Jenn Ashworth, award-winning Preston novelist, talks to Daisy Baldwin for the Lancashire Writing Hub. Jenn has also kindly donated a copy of her novel A Kind of Intimacy as a competition prize – although she has also set an incredibly challenging competition question at the end of the interview…
Jenn Ashworth was born in Preston in 1982 and studied at Cambridge and the Manchester Centre for New Writing.
Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy was published in 2009 and was described by The Guardian as ‘a hugely readable debut novel […] about the inability to know others and ourselves’. Her second book, Cold Light comes out next year. Her website is at http://jennashworth.co.uk/.
Daisy Baldwin was born in Croydon in 1987 and grew up in Lancashire. She attended Oxford University before completing the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. She is currently at work on her first novel and living in North London. She blogs at Paper Face Girl.
LWH: You’ve achieved a lot both personally and professionally in the last few years! What gets you out of bed in the morning?
JA: I’m a terrible person in the mornings. I’m usually dragged out of bed by my hair and the demands of the school run. The Mr indulges me and usually brings tea. If left to please myself, I’d probably end up nocturnal.
More generally, the drive that gets me to my desk, even when I don’t feel like it, is a combination of the creative and the practical. I always feel that the next thing I write is going to be better. I want to be better, so I need to practice every day. I want to find out how the story ends. I can’t leave emails unanswered because it’s rude, I like to have an empty inbox and everything ticked off on my list. I want to show my daughter that working hard on things that are important to you and no-one else is important. And it pays our rent, so in a very real way I get up and go for some of the same reasons as I did when I was a librarian.
LWH: Do you think anyone can be a writer?
JA: It depends what ‘be a writer’ means. I think anyone can learn to improve their writing, even if it is only a little. I think anyone can get more pleasure out of putting words down and sharing them with other people (and if you don’t get pleasure out of it, pack it in!). I think anyone can learn to read critically and closely and apply their learnings from that to their own writing. But the extent to which that improvement can be made is probably different for all of us.
Not everyone is going to be mainstream print published, not everyone is going to get big audiences when they perform. Not everyone will make a living or get a huge readership. Some of that will be to do with talent (which is not teachable) and the quality of the work and some of it will be to do with the demands of the market, what’s wanted, what’s fashionable, what’s lucrative.
I recently did an interview with the poet Sarah Hymas and she said writers need to define what success means to them. I agree. ‘Being a writer’ for me, means sitting down as regularly as I am able and telling stories, and being demanding and honest with myself when it comes to editing. I think most people who want to do that, can do.
LWH: Describe a time you lost faith in yourself and how you overcame it.
JA: I haven’t.
I regularly doubt that other people will enjoy reading my stories as much as I enjoy writing them. I have doubted that I’ll be able to make a plot or character work, that I’ll be able to sell my writing, that I will get better. I get shy and bored and frustrated the same as anyone else. A lot of writing is slog and sometimes I doubt my ability to motivate myself through the dull times. I am embarking on a third novel and because it’s structured quite differently to anything I have tried before so right now I am wondering if I’m going to be able to pull it off.
But I don’t doubt that I will always be writing in one form or another. This is what I do. What else would I do? I always think it’s a bit odd when people don’t write.
LWH: Would AKOI have been the same set in Bristol or Brighton? How important is place in your writing?
JA: Place is really important because character is the most important thing and where we live and who we live with shapes our personalities to a degree that nothing else does.
When Annie moved to Fleetwood, she had Blackpool in mind so the joke of her disappointment probably wouldn’t work in exactly the same way for someone else as it does for a character who’s been brought up in a remote Cumbrian village dreaming of ballroom dancing, bingo and candy floss. But the joke of her disappointment isn’t the only interesting thing about the novel, and there are lonely, odd people, snobs and Barrat-style housing estates everywhere. Readers in the US, Australia and Canada, who I presume have never heard of Fleetwood, write to me and tell me they know someone exactly like Annie, or Lucy, or Ray – so even though I think Fleetwood is unique, it must be fairly translatable too. 
LWH: You have studied in both Cambridge and Manchester, are these or any others places you feel you know intimately enough to set a novel there?
