dovegreyreader asks... William Fiennes

A real treat in store today, and my thanks to William Fiennes as he settles down in the virtual armchair, and I suggest you might want to settle down too with a nice cup of coffee and a pile of biscuits to just enjoy this and be ready for a great reading list at the end. (The Escher print, by the way, was my bookmark whilst reading The Snow Geese.)

William, a very warm welcome to the virtual armchair and now that I've read both The Music Room and The Snow Geese I feel as if I have journeyed with you through two very important times in your life. I wonder if you could talk us through where the books came from, what compelled you to write them ...in fact can you tell us everything as usual, you know us here.

I don't know if I'd have written The Snow Geese if I hadn't fallen ill. I'd had Crohn's Disease since I was eighteen or nineteen, when I spent a year teaching in the north-east of Brazil, and the symptoms had flared and receded in phases all through my time at university. And things got pretty bad again in my mid-twenties, when I was studying as a postgraduate at Oxford, doing an M.Phil and then starting a D.Phil, my head full of English sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. But then came hospital, surgery, complications, and a long convalescent period at home, at the house I'd grown up in, a place I loved above all others, where my sense of belonging was unambiguous.
So I thought a lot in those days about the idea of home, the idea of return, the power of that longing to find our place in the world, to belong in where we are, or in what we do, or what we love. And I thought about how our longing for the familiar, the known, exists alongside our appetite for the new, the undiscovered, and how we all have to negotiate a way through those contrary impulses.
At the same time, I was getting more and more excited about natural history.
I'd always been an outdoorsy person, a walker, but now I wanted to know the names of things - birds, trees, plants - and I was reading lots of books about evolution and ecology, books by Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Richard Fortey, Jonathan Weiner, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard. And sitting outside our house each evening, watching the swifts scream overhead on their exhilarating vespers flights. And dreaming of a return to health, independence, freedom of movement.
And then coming across Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, which got me curious about geese, and imagining a journey, an adventure, a quest...
So now I can see how the book was born out of the confluence of several different streams of thought and experience - home, illness, recovery, poems, nature, science, love of language, and a great longing to drink down the world in gulps after such a period of deprivation. But it was only really when I started writing that I began to think I'd found a form in which to convey such ideas - a sort of poetic form, in which the images would do most of the talking... 

I don't need to tell you, Lynne, that it took me a long time to get from The Snow Geese to The Music Room... That gap wasn't for want of trying. I started about three other books - novels - but gave them up, despairing. I don't mean to sound grandiose, but to me there was a sense of rightness about The Snow Geese, as if there'd been a hole in the universe the exact size of that book, waiting to be filled. Perhaps many writers feel that about their first book, I don't know. But nothing I tried afterwards had anything like that feeling of necessity. They say that everybody has one book in them, and I thought that maybe The Snow Geese was mine; I started thinking about alternative careers, and even applied for a couple of proper jobs...
What was I thinking?!
I was a bit lost, really. Then I suppose I recognised that the problem with those abandoned books was that I didn't really care enough: nothing was at stake; nothing seemed to matter. Of course, this may just have been a failure of imagination on my part... But I wanted to write out of strong feeling. So I asked myself what I did care about. And immediately that took me to my brother Richard, and the way my parents had looked after him, and the strange magical scenes of my childhood... I didn't think I was writing anything like a "family history" or "memoir" - it felt much closer to a poem, or a song, or a novel in which everything happened to be true, and which also happened to introduce you to the history of neuroscience, and the principles behind our understanding of the brain... As with The Snow Geese, I didn't really think about the question of genre. I just wanted each book to be as perfectly itself as it could be. And again I hoped that the images would do the talking - that the right images would have more power than any amount of explanation or commentary. At first it came in a bit of rush, but then I got all knotted-up with fears - that it was too tender, too personal; or that nobody would be interested; or that it was really embarrassing to admit we lived in such a big house... And of course I worried that it might be painful for my family to relive some of those moments, even though I was writing from love, and, despite everything, in celebration. But as I went on, I began to realise that I wasn't just writing about Richard, or about our particular experience. The moated island was a microcosm, a little world, in which love and beauty and wonder coexisted with difficulty and violence and loss. So there was a vision of life, inside that ring of water. And at the heart of it was care - of parents for their children; of people for the places they live in. So my desire to sing a little bit about my brother led into these wider currents...

We love to know about a writer's writing day because we're completely inquisitive here too so can you tell us about that and what the process involves for you?

Well, I wish I could say that I was supremely disciplined and single-minded about the whole thing. I know that I've been most productive, and had my best periods with both books, when I've settled into quite strict routines, the structure of one day identical to the one before... Ideally I want to have the same breakfast, the same lunch every day; I want to work all morning; in the afternoon I want to walk or swim; I want to have tea and cake, and then I want to work again as it gets dark... I've had periods like that, and they've been really exciting and fulfilling. But too often my life's been too unsettled, or I've been too ready to prevaricate and dither, or I've been too frightened of the empty page, or simply too lazy to pitch myself into that fruitful pattern... Both my books have involved a lot of time in libraries, learning about ornithology or the history of nostalgia or neuroscience or epilepsy, and over the last ten years I've spent months in the Bodleian in Oxford, or the British Library, the London Library, the Wellcome Institute, or the neurology library in Queen's Square, following some thread of curiosity that seems part of the book's larger inquiry... I dream of having my own study, and one day I'd like to turn the attic of my small house into the perfect writer's room (the kind they feature in the Review section of The Guardian on Saturdays...), but for now I have to make do with the kitchen table, or desks in those libraries if I'm getting cabin fever... And once I get into a piece of writing I can sit hunched over my computer for hours, nothing moving but my hands on the keyboard, and I end up with all sorts of aches in my shoulders and down my legs, and because I sit so still I get really cold, and in my dream attic study I'm going to have some kind of brilliant high-tech underfloor heating... I always have a notebook on the go - not quite a diary or journal or commonplace book or image-cache but a mixture of all those things - but otherwise I tend to write directly onto the laptop, in part because most of my writing is rewriting: I go over things again and again; I love what Tobias Wolff calls "living at the level of the sentence" - the whole business of tweaking, planing, whittling and rejigging until the rhythm of the phrase, paragraph, passage or chapter sounds satisfying and somehow inevitable to the inner ear... And then I give about two days a week to teaching, and time to First Story, and I listen to lots of music and fantasize about being a musician, and I go for lots of walks, and I watch a lot of films, and (don't tell anyone) I really like TV, and then of course I want to read good books, and all of this is more of a disruption to that ideal writing day... But I think some of this belongs to the next question...

