Tag Archives: Jan Baynham

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: JAN BAYNHAM ON WRITING HER DEBUT NOVEL

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Jan Baynham is a good friend to all the Sister Scribes and here she provides an insight into writing her debut novel, Her Mother’s Secret: The Summer of ’69. Susanna Bavin asks the questions.

You started out as a short story and flash fiction writer. What made you decide to write a full-length novel?

On retirement, I joined a writing group where I wrote my first short story. Very soon, I could see my stories getting longer and longer. After enrolling on a novel-writing course at Cardiff University, I enjoyed being able to explore characters in more depth and delve further into their stories. I still write shorts but now it tends to be when I’m editing or doing research for a novel. When writing a novel, I love getting to know my characters so well that I miss them when I come to the end and I enjoy visiting new locations with them. The length of a novel allows me to create more involved plots and sub-plots for the characters to experience than I’m able to do in a short story or piece of flash fiction.

What was the initial idea behind the story from which it all grew?

The novel started out as a short story. At the time, I’d been reading a novel where the rustling in the trees sounded like whispers and inanimate statues took on the form of the ghosts of people they represented. Combining both ideas, I asked myself what if the whispering could show the presence of a past family member. Always fascinated by family secrets and the bond between mothers and daughters, I knew I had the basis for a story. In both the story and the novel, I leave it to the reader to decide what the whispering represents. In the short story, Alexandra’s search for the truth was resolved quite quickly whereas in the novel there are many more twists and turns, obstacles and setbacks before the story concludes.

Tell us about the places that feature as the backdrops of the story.

Once I’d decided that my main character Elin would be an artist, I chose a setting where the surrounding colours would be more vibrant and intense than in her home country of Wales. Having visited many times and being struck by the wonderful palette of colours seen in every landscape, Greece was my choice of background. The island is not based on one particular place but is an amalgam of areas I’ve visited. Every holiday has contributed to the whole backdrop where I’ve tried to show the climate, the vivid colours of the sea and the flowers as well as the warmth of its people.

How important is the mother-daughter dynamic to the story?

The mother/daughter relationship is central to the novel. Alexandra is grieving after the untimely death of her mother, Elin. She experiences a whole gamut of emotions from deep loss and its accompanying sadness, through to anger that her mother has abandoned her. When she learns there is part of her mother’s life she knew nothing about, Alexandra goes to Greece with the hope of finding answers.

What have you learned about the writing/editing process? Is there a piece of advice you’d like to share?

Everything suggested by my lovely editor at Ruby Fiction was very clear and straight-forward, but one thing stood out. I hadn’t always got the dates or passing of time issues right. Elin’s story is interspersed with diary entries and these didn’t always tally! The way I dealt with these continuity edits was to have a calendar in front of me and highlight the dates as events happened. Although a diary may not feature in another novel, I will definitely use a calendar to check the passing of time in future.

 

SISTER SCRIBES: SUSANNA BAVIN ON THE APPEAL OF THE SHORT STORY

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Hands up everyone who remembers the First, Second, Third etc Pan Book of Horror Stories, Edited by Herbert Van Thal. I loved those scary stories when I was in my early teens. Looking back, some of them weren’t entirely suitable for a young reader, though that didn’t stop me lapping them up. My favourite was a ghost story by E F Benson (who wrote the Mapp and Lucia books), called The Confession of Charles Linkworth. I had a phase of reading it every Sunday afternoon before tea and, even though I ended up practically knowing it by heart, it frightened me silly every time. The hero of my newest book, The Surplus Girls, is named Gabriel Linkworth, as a nod to that story.

That was the second E F Benson short story I had come across. The first was The Room in the Tower, which featured in a book called Ghosts! An Anthology, which I received as a Christmas present. Unfortunately, the story was rather wasted on me because I didn’t altogether understand it. It is, in fact, a vampire story and I sort of knew that when I read it, but I was a very literal-minded child and this was in a book of ghost stories and therefore Julia Stone had to be a ghost… didn’t she?

I have always been a reader of short stories. In particular I love the collections that were put together in 1930s, with titles such as The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries and A Century of Humour, which was one of a series of A Century of… books. What better way to be introduced to writers such as Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, O Henry and W W Jacobs? My first taste of G K Chesterton was the wonderfully funny The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown, which I re-read regularly. The Mammoth Book mentioned above even contained a ‘sealed section’ at the end, with stories to make you ‘glance over your shoulder and perhaps even start when there is a creak on the stair.’

A writer whom I came to love was A J Alan, whose wit and humour could find mystery in the most ordinary situations. It was often the style in these 1930s anthologies to top each story with a few sentences of author biography, beside which was a pencil sketch of the man (it was almost always a man) himself; but there was only ever a fancy question mark in the place where A J Alan’s portrait should be. He was famous for reading his stories on the wireless and his identity was a closely guarded secret, as befitted the mysterious nature of his tales.

And I adored Anthony Hope’s The Dolly Dialogues. I bought myself a first edition after enjoying the two chapters that featured in A Century of Humour. They are clever and teasingly romantic observations of life and love.

The most recent collection of short stories I’ve read is Jan Baynham’s Smashing the Mask and Other Stories. Although there isn’t an official theme to the book, a thread of the supernatural runs through several of the tales and in each one Jan creates a different sort of atmosphere, from the deep sorrow of a ghostly mother to the chilly horror of a long-ago murdered girl to the traditional creepiness of helping a stranger. She also uses painful directness to tackle the all too recognisable dilemmas of hoping against hope to meet a long-lost child and struggling to be brave in a situation of coercive control. Jan has produced an intriguing collection filled with insight, a variety of moods from the uplifting to the poignant, and more than one clever twist in the tale.