Time for a new interview, this time with the very talented Aliya Whiteley. I've enjoyed Aliya's work for a long time, not least because she's turned her hand to a lot of different kinds of stories and executed them all so well. I'm partway through reading her new collection, and it is one of the best things I have read so far this year, and may well stay that way. You should read it, I think you'll love it too. (Get here: Lulu)
We're in a lift, I'm someone important (come
on, pretend), you've got thirty seconds (tall building, slow lift) to tell me
about your latest book.
I’m stuck in a lift
with Cher and you want me to talk books?! I’ll attempt to remain coherent. Witchcraft in the Harem is a collection
of fantasy short stories that take you to dangerous and exciting places.
Here’s the blurb:
You’re running away from something terrible. You think you’ve
escaped it, this thing, but it turns out it’s waiting for you in all the places
you hide: your house, your garden, a self-help group, a seraglio, the island of
Zanzibar, a museum in Turin, a hot air balloon in Canada, even in the ladies’
room of your favourite nightclub. You’ve carried it into these places with you.
It’s inside you. And now it’s time for it to come out.
I loved Gypsies,
Tramps and Thieves, by the way. Will you sign my face please?
Uh-oh. Not sure lifts are meant to stop
suddenly between floors like this. Guess we've got a bit more time. Ignore the
flickering lights and creaking sounds above us. Would you like to tell me about
other books or stories that you have available?
Before I wrote
fantasy stories I wrote comic novels. Three
Things About Me and Light Reading
are still out there for public perusal. And I have the true-life story of the
time I fled my wedding (and took my fiancé along with me) available in the
bestselling Lonely Planet anthology Better
Than Fiction. None of these are as
monumental as If I Could Turn Back Time,
obviously, but one does one’s best.
Please stop repeatedly pressing the emergency
button. The comment about building a ladder of bones to reach the ceiling hatch
and get out of here was just blue-skies thinking. So, what are you working on
now?
I’ve just finished writing a fantasy novel and I’ve got short
stories coming up in magazines like Kaleidotrope
and Per Contra, as well in the Best of Smokelong anthology, so these
are exciting times for me. Please don’t make a ladder out of me. I have so much
to live for.
You've told us about what stories you've
written, and I know from my own reading how wide-ranging they are. How would
you describe yourself as a writer?
I really don’t do just one genre or type of story. I write the
ideas that come to me. I’ve always loved fantasy, but as a loose definition for
stories in which anything could happen. I’d describe myself as unpredictable.
Pascal said: "Please forgive this very
long and drawn out letter, I did not have time to write you a short one."
Do you find writing short fiction harder than your novels?
The challenge of the novel is to keep going every day, and maybe
find at the end of the writing process that you’ve wasted a year. I can’t tell
early on in a novel if I’m wasting my time, so in that regard a short story is
easier to write. Plus my mind works in short. I’m not a person that writes five
thousand words and cuts down to two. I write one thousand words and work up. I
often find with novels that the scenes I add late on in the editing process
become the key moments, which is strange. But my brain works that way.
In your own writing, what do you think you do
well, and what do you wish you could do better?
I think I can
surprise the reader well. I love those moments when you’re reading a book or a
story and you think to yourself – I have no idea where this is going. I love
those moments, and I try to get that feeling into my writing. It’s very
powerful.
Right now I’m working
on a novel from a male point of view, and I’m wishing I was naturally better at
that. I’m persevering, though.
Can you remember what made you sit down to
write your first book or story?
Compulsory
redundancy. I was an assistant at an insurance company and when they decided to
close the office they needed someone to stay behind for three months and sit
there with not a lot to do until all the furniture had been moved out. So I
filled my time by writing. I wrote a really awful romantic novel, just to see
if I could. And I could. That gave me the confidence to try to write something
literary, and I wrote my King Lear/Dune crossover novella, Mean Mode Median. And I loved it – that feeling of creation and
freedom.
Do you have a book or short story that you're
very fond of, but you think should get more attention from the world than it
has?
I wrote a novel a few
years ago called The Flipside of Libby
Frost and it is an Acker Bilk inspired weirdness of a novel that I’m very
proud of. But it fell in that period when conventional publishing wanted me to
write something a bit more commercial and so it never got published. Maybe
someday it’ll make it out of the hard drive and into the real world.
Print publishing is a doomed but still
predatory dinosaur rotting from the feet up. Ebook publishing is the vomiting
out of the world's slushpiles onto the market. In the ongoing war of words and
hyperbole, where's the happy medium to be found? Where do you think the
publishing business is heading over the next few years, and what are you doing
to be ready for it?
I really don’t know
and I’m rubbish at predicting things. My experiences with larger publishers and
the business model of publishing has taught me that I can’t do anything about
it. I want to get my work out there and beyond that I am unbothered about the
medium. I’ve done big publishing, small press, and self-publishing, and they
all have something to recommend them. No matter how I get published, the only
thing under my control is putting my best work out there so that I’m not
ashamed of it. So that’s what I concentrate on.
What book do you most wish that you had written?
Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation. Anything by
Rupert Thomson, actually, because he’s brilliant. Or The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.
If you could give an aspiring writer one piece
of advice, what would it be?
You only start to get
good at it if you do it lots and do it for years.
If you could tell an aspiring piece of writer
to ignore one commonly given piece of advice, what would it be?
Any reductive piece
of advice annoys me. Don’t use adverbs, don’t use tags other than ‘said’, and
so on. You get a feel for what fits after a while, and sometimes it’s an adverb
or a different speech tag. She opined grandiosely.
Are you 'out' as a writer of fiction with work
colleagues/family, and if so, what reaction did you get?
I was a full-time stay-home mother, but then my daughter
ungraciously went off to school, so I had to come clean and admit I had also
been writing for the past five years and wasn’t about to go out and get another
office job.
It’s difficult to hide because I like writing in cafes. In fact,
I choose one café that I love and I go there every morning, and so it would
look odd to say I’m merely doodling when I’m obviously scribbling long
sentences for two hours at a time. So I tell people I’m a writer, and they
think I’m strange or deluded, and that’s fine. They’re always really pleased
for me, though. Pleased that I’m happily scribbling away.
Gibbons or tigers?
I just wrote a short story
about tigers that live in your brain, so tigers it is.
