Ask the Author: Jo Baker
Answered Questions (33)
Jo Baker
Hi Carrie,
it was the interaction of the two.
I love Austen's work - I am a massive, daydreaming fan of her stuff - I love the wish-fulfilment and the wit and the brilliantly structured, totally satisfying stories. But coming from working class roots, I struggle see myself in her characters' shoes. Writing Longbourn was, more than anything else, an attempt to 'locate' myself within Austen's world in a way that felt true to me. So the class issue was important, but the book would never have been written if I hadn't been a total nerd for Austen's work.
it was the interaction of the two.
I love Austen's work - I am a massive, daydreaming fan of her stuff - I love the wish-fulfilment and the wit and the brilliantly structured, totally satisfying stories. But coming from working class roots, I struggle see myself in her characters' shoes. Writing Longbourn was, more than anything else, an attempt to 'locate' myself within Austen's world in a way that felt true to me. So the class issue was important, but the book would never have been written if I hadn't been a total nerd for Austen's work.
Jo Baker
Something unobtrusive will hang around for ages - an image or an idea - and then something else comes along and reacts with it. Maybe a bit of news, or a conversation, or an encounter. It really is like a chemical reaction, and completely unbidden. I can't do it any other way.
Jo Baker
I have just finished Beatlebone; I have SweetBitter to read next. I'm happy reading anything - and I think one can learn from anything. But I can't read horror; I just can't....
I've read quite a bit of American fiction, but I wouldn't know where to draw the boundaries of 'Southern' - who's Southern?
I've read quite a bit of American fiction, but I wouldn't know where to draw the boundaries of 'Southern' - who's Southern?
Jo Baker
Hello Milly! I grew up round there and currently live in Lancaster. I also do some volunteering at QES, if that's relevant to you. You can message me on directly if you want to find out more.
Do you mean The Telling? That is much more Lancashire than Longbourn is - set specifically in the village, in the old Reading Room Cottage...
In Longbourn I do go north, via the line from Austen that the Bingleys made their money in 'Trade, in the north'. and when i describe the countryside it is very much the countryside of my childhood - spent up trees, and in the river, building dens and getting nettled. Sense of place is really important to me, but I think a novel only really properly works if the characters and story come first, and the sense of place comes in around them.
Do you mean The Telling? That is much more Lancashire than Longbourn is - set specifically in the village, in the old Reading Room Cottage...
In Longbourn I do go north, via the line from Austen that the Bingleys made their money in 'Trade, in the north'. and when i describe the countryside it is very much the countryside of my childhood - spent up trees, and in the river, building dens and getting nettled. Sense of place is really important to me, but I think a novel only really properly works if the characters and story come first, and the sense of place comes in around them.
Jo Baker
'Longbourn' was such fun to write! In a way the new book 'A Country Road, A Tree' is similar - it's a different period, different kind of story - but it's a similar kind of conversation with another writer's work. In this case, it's the story of what Samuel Beckett got up to during the Second World War (it is an amazing story, and I can say that in all honesty because I didn't make it up) and how it transformed him as a writer and a man. So... there are connections, though they may not be that obvious at first glance... And then I have just been commissioned to write a new book that riffs of an existing classic... not Austen, but similarly beloved. More news as it comes...
Jo Baker
Hi Lina, thank you so much, that's a lovely thing to hear.
Regarding another book - if you started with 'Longbourn'; then I have written and (just) published a new one - 'A Country Road, A Tree'.
If you started with 'A Country Road, A Tree', then I am about 20k words into a draft of something new.... And there are four books prior to Longbourn if you are at all interested in chasing them up...
thanks for saying Hi. x
Regarding another book - if you started with 'Longbourn'; then I have written and (just) published a new one - 'A Country Road, A Tree'.
