A Writer’s Telling

Sandra Garside-Neville interviews Fay Sampson

When I joined the Historical Novel Society, the first HNR I received included a review of Fay Sampson’s The Flight of the Sparrow, which is about the early 7^th century English King Edwin. It was within my period of interest so I bought it, and was swept away by powerful the first person narrative of an initially unsympathetic character. The book immediately found a place on my list of very favourite books.

Many of Fay Sampson’s books are set in the Dark Ages – from the post-Roman period to the English conversion to Christianity in the 7^th century - but she also writes children’s books, fantasy novels and non-fiction. She’s a versatile writer with a very distinctive style, and here we explore the background to her work.

*Could you tell us anything about your background and childhood that isn't in your website biography? Ancestry, educational influences, inspiring teachers, relatives etc, other formative experiences, places or people?

I grew up with a strong sense of my roots in the West Country. My father was a Devonian, and from early on I hoped that there might be a pocket of Celts tucked away in the little-frequented area between Exmoor and Dartmoor where his father's family came from. I think I hurt my mother's feelings by showing much less interest in her Kent origins. I am mortified now to discover, too late, that one my great-grandfathers was a famous Deal boatman, salvaging ships off the Goodwin Sands and rescuing lives.

I loved history at school. I had a wonderful history teacher, Miss Bardens, who made the passage of the 1832 Reform Act the most exciting drama in the school syllabus. I was only sorry that I couldn't combine A-level history with my other chosen subjects.

I also loved reading. One of my earliest memories is of my mother reading The Water Babies to us in the cupboard under the stairs, during an air-raid. Later on, there were evenings when my mother, my sister and I sat around the fire sewing, while my father read aloud to us, usually an historical novel.

I was something of a tomboy, at heart at least. For a time, my favourite reading was pirate stories, and I have always enjoyed novels of action. Even now, though I admire Jane Austen, I am not a great fan. I had a sympathetic godmother, whose presents to me were always books. They were usually beautifully-bound historical novels: Dickens, Dumas, the more swashbuckling offerings of Scott. I appreciated the book as a physical object, as well as a good read.

During my teens I struck up a friendship with an elderly neighbour who gave me the run of his library. I particularly remember Macauley's work on the trial of Warren Hastings.

There was an incident when I was about fourteen, which proved more significant than I realised at the time. We were each asked to talk to the class for a few minutes on a subject of our own choice. Not long before, that elderly neighbour had been telling me about the Dark Ages, a subject previously unknown to me. It sparked an interest, and I talked about this, particularly the early literature and its sources. It was years before I took up this subject again, but the seed was there.

I was stirred by romantic places. Top of my list was Tintagel. In those days, I only knew about the Norman castle. Discovery of its Celtic history was still in the future.

*Did you read any historical novels and non-fiction history books as a child that sparked or developed your interest in history in general, and your chosen periods in particular?

Besides the books and authors mentioned above, a novel which made a great impression on me in my teens was Les Miserables. I had something of a taste for tragedy. I particularly remember the death of young Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. At that stage, I didn't read much non-fiction, but I did enjoy real-life tales of adventure: Captain Scott's Diary of his expedition to the Antarctic, Frank Smythe's The Spirit of the Hills, Thor Heyerdahl's The Kon-Tiki Expedition. These were the books I requested for my school prizes.

I don’t remember coming across anything relating to the Celtic period which was to capture my imagination later.

*When and why did you start writing children's fiction?

I had stopped teaching to raise a family. When my younger child was about to start school, I wondered what to do with the extra free time. Should I go back to part-time teaching? My husband Jack persuaded me to try writing seriously for publication. I had put out a few feelers before: short stories, synopses for a book or television play. But I hadn't buckled down to writing a full-length work.

Sidney Robbins, a seminal figure in promoting children's literature, encouraged me to write for children. I realised that what little writing I had done had either been for children, or had a child at its centre.

* When and why did you start writing adult historical fiction?

The great thing about writing is that the more you write, the more you want to write. The ideas keep stacking up and there is never enough time to unpack them all. I love writing for children, but there are some themes which require a depth of experience which even a teenage readership doesn't have.

