Ask the Author: Angela Young
Answered Questions (11)
Angela Young
I'd go to Alice's Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass and listen to all I met there because their lateral, quirky off-the-wall conversations and answers to Alice's questions (as well as Alice's own questions) made me curiouser and curiouser as a child. They still do. (And they made me think while I laughed.)
Angela Young
A combination of both: I don't think the ability to a spin a good yarn can be taught, but the techniques and practicalities of plot and story can. This guides me: 'PLOT is what happens. STORY is how the characters FEEL about what happens.' [Neil Landau, 101 Things I Learned in Film School.]
Angela Young
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (before this year's Man Booker shortlist arrives); The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley (2015 Costa Winner, a bit behind here); The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink).
Angela Young
If I gave that away I'd be giving away a possible plot!
Angela Young
Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson, because she is independently feminist in a time (the 1850s, in England) when that was difficult and required great courage. Because Smithson tries to do the right thing by Woodruff, tries to understand her and her desire to live independently which is an entirely alien concept to him, and because the narrator (John Fowles, who also becomes a character) provides three possible endings showing, I think, how difficult it was for a woman at that time truly to be independent, in everything that concerns her.
Angela Young
My agent, Heather Holden-Brown, suggested the original idea: to write a novel based on the life of my great-grandmother who sailed on RMS Titanic in 1912. But in the writing the novel changed completely and became a story about the struggle a young woman has when she falls in love and wants to marry for love but lives in a society (the English, Edwardian, aristocratic Downton-Abbey era) that makes mergers when it makes its marriages. A society that fights to keep its land, its titles, its bloodline and its money in the family - through marriage - and thinks nothing of love.
Angela Young
From a feeling, to begin with. And then from a desire to discover why that feeling keeps haunting me. So, for my first novel, SPEAKING of LOVE, I wanted to know why - like many people - I was so frightened of madness. Why I felt I might catch it, the way you catch physical diseases. And in the writing of the novel I discovered.
Someone said, 'All art is the answer to a question.' I agree, but I'd add 'from the heart': all art is the answer to a question from the heart.
Someone said, 'All art is the answer to a question.' I agree, but I'd add 'from the heart': all art is the answer to a question from the heart.
Angela Young
My third novel. It's about love good and bad, unexpected and out of this world. I've called it - at least for the moment - For the Love of Life.
Angela Young
Read as much as you can and write whenever you can. Write and write and write because - this is what I say to myself - I surely can't get worse by practising. And don't give up when the first rejections come in: if your tenacity matches your talent your work will, eventually, make it out into the world.
Angela Young
The freedom to live in my imagination.
Angela Young
I 'splurge'. It's a technique I learnt from Linda Leatherbarrow, one of the tutors on the MA in Writing I did at Middlesex. You write for five minutes without stopping and you write anything that comes into your head. You use conjunctions instead of punctuation and if you feel like stopping you write, 'I feel like stopping' but you don't stop. It works because it bypasses your conscious mind (which is busy telling you you can't write anything, let alone anything good) and - so far - it's always revealed a jewel that I can start work on again.
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