Full Fadom Five

Port Perry writer talks to AW’s Lucy Black about his debut novel.

LB: Congratulations on having published such an accomplished work of fiction! Your use of language is quite lovely. Sentences such as: Here and there they were gathered into little assemblies, parliaments and prides one might say, flocks and trains, droves and dissimulations, schools and murders, rookeries and ostentations, lamentations, shrewdnesses, knots and nobs and other assembled veneries, elevate the writing to a very fine standard. Please try to explain how such wordsmithing takes place for you. Is it the work of a moment or the result of editing and polishing?

DB:Thanks very much. Sometimes I know exactly what I’m after, and sometimes a sentence (or several) will come to me fully formed. More often, I’ll have a keen feeling for the energy the sentence needs, so I’ll write quickly to capture that energy and I’ll go back later to rework it.

In this case, I had a sense of what I wanted (a playful list of collective nouns for different animal species), but I only settled on the specific choices later. I was especially interested in the music of the sentence: the balance and variety of rhythms, phrases, sounds. Some terms aliterate, assonate, or rhyme, but others don’t. They’re arranged mostly in twos (or threes), but “lamentations” and “shrewdnesses” are each alone. Some terms feel concrete and familiar; others are abstract or even perplexing.

The point is to give the idea form and structure, but also movement and interest. If I get it right, the playfulness behind the first draft is not only preserved but amplified.

LB: Your novel is peopled with some very interesting characters. Some like Noah are well developed, while others like Flory only make brief appearances. Please share with us how you develop your characters and what helps you to shape them.

DB:For me, the thing about character is that it serves a purpose, like any other story element. The purpose of a protagonist is obviously multifaceted, whereas secondary characters serve fewer or narrower purposes. But even a transient character like Flory can serve several purposes.

I think of a line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Sir Andrew, hearing his supposed friend Sir Toby boast that the chambermaid adores him, says “I was adored once too.” Andrew’s habit of parroting Toby explains why the line is often played for laughs. But if the line is delivered sadly, with a sense of loss as Richard E. Grant does in Trevor Nunn’s film of the play, suddenly Andrew’s character enlarges. In fact, that line opens up the thematic heart of the play by restating it in a different register.

Flory appears only briefly, and occupies fewer than a dozen lines, but her experience is part of the story Noah tells himself about his family history, and it contributes to the atmosphere of that history, which Noah finds so compelling. In so few lines, complexity and nuance are difficult to achieve, but vividness is possible with the right details. If done well, you can capture an entire life in a few words.

LB: Much of the book is informed by things Shakespearean. Beyond the indenture which is central to the plot, there are many references to The Tempest, King Lear and the other plays. Please share something about the importance of Shakespeare’s work to your own creative process.

DB: While I was writing, Shakespeare was always in the back of my mind and often in the front. Partly, this was pragmatic: the indenture is from Renaissance London and some of the story takes place there. But my use of Shakespeare is also thematic. Full Fadom Five is about inheritances—not only the specific, personal inheritances of the characters, but also the cultural inheritances that envelop these. Shakespeare and the Bible (especially the King James translation) are inheritances for anyone writing in the English tradition, so I’ve woven both into the novel’s language and structure.

In the case of Shakespeare, sometimes I use words or phrases or images that allude to his work. Sometimes I use specific elements of plot or character as points of departure. Some of these correspondences are whimsical, even trivial, and contribute atmosphere and texture but little else. Most, though, are quite serious.

I wonder how much it’s possible for us to move beyond the stories we’ve been told. The tensions between the comforts of tradition and its burdens are at the heart of the novel, and the works of Shakespeare are a field of play where I can explore those tensions.

LB: Share with us a little about your go-to support group. Do you have trusted supporters that you bounce ideas and early drafts with? Are they also writers?

DB: I think all writing is solitary to a great degree, but I’m particularly solitary in my process. I take criticism well, but it tends not to change my mind unless I can see for myself what isn’t working. That’s a mixed virtue, I think, and (for good or ill) I’m very stubborn. I need to figure things out for myself.

I used to show people early drafts, but I do that less the older I get. Now, I ask for feedback only on completed drafts and only once I’ve exhausted my own resources: when I no longer know what to do. And I ask a variety of people: some are writers, others are friends I know to be very good readers. Both are helpful.

I’m not the most helpful reader of other writers’ work. I’m always thinking of what I would do differently, and I find that difficult to set aside. I know other writers do too. But writers usually give excellent technical feedback. I’m grateful to several writers who read earlier drafts of Full Fadom Five.

My readerly friends tend to focus more on their enjoyment, and that’s also useful because one wants to be read by book-loving readers, not just other writers. I get my wife to read my work too, although that puts her in a tough spot—wanting to be supportive but wanting to be helpful, which are often different things.

Most important for me, though, is the variety of readers. If several people enjoy the work, but for different reasons, there’s a good chance I’ve written something rich and alive.

LB: Tell us about a book that you have returned to over the years and read more than once?

DB: I go back to Shakespeare often. He has a lot to teach about language, character, and dramatic energies in storytelling, and about ambiguity and irresolution. I tend to be suspicious of resolved endings, and I see a lot of beauty in things that don’t quite work out. I think Shakespeare does too. It’s one of the things I like about his plays. That and the sheer variety and depth of humanity—especially in his best plays. There’s more there every time I go back.