I'm now adding an extra degree of inquisition because I think we'd like to know what writers do when they don't write, what interests you and fills your non-writing days?

For a while now I've been Writer-in-Residence at the American School in London: I teach there every Tuesday afternoon. And I'm Director of the charity First Story (www.firststory.co.uk), which I set up with a teacher called Katie Waldegrave in 2007. Katie was teaching at Cranford Community College in Hounslow, and when she heard about my job at ASL she invited me to come to Cranford to do a similar thing. I started visiting the school every Wednesday afternoon, running a creative-writing class for about fourteen sixth-formers. I enjoyed it so much, and the students seemed to get so much out of it - not just in terms of their literacy skills, but also their self-esteem and self-confidence - that Katie and I thought that we should try and spread the idea to other schools.
We focus on "challenging" secondary schools - schools with at least 30% of students eligible for free school meals, and/or less than 25% getting five A-C grades at GCSE - and this year First Story has arranged and paid for fourteen writers to work as writers-in-residence in fourteen different schools in London and Oxford. The student writers give readings of their stories and poems, and at the end of the year we help them publish their work in anthologies - proper books that they can give to their friends and families, and that the students and their schools can be proud of. I used to do quite a lot of journalism - mostly book reviews and travel pieces - but for the last few years that other portion of my working life has been almost entirely taken up with school things.
Teaching full-time would knock me out, but I find the amount I do very rewarding. And I suppose it answers to some appetite in me to be doing something alongside writing, and to be working with other people, getting out of the house, engaging with the world. A sort of counterpose, as a yoga teacher might say, to writing's necessary inwardness and solitude. I'm remembering that passage in The Music Room where I talk about the rooks and the herons that haunt the moat, and how they seem to suggest two different modes of being - the rooks talkative and gregarious, the heron solitary and contemplative. I've always wanted to have room in my life for both those birds.

Who must we read? Which authors and books would you urge us not to miss?

It's a wonderful question to be asked, because you know it's been asked out of love for something and you can answer it out of love for the same thing... Chekhov's stories are a sort of holy book for me. Try the recent OUP selection called About Love, edited and translated by Rosamund Bartlett, or Granta's The Essential Tales of Chekhov, selected and introduced by Richard Ford. And Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. And War and Peace: I used a bread-knife to slice the Penguin Classics paperback into four sections and then it was much less intimidating... Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March. George Eliot's Middlemarch. I go back to all of these. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. Les Murray's verse novel, Fredy Neptune. Lorrie Moore's stories. Seamus Heaney's poems and essays and the thrilling autobiography-in-conversations called Stepping Stones. The Iliad and The Odyssey in the translations by Robert Fagles. John Cheever's stories, especially "Goodbye, My Brother" and "Torch Song" and "The Swimmer" and "A Vision of the World", and his extraordinary Journals... Poems by Ted Hughes, Paul Farley, Don Paterson... Cosmicomics and The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. The Sportswriter and Independence Day by Richard Ford. The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Primo Levi. Tobias Wolff. James Salter's Burning the Days. John Updike's Rabbit novels, with Nicholson Baker's U & I as a spritzy chaser. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Edward Hoagland's essays. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Moby-Dick - one of the books that made me want to be a writer. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. And not forgetting the wonderful essays by Joseph Mitchell, hard to get hold of in the UK, but collected in a Vintage (US) paperback called Up in the Old Hotel. He is one of my heroes. Oh dear - I know that as soon as I dispatch this list to you I'll think of a dozen other things I should have added to it. But I hope this will do for starters...

You said a book every seven years...can we know, will I really be sixty (and a bit...) before the next one?

Did I really say that? Perhaps it was just a way of protecting myself... I do remember saying, at Dartington, that I'd learned I wasn't exactly Barbara Cartland... But I do hope it won't be as long as seven years... Because although I find the task of writing quite hard (run through with fear and anxiety, so that the whole enterprise can feel at times little more than an arena for self-criticism, etc) I really like the having written - I mean, I'm glad that those two books exist; I love feeling the miraculous leap of images from mind to mind that books make possible... Oh but I shouldn't pretend I don't relish moments in the actual writing, when some figure of comparison flies in out of nowhere, and the right combination of words makes both the language and the thing it's describing new somehow... And something to do with salvaging and consecration... But one of my problems is that I'm not very good at making things up; I'm not a natural yarn-spinner; I don't have a story-tap I can turn on and off at will - so instead I seem to have to wait for a book to float up in the sort of confluence of streams I was talking about earlier... Right now I do have an idea, a project, but already I'm aware that it's unlikely I'll be able to write something as whole-hearted - as Rich - as The Music Room. Or The Snow Geese, for that matter. So it'll just have to be different. And actually I'm quite looking forward to finding out how it's going to be different...