Tess Stimson Exclusive Interview

Tess Stimson is back with her new novel The Wife Who Ran Away, which comes hot off the heels of the success of What’s Yours Is Mine.

I caught up with her to chat about the new book, how her journalism career has influenced her writing and what lies ahead.

- The Wife Who Ran Away is your latest novel can you tell me a little bit about it?

It’s one of those of the novels that does what is says on the tin. It is about a wife who, at the beginning of the novel, is having a crisis in various ways; her marriage is bad but it isn’t good, she feels totally invisible to her husband, her teenage children a re being bratty and difficult, her job is under threat from younger competitors and her mother is driving her bonkers.

She decides that she just can’t deal with it anymore and she needs to get away for five minutes so on impulse she jumps in a cab, goes to the airport and gets on a plane.

So without giving too much away she flies to Italy and has a wonderful time with a student, she goes to stay with a friend there, and stays away much longer than intended.

- Where did the inspiration for the central character of Kate come from and how do we see her develop throughout the book?

The inspiration came from a girlfriend who, many years ago,  was in a similar situation to Kate told me that she had had an impulse when she was in Selfridges on day coming down the escalator and she felt like she wanted to just get into a cab and disappear. She didn’t do it but it always stayed in my mind.

Years later I found out that my husband was having an affair and I was trying to get my head around it and decide what to do I took my children to my mother and asked her to look after them, they were four and one at the time, and flew off to Florida.

I spent a couple of weeks walking up and down the beaches just gathering my strength to do what had to be done and that was end the marriage and start again - so that really was the genesis of the book.

As for Kate herself she flees her life because it all gets too much but she realises while she is away that she has allowed things to get that far and not stood up for herself and made things clear enough.

She has also had also had some traumatic events in the previous six months that the book slowly reveals that all comes to a head.

She ultimately has to make a choice; does she stay in Italy with the new life that is beginning with her there? Or does she go back and work with what she already had?

- You have touched on my next question really you have been through a similar situation yourself so how much did you draw on that?

That was the genesis and I think that most writers do often use parts of our lives as jumping off points but that doesn’t mean that the characters that we write about are us but they certainly can inspire it and they can be the seed from which the story grows.

We do plagiarise our lives quite shamelessly, as well as the lives of the people that we know; as a writer no experience, however bad, is ever wasted.

So some of myself did go into Kate but she isn’t me, I’m a very different person, but some of the events that happened to her were inspired by things that have happened to me.

- So what were the major themes that you wanted to explore with your new novel?

I think looking at motherhood and how it can make us feel very trapped and we end up seeing only the negative and we can get sucked into that - that was definitely one theme. 

I think for women in particular if you have had a fairly exciting twenties with career and romance and babies - an awful lot of thing can happen to you in that decade that by the time that you get into your late thirties and early forties and everything just seems to flat-line.

It’s about reaching our expectations from what we want out of life and that was definitely one thing that I wanted to look at. I also wanted to look at how women can be taken for granted in a marriage and can let themselves be because we are too much of the pleasers - we are the soothers and the peacemakers and the mediators.

It’s not just about who does the hovering but we are often the engine that makes the house run and we can end being swamped by it and sometimes you have to stand up for yourself in order to make everyone’s life happy not just your.

- Your novels quite regularly feature family life as well as adultery so why do you chose to focus on these two things?

I think that this is more interesting for me - there are an awful lot of novels available for those who are looking for Mr Right and that is really the easy part what interests me is what happens afterwards.

I think that normal human relationships, family life and married life has huge drama in it and you can have heroes and villains, passion and despair and all these things and those are the things that fascinate me.

- How does the writing process work for you is it characters first and then plot or does plot come first?

I usually have an idea about a story or a theme that I want to explore and the main character, certainly the central female character, is certainly bound up in that plot - the two kind of go together intrinsically.

The lesser characters I will flesh out and decide how many children I want her to have, does she have a best friend? Is she going to have parents that are alive or dead?

But the main character, my main characters are nearly always female; but the male characters always do play a big role, they usually come to me with a plot - it’s a certain type of person who would do something like run away from her children so Kate and the concept came together and I filled in the rest later.

- You always write from the point of view of your characters so why do you choose to write in this way?

I have done that for four or five novels because I really enjoy hearing my character’s voices and I find it very interesting that two people can see the same event have completely different views of it; they often say that about crimes that all the witnesses tell totally different stories.

Because you write in the first person the reader tends to trust that view point and then you will switch to someone else and they will think ’oh that’s not what I thought it was’ and I enjoy that twist and I enjoy getting inside my character’s head.

- You kicked off your career in TV so why did you make the move to being writer - is it something that you had always been interested in?

Yep I have. The first book I wrote I was eleven yeas old and I filled about eight exercise books with this terribly exciting story about an island that sank beneath the sea with this big bubble over it.

When I was at university I went straight from Oxford to working for ITN on the TV news and the writing went on the backburner because it’s actually quite hard making a career and a living out of writing.

The first book I did, which was many years ago, was non fiction but it did give me an entrance into the world of writing and that was when I started writing my first novel and being able to support myself doing it.

- How much do you miss the world of TV?

I am still a news junkie I tend to have CNN or BBC News on in the background usually somewhere in the house - because I am alone in the house writing all day while my husband and kids are out in order to have some company I will have a TV on with the news on somewhere.

But apart from that no, I travelled a lot in my twenties and went to a lot of places; a lot of war zones, and saw an awful lot and I wouldn’t really want to go back because it was exhausting and I wouldn’t want to be away from the family for that long.

- So how much does your experience in the field of journalism help with your writing - if it helps at all?

It helped tighten up my writing certainly because I did English at Oxford and I came out writing lots of essays with long flowery sentences and working with TV you really have to tighten, shorten and cut.

I am my own worst editor, when I finish a book I won’t read it for a month then I go back to it I take out at least 10% - and that is the legacy of journalism certainly.

I also see things very visually, I can see it so when I am writing about it it’s like describing a photograph and I think cinematographically and I think it’s because I pent all those years putting news stories together and visualising them.    

- There is a saying that there is a novel in everyone so for anyone who has aspirations of writing a book what tips would you give them?

Make sure you have a day job (laughs) because it is very hard to make a living. But they say not to give up and I really think that this is key. Also don’t wait for inspiration because if you wait for inspiration it will never happen - there’s that cliché that writing is 10% inspiration 90% perspiration and that is absolutely true.

And you have to write even when you don’t feel like it set yourself some time; you will write for a certain amount of time or a certain number of words and just go for it.

The other thing is read as much as you can in the genre that you want to write in and to read, what I call, ‘above your pay grade’ read books that are better than the kind of thing that you are doing and learn from that as well. I don’t think that you can be a writer if you are not a reader.

- Finally what is next for you?

I have just finished the next book - I haven’t quite decided on a title yet but it is going to be the story of two women who find out that their fourteen year old daughters were switched at birth. One of them wants to switch back but the other one doesn’t so that is the essence of the new one.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw