Where are you from and what do you love most about your hometown?
R.M. – I’ve only ever lived in two places. London, where I am now, and Alderley Edge, a village in the north-west of England. London I love because it’s the center of the arts in the UK. It has the best musicians, the best writers, the most exciting events and the newest ideas. Alderley Edge has now become famous as the home of football stars, but when I was growing up it had quite a different flavor. The local celebrity was the children’s writer Alan Garner, who set a thrilling, sinister fantasy adventure in the woods and caves that surrounded the village. To read about this landscape in a book and then have it actually beyond my garden gave my writerly imagination a strong start in life.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? How has that childhood dream affected your career?
R.M. – My role models were creative people – artists and musicians. I always wanted to make things that would be special, that people would enjoy and use not in their jobs or their sober nine-to-five hours, but as their entertainment and as landmarks of important times in their lives. At a very young age I grandly imagined my ideal would be to write one novel, make one music album, make one movie, paint one picture… then I got hooked on writing. And I know I made the right choice. Novels are, for me, the best way of telling a story. The connection with the reader is so much more intense and personal than with other story forms like movies or drama. The book unfolds in the reader’s head and becomes a transforming, hypnotic experience. When I look at my shelf of books I’ve read (yes I’m not getting rid of them, despite owning a Kindle) they have all been special experiences, as real as a weekend away with unforgettable people.
Tell us about your latest book. Do you have anything new in the works and can you tell us a bit about it?
R.M. – My latest novel is called My Memories of a Future Life. It takes the idea of visiting a past life to see who you were and flips it around – so it’s reincarnation in reverse.
What if you were someone’s past? Could your next incarnation feel you now? What echoes and scars would you leave in their soul? Do you need to know what those are?
The narrator is Carol, a concert musician. She needs nothing more than her piano and certainly doesn’t think she’s lived before, but when she’s forced by an injury to stop playing she fears her life may be over. Enter her future incarnation, a healer with a secret injury. But what is he really? And can he help her find the answers she needs now?
I do have a few new projects in the works. I have a follow-up to my writing book, Nail Your Novel – Why Writers Abandon Books and how you can Draft, Fix and Finish with Confidence. I’ve completed another novel, Life Form 3, which my agent is showing to publishers – and they’re very excited about. I’ve also got two other novels I’m developing in parallel because the ideas are coming for them unbidden. One is provisionally titled Echo. The other doesn’t yet have a title. My head is a very busy place.
Why did you write this book?
R.M. – I’ve always been fascinated by the phenomenon of past-life regression, especially when people go to a former life and find they drowned and so that explains why they have a fear of water. The romantic half of my brain wants it to be true. The scientific half knows it can’t be. But the stories that come out of it are powerful, whether they’re true or not. I wanted to create a novel that explored this powerful experience and the answers people find.
So I started thinking about going to future lives and who might do that.
Then fate intervened. I had repetitive strain injury from using computers too much and saw a lot of doctors. They found nothing wrong with me, but every time I used a keyboard I was in peculiar, nagging pain. Fortunately I was able to find other ways to do my job. But I thought, what if there hadn’t been alternatives? For instance, if I was a musician? There would be no substitute for a piano.
I started researching the world of classical musicians and one of the things that struck me was how dictatorial a musical score is.
My experience of music is casually tinkering on the piano, but a score is very strict. It tells you exactly how long to play a note for, and on an almost infinite scale of volumes – loud, very loud, very very loud. Not only that, it tells you how to express the piece – for instance, you might be told amoroso, which means ‘play it lovingly’. You don’t decide that yourself. It suddenly seemed as though this was channeling the spirit of the composer – not only do you follow their instructions, you feel the way they did when they were writing it.
At that moment, it was as though a lightning bolt had jumped from one idea – the injured musician – to the idea of visiting another spirit from the past or future. I had a narrator in despair with an injury she couldn’t explain. And a place she could look for answers. I had to write it.
How did you come up with the title?
R.M. – I find titles very difficult. This one took a lot of head-scratching. There were many I considered, but eventually I played with words that created a sense of tension. So ‘memories’ and ‘future’ had to go in. The book has a very intimate feel and is first person, so calling it My Memories of a Future Life seemed natural.
How did you choose your genre?
R.M. – I wanted the story to be mysterious, suspenseful and pacy – but psychological rather than paranormal. I wanted the book to feel like an overwhelming piece of music, to reflect the character’s life and the intensity of her experience, and I wanted the story to be as strong and intriguing as possible. So that means its natural genre is contemporary literary fiction.
What inspired you to be a writer?
R.M. – The pleasure of telling a story, entertaining readers and exploring profound questions about life. Sometimes there are no answers, only questions – but the questions still make us feel we have understood. The best way to do this is to write fiction.
