Sophie Cooke interview

This interview with Sophie Cook, author of Under the Mountain and The Glass House, was first published in May 2009.

Where were you born and raised?

I grew up in the Trossachs, a tangled stretch of Scottish countryside on the southern edge of the Highlands. The first house I can remember was the Pass House, near Kilmahog, a great Victorian pile with a footbridge that led to its own island in the middle of the River Leny. I used the house as the setting for my second novel 'Under The Mountain', with a few tweaks and changes. It was a brilliant house to live in as a child but my family couldn't afford to keep it. My parents rented out the top floor to students at Stirling University and then when I was six they sold the house and we moved out - first to a modern bungalow on the edge of Callander, and then nine miles away, to a caravan in the woods of a derelict gamekeeper's croft, Bal-na-Craig, which my parents gradually renovated. It's a beautiful place, with a waterfall crashing down just outside the back door, and those five acres of rock and water and rowan are like my twin. I sometimes think that I don't really belong to a country so much as a small patch of the Menteith Hills. I attended McLaren High School in Callander, where I had an inspirational English teacher called Miss Cunningham, and then spent one year at the Edinburgh Academy on a scholarship before going on to Edinburgh University to study social anthropology. My father is a wildlife conservationist and environmentalist; my mother is a care worker at Camphill, the Rudolf Steiner residential facility for adults with extreme learning difficulties such as autism and Down's syndrome. I have an older sister, a younger sister, and two younger brothers. The youngest, Toby, is an artist whose work was recently shortlisted for the Jolomo landscape painting award.

What was it that first got you into writing and when did you start writing?

I've always made up stories for as long as I can remember - daft and fancy tales that I'd tell to entertain my brothers and my friends at primary school. I wrote a lot of stories about spacemen as a child, and then our teacher encouraged us to write semi-autobiographical short stories at high school. While I was at university, I wrote the opening chapters of a never-finished surrealist novel, from which I later took the adult character of Vanessa, reversing her into adolescence for the short story 'Why You Should Not Put Your Hand Through The Ice'. While I was living in London in my early twenties I also wrote a couple of short surrealist pieces (a man whose gloves are eating his hands etc). 'Why You Should Not..' then made the shortlist for the MacAllan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition, which at that time was the biggest short story competition in Europe. I met agents and publishers at the awards ceremony, and the prize money meant I could scale back my shifts as a barmaid and devote more time to writing. And then of course that short story became the opening pages of my first novel 'The Glass House'. It was a novel that became a short story that became a completely different novel. Having said that, some elements remain. There are about five consecutive pages which I have left completely unaltered from the way I wrote them in that original half-novel when I was nineteen. Writing is like sewing - taking bits of flat cloth and turning them into a three-dimensional world in which life can happen - and your notebooks, or your hard drive, are the sewing basket. Full of all those pieces of leftover cloth that can be reused in something different; all the scraps of embroidered fabric that you keep just in case.

Which writers have influenced you the most?

I grew up on Russian writers, because that was what was in the house. I loved Solzhenitsyn, Dosteoevsky, Chekhov, Pasternak, Tolstoy: the beautifully poetic physical descriptions, coupled with those surgically exact psychological insights. I know critics have drawn parallels between my own work and that of Virginia Woolf, as well as Scandinavian authors and screenwriters like Thomas Vinterberg. I think the Scandinavian connection is to do with the physical environment: at northern latitudes, you grow up with a psychological tolerance of extremes - endless daylight in summer, overwhelming winter darkness. You grow up being accustomed to it and perhaps also needing that contrast in your experience. People talk about the gothic schizophrenia of Scottish literature, its Jekyll & Hyde quality, and I think that's why it's there. If you live at high latitudes then you see the same landscape in drastically different lights, and you become aware of the temporary nature of its current appearance, the transience of your own experience on the permanent rock of the land itself. I think that has a huge deep-rooted effect on the national literature of countries like Scotland, Norway, Finland, Russia. There is something very MASSIVE about the landscapes in our books, and always an awareness of dualism, opposites: of the winter that will come and swallow up our sun. There's always a stopwatch on our haymaking, always an awareness that the good times can't last. It is often interpreted as pessimism, and can manifest itself in recklessness, but, at its best, this aspect of our national character can give us a heightened appreciation of current happiness, a bittersweet nostalgia for the present. The long dark winter ahead is the salt that seasons our summer.

