Lucy Caldwell / Features / Untitled Books

“When you’re writing something it can’t be safe. You have to give a part of yourself to let it live, which is why you always feel so bereft when you finish something. Because you’ve given a part of yourself away”

Lucy Caldwell

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981 and is a graduate of Goldsmith's MA in Creative and Life Writing. The Meeting Point is her second novel, and she is also an award-winning playwright, currently under commission to write for the main stage of the Royal Court Theatre.

In December I was asked to write a short piece on my top five novels of the year. Some of my choices were agonised over: what to leave in, what to leave out, but the book I knew without question would remain on my list was Lucy Caldwell's The Meeting Point. I reviewed the novel last January, and have spent the subsequent twelve months singing the praises of this beautifully written and gracefully told story. Set in Bahrain in the period immediately prior to the Iraq War, The Meeting Point tells of an uneasy alliance between Ruth, the lonely wife of an Irish missionary, and troubled local teenager Noor.

Caldwell and I meet, appropriately enough, on St Lucy's Day. The festive air of the run-up to Christmas is magnified by the fact that Caldwell is celebrating having just finished a draft of her third novel (I was lucky enough to get a not-to-be-divulged synopsis). It's late afternoon so we politely order coffee, only to both eventually admit that we wish we'd ordered wine instead.

Although The Meeting Point was published at the very beginning of the year, it 's recently been back in the limelight after winning the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers. Described by the judges as a "beautifully written and mature reflection on identity, loyalty and belief in a complex world", Caldwell's novel was chosen from an exceptionally strong shortlist, including Tea Obreht's Orange Prize-winning The Tiger's Wife. This seems like the perfect end to the year, winning the prize and then finishing a first draft of her next book, so I'm keen to find out how Caldwell's been celebrating.

"That's what my students asked when I won," Caldwell laughs (she's a lecturer on the Creative Writing MA at City University), "but I told them, 'Actually, I'm at my desk working.' I want to set a good example for them of course," she continues, "but really, you're only as good as your next piece. You have to keep writing."

As well as working on her third novel, Caldwell has been adapting Diana Wynne Jones' children's book Witch Week for BBC Radio 4 Extra. She's absolutely delighted when I tell her that I know the story. "Don't you think it'll make such an excellent radio play?" she asks gleefully, "I'm so excited about doing it, it's such a chilling story."

Has she ever considered writing children's stories herself?

"Oh yes," she replies, "I've always wanted to write a children's series. Something like The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper for example. I think that books you read at that age remain with you for longer and are more powerful than a lot of things you read as an adult. Perhaps it's because you're more fully formed as an adult; it takes something more to affect you."

Also a prize-winning playwright, Caldwell won a place on the young writer's programme at the Royal Court after leaving university. Her play Leaves (2007) was later performed there, and she has also been writer-in-residence at the National. She'd taken her first play to Edinburgh after university, she explains, and the play script got into the hands of someone at the National who then asked if she'd like to come in for an attachment. Surprisingly enough, her immediate response was one of horror, precisely because "it seemed like such an amazing opportunity". But luckily she decided to give it a go. She was waiting for her first novel, Where They Were Missed, written while she was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, to be published at this point, and in fact found her eight weeks with the theatre "amazing".

"I had a room, a backstage pass and there were directors and actors there I could use, and halfway through I had a rough draft. I'd worked so hard, so they paired me up with Natalie Abraham (now assistant director at The Gate) and we cast my play, did a reading, and then I went away and did some more work. I didn't read any prose, bar Plath's The Bell Jar, the entire time, I was so determined to write a play. But afterwards it took me about six months to surface again as I'd been writing about this nineteen-year-old who didn't want to live anymore. It took a good six months to separate myself from her. I suppose it's like what Nietzsche says; if you look into the abyss the abyss is going to look back at you."

Does she find her characters often take her over like that? Yes, she tells me, using the example of The Meeting Point: despite having already realised that the story was going to be about a minister's wife and set in Bahrain - and even these elements can't, she explains, be described as conscious choices as much as decisions based on gut instinct or intuition - when she actually started writing, she found herself writing a teenager's diaries. This character eventually became Noor, but at that stage Caldwell had no idea who she was. "It was like a compulsion," she explains, "I didn't know where she came from."

We talk about whether writing is a means by which one can live other people's lives, or whether it's more complicated than that. "Partly," Caldwell suggests. "It's impossible to know completely what it's like to be someone else, but that's what all art does; its empathy. It allows you to try to see what it's like to live other lives or experience other things."

She goes on to talk about her various teenage characters, explaining that she enjoys the technical challenge they present. "If you write a thirteen-year-old, that's utterly different from writing a fifteen-year-old," she declares. "When you're writing adult characters age just doesn't matter so much, and the writing is so much to do with being in control of the form, the syntax and the vocabulary."

She speaks about the technicalities of writing with a great deal of thought and understanding; a firm believer in the honing of her craft, who takes issue with the view held by some that you're either a writer or you're not. "Why is learning or teaching drawing or painting - or music techniques for that matter - any different from learning writing techniques?" she asks. "No one expects an artist to sit alone in a garret until they produce an amazing painting, but with writing it's all too often about the muse descending rather than something you have to work on."

And, it seems, it works both ways, as teaching writing constantly forces her to question and reflect on her own work. "When you're writing something it can't be safe," she explains, "you have to give a part of yourself to let it live, which is why you always feel so bereft when you finish something because you've given a part of yourself away. So you also have to be open to change; be open to yourself changing."

That said, she tells me she was completely perplexed when she realised the extent to which people assumed her first novel was autobiographical just because it was set in Northern Ireland where she herself grew up, roughly during the same period. "It's odd that people are put out when they realise that it's not," she laughs, "it's like they feel slightly cheated or something."

She has a theory about why so many young authors write novels set in the period in which they themselves grew up. "It's not because writing is necessarily autobiographical," she suggests, "but when you're creating a world for the first time and you've never done it before, the world that is most alive or vivid is often that of your childhood. Building a world from scratch can be done - I did it in The Meeting Point - but it's a case of layering, and I need to be as confident in that setting as I am in my childhood setting."

She then goes on to explain how she found herself drawing endless maps of the compound in Bahrain in which her characters live in The Meeting Point, in order that she could correctly visualise the various lines of sight from each villa. "None of this makes it into the novel, but it's the necessary scaffolding so I can feel confident in that world," she declares. "I love that when you write fiction, you have the whole world inside of you. I'm such a private writer as well; I wait until I have a full draft before I send it to my editor. I find that the effect of my work is cumulative, so it's never that interesting to hear people's views on one chapter alone because they don't have the whole thing in context." As such, she very much enjoys the solitude of novel writing, although she admits this doesn't stop her sometimes "craving the interactiveness of a play".

It is clear that Caldwell has her pick of writing projects and all her work so far is held in high acclaim. I and a growing legion of fans, eagerly await both her adaptation of Witch Week (due for broadcast in the spring) and the new novel next year.

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The Meeting Point is published by Faber and Faber.

Lucy Scholes writes for the Sunday Times,TLS, Independent, Daily Beast and the Huffington Post UK. She also teaches at the University of London, and Tate Modern.

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Thursday, 12 January, 2012

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Issue 41 / February 2012

“When you’re writing something it can’t be safe. You have to give a part of yourself to let it live, which is why you always feel so bereft when you finish something. Because you’ve given a part of yourself away”

Lucy Caldwell

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