JA: Ooh. Good question. I could set a novel in Cambridge or Manchester – or anywhere, I suppose. I could read and research and go on visits. But would I want to? I don’t choose a place because I know it well enough to write about it, the places I have written about make me curious and curiosity is what prompts me to write. Even though I’ve had a spectacularly small, untravelled life so far, I feel like I’ve got enough stories to last me for years.
I wrote about Preston in Cold Light because I’ve lived here all my life and I still see it as such an odd, peculiar, stranded little city and I wanted to give my version of it to the world. I don’t have that emotional attachment to or investment in Cambridge or Manchester. I’m not curious in the same way – perhaps because they’ve both been written about so much before.
Novel number three is set in Chorley and Salt Lake City…
LWH: With marketing budgets slashed and the advent of social media, writers are increasingly expected to publicise their own work, through talks, blogs, media interviews and the like. I know you’ve blogged recently about this but could you say a little here about your feelings on this aspect of the writer’s life?
JA: My feelings on it are very mixed. If the work is no good, no amount of blogging and networking and interviewing is going to sell it. And because the self promotion work is immediately gratifying in a way that the slow burn of novel writing isn’t, it can be easy to let the promotional work overwhelm the writing work. And the blogging world can be very cliquey and back-stabby, and I hate the vanity and silliness of that aspect of it.
Festivals, reading nights, talks etc – can be good and bad too. They bring in income – most festivals and the like pay and if they don’t, they should do. Through them I’ve met other writers who I now call friends. They’re a way of talking directly to readers and finding out what people think of my book. There’s no hiding from the fact that some festivals and events come with a little prestige and reputation too, and for a career that can be so rickety and unstable, that side of it can feel very welcome.
But they are tiring, and they suck up time in travelling. You always say you’re going to write or read on the train or in the hotel room, but you never do. It is work but it isn’t writing, and if you’re surrounded too much by people telling you how good your book is, you can start to believe it, and if you can’t look at your own work honestly and put great demands on yourself, editing the work in progress gets more difficult.
Of all the promotion work I do, I like blogging the best. I get to stay at home and interact with the world through my keyboard. It’s brilliant. But for me, blogging isn’t (only) about self promotion. It’s a form of writing in itself, and one that I very much enjoy. I’ve made real friends, made ‘contacts’, been offered work, been able to promote other people’s work and writing – all kinds of practical benefits.
But it’s also worked like a very public diary and made me commit to examining my own writing process. I’m interested in how we tell stories about ourselves. I’ve been keeping a blog for four years now, I think. It’s still odd when my students tell me they read it. If you read back far enough, you can trace certain preoccupations of mine as they develop. It’s very useful for me to be able to do that.
LWH: You’ve got two children, are you enjoying revisiting children’s literature and what are your favourite children’s books?
JA: We don’t go for any of that pink-princess-mermaid-with-wings tat, although Small Fry would very much like us to. Right now, McTiny is too small to get a vote: he just gets what he’s given. We’ve recently read The Borrowers and Stig of the Dump. The Mr is a big fan of Alice and Wonderland, and we have audio books – Alan Bennet reading Winnie the Pooh. We’re reading The Twits right now. We mix it up now and then and exchange an episode of The Simpsons for a bedtime story though.
My favourite book ever, ever, ever is The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren. I don’t have a copy any more. It’s starts in our world – with two brothers. One is very sick, and has an older brother who’s strong and healthy. Everyone thinks the younger, sick brother is going to die. But he doesn’t – there’s a house fire and the older brother dies first. Eventually, the little brother dies of his illness and the two meet again somewhere else and have all kinds of adventures with horses and dragons. Then they realise death exists in the afterlife too.
I don’t have a copy any more. Every time I buy one, I end up giving it to someone else. Seeing as it’s about The Afterlife, and we’re already trying to repair the damage done to Small Fry’s understanding of science by all this festive talk of angels and virgin births, we’ll probably save that one until she’s a little bit older. I can’t wait.
LWH: What’s the worst thing about being a full-time writer?
JA: People popping round during the day because they don’t think I have a real job. People thinking you’re really, really rich. People assuming that you’ve read every book in the world and are ready and able to talk intelligently about them. People saying, ‘ooh, you’ll be the next J.K Rowling then?’ Repetitive strain injury. Copy editing. People who I’ve met once emailing me with lists of typos in A Kind of Intimacy.
