Ask the Author: Fiona Barton
Answered Questions (6)
Fiona Barton
Hi Carol, Thank you for your question - and apologies for the delay in replying (am on tour with my second book, The Child). So, in answer to your query: I have always been fascinated by the people on the edge of stories.
The Widow began for me as an image and a voice. The image was a wife, sitting in court, hearing in the most gut-wrenching detail, the crime her husband - the man she chose - is accused of. I covered a number of stories where the wife hovered, anonymously, on the edge of the main story and I always wondered what she knew or allowed herself to know.
The voice was Jean Taylor’s - the widow in the title. She was there from the start - my ear worm. And it was her phrase “No more of his nonsense” that set the mood of the book.
I wrote my first words in February 2009 – ten chapters and the ending – and then put it in a drawer until I was given a deadline (essential for a journalist!) and finished it in August 2014.
Hope this helps, f
The Widow began for me as an image and a voice. The image was a wife, sitting in court, hearing in the most gut-wrenching detail, the crime her husband - the man she chose - is accused of. I covered a number of stories where the wife hovered, anonymously, on the edge of the main story and I always wondered what she knew or allowed herself to know.
The voice was Jean Taylor’s - the widow in the title. She was there from the start - my ear worm. And it was her phrase “No more of his nonsense” that set the mood of the book.
I wrote my first words in February 2009 – ten chapters and the ending – and then put it in a drawer until I was given a deadline (essential for a journalist!) and finished it in August 2014.
Hope this helps, f
Fiona Barton
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Fiona Barton
The complete freedom to invent and see where it takes you.
Fiona Barton
Stop making excuses and start today...
Fiona Barton
Book 3. Kate and Bob are still with me, nagging me to get on with it!
Fiona Barton
Exactly the same place that my fictional journalist Kate finds it. As a journalist, always looking for stories, I tore interesting items out of newspapers as I spotted them and shoved them in my handbag for later. They were often just a few lines – the basic facts - but it was the unanswered questions that drew me in. The Who? or the Why?
A paragraph about an infant’s skeleton found in a garden was squirreled away by me many years ago. Like Kate, I wanted to know who the baby was and why someone had secretly buried it. I was drawn by the desperation of the act and the human tragedy behind it.
I never got to write the story – the police solved it immediately, I seem to remember, arresting the mother and finding more tiny corpses - and the newspaper cutting is long gone, discarded in one of my ritual handbag clear-outs.
But the image of the nameless child, just beneath the surface of someone’s life, has stayed, waiting for its moment to be unearthed. And for its story to be told.
A paragraph about an infant’s skeleton found in a garden was squirreled away by me many years ago. Like Kate, I wanted to know who the baby was and why someone had secretly buried it. I was drawn by the desperation of the act and the human tragedy behind it.
I never got to write the story – the police solved it immediately, I seem to remember, arresting the mother and finding more tiny corpses - and the newspaper cutting is long gone, discarded in one of my ritual handbag clear-outs.
But the image of the nameless child, just beneath the surface of someone’s life, has stayed, waiting for its moment to be unearthed. And for its story to be told.
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