20 Writerly Questions for Jane Johnson
1. How would you summarize your book in one sentence?
The salt roads cross the desert like the lines on a hand, tracing the hard path between life and death, the path that two women from vastly different cultures must walk if they are to find love and freedom, and the answer to a mystery that spans continents and generations.
2. How long did it take you to write this book?
Nearly two and a half years: half of which was research – books, internet, interviewing family members and contacts, travelling in the desert.
3. Where is your favorite place to write?
I like to write the first draft long hand and outdoors too, preferably by the sea or in the mountains, anywhere there’s lots of wide open space, which lets my mind roam free. My Cornish cottage is so tiny it doesn’t have room for a study; in Morocco, I often sit on the roof terrace of our apartment, or walk out into the wilds with a notebook.
4. How do you choose your characters’ names?
Usually when I’m researching they leap out at me, demanding to be chosen. Tuareg names are complicated and very foreign, though, so I was careful to choose only those I could pronounce!
5. How many drafts do you go through?
As an editor, I self-edit all the time, which is a danger in itself: sometimes it can be hard to gain forward momentum, which is one of the reasons I force myself away from the computer in order to write outside. Once I have the first draft of a scene in long hand I then type it into the laptop, editing as I go. Then I’ll return over arcs of narrative when the shape is clear in my head, and then again at the end with all the ‘go-back’ points I’ve accumulated.
6. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?
Ah, an impossible question! There are so many books I admire, all for different reasons. But maybe The Persian Boy by Mary Renault: the balance she achieves between superb characterization, emotional power and impeccable research is simply stunning.
7. If your book were to become a movie, who would you like to see star in it?
Fantasy casting, what fun. For the young Mariata, maybe Natalie Portman, or to be properly authentic, Aminata Goumar, from the Tuareg group Toumast, who has a classic Tuareg profile and strong bone structure. For Izzy, maybe Jennifer Connelly, though her skin needs to be darker. For Amastan, Johnny Depp – or Algerian actor Salim Kechiouche; for Taïb, perhaps French-Tunisian actor Sami Bouajila … or my husband, Abdellatif!
8. What’s your favourite city in the world?
I am not generally a great lover of cities; but recently I have been reconnecting with London, having lived away from it for 5 years, as I carry out research of Restoration London sites for the new novel, The Sultan’s Wife, which is set partly in Morocco and then follows its embassy of 1682 to the court of Charles II. It’s been fascinating getting behind some of the famous, and not so well known, facades I’ve passed in cars and buses for most of my life without any idea of what lay within.
9. If you could talk to any writer living or dead who would it be, and what would you ask?
These are hard questions! I loved Wolf Hall and it would be wonderful to sit down with Hilary Mantel and compare notes about the pitfalls and problems with characterizing real historical figures. And what fun it would be to be able to go back in time and talk to the 14th century Moroccan explorer and writer Ibn Battuta.
10. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind?
Generally, I don’t, since I either listen to it and then don’t write; or if I’m concentrating I simply don’t hear it.
11. Who is the first person who gets to you read your manuscript?
For the Moroccan sections, Abdel will read to check my cultural references; then I have a little bank of readers, including two professional publishing friends (who shall remain nameless) and a couple of devotees of historical fiction, who do me the favour of giving me honest feedback. Then of course it goes to my editors!
12. Do you have a guilty pleasure read?
I don’t believe in this as a concept: all reading should be about pleasure, otherwise what’s the point? I don’t ever feel guilty about reading!
13. What’s on your nightstand right now?
A bit of a tottering pile! I’m happily rereading A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin (which I published in 1994) ahead of the big Sky dramatization in spring 2011; a biography of Charles II; the diary of John Evelyn; and A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman.
14. What is the first book you remember reading?
I was happily engrossed by all sorts of comics from the age of three, do they count? As for actual books, I have very clear memories of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth.
15. Did you always want to be a writer?
I’ve always been a book addict and I wrote stories – long stories – from the age of about 7, and told them to classmates too, but I never planned to become a novelist. In fact I never planned to be anything in particular and fell into my publishing career (20+ years as an editor with HarperCollins)
16. What do you drink or eat while you write?
When I’m caught up in the writing I can forget to eat or drink; but those are rare times. Usually I’m wrestling with sentences or structure, fuelled by herbal teas and coffee. Lunch tends to be whatever comes immediately to hand – soup, salad, bits of bread. And luckily my husband is a chef or I’d probably go on living from hand to mouth all the time (I am a lazy cook).
17. Typewriter, laptop, or pen & paper?
First draft usually pen and paper; then laptop. I am a rubbish typist – had a typewriter when I was little and used to bash away with two fingers, and I’m afraid that bad habit stuck and I never learned to touch type, or even type accurately. I went to typing classes after school for a while: it was sheer torment. So I spend too much time correcting my errors if I write on a laptop, and that gets in the way of the creative process.
18. What did you do immediately after hearing that you were being published for the very first time?
When I heard from my agent that The Tenth Gift had sold, I was sitting peeling potatoes in the kitchen of my husband’s restaurant in Morocco and had to ask him to call back later since Abdel was gesticulating furiously for his vegetables! When I sold my first children’s book (The Secret Country) in 1999, I just sat at my dining room table staring at the phone long after my agent had rung off, simply not believing what I’d just heard.
19. How do you decide which narrative point of view to write from?
It never feels like much of a decision: I can always hear the character’s voice in my head. Julia from The Tenth Gift and Isabelle in The Salt Road are familiar enough; but then there is Mariata, that determined, headstrong Tuareg woman, and The Sultan’s Wife, which I am working on now, is largely narrated by Nus-Nus, a eunuch at the court of the Moroccan sultan.
20. What is the best gift someone could give a writer?
Time, and a quiet space in which to think and write. If I could buy time, I would spend all my money on it…
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