What kind of things do you write?

Novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry.

What are you working on now?

My third novel, which involves a return to some of the more surrealist elements in my writing; a few short stories; and a screenplay set in Berlin, where I now live.

What is your writing day like?

It starts at 10 or 11 with coffee in a big mug. The mug is yellow, green, or white - other colour mugs are for other kinds off coffee, not the writing kind. If I'm writing drafts, I fire up my laptop and put my headphones on. I have a playlist called 'Pen Music' which I put on a loop: Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Turin Brakes, Tin Cans, Aaron Wright, The Doors, Dominic Waxing Lyrical, Lou Reed, Ben Harper, The Smokin' 44s. I have to have music because otherwise my attention wanders off: its creatively stimulating but in a structured way. If there's silence then my imagination runs riot and I can't think straight. Then I write, starting with a poem based on whatever I dreamt the previous night. Most of these poems get destroyed - they're like my morning stretch. Then I get going on the book or story I'm working on. Or, if I'm making notes or trying out ideas, I curl up on the sofa with my pens and the giant spiral-bound accounts pads which I like to use as notebooks because they were designed for a different purpose: it feels just accidental enough not to be daunting. With beautiful purpose-designed notebooks, I always feel that whatever I write won't be good enough for the notebook, it makes my writing style shrink and turn nervous and small. Accounts pads, post-it notes and paper napkins all work far better, but I've found accounts pads are the most practical of these. And I enjoy scrawling across the columns. After 2ish, I usually read a novel or watch a DVD or go for a walk or meet friends at the local cafes in Friedrichshain. It's not a very productive time of day for me. I pick up in the evening again, and probably write some of my best material between 5 and 10. I guess I'm lucky not to have family commitments - it is a bit of a luxury to be able to write whenever you feel like it and not worry about being anti-social. I go out later on, at 11ish.

What's the most exciting thing about writing for you?

Seeing where the story will take me. Trusting it. It's like a crazy game of Follow My Leader with a hundred potential wrong turns at any given moment. When you start writing any story, there are really a million different stories it could be, depending how you tell it. You keep hoping you've got the right one, in amongst all those others - that you aren't following a near-miss - it's almost like tailing another human being, the way it darts around ahead of you. The times you lose it and then have to retrace your steps back to the last place you are certain you saw it.

What's the most frustrating thing about writing for you?

Getting bogged down in all the things that aren't writing - tax returns, admin, funding applications. Making the mistake of writing when I'm feeling emotional - the results are invariably unusable. You have to be feeling very calm to write well, otherwise it turns into self-indulgent expressive shite and the story slips away.

What's the best piece of feedback that you've had from your audience?

I always love it when people engage with the characters as human beings and we sit there and argue about their motivations. I also really enjoyed the event I did at the Edinburgh Book Festival for Under The Mountain, in 2008 - it's great when you get a good meaty intellectual discussion going on.

Do you write for a particular audience, or is your first priority to satisfy your own creativity?

Neither. I feel quite squeamish with talk about creativity. I write to tell a story that wants to be told. Satisfying the story, doing it justice, is the first priority. That's what satisfies me, and then also I get to have fun rolling around in language in the process of doing that. The creativity is in the crafting of the sentences; the story itself is not created by me but rather comes from somewhere else. All I do is follow it and put everything I've got at its disposal. It's the kind of sculpture that's more like hacking into a lump of rock than building something up out of clay. So while it is creative, it is creative in a negative, destructive way - you are always aware of all the stories you are not telling, all the ones you are sloughing away, in pursuit of this one, the best. The creativity isn't in creating the piece of rock, because that was done by processes far greater than yourself - the psychogeology of Jungian archetypes etc - but is only in the way that you cut that rock to show its qualities best. The particular ideas whose colours you want to accentuate.

Do you have a homepage? Do you have any short stories or poems published online?

I update my Myspace page fairly regularly with news of readings & events, and also publish some of my poems there. New friends welcome.

www.myspace.com/sophiecooke

Lisez cette page en français avec Babelfish Lesen diese Seite auf Deutsch mit Babelfish

Submit your website to 40 search engines for FREE!