But really, it’s a very very nice job and apart from the occasional moan when I’m very tired I’m almost always glad to be doing it.
LWH: How long did it take to write Cold Light? Could you break it down into stages of drafts, research, revisions etc.
JA: I started writing after I’d given A Kind of Intimacy to my agent but before we sold it to Arcadia. I was testing out various story lines. I tried to plan, but it didn’t really work. I ended up with two interwoven stories – one about two teenage girls and another about a giant dead squid and a traffic jam. The dead squid one wasn’t working – I couldn’t make it say what I wanted to say. So I got rid of that and concentrated on the two teenage girls.
I realised, after eighteen months or so, that I was trying to write a Greek Tragedy. The deaths almost all happen off stage and there’s a bit of a chorus in the form of a charismatic but fatally flawed news presenter. I’ve probably made it sound a bit dafter than it is.
But my process is to be playful and mess about and expect to chuck lots away. It took round about three years, but I was only writing full time for the last five months of that time. Then Sceptre bought it and I spent another month or so on some tweaks and copy edits.
I didn’t do a vast amount of research. Some reading, on-line and off, about deep-sea creatures, submarines and bio-luminescence. That was a really big part of my first attempt, and a more understated sub plot in the finished version.
LWH: You’ve mentioned in the past that pre-AKOI you had written a large chunk of another novel which was then lost when your computer was stolen (NB is that right or have I massively embroidered the tale?) and that you chose not to return to this topic. Were there moments during the writing of AKOI and Cold Light where you seriously felt like giving up, and how do you know when a project is fatally flawed or just having teething problems?
JA: With both A Kind of Intimacy and Cold Light there were plot strands – sometimes equating to a third or more of the novel, that clearly weren’t working and needed to be chopped out and got rid of. I hand wrote Cold Light and by the time I’d finished typing it up, it was a very different creature again. I expect to throw a lot away so I feel all right about that. I always feel like giving up around 30,000 words in, and again at about 50 or 60,000 words. It was the same for the Balloon novel, alas lost. Maybe if Cold Light or A Kind of Intimacy had been stolen at those points I would have felt okay about letting them go too.
Sophie Hannah said at an event that she doesn’t let a project be fatally flawed – it’s her job to make it work. I have a similar outlook. I will change and bend and delete and rewrite in order to get it to work. But apart from the Balloon book and a few short stories, I’ve never really given up on a writing project.
Actually, I tell a lie. There was a novel I started after A Kind of Intimacy but before Cold Light. I got about a third of the way through (that magic 30,000 again?) and realised it was a bit too autobiographical. I wasn’t able to be as violent with my material as I needed to be to make it into a good story. I had stage fright. I still have it and I might go back to it at some point, but giving that up was as much to do with my feelings about the project as it was about being able to tell the story didn’t have legs.
LWH: What are your three favourite types of cake?
JA: Another high-quality question!
I’d rather have a pair of vanilla slices than a cake any day, but in the tragic event of there being no vanilla slices (or iced fingers, or bakewell tarts) available, I’d have sticky banana cake, then ginger cake, then scones with clotted cream. And seeing as scones aren’t really cakes, I could probably also have lime cheese cake. I could, couldn’t I?
LWH: You’ve blogged about your interest in the individual as an unreliable narrator; the part our own minds play in suppressing memories. Are there any novels or writers you admire who also address these issues?
JA: I very much admire Jenny Diski’s writing – especially Strangers on a Train and Skating to Antartica. Paradise, by A. L Kennedy. Anything by Kazuo Ishiguro. Paul Auster.
Although if you’re writing a first person narrator and the narrative isn’t unstable or unreliable in some way, you’re doing it wrong.
LWH: You’ve written a series of ‘Tips for Writers’ on your blog, give me a tip which isn’t writing related?
JA: Don’t put the bin out the night before – it’ll get nicked and the council will charge you for a new one.
Jenn’s Competition challenge to win a copy of A Kind of Intimacy starts here…
Okay – here’s my question:
rank these cakes in order of awesomeness:
Eccles cakes, Bakewell tarts, syrup sponge cake, ginger cake.
Email your answer – clearly marked Jenn Ashworth Competition – to Jane at writing@theyeatculture.org by Friday 31st December!
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