Course tutor, novelist and screenwriter Lucy Atkins shares an insight into her current research and reading.
I mostly read literary fiction with a sprinkling of memoir or biography, ideally author-related, so the new Deborah Levy caused me to pull on my trainers and run (not much else can do that, trust me) to my local Daunt’s – and then cancel all plans. My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a short, hybrid ‘fiction’ in which a character, Levy-like, is in Paris trying to write an essay on Gertrude Stein. It’s a blend of literary memoir, novel, and biography – yes, all my favourite things in one book, by one of my favourite writers! The joints from ‘essay on Stein’ to ‘make up stuff’ to ‘this is me’ are seamless and blurry and somehow each part coheres into something whole and new. It’s genius.
Before that, I read two Gwendoline Riley novels back to back – an intense activity that almost finished me. Riley’s work is cold and dark, extremely so, but the writing is superb, the delicacy of the observations make it mesmerising. And before this – pretty much the opposite end of the human warmth scale, but equally impressive – I was weeping over Lily King’s Heart the Lover. I don’t like this title, I find it really hard to parse, but the novel is superb; true, subtle and more moving than anything I’ve read in years – a masterclass in how to find a single detail that speaks volumes.
As for my own creative work, I’ve been reading books on screenplay writing as I’ve been commissioned to adapt my Oxford-set novel, Magpie Lane, for TV. It’s been a ‘journey’ as they say – ah, how I’d love to sit in on some of the MSt screenwriting workshops. But I’ve really enjoyed learning a new way of writing. I hope I’ll be able to apply some of what I’ve learned about story structure to finishing my sixth – as yet very much half-written – novel which has been shoved aside to make room for the screenplay, and isn’t happy about it. But I’m always telling my students to step back from the manuscript so maybe this hiatus, too, will turn out to be a blessing.
