LesiaDaria writer

Speech delivered by Lesia Daria

Sept. 23, 2015
London Review Bookshop, Bloomsbury, London

Good evening and thank you for coming to the launch of my debut novel Forty One. Those who know me well know I’m not a woman of few words, and I think I’ve put that on record with the 486 pages of Forty One. I hope you don’t mind too much that I’ve written my speech – it’s to keep me from straying off topic, or we might be here until the year 2021!

On receiving the book, my mentor Richard Beard called it a brick, which I took to mean physically heavy as opposed to dense, though I was hoping for weighty-in-a-masterpiece-kind-of-way. In any case, it’s too early to judge my contribution to literature. Ultimately, you and many other readers will decide if I’m worthy or not.

All I can say at this moment of launching the book is that the experience of creating Forty One taught me that writing is as much a craft to be learned and a trade to be practised, as it is an art relying on inherent talent and inspiration. The muse can be present, but often she is not, and only perseverance and hard graft get you there in the end. The surprise for me wasn’t that I was able to do it – to write or complete a novel – but that I finally proved to myself that my intuition was correct. I am a writer, if for no other reason than it’s the perfect way for me to work out my perfectionist tendencies and my bull-headed persistence without annoying anyone else too much.

So why Forty One? . . . If you want a literal answer to that question, it’s the age I chose for my main character Eva at the start of the journey she makes. It was also my age when I began writing. I only recently made the connection that I’ve long been familiar with this number in the form of my shoe size, somewhere between 41 and 42 – so you could say most of my life I’ve been on the quest to find something that fits. . . But at the time of writing, it did occur to me that numbered titles are easy to remember and they tend to last: Fahrenheit 451, Catch-22, and 1984 come to mind. Each of these stories stayed with me long after I’d read them, proving maybe you only do need to write one good book. They also laid the foundations for me to try the kind of writing I enjoy reading, which are works with political and philosophical undertones.

Certainly when it came to thinking up a pen name, I consciously drew inspiration from a great writer, Joseph Conrad. I guessed that Conrad thought there’s no real reason to impose the alphabet soup of a Slavic surname on your English readership. First and middle names and stop: don’t scare them off before you even start.

Starting is the question people most ask of writers: how and why? For me, starting to write wasn’t particularly difficult because I always dreamed of becoming an author. In fact, I began my career at the tender age of six, with such thrilling titles as ‘Dot Man, the Man Made Entirely of Dots.’ You can see the existential connection there already. . . Another whopping bestseller, also a hand-illustrated, single copy samizdat, was called ‘Lee’s Imagination.’ That particularly vivid recounting of an uncle’s exploits, which circulated the family for years and was a source of much amusement, proved that in my case, being earnest is a form of entertainment.

In my teenage and early adult years I was devoted to correspondence in true 19th century style. I don’t suppose many people recall the times when a ‘reply’ wasn’t an instant text but took two weeks. But in the late 80s and early 90s, I was one of those people who actually wrote twenty page letters and waited for them patiently in the post. That experience stayed with me, and I’ve always had a lot of time for writing and solitude, if not the patience for much else. For most of my twenties, I was ostensibly a journalist, which consisted of a range of jobs, affairs and international moves, all of which were a jumble of cause and effect. It was a period of real high drama that took time away from creative writing, but you could say I was gathering some pretty fine material.

That decade of journalism was also a kind of writing. At my last job, the Financial Times, my boss liked to figure out who were the ‘reporters’ and who were the ‘writers.’ I easily fell into the latter category because my kind of news didn’t require much digging, consisting largely of market ups and downs. But I was good at stringing sentences together -- even in four minutes, my tightest deadline. Unfortunately, working with numbers produced in me a kind of paranoia as I worried about accuracy, so I was able to breathe easier when it came down to just words. I love how words have multiples of meaning and how much choice there is, and now I can be as obsessive and slow as I like about finding the right word and editing every sentence until it sings.

My first novel followed quick on the heels of leaving journalism, a satire set in the former Soviet Union, a kind of Kurkov-esque version of Scoop. Inconveniently the writing was squeezed into nine months of pregnancy, or what I called birth-line-as-deadline. Completing the manuscript a day before going into labour, I quickly sent it out and got a few fast rejections – possibly because I had titled the novel ‘Vortex’ and agents thought was sci-fi or maybe that it should go down a black hole anyway. The baby in the background soon convinced me I wouldn’t get any work done in the foreseeable future, so it was shelved. The manuscript, I mean, not the baby.

So it was with bated breath, as my second child ambled off to school, that I thought, right, NOW is the time! A fairly pointless argument with my husband – and yes, it was about curtains – sparked me to type a five page rant which was supposed to set him straight, but thankfully I never sent it as an email. I went back to it a few days later and thought, what if this wasn’t me? What would be the circumstances that led to this moment? What would be the history? What happens next? And so I created Eva, and Adam – and yes, she came first – and Harry and Xavier, and all the other characters. The children Katya and Christophe came easily because I could watch my own for inspiration. I saw no reason to fictionalise them too much, though I did make up all of the dialogue. I suppose I wanted to capture them in some way, at those funny ages of four and six, before they disappeared forever.