If you started with 'A Country Road, A Tree', then I am about 20k words into a draft of something new.... And there are four books prior to Longbourn if you are at all interested in chasing them up...
thanks for saying Hi. x
Jo Baker
Hi Rebecca - i've been answering quite a few general questions about research (see below) but just to add something specific about this book to what I've already said (i hope) - there are three biographies of Beckett, and I used them all to some degree or other. I also used his Collected Letters. Between them I drew up the bones of the story, but this needed more context - period detail, timeline of the war, that kind of thing - so I got stuck into more general histories. I love reading 'contemporary' fiction when researching a period - you can get really useful detail from the fiction generated by a particular time. i also read memoir and biographies of others who'd lived through this time - including Resistance memoirs. Alongside that, I re-read my way through Beckett's own work, looking for moments where i could make connections, and find echoes.
Jo Baker
Austen's economy is extraordinary (everything has weight and meaning; nothing is redundant), as is her handling of time (she does it with such confidence - compresses weeks down to a sentence, expands an afternoon to a whole chapter - like she's playing a squeezebox. ) I hope I've carried this through, to some degree, into later writing. I think the process of writing Longbourn also made me tune my ear to another writer's voice, and that's something I wanted to do in A Country Road, A Tree - echo, but not parody, the other writer's voice.
Jo Baker
Oh I read ALL the time. And i usually have about half a dozen books on the go. I don't think you can really be a writer if you don't read. I'm currently on tour and I don't have a kindle, so I have been lugging books around with me and have a sore shoulder from the weight. I really need to catch up with the 21st Century.
You need to feed yourself, as a writer. It's not as simple as keeping up with what your peers are up to. You need to gather resources, and as widely as possible. I read all sorts; I often get crushes on other writers and just read everything they have ever written, and then just move onto someone else (so fickle!) I read fiction and non fiction, history and biography, all sorts. I also like reading genre fiction (sci-fi, detective fiction, that kind of thing). i think 'Literary Fiction' tends to treat plot as a bit by-the-bye; I'm fascinated by plot and I LOVE seeing it done well. i have massive admiration for that.
You need to feed yourself, as a writer. It's not as simple as keeping up with what your peers are up to. You need to gather resources, and as widely as possible. I read all sorts; I often get crushes on other writers and just read everything they have ever written, and then just move onto someone else (so fickle!) I read fiction and non fiction, history and biography, all sorts. I also like reading genre fiction (sci-fi, detective fiction, that kind of thing). i think 'Literary Fiction' tends to treat plot as a bit by-the-bye; I'm fascinated by plot and I LOVE seeing it done well. i have massive admiration for that.
Jo Baker
it does vary - i usually have an image or an idea hanging around for years before something else comes along and makes it start to fizz. if I didn't have the fizz, the work wouldn't happen at all. The plans get made as I go along - I think that's really important actually - to be flexible with your plans and realise that there is the platonic ideal of the book you were going to write, and then there is the book you are actually writing or have written. And the research (as I've mentioned below) is a shifting thing too - a layering of general and then very specific work, when I've discovered, through the process of writing, what I need to know.
Jo Baker
I think it's patience, and postponing the idea of finishedness. In my experience nothing is ever finished - so keeping on thinking things through and daydreaming stuff, and adding - there's a layering that goes on that isn't necessarily obvious (in fact it shouldn't be obvious) to the reader. I don't finish a section and then move onto the next - I'm weaving through them with every redraft.
I have yet to suffer from writers' block. I don't want to jinx myself, though, and say I don't get it - I just haven't had it yet. I've always just kept banging my head on the desk - metaphorically speaking - till something happens. Writing, even if it's nonsense - filling up ages. Something eventually emerges that makes some kind of sense.
I have yet to suffer from writers' block. I don't want to jinx myself, though, and say I don't get it - I just haven't had it yet. I've always just kept banging my head on the desk - metaphorically speaking - till something happens. Writing, even if it's nonsense - filling up ages. Something eventually emerges that makes some kind of sense.
