Will Eaves (right) signing a book for Judith Heneghan (left)
Will Eaves joined us for the final evening of this year’s Winchester Reading Series. Will is a novelist, poet and teacher. He was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement for many years before moving to Warwick where he is Associate Professor in the Writing Programme. His novel-in-voices The Absent Therapist was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2014. The Inevitable Gift Shop, a collection of poetry and prose, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry in 2016 and specially commended by the Poetry Book Society. The opening section of Murmur was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2017.
Will opened the evening by talking a little about his own writing journey, saying, ‘For me, writing isn’t a vocation; it’s an acquired habit.’ He feels that having a reasonably disciplined approach to safeguarding time is important for a writer. Even if you only have one hour a week to dedicate to writing, protect it and stick to that hour. Will explained how he’s always written alongside a full-time job not only for the very practical reason of having to earn a living, but also because he feels ‘that component of one’s life that one can call creative becomes more fertile and is somehow more active if it’s kept to one side, or is on your blind side. There’s something about it not being centre-stage that allows your subconscious, which is where all the interesting stuff happens, to go to work.’
His first three novels he describes as, ‘loosely tragi-comedies of manners set in Bath and London.’ Their identifying feature seems to be a magical element, which sets the otherwise domestic environment at odds with itself. By the time he had completed that trilogy he felt he wanted to try something different. He took a job at Warwick University and started writing Murmur.
Murmur is inspired by the life of Alan Turing. Will studied at Turing’s old college but only became captivated by his story when he read the memoir written by Turing’s mother. Will explained that having greatly assisted this country during the war by cracking the naval code Enigma, Turing was arrested and convicted of gross indecency in 1952. He was given a choice:; go to prison, which would have been the end of his career, or take a punitive hormonal regime known as organotherapy. He chose the latter and bore this enormous physical and psychological insult with great fortitude. Turing subsequently worked on some fascinating and groundbreaking explorations of pattern formation at the interface between biology and mathematics, but then took his own life in 1954. Murmur imagines what it would be like for a hardline materialist, a scientist who believes in objective truths about the world, to deal with this sort of personal affront. What place would he find in his objective, rational world for this experience of pain? As Will points out, this is a still-unsolved problem in the philosophy of science and of mind.
Will read from Murmur and immediately became the character he was voicing. I had the unnerving sensation that he understood not only Alan Turing, but also the essence of the mathematical theories Turing dealt with. He also read some passages and poems from The Inevitable Gift Shop and The Absent Therapist. He manages to capture complex ideas in an accessible, carefully constructed way; a good example being his thoughts on the rhythms of language, describing our heart beat as ‘the undersong of all language.’ His reading voice is as beautiful as his writing, fluid and sensitive yet shot through with a wicked sense of humour. And, especially when reading from his collections, his mastery of the change of mood, tone, voice, accent and energy turns on a penny. At a stroke he can become Brenda ‘the fairly casual racist,’ or a beleaguered Head Teacher, or an outraged victim of a pub quiz hustle. So when the floor was opened to questions, it was no surprise that the first was about Will’s command of voice.
Q: You have a knack of dropping into other voices. Is that a natural gift or something you’ve had to work at?
Will: I’m quite good at earwigging. I keep my ears open and I write down things I’ve heard very quickly. But the content of what you hear, the anecdotes themselves, are not the only interesting part. The way in which people report someone else’s words is key. Because that secondary sense of ‘what so-and-so said to me’ is actually the illustrative component of someone’s voice. What they choose to remember, how they choose to phrase it and how they shape the reality of the other person’s comments is all so characterful. And indicative of the person telling the story. I love the traps they get into and the way they fall over themselves, contradict themselves or double back in time because they’ve got things in the wrong order. I find it fascinating.
Q: You mentioned that some of your previous work contained an element of magical realism. Did that just happen or was it intentional?
