10 Questions: Samantha Harvey

Gentle flood (of) rage.

 

I wanted to write a novel in the form of a long letter because letters have an urgency given by the fact that they’re directed somewhere. They’re arrows shot from a bow. What if that arrow is directed towards a friend who is both beloved and hated? How do you go about writing such a thing? Letters are so nuanced, so formal in a way and so intimate in another. I liked the idea of writing a love story (of sorts), whose raw emotion is constantly checked and bounded by politeness and convention – but which spills out anyway, in and between the lines. 

 

Like most ideas, it came to me in the small dark hours. I had a working title from the word go but I knew it wasn’t right. And I knew I wanted the title to be part of the letter, i.e. Dear... ."Thief" seemed about right, accusatory but affectionate despite itself, which is what the letter is, in essence. It’s a woman trying to punish a person she loves, and trying to love a person she’d rather punish. It’s an emotional see-saw of a letter, and to me the title reflects that. 

 

It’s mundane – normal-ish weekday working hours. I rely heavily on routine and I work whether I feel like it or not. Writing creates its own hunger; once I begin the appetite for it comes. That said, sometimes I just want to write, so I do, regardless. I drop whatever I’m doing. Towards the end of Dear Thief I was working all hours with such intense clarity of purpose that I didn’t dare stop, in case the clarity left me. 

 

Roger Deakin’s Waterlog. It reads like a love story – his passionate but unsentimental love affair with the water and the land. To be able to write from your own heart straight into another’s, so directly and frankly – that’s the thing I covet about his writing. 

 

Moon, I think. It’s round and ancient and you can’t say it quickly. 

 

Perhaps the |whisky priest" in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. He is compassionate and defiant and terrified, a weak man striving to be strong. 

 

Charlotte’s Web, Danny The Champion of the World, Stig of the Dump, The Faraway Treem, The Sick Cow, a picture book about a slug invasion whose name I can’t remember, the "Ramona" books and Goodnight Mr Tom. I don’t think children confine themselves to favourites. 

 

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. (I know, I’m 60 years behind the curve.) Also Edward St Aubyn’s "Patrick Melrose" novels, which I recently binge read.

 

I love reading because I love language and things that are made of words. I love words because they are doorways. Books are tens of thousands of doorways.