Joyce too. (He’s also suspicious of resolutions). I’ve read Ulysses three times, parts of it many more times than that. At first, I loved the language and the ostentation. Then, the characters and how I was discovering things on every page that I’d missed the first time. The third time I read it, I finally felt it coming together. As I read the penultimate episode, told in quasi-scientific catechism, I was amazed how much of that massive novel he was weaving together—it was immensely satisfying.

I expect I’ll read it again, and likely more than once. It’s new every time.

LB: What are the key resources that you reference when working on a manuscript?

DB: The Oxford English Dictionary. A thesaurus, usually the one in my computer’s dictionary app. Books of all kinds, but especially reference works and manuals: birds, buildings, water, weather … anything with interesting lists.

Maybe it’s the effect of Hemingway—his influence is still considerable—but I think writers (and readers) sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that writing simply is the only way to write truly. There’s a lot of merit in that kind of writing, and such apparent artlessness is devilishly hard to do well, but I think writers can sometimes strive so hard for naturalism that they deny themselves much of the semantic richness available to them in English.

A lot can be done with syntax—as Eimear McBride does in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, for example—but there’s really no substitute for having a large pool of words and concepts to draw on for description, imagery, metaphor (especially metaphor). To the extent that I expand my vocabulary, I expand what I can say about the world and how I can say it.

LB: Please tell us a little about the writing spaces or environments that work best for you.  Are there particular items that you like to have in place?

I’m quite flexible when it comes to writing spaces. I can write almost anywhere if I can clear my mind of other responsibilities. To do that, it helps to have an environment with a bit of natural distraction, like a café, or to create one by putting on some music. It takes some effort to tune out the noise, but that in turn helps me pay more attention to what I’m writing—it’s paradoxical, but it works for me.

I also like to have both a notebook and a laptop computer on hand. I mostly write on the computer, but sometimes it’s helpful to get the hand and brain working together. And I know some writers find it impossible to write on a computer connected to the internet, but I use the online Oxford English Dictionary a lot, which obviously I can’t do offline.

I do silence my alerts, though. A lot of good work gets lost if your tech is constantly barking at you.

LB: What do you consider to be the most important part of the writing process?

DB: The most important part of the process for me is conviction. That’s probably not the kind of thing you mean, but I only write well if I believe I have a story only I can tell. I’ll test out lots of ideas, but I tend to weed them quickly if I don’t sense there’s something I might be uniquely suited to develop.

This stimulates my desire to write, but even when I’m not writing—and I’m often not writing—even then, this conviction keeps me alert to the problems and possibilities of the story and open to inspiration, even if only subconsciously. The result is that significant ideas often arise suddenly for me, seemingly from nowhere. The ending to Full Fadom Five came to me on a long drive. I dictated an outline for the final pages as my wife took notes in the passenger seat. Many of the details eventually changed, but many didn’t; and, crucially, until I changed them they were an impetus while I wrote the latter stages of the novel. I believed this was the ending only I would write. And it came to me with my eyes on the road, at a moment when I hadn’t been writing for some time. Some of my best work comes when I’m not thinking about it at all and happens in parts of me I can’t consciously access.

I may be fooling myself. It may just be pretension. But it doesn’t matter. For me the conviction is the important part. Without it, I can do almost nothing worthwhile.

LB: What would you consider to be the most important elements in good writing?

DB: There are some obvious things: inventiveness, surprise, richness, ambiguity. But I think movement is most important, at every level of composition: story, episode, chapter, sentence, word. All of these should contain a sense of tension and movement, and if there’s tension and if there’s movement, the story will pull the reader this way, that way, back and forth, together, apart, and it will feel alive.

Even if the story doesn’t seem to be moving, the reader must be. The theatre director Declan Donnellan talks about this (albeit in a very different context) in his book The Actor and the Target. Boiling it down, he says, “If it doesn’t change or if it is completely still, it’s dead.” This seems obvious once you think about it, but it’s very easy to get caught up in clever, even brilliant, writing that nonetheless is stagnant or creates stagnation in the reader.

We all get caught in that trap, of course, but to the extent that we avoid stasis and create movement I think we’re more likely to write well.

LB: Do your characters ever speak to you or have a say in what happens in the manuscript?

DB:  I think the nature of character is fundamentally strange. We often think about it in terms of “in” or “out.” And that’s useful, as far as it goes. But I’m not sure those categories are especially meaningful. I think we’ve all had the experience of doing or saying something that surprises not only others but (more importantly) ourselves. We may want to claim, “that wasn’t me, that was out of character,” but this is wishful thinking—if it happened and we did it, then it’s a part of our character … no takebacks. Anything we do is, by definition, in character.

But that’s a useful notion too—it means that if I follow the logic of events and circumstances in my story and ask questions of my characters as they encounter these, I may find that they respond in ways that surprise me. They may even betray my notions of who they are.

There’s always negotiation, much like with real people, between what I need from my characters and what they need for themselves. But as I nudge them, if I listen carefully, I find they usually tell me who they really are.