Will: ‘Intention’ is interesting. The most intended part of writing has to do with the proportions and shapes of things, the nuts and bolts of scale. I don’t think so much in the early stages about what kind of book it’s going to be, whether it’s going to be realist or magical or whether it’s going to have those components or not. Something happens and it’s often an image in the first couple of chapters, when a book’s developing, that gets my attention. The trick then is to develop that image and make it work. I have a composer friend who says work is often about making triumphs of your mistakes. Which I find helpful and reassuring. So, however absurd the idea I have, however mad, I have to go with it and make it work.
Q: How much of the Turing story is historical research and how much have you had to fill in for yourself?
Will: The novel is bookended by two sections of Alec Prior’s journal, and those are quite thoroughly researched, although I’ve invented a lot of stuff, too. Although I made sure I knew the historical setting in some detail and though I’ve tried to familiarise myself with key issues and run the book past a few mathematicians to make sure I haven’t made any egregious errors, it’s been really important for me to make Alec a fictional character. Because where something is as super- precise as, Turing’s work, you don’t want to claim you’re getting it right when there’s a fairly high risk that you’re going to get some of it wrong. I want to respect the source and that involves moving away from it so that I leave the real man, and his legacy, intact. The central section of the book plunges the reader into dreams and hallucinations, which allows me the distance to be creative. I asked myself, do I want to write a strictly factual, biographical fiction that is going to lay me open to accusations of misrepresentation and misunderstanding?. And I thought, no; it’s too important and I care too much about what happened to do that. So, the imaginative central act, which is lurid and fantastical, is as important as the research.
Q: How important do you think it is to use an alter ego?
Will: This feels like a question about truth and one‘s responsibilities to the model of the story, narrative or poem.
Well, there’s one pikestaff plain response to that, which is to do with libel. You mustn’t libel someone – libel being, ‘a published false statement that is damaging to a person’s reputation.’ So, you cannot libel the dead. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have responsibilities to them. I take that kind of thing very seriously because I’m not comfortable with the blanket excuse that ‘it’s fiction, I can play fast and loose, it’s fine.’ I don’t think it’s fine. I think you have to do the work to embody your characters. And, generally speaking, where you run into problems both in the construction of the story about a real person, and also legally, is where you haven’t done enough work. You haven’t researched it properly; you’re winging it. That’s where the trouble starts.
Q: Can you tell us about the way in which you combine research with writing?
Will: I read a lot and widely and variously and I take a lot of notes. I have big files of notes and I keep researching as I write. I don’t feel I have to do all the research first before I can start; I’m a big believer in getting going. And actually the work and the reading must fuel your imagination as you go along. For me, that’s partly to do with the physical way I write. I write in longhand then I type it up. Then I write on the end of what I just typed and then type that up and it’s a sort of organic process. And my reading proceeds in the same way. I‘ll read one thing and then I’ll read at a tangent to the thing I just read, because that tangential relationship somehow clarifies the whole.
Q: You say shape is very important to you, but is not quite the same thing as plot. Can you expand a little on that?
Will: Let’s think of shape as a cake. For example, a rich, wonderfully tasty domestic drama is like a tiered cake. The story, the shape is the whole thing. Plot is just the mechanism by which you serve it, the slice on the salver. Plot is often a set of circumstances that happen to x number of characters and you go from A to Z with those people in the slice of time you’ve chosen in their lives. But actually, the overarching shape is everything that conceivably happens to them in their whole lives.
For me, sometimes, shape is often a mnemonic – a thing I have in my head that allows me to believe my work already exists, which can be a very important belief. For example, in my second book, I wrote about two sisters who swapped lives and the shape I had in mind for that was the Forth Bridge. Because you have three spans of the bridge and then the same three spans reflected in the water. We often get stuck writing when we measure how we’re going along but if you have a shape it’s like having an armature, something onto which you can plaster the rest of the book. That’s quite different to the mechanism of how characters get from one room to another.
Our thanks go to Will for such an inspiring and insightful evening. His books are available from C.B. Editions and are a masterclass in the art of precision and passion.
Georgina Lippiett is studying the Writing for Children MA at the University of Winchester @McSquorge
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