In the late 1970s, when I was teaching part-time and writing for children and teenagers, I wrote a novel about Morgan le Fay. There were four narrators, each telling of a different phase of her life and shedding a different light on her character. Right at the end, Morgan got to speak for herself - just a page and a half. I couldn't decide whether this should be a book for teenagers or adults. So I decided I'd write it anyway, and see how it turned out. The result, as I should have foreseen, was that it fell between two stools. It was about an adult sexual relationship that went too deep for a teenage audience, yet it was not dealt with at sufficient length, nor explored thoroughly enough, to make an adult novel. It didn't find a publisher.

Ten years later, my school was merging with another, and it was getting hard to find enough people to take voluntary redundancy. I loved both teaching and writing, but there weren't enough hours in the day to do justice to both. I decided to take the money and run. The extra time, I decided, would enable me to expand that early idea and turn it into, not just a novel for adults, but a sequence of four. The first publisher who expressed an interest wanted to do it in two volumes, with Morgan's coda at the end of the second one. That deal fell through, and Headline offered a contract for four separate volumes. As I put down the phone, I realised that Morgan's contribution wouldn't work that way. She was too important to be tacked on to just one out of the four narrations. She needed a volume of her own. I rang my agent, and Headline's reply was: "If she says there's a fifth novel, there's a fifth novel."

As I was nearing the end of the fourth, the awful truth dawned on me. From that early draft, I had had a workable basis of narrative for the first four. All I had for Morgan was a page and a half. Out of this I must make a complete book.

Panic sent me back to the sources, to find everything I could about Morgan's story. And that was where I found the story itself. The research I had done so far had been historical, rather than literary. I had been thrilled to discover that taking the story out of its medieval knights-in-shining-armour setting, and putting it back where it belongs in immediate post-Roman times, had brought together Arthur and the early Celtic Church, already an enthusiasm of mine from the background to my children's novels. Now I found that Morgan's story also needed to be shifted back from Malory’s version. The earliest references to her show her wise and benevolent, but down the centuries she has become demonised by successive authors. This changing perception became part of my narrative.

I wrote this sequence, or at least the first four books, on the boundary between fantasy and historical. It could be read as a novel about magic, or about people who believe in magic. The 4th-5th century setting for it was really important to me.

In the same way, the next novel Star Dancer, was about Sumerian gods and goddesses, and therefore classified as fantasy. But I gathered together every scrap of myth found on cuneiform tablets and read everything I could about the historical background – it’s actually better documented than the Dark Ages in Britain. It was a kind of literary archaeology.

For many years I had been increasingly fascinated by the post-Roman period, the growth of the Celtic Church and the struggle to find an independent British identity. I wrote a huge baggy historical novel, going back to Pope Gregory sending Augustine to Britain, and culminating in the Synod of Whitby. It had multiple narrators and took in huge swathes of Bede, as well as a lot more from the Welsh sources. It didn’t find a publisher, but more manageable sections of it are now finding their way into print. The catalyst for the first of these, A Casket of Earth, was the Lichfield Prize, offered for a novel about the Lichfield area. This triggered a memory of the Northumbrian princess who brought St Chad to Lichfield. Bede says she was also accused of murdering her husband. But why? She had everything to lose by his death. I find that unanswered questions like that make a rich breeding ground for novels.

* What do you think are the differences between writing historical fiction for children and for adults?

Not much. Perhaps I don't make enough concessions in writing for children. But I think truth is important. I made a rule with my own children, never to tell them anything I would have to unsay later. So my children's books can be quite tough. I find children respond to that. It's the adults who sometimes have problems.

The good thing about writing for children is that you know you have to be disciplined. You can and should feed in solid historical background, but it mustn't hold up the narrative. Writing for adults can be more self-indulgent. There is greater freedom to go off at a tangent about something which enthuses you. And therein lies the danger. I remember a scene in The Agony and the Ecstasy, where the writer takes you down a street and tells you who lived in every building on the way. I found myself falling into the same trap, being so enthusiastic about all the interesting stuff I'd discovered, that it was getting in the way of the story.

My escape hatch was to write a non-fiction book, Visions and Voyages: The Story of our Celtic Heritage. And this was followed by Runes on the Cross, which did the same thing for the Anglo-Saxons.

*You also write science fiction/fantasy, as do several other well-regarded historical fiction novelists. Why are you attracted to this other genre?

Fantasy was my first love. The first children's book I wrote, still unpublished, was a contemporary adventure story. But that was consciously a warm-up exercise. I felt that if I plunged straight away into the book I really wanted to write, I might mess it up. I needed practice. The second book was fantasy: The Chains of Sleep. Although it didn't achieve immediate publication, it did make it after I'd had several other books published and knew the craft better. Although it had a modern setting, it was based on both the history and the legends of the Scilly Isles.

