I haven’t read Susan Cooper for years and years – about thirty of them, to be exact – but when I came upon this interview just now it made me want to curl up in an armchair with a mug of cocoa (spiked with Glenfiddich, of course) under a good strong reading lamp and hurtle through all five Dark is Rising books one after the other.
This is an inspiring, beautiful article that I would recommend anyone to read, especially if they’re up to their eyes in writing a novel. Cooper has clearly drawn heavily on her own life in her fiction. She’s used her own passions and experiences – but in the best way any writer can, that is invisibly and unselfishly, to create worlds and stories that will captivate and inspire others. She never insists that ‘this is about me’; rather she’s saying, ‘this is about you.’ This is something that as writers we should all aspire to.
I love especially the passage where Cooper describes the moment when she first knew that The Dark is Rising was not a story set on its own, but part of a series:
My head went into overdrive, and I took out a piece of paper and wrote down five titles, starting with Over Sea, and five times of the year – the Celtic festival times like Beltane and Samhain, and the solstices. And the people who were going to be in these five books. And I wrote the last page of the last book so I knew where I was going. Then I spent the next six years writing these four books.
‘My head went into overdrive’ – that’s when you know you’re on to something. And the quote taped above her desk, the words of her friend Ursula Le Guin? Never a truer word:
If you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. Nobody ever said it was easy. What they said is: life is short, art is long.
This is just to say Happy Christmas to everyone who’s been reading this blog, to all those wonderful readers, writers, friends and critics who have been so generous with their talk, ideas, support and encouragement. Thank you all, so much – it’s a huge deal and I truly appreciate it. Time now to unstopper the malt and pick out a DVD. I keep threatening Chris with the Abrams Star Trek, which I have a perverse love for, but I don’t think I’m going to get away with that one…
Cheers, everyone!