Who is your favorite character in your books? Why?
R.M. – It has to be Gene Winter, the hypnotist in My Memories of a Future Life. His hold over Carol, the pianist narrator, is almost hypnotic before he ever puts her in a trance. She first meets him at the hospital. He works there and she’s just had bad news after some tests. Gene recognizes her from school, and remembers her playing a thundering piece on the piano. At that moment she feels as though he has taken an x-ray of her life. Subsequently every time she meets him she feels he remembers what she used to be and that makes her very uncomfortable. When she later finds out he can hypnotize her and take her to another life, that makes him even more disturbing. Throughout the novel they are playing a psychological game of cat and mouse.
Have you ever used contemporary events or stories “ripped from the headlines” in your work?
R.M. – Yes but not directly. I pay a lot of attention to stories about ordinary people getting into extraordinary trouble – for instance the tragic story of seven guys killed on the motorway when they were driving back from a stag weekend. I never use stories just as they are, though; I take them as a start point and clothe them in my own world and characters. Having said that, I can’t think of any that made it into My Memories of a Future Life.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging about writing?
R.M. – It’s not an easy game! I find there are challenges all the way. Until I’m well advanced in the writing for a novel, I wonder how I’m going to find enough story – but with experience I’ve learned that the ideas turn up everywhere – in the pages of a newspaper, or a chance remark heard on the radio. I’ve learned not to rush, but to let them come. They will.
What advice would you give to writers just starting out?
R.M. – Don’t be in a hurry. Although you can now publish as soon as you feel like it, you should get your manuscript evaluated by someone experienced. You can teach yourself a lot on your own, but there comes a point where you need someone to spot the flaws you simply can’t see for yourself. This goes for professional writers as well – we all have trusted confidantes who will point out the areas of a novel that need more work. We all love the novels we’re writing, and your book will be better if you’ve done justice to it – but that learning process can take years. Writing a novel is a long game – and so is learning how to write them. In short: try to be the best writer you can in order to do justice to your books.
Do you ever suffer from writer’s block? If so, what do you do about it?
R.M. – I have periods where I feel I haven’t any ideas, but staring at the screen won’t solve it. So I have lots of remedies. I might play word games to get the creativity started. I might just start writing and see what happens. I might pick an event or item that appeared earlier in the story and try to work it back in. I have a huge armory of weapons to beat writer’s block – which are in my other book, Nail Your Novel.
Who is your favorite author and why? What books have most influenced your life?
R.M. – I have an ever lengthening list of favorite authors. Graham Greene for his unsettling profundity. Evelyn Waugh ditto. E M Forster and Laurie Lee for unbearable lightness. Andrea Newman, Marian Keyes, Gavin Maxwell and Barbara Trapido for insightful, humorous humanity. Isabel Allende, Audrey Niffenegger and Margaret Atwood for stretching the boundaries of where literary fiction can go. Donna Tartt for The Secret History, period. All those authors, and more, have twirled into my literary DNA.
How did you deal with rejection letters?
R.M. – Rejections come for so many reasons, but they aren’t easy to handle. The vital thing is to keep looking forward. If it’s your first novel and you’re looking for representation, make sure someone more experienced has read it before you send it out. Don’t waste a shot on something that isn’t ready. Some rejections come with no feedback, but if you get any comments at all – even a short line, it shows your work grabbed attention. Take notice of what it said, learn from it and keep going.
What tools do you feel are must-haves for writers?
R.M. – A good imagination, a feel for language, a thirst to improve, a love of stories and a way of making time to write!
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in the name of research?
R.M. – I was interested in people who have their bodies frozen for reanimation in the future, so I visited a club of people on the south coast of England who do this. They showed me around their operating theatre and told me how they’d been doing experiments on a pig. It was very strange. Most of the time my research involves finding interesting people and interviewing them.
Visit Roz On The Web.
My Memories of a Future Life can be found on the Kindle – http://www.amazon.com/My-Memories-Future-Life-ebook/dp/B005O6D97Q/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1316546701&sr=1-6
You can listen to a free audio of the first four chapters, either streamed or as an MP3 download – http://mymemoriesofafuturelife.com/2011/09/01/download-free-audio-of-the-first-4-chapters/
You can find out more at the novel’s website http://mymemoriesofafuturelife.com
My blog is www.nailyournovel.com and I’m on Twitter as @dirtywhitecandy (for writing advice) and @byrozmorris (for general chit-chat and nattering about my fiction).
Roz, such wonderful questions and, as always, wonderful answers!
I love that you hammer home the point of patience. There is such a temptation–of course there is!–to put our work out the second we type THE END. But the truth is that you get one chance (usually) with each agent so it is always worth that revision(s) to make it the best it can be.
But wow on that last question. Fascinating! Tell me there’s a blog post in there
…