But I believe there is no place for mediocre fantasy. If you haven’t got an original idea, you shouldn’t write it. And good ideas are not two a penny. Historical fiction, however, doesn’t need to be original to be good. There are thousands of wonderful plots and characters just waiting to be written about.

So I followed The Chains of Sleep with an historical novel for teenagers, The Hungry Snow. I had heard of a remote village where female births were suppressed in a time of severe winters. Again, it was curiosity that inspired me. What drove them to that? What were the different reactions in the community?

The attraction of both genres is in the loving creation of a different world, convincingly realised. The research for this may be from external sources or from the inner resources of one’s mind, but the result is not very different. It has been said that fantasy may appear like gossamer on the surface, but underneath it should be pre-stressed concrete.

Fantasy does have the advantage over historical fiction that no one can jump up and say, ‘Well, actually, it wasn’t like that.’ I wrote an historical novel for children, A Free Man on Sunday, about the 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass. That was particularly challenging. Some of the people who took part in that were still alive. It was enormous relief and joy when they said, ‘Yes, you got it right.’

*Many of your novels are about Celts. What attracted you to writing about them?

A strong sense of my own roots and a delight in the heritage no one told me about when I was a child. Besides, they are wonderfully colourful and artistic. I love the exuberance of their literary style, the piling up of adjectives and images. And the Celtic Church has so much to offer our generation, values that were often suppressed in the centuries after Rome took over.

*Several of your novels have religious themes, as have your non-fiction books - is this a particular interest of yours, or does it spring from the eras you set them in?

It’s a personal enthusiasm. I grew up a devout Anglican. As a teenager I tried to throw religion off and become a scientific materialist. And I just couldn’t do it. There was that residual belief, like a cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s fist, which wouldn’t go away. So I gave in and decided that if I couldn’t get rid of faith, I’d just have to take it seriously.

And the story of the Celtic Church in the post-Roman period is exciting. It had a huge challenge to meet, with the Romans gone and the Anglo-Saxons invading. They’d hardly had time to work out what it meant to be free and British. They had to find a form of Christianity that would help them meet a rapidly changing situation. It was evolving all the time, and there were wonderful characters along the way. Like the Celtic literary style, they were sometimes over the top, but great fun.

*Is there an overarching theme in all your novels, or perhaps several themes that recur in your work?

Themes are tricky. I typically start out with some trace of a story that raises questions I want to explore. While I’m writing the first draft, it’s the story and its protagonists which occupy me. But when I read it through, I often discover there’s another story running under the surface which I hadn’t been aware of. So an adventure story may turn out to be really a novel about relations within a family. I then write the second draft with that heightened consciousness and explore that theme too, in a more sustained way.

I suppose a recurring theme is the possibility of change. Things may be bad, but they don’t have to be this way. People can change, and people can change situations. I’m always reluctant to write about absolute evil. Redemption isn’t inevitable, but the possibility is always there.

*Which of your own novels is/are your favourite(s) and why?

The novels which were shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize gave me great pleasure. The Pangur Bán Celtic fantasy novels were great fun to write, and the historical A Free Man on Sunday was great fun to research with the original trespassers.

Among my adult fiction I particularly enjoyed writing Taliesin’s Telling in the Daughter of Tintagel sequence. Taliesin is a Welsh bard, and I could let myself go in his narration, as I couldn’t with the narration of a Cumbrian blacksmith.

*One of your hobbies is walking in the Devon countryside. Does that influence your writing - say for settings and plot ideas?

Yes, very much. The first novels I wrote were inspired by place. I would stand on Dartmoor, or the Scilly Isles, and ask myself what was the story which belonged to this place. I frequently write with a map spread out beside me, so that I can get a sense of what the journey would be like from A to B, what you would see if you stood on that hill. And whenever possible, I walk the ground. I was particularly lucky with A Free Man on Sunday, when I was able to take part in the 50th anniversary reconstruction. I booked myself a trip to Iraq for Star Dancer, but then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and it didn’t seem like such a good idea. My most recent novel, The Silent Fort, takes place on Woodbury Common, where I spent much of my teens walking.

*Your latest novel, The Silent Fort, is set in the West Country around the time of the Roman invasion. Is the setting based on real places that you know?