I had no storyline in mind as I wrote. I wasn’t too interested in plot, and certainly not in the predictable hooks or contrived twists and turns that are the mainstay of novels, the usual devices to hold a reader’s attention – although that did come back to haunt me later, as I had a lot to reorganise. But at the beginning it was writing without a plan, which worked well ironically too, because all the main characters were locked into ‘the Plan.’ Once again, after nine months of free form and stream of consciousness, I had a manuscript in hand. In my novice status, I thought it was a completed work of genius. Then came the realisation, as Hemingway famously said, ‘the first draft of anything is shit.’

I then spent four and a half years rewriting, another quote on my desk reminding me: ‘There is no such thing as writing, only rewriting.’ (Gillian Slovo) And when that failed, I turned to this one (by Richard Skinner): ‘All writers know where they’ve gone wrong, really. Deep down. Reroute yourself.’

That meant imposing the structure and missing plot, following characters through in places where they disappointed, disappeared or needed to be disposed of, changing the order of the storyline many times, focusing on improving pace, as well as doing the bits I really liked, such as trying in metaphors and allusions and working on the rhythm of sentences. And believe me, I had my work cut out for me, because I had an awful lot of sentences.

I was also somewhat hampered by lack of experience. Not that it’s impossible to write a novel if you’ve never taken a creative writing class, studied literature or have any idea what you’re doing, but it’s just more of an uphill battle. Because I had embarked on Forty One like I do most things in life – dive in first, ask questions later. So I tried to rectify that in part with writers’ workshops and courses like the one offered by Richard and the National Academy of Writing, in which I always learned that I still had a lot to learn.

As a journalist you’re always prepared to be edited and take criticism. Your writing isn’t even yours at the end of the day but belongs to a sub or copy editor. But you do get a bit precious with words when you’ve been honing the opening scene for five years, only to be told, quite frankly, it still sucks. On the other hand, by year five, you’re also so tired, you’ll do anything to get the manuscript across the finish line. So I took on board what I thought was good advice, but I also tried to stick to my own ideas about how my experiment should proceed.

‘From across the room she sizes them up, the new enemy – or more accurately, a former ally that’s betrayed a confidence. Of course it’s preposterous to view curtains this way...’

... or words, or imagined readers or critics, I might add. Because I wasn’t only speaking for Eva there in my opening line, but for myself, my own fears. This is an example of how my experience became part of the text. Because many times during those years of writing, I was afraid readers might fall away or critics tear me apart, either for lack of understanding or finding fault. Worse, I worried that the words themselves might fail me, that I would never find the right words to convey what I wanted.

‘She sighs, eyes her text. Always that same feeling. Sent, gone, irretrievable.’

So in the end, my perfect beginning was a theme that ran through, the perfect way of writing Forty One, a kind of conscious fiction or, one could say, a fiction of double conscience.

In terms of writing, I also set other goals. I wanted to be able to talk to the reader, subsuming that into the text so it too was barely noticeable. I wanted to reflect accurately the way people think: how thoughts move from subject to subject aimlessly and seamlessly yet still often produce clarity. And I wanted the writing to have strong metaphorical quality, even though the action and dialogue in the novel could not be a symbolic exchange, they would have to be as real as possible.

Because I was setting out to write about real life – not the easy dramas that thrill readers and keep so many popular novels going, but the parts of life that disturb quietly: repetition and malaise, the slowness of facing our ultimate end. I certainly knew it would be hard to write about boredom without being boring. And if the novel wasn’t going to ride on plot, then ideas and characters would have to carry the story. So they would have to be very good characters and ideas indeed.

To make it real, I set myself the Tolstoyan task of painting a backdrop with multiple layers and depth. Politics, economics, social trends and class prejudice, would all affect how the characters wrestled with their consciences, their lives and their roles in society.

And the greatest risk of all: making the search for meaning central to the book. How to make such an intangible quest as real, vivid and grounded as the rest?

As one editor (Alan Mahar) noted:’ I’m certainly admiring the ambition of this novel and its philosophical focus, but I’m conscious that what you’re setting out to achieve is a very difficult challenge.’

I agree, the stakes were always high. But I believe I succeeded in my intentions. Now individually and collectively, you the readers will decide how you view it. So I turn over to you Forty One, what I think is a worthy and fine book, my journey over. I can only hope the characters, their story and how I’ve told it, will resonate for you too.

‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’

This saying of Newton’s, a favourite in our house, is a reminder that whatever success you achieve, your insight and foresight is owed to those who laid the foundations. I think all writers know this instinctively because we spend so much time reading and marvelling at the great writers who came before us, as well as those who write contemporaneously. In using other writers in my text, it wasn’t to compare myself or falsely raise myself up, but to share with readers how I opened up to those writers, how I echo them, rethink their ideas and marvel again at the clarity of their thinking, the beauty with which they have set down their thoughts.

In this regard, the Polish Nobel laureate poet, Wislawa Szymborska became a true inspiration. Szymborska came to me late and serendipitously, as so many things do in my life, and in reading and writing in particular. I was in the final stages of editing Forty One, when a friend pointed out that my main character Eva would have read Szymborska, so I immediately went out and bought several collections of her poems. I realised not only did they obviously fit my character’s profile but they slotted perfectly into a particular scene. Proving it’s never too late – to learn, to discover, give new things a go, or insert them in your book – I found in Szymborska an unlikely new friend, someone with whom unexpectedly and inexplicably I feel a shared ethos.

I hope I can someday do that for others with my own writing, and so I’d like to end on this note, standing on the shoulders of Szymborska and sharing her with you.

This poem is called ‘The Joy of Writing’