Night Flower
What can you tell us about your new book The Night Flower?
It opens in 1842 and tells the story of a young Gypsy girl who lives in a Newcastle slum and is convicted of burgling a house. She’s sentenced to seven years’ transportation to ‘parts beyond the sea.’ The novel is about what happens to her once she reaches Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), and explores themes such as crime and punishment, morality and hypocrisy, prostitution and motherhood, particularly motherhood that is the antithesis of the chaste, self-sacrificing Victorian ideal.
What interested you in this unexplored part of our history?
The idea came to me one morning in August 2010. My daughter was six months old and I hadn’t slept for longer than an hour at a time since she was born. I had this idea in my head that if I could only write a novel, I wouldn’t be so bothered by the lack of sleep. I was driving to a baby shop to buy her a highchair. Radio 4 was playing in the car and someone was talking about this new historical resource called Old Bailey Online, which contains transcripts of all the cases ever brought before the Old Bailey. The woman who was being interviewed shared a story she’d found, in which two impoverished Gypsies stole a posh girl’s dress and were sentenced to death. On appeal, their sentence was reduced to transportation. It was still a shockingly harsh punishment and it was generally thought that the main reason for it was because they were Gypsies and the other girl was upper-class. The people on the radio carried on talking about what life was like for young girls and women in a penal colony and the more they talked, the more I thought, ‘I think I need to write this novel.’
This is your second novel, so what can you tell us about your first?
My first is called Mothernight and is for a young adult audience. It’s about two seventeen-year-old girls, Leila and Olivia, who are at boarding school and who are also lovers. It’s an intense and passionate relationship, but Leila is a character full of sadness and grief. Nine years earlier, her baby half-brother died suddenly and Leila was sent away to school because her step-mother was convinced she had killed him. Now, Leila and Olivia are about to leave school and are both returning to Leila’s old home for the summer, where the tension mounts and becomes unbearable for everyone. It’s not a whodunit - it’s a did she/didn’t she?
Where did your inspiration for the characters of Rose and Miriam come from?
I created Miriam first. I’m not sure exactly where she came from. When I started writing, her voice appeared on the page and was quite distinctive. I think she just grew from her voice. I knew she was going to be a convict, so she was going to have a bit of attitude, but I also wanted her to be likeable and vulnerable.
Rose came much later. I felt I needed another character whose voice could act as a contrast to Miriam’s, which was why I chose someone from a higher social class than Miriam. She also needed to be a convict and it was unlikely that a Victorian lady would be transported, so I made her a gentlewoman of reduced circumstances. The more I wrote of her, the less I began to trust her.
What other Victorian gothic novels have you enjoyed and drawn inspiration from?
Essie Fox’s novel The Somnambulist is an excellent read. It was selected for the TV Book Club in 2011. I read it then and loved it. I’m not sure whether it would really be classed as gothic, but Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is one of my best ever reads. I also love ‘genuine’ Victorian novels - Wuthering Heights is my very favourite. I studied it for my A Level English Literature sixteen years ago and still remember it vividly.
How much research was required for this book?
Not as much as you’d think. I read some excellent non-fiction books about the system of transportation, but it was mostly just through reading things on websites. I wanted to know what happened to convict women who conceived children in the colony and what happened to the children. It was all contained in about three pages on one website. The joy of carrying out research for a fiction project is that you really just need the basic facts and then you can make the rest up. It’s not like writing an academic treatise on the subject, which would have bored me to death.
What is your writing process?
I only ever write in the mornings. I find I need to do it before normal life for the day has got into my head. I start as early as I can and usually work for about three hours. Then I stop. When I’m at the beginning of a project, I’m happy if I can produce 500 words in that time. Later, I increase this to 1,000 words and in the last couple of weeks; I can usually churn out about 3,000 words a day.
I started writing The Night Flower when my eldest daughter was eight months old. I had two mornings a week in which to write, so I was very disciplined about it. It was finished by the time she was eighteen months.
What advice can you give to aspiring novelists?
Don’t think about publication. Just think about writing. Write every day if you can. And don’t think of the blank pages ahead of you. Just think about this page, or this paragraph. Set yourself realistic aims, like 500 words a day. If you just write 500 words a day, five days a week for a month, then at the end of that month, you’ll have 10,000 words. At the end of a year, you’ll have a novel.
It might not quite work like that because you might discard thousands of words along the way, but if you keep at it, it will eventually all become clear and one day you will look at your document and think, ‘I do believe this is a novel.’
Then re-write it. And re-write it. And re-write it. Then leave it under the bed for six months, go back to it, decide it’s rubbish, burn it and write another one. Repeat this entire process five times. Then you will be ready for publication.