Absolutely. Read the page on it on my website.

*What do you think of the Romans vis a vis the Celts?

I not only find the Celts more fun than the Romans, but the people who write about them are more fun too. Anne Ross is wonderful.

The Romans think in straight lines, the Celts in spirals. The Romans understand about law, the Celts about poetry.

But there’s a lot of tiresome sentimentality about the Celts. They were often bloodthirsty and wrongheaded – and that’s just the Celtic saints. I’ve tried to be honest as well as loving about them in Visions and Voyages.

*When writing a novel, do you begin with characters or plot?

Maybe neither. It’s often a place or a question, though it may be an incomplete fragment of a story. What might have happened here? What would it be like to be in such a situation? What could have made them do that? The characters grow out of the situation and the plot is my attempt to answer the question.

*Do you plan your novels to the end before you start writing?

I used to when I started. But like many novelists, I found the characters tended to revolt and tell me they’d actually do something different halfway through. Now I know roughly where I want to start and finish, and some of the high points on the way. It’s a bit like crossing a bog on Dartmoor. You stand on the brink and think you can see a succession of footholds which will get you to the other side. But it doesn’t always work out like that. Each time you leap, you hope you’ll see another stepping stone within reach, even if it’s not the one you planned.

* Do you do most of your research before you start writing or as needed during the writing? What are your favourite resources?

I like to read and think my way into a period before I begin. And to visit the place if I possibly can.

I’m a bookish person, and I have a large research library of my own. But a lot of my best research has been physical. Being a writer is wonderful. You get to do all the things you wanted to do as a child, and didn’t have the chance, and you can put them down as expenses. I’ve learned to ride a horse and sail a boat, and got as near as I could to driving a chariot. You find out things you’d never realise otherwise: how slowly a boat capsizes once it’s become inevitable, and the water is creeping up around you; what a leather boat waterproofed with sheep’s grease smells like after a long voyage; the fact that you only need to rotate your wrist to steer a horse many times stronger than you.

The reconstruction of the Kinder Scout Trespass was a delight. I could ask the old trespassers things I’d never find in a book: What did you put in your sandwiches? What songs did you sing on the bus? And they told me wonderful incidents I’d never have invented, which got into the book.

And yes, you still find you need to discover more things as you get into the writing. For one chapter of The Chains of Sleep I needed to find out about the working of outboard motors, Welsh mythology and an early Christian heresy.

But you can ask ninety-nine questions, and the one that trips you up is the hundredth one you didn’t even think you needed to ask.

Sometimes you know there’s a gap in your research, and you just can’t bridge it. So you make something up. Then, astonishingly, you find out later that what you thought you’d made up is what actually happened. That’s when you feel that perhaps you really have got under the skin of the period.

*Can you tell us anything about your next novel? Any other future writing

plans?

I’ve recently finished a contemporary novel, which draws heavily on the story of Columba and Iona. And I’m writing another fantasy for older children. But the imperative to return to Hild’s story is growing stronger. See below.

*The character of Hild (later Abbess of Whitby) came across very strongly in 'The Flight of the Sparrow' your book about King Edwin. Do you plan to write Hild's story?

You are not the only person to ask that. Hild was the central figure in the big novel which culminated in the Synod of Whitby, though it was about many other people too. Yes, I’d love to. She stands at the cusp of that tussle between Celtic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon, to define which way our country went. And she’s a feisty character in her own right. I love the fact that when they excavated her abbey at Whitby they found more styluses than spindle-whorls. Hild is the figure of what we lost at the Synod of Whitby, when the abbey-based Celtic system went down to the diocesan Roman model of the Church. As abbesses, women like Hild were at the heart of things. But when bishops ruled, they were sidelined.

*Why have some of your recent books been published by Robert Hale, a house known mostly for regency novels?

I offered my proposal for A Casket of Earth to a range of publishers. Hale were the first to come up with a positive reply. They have a wide-ranging list and have been good to work with. My regret is that they don’t do paperbacks.

*How do you organize your writing day?

I’m a very lazy writer. I regard mornings as prime writing time, but after breakfast I go back to bed to do it. I write the first draft of my fiction longhand. I know roughly the area I’m going to cover that morning, but I just sit there doing nothing until I hear in my head, as if they were being dictated, the opening words. They have a ring of authority. Then I’m away. This way of working induces a more subjective way of writing; it comes from the heart rather than the head.

When I’ve written myself out for the morning, I type it on to the computer, doing some light editing as I go. There’s still a second and third draft to come once I’ve written the first draft of the whole book. Seeing it on the screen makes it look more like a published book. It helps me to distance myself from it, become more objective. The hardest act of imagination for a writer is to put herself into the mind of someone who has no previous knowledge of this story, and has to form the picture solely from the words on the page.

After lunch and the crossword, it’s sensible things like gardening and housework, then back to the desk for lower-level activities – authorish correspondence, website stuff, marketing, etc.

*Do you do any writing-related activities - talks, workshops, writing courses etc? If so, do you enjoy helping aspiring writers?

Yes, I’m actively involved in encouraging writers and readers. I prefer giving talks to workshops. It can be nerve-wracking, creating a story with a class of children using their ideas, and trying to achieve a wonderful climax just before the bell goes and they all charge off to catch their buses.

I have taught adult education courses in writing, and been a writer-in-residence for a short time.

I’m an active member of the Society of Authors, the West Country Writers Association, and the Association of Christian Writers. The ACW has a good network of local groups, as well as national events, and I currently chair the one in Mid-Devon. From time to time I get together with other science fiction and fantasy writers to critique each other’s work.

As an unpublished writer, I received help and encouragement from experienced authors, and I want to pass that on.

*Do you think it's more difficult to get published now than it was when you started your writing career?

Yes. An alarming number of publishers are now refusing to look at anything not submitted by an agent. And the buying up of small independent firms means there are fewer possibilities to try. One reader may refuse a book on behalf of half a dozen imprints.

Electronic sales records also mean that a publisher can check with the book chains before deciding whether to offer a contract. If a bookseller rates an author as not previously a fast seller, they may not want to stock future titles.

Books have become commodities, rather than works of art. The old-fashioned publisher who believed in a book, and wanted it on the list for its quality, is becoming a thing of the past. Now the accountants are more likely to have the final say.

But there’s always hope. Books do still get published from modest backgrounds. And the future may lie with the internet. My Daughter of Tintagel sequence is being re-issued by Cosmos as Morgan le Fay. Sales will be mostly made over the internet with print-on-demand. New technology will make it possible for small firms to set up and bypass the conglomerates.

*Do you read historical fiction for pleasure? If so, which novels have you enjoyed recently? Any favourite authors?

My reading tastes are wide, and certainly include historical novels. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is heartbreakingly brilliant. A recent enjoyment was The English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale. Helen Dunmore and Shusaku Endo stand out.

*Do you think historical fiction has had a bad press? If so, any ideas why?

Yes, I think there is an unfair tendency to classify the best historical novels as literary fiction, and then claim that the genre doesn’t produce outstanding work.

People assume that it is escapist. Fantasy suffers even more from that. And it certainly can be. But Philippa Gregory has put her finger on what the best historical novelists do. She says she starts each novel asking two questions: 1. What was the key question which was occupying people’s minds at that time? 2. What is the question at the forefront of our minds when we look back at that period? Anyone who reads a novel written out of those concerns is going to come away enriched.

*Do you think historical fiction has become more respected in recent years? If so, why do you think that is?

Yes. There are not only very good writers who have made their reputation as historical novelists, but also respected authors who write contemporary novels are turning to historical themes as part of their repertoire.

*Do you think historical fiction has a unique contribution to make to our understanding of the past, say in ways that non-fictional history books can't?

Certainly. Historians mostly work in an objective way, and take pride in this. They look at the evidence from the outside and try to make sense of it that way. Novelists try to get under the skin. Of course, we can never really get inside the mind of someone from another century, but then there are similar barriers in writing any novel other than the autobiographical. When you put yourself imaginatively into someone else’s situation, you begin to get insights about their motives and actions which are not apparent from the outside. In writing The Flight of the Sparrow I found conflicting evidence about the conversion of Edwin of Northumbria. The Welsh sources have him baptised by a British priest of the Celtic Church; Bede gives a long account of events leading up to his baptism by the Roman missionary Paulinus. But what if both were true? Imaginatively engaging with the material to see how this might be, I found all sorts of puzzling things in Bede suddenly falling into place.

But it does put a responsibility on us to search for truth, and I don’t just mean getting the buttons in the right places.

Fay Samspon’s website is at http://www.faysampson.co.uk/ and includes details of her latest book ‘The Silent Fort.’