Jo Baker
Yes, it's different - but in both cases there is an existing framework of events (fictional or real) on which I hang the story; that, in some way, is actually a help - it closes down options (all the things you could write) and what's left is what you can write. Also in both instances I feel an obligation to be thorough and be what i think of as 'imaginatively honest' - to approach everything in an uncynical and open and sincere way. But as you say, this was an actual real man, and here I am following him around, and that's just kinda weird. But if we set aside the fact that this is fiction, then it becomes a lot less weird. So many academics and other writers have written about him and some of them have attributed all kinds of uncomfortable things (one academic wrote that Beckett was a misogynist - which actually makes me cross - I really do not see this, in his work - I just see a writer who treated women as people, not ideals). Another thing - not a justification of the approach, so much as an influence - has been looking at the other writers who've written brilliantly about other writers - for example Colm Toibin's The Master. And Beckett wrote (an unsuccessful) play about Samuel Johnson - so maybe it all evens out in the end?
I think anyone who writes anything about me would have to make so much up it would be more in the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter mode, than The Master. Unless my life takes some weird swerve in the near future, any novel about my life would be 'she put the fish-fingers under the grill, and opened a can of beans. 'Go wash your hands for dinner, kids,' she said. 'Ugh,' said the kids, 'Do we have to?'; 'Yes, you have to. Now go wash your hands.' The fish fingers had begun to burn. She cursed under her breath, and turned them over, and hoped the kids would not notice.' etc. etc. etc.
I think anyone who writes anything about me would have to make so much up it would be more in the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter mode, than The Master. Unless my life takes some weird swerve in the near future, any novel about my life would be 'she put the fish-fingers under the grill, and opened a can of beans. 'Go wash your hands for dinner, kids,' she said. 'Ugh,' said the kids, 'Do we have to?'; 'Yes, you have to. Now go wash your hands.' The fish fingers had begun to burn. She cursed under her breath, and turned them over, and hoped the kids would not notice.' etc. etc. etc.
Jo Baker
Ooh, that's an interesting question. Probably not - the past two books are quite literary books, in that they reflect on other works. But if you think the latter is also true of me, then I am really happy to accept that too!
Jo Baker
I drive! But I don't particularly like doing it if I'm heading somewhere different and unfamiliar. I love train travel, and I walk. I think the younger generation in the UK is learning to drive, but because of our geography and the layout of our cities we tend to not be so car-oriented.
Jo Baker
i'm lucky that nowadays I don't have to work, as well as work, if you see what i mean, and I know how difficult it is to fit creativity around everything else that there is going on in life. But if you can make it a treat for yourself, an indulgence, then you will get something written, at the very least. I do find habit is important though, so dropping in for an hour once a week wouldn't get much done for me. but set aside two hours - or even just an hour - most days - and you will see the work add up. Good luck with it!
Jo Baker
Novels usually take a decade of daydreaming and two or three years to write. They hang around as half-formed ideas for a long while, and then something sparks them off and things begin to fizz. In the past I have had jobs - some part time, some full time - bookselling, arts admin, teaching - it's only in the past four or five years that I have been able to write full time. I do think that it's not a bad thing to have a job, colleagues - and a salary! - writing can be terribly isolating, and going to a job really does help with that.
Jo Baker
an image - a shabby man on a desolate road. Like Picasso's Don Quixote, but a solitary figure - and without the horse!
Jo Baker
Hi Kristin; I'd been thinking about this book for about 10 years, during which I also wrote another book set in part during the 1940s, so the research has been going on for a good - but rather ill-defined -while.
Jo Baker
Hello Helene! I have been offered a commission for a new version of an existing classic, and I am seriously considering it - because I get to choose the book. It's too early to talk about in any detail though.
If I could choose any, actually - Moby Dick from the whale's point of view. i think that whale is seriously misunderstood.
If I could choose any, actually - Moby Dick from the whale's point of view. i think that whale is seriously misunderstood.
Jo Baker
Hi Mary Lou - as you'll see from the answer below, it's kind of both! I do a general sweep first, which is alongside an idea for a story - and keep reading alongside the writing, and then tend to do a final phase looking for details I suddenly realise I need!
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