoughts and feelings are transformed in the writing of them. But that’s not the same as saying my novels are autobiographical. They most definitely are not! My characters are not me. They are all imagined, created by me. But I need to feel a connection to the material I am writing.
How long does it take you to write a book?
Different novels take different amounts of time. I think and dream and imagine and write notes for a long while before I start writing down the story. Once I know enough to start typing on my laptop, it takes me about nine months to a year. Breathing Underwater took the longest: that’s because I wrote one version then realised there was a better way to tell the story, with the parallel sections of ‘This Summer’ and ‘Last Summer’, and I rewrote the whole novel completely! I’m very proud of taking that time to get it right. I’m a slow writer because I think so much, and rewrite and edit a lot. Plus I’m not writing full-time: I have another job, as a university lecturer teaching Creative Writing.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading your books?
I hope my readers will immerse themselves in the story. I hope they will be able to ‘see’ the places I describe and imagine themselves there. I hope they will be moved and feel strong emotions alongside my characters, going on their own emotional journey. I hope they will think about things: their own lives, choices, friends, families, relationships. I hope they will put down the book at the end and feel satisfied and uplifted.
If you could recommend just one book for everyone to read, what would it be?
Impossible question, but if you could only read one book, it would have to be a children’s book: Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. Like the best children’s books, it’s a book for readers of any age. It’s a beautiful and moving story. It’s perfectly constructed, I think, and profound about the connections between the young and the old, between past and present, and the importance of memory.
Why I Wrote Drawing With Light
I knew that I wanted my next novel to be a love story. Before I started, I wrote in my notebook I want to write about the transformative power of love: the way it changes you and opens you up to the world.’ I drew on some of my own memories of first love when I was creating the character of Seb. Gradually, I came to see that I was writing about lots of different kinds of love: the love between sisters, and the love between a man and a dog, love between friends, and the love that holds families together: not just parents and children, but step-parents too. Central to my story is the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and a big question: what could happen to make a mother abandon her own children? Could you ever forgive a mother who did that? This is the mystery at the heart of the novel.
While I was writing, the title I had in my head was ‘Talking in the Dark’, with all its associations with intimacy and secrets. It’s what sisters do, and best friends, and lovers. I like the final title Drawing with Light because it’s more uplifting and hopeful, which reflects the story more accurately, and because it is a reference to the art of photography, which is a very important strand in the story.
My Favourite Section In Drawing With Light
I’ve chosen the first chapter in Notebook 3, Summer, Pyrénées Atlantiques. It comes towards the end of the novel. The novel is divided into Emily’s three notebooks: this helped me to structure the story and deal with the passage of time, and is also a ‘nod’ towards Dodie Smith’s wonderful novel I Capture the Castle,in which her character Cassandra is writing in notebooks.
I’ve chosen this passage as it is the point where I first started writing the novel; it’s where Emily finally meets her mother for the first time. I could ‘see’ the whole scene as if I was standing there watching it all unfold. I knew the place — I had been there a year or so before — and had a photograph of it on my desk: the mountains behind, the fields where hay-making was taking place. In my head I heard that first, hesitant encounter between Emily and her mother.
As I started to write, I began to see that the real story would be about what has brought Emily to this point, so that she feels strong enough to make such a difficult emotional journey. Falling in love, and being loved back by Seb, gives her that courage. I started to think about the mother’s story. What has happened to her? How could she do such a terrible thing as abandon her own children? In the back of my mind were things I had read about women who have been artists as well as mothers (like the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, for example) and for whom that has been an enormous tension and struggle. Maybe I was remembering what it was like for me when I was bringing up my small children and also wanting a creative life. I am fascinated by the whole question of how we can be good parents, and also not give up on our own deepest desires and needs.
I had to imagine what it would feel like for both Francesca and Emily. I knew Emily would feel very angry, and I knew that anger is how people cover up hurt and sadness. I had to keep rewriting the scene to get the emotional feel of it ‘right’, as well as describing the setting where it’s all unfolding.
After I’d first written this scene, I wrote in my notebook ‘It’s the end of the story…rather than the beginning!’
Writing for me is a slow process of discovery: it seems as if the story already exists out there somewhere, and if I listen hard enough and pay sufficient attention, it will gradually come close enough for me to see exactly what it is.
Objects From Drawing With Light
There are many layers of influence in this novel. There was my original journey to the house in the Pyrénées, and an earlier trip to the museum of modern art in Ceret, France.
While I was at a conference in Vancouver a few years before, I came across the amazing paintings of trees by Canadian artist Emily Carr. Earlier still, as a teenager, I loved Robert Frost’s poems ‘Birches’ and ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’; as a younger child I played in woods near my home and made a den under an oak tree with a friend.
By happy coincidence (‘happenstance’), as I was beginning to write the novel, my younger son was beginning to learn about Photography for A level, and his exciting, experimental photographs were an inspiration to me for Emily’s own photos. I borrowed some of his notes. Later, he took photographs of trees and rivers to help me further. My artist sister has a studio where she works on s
tone sculpture, and her work helped me develop that aspect of the story. I based the stone mouse that Seb makes for Emily on a replica of Toby’s mouse from The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston, which I bought at her ancient, beautiful house in Cambridgeshire when I visited it a few years ago. I keep the mouse on my writing desk…
Things to do after reading Drawing with Light
Go to an art gallery. Look closely at the paintings you like or feel drawn to. Write about them in a notebook.
Find out about Emily Carr. One good book about her is Beloved Land: The World of Emily Carr, introduced by Robin Laurence (Douglas & McIntyre Ltd, Vancouver, 1996). Look online at www.emilycarr.ca for pictures that are in the Vancouver Art Gallery collection.
Take photographs. Look at work by Ansel Adams and Charlie Waite.
Go for a walk. Look closely at the trees! Sit under one to daydream, think and listen. Write a poem about the experience.
Read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It was written a long time ago, but it’s a wonderful story and the central character is inspiring. Cassandra is seventeen and wants to be a writer…
Keep your own writing or photography notebook.
A Room of my Own
My attic is the place where I can escape to write. It is quiet at the top of the house, and from the skylight windows I can see hills and fields and trees and plenty of sky. It is full of books, some on shelves, others stacked high on the floor. There are piles of paper, boxes of old manuscripts, and photos, postcards, other things that help me to write whatever story I am currently working on. It is very untidy but I know where everything is! A small carved mouse (Toby’s mouse from The Children of Green Knowe) perches close to my laptop.
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Also by Julia Green
Breathing Underwater
Bringing the Summer
Blue Moon
Baby Blue
Hunter’s Heart
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin and New York
First published in Great Britain in March 2010
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP
This electronic edition published in October 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Text copyright © Julia Green 2010
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 1647 9 (e-book)
www.bloomsbury.com/childrens
www.julia-green.co.uk
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