1) Do you come from a literary background?
Not really. My father was a post-war Polish refugee who later became a scientist. My mother was of English and Irish parentage, with a working class Yorkshire background. I was born in Leeds and there wasn't much cash to spare. But we read a lot as a family and there were always books at home. I remember being taken to the local library when I was very young. My parents read to me and I don't ever remember being short of reading matter.
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2) What writers did you enjoy reading as a child?
I was given several Wonder Books from the 1930s by one of my aunts. They were anthologies of poems, stories and extracts from the classics with art nouveau illustrations by artists like Anne Anderson. I had serious asthma as a child, and the books were my constant companions. They were passed on to other family members, but I recently bought one in a charity shop and it was like meeting old friends all over again: the Brothers Grimm, Hans Andersen, Robert Louis Stevenson. One of my other favourite books was The Wind in the Willows. A teacher at our small primary school read the whole thing to us in episodes. Besides these, I loved Enid Blyton, especially the Adventure series and Rosemary Sutcliff. And I recently rediscovered a novel called Rider's Rock by Eleanor Lyon, a magical story about a lost village on the Welsh coast. I think I must have read that one about two dozen times. Going back to it so many years later, I was delighted to find it had lost none of its appeal.
3) Did you write as a child?
I can hardly remember a time when I didn't make up poems and stories. Perhaps because I was so often ill, and there was no television in the house, I listened to the radio, read books and decided that I wanted to make up my own stories. I still have one or two old notebooks with some rather terrible poetry.
4) How did you get started as a writer?
I began with a mixture of poems, short stories and radio plays. I was serious about poetry when I was at Edinburgh University where I did a degree in Mediaeval Studies. I had a couple of collections published when I was in my early 20s. I was also submitting stories to literary magazines and sometimes getting them published, and I was just starting out as a radio dramatist. My first professionally produced radio play was a strange little drama called The Hare and the Fox. I went on to have more than 100 hours of drama produced, half of it my own original work and the rest full scale dramatisations of the classics. Some of them were novels I had first come across in those old Wonder Books.
5) Do you find writing easy?
Not so much easy as compulsive. I don't want to do anything else. There is almost nothing I enjoy as much as writing. I like most parts of the process but especially planning and revising. The first draft, the blank screen waiting to be filled, can be a bit daunting. I joke about displacement activities, and I'm as guilty as anyone of spending too much time on Facebook. I think it's the writer's equivalent of the office water cooler. We work alone so much, and it's so good to chat that it's very tempting to spend time on there. I can be distracted, but if I'm honest, I'd always rather be writing.
6) Describe your working day.
I write almost every day, but how much I write varies, and it can depend on how closely a deadline is looming. I'm usually at my desk around nine o'clock. We live in an old cottage in the West of Scotland, and I'm lucky enough to have a dedicated study. It has a view of the garden and the woods beyond. This is a source of pleasure, distraction and guilt when I realise how many weeds I have failed to pull up. I'm an owl and stay up very late but I'm not good in the mornings. Coffee helps. I tend to do emails, promotional work then and move on to creative writing in the afternoon and evening. I may have several different projects on the go at once. My characters become very real to me and occasionally wake me up in the middle of the night. I have something to tell you, they say, urgently. Some days I do very little. All writers need thinking time. Some days I do far too much and realise that my hands are stiff and my eyes are like cinders. I'm not very disciplined.
7) Do you do much research?
I do a lot of research, especially if I'm writing historical fiction or a play which demands it. It can become an end in itself but I do like to be accurate. Historical howlers are going to pull your reader right out of the story. The trick which works for me, and which I learned from working on drama, is to do the research, but then make myself forge on and write the first draft informed by the research but without constant reference to it. I often surround myself with pictures, music, things to create the right atmosphere. But it's only when I become totally immersed in my story that I realise what else I need to know. Then I'll do more research through subsequent drafts.
8) Please guide us through the stages of one of your books - the ideas, the planning, the drafts, working with an editor, etc.
An idea can come years before I actually write the book and sometimes I'll experiment with plays and stories first. The Curiosity Cabinet is a good example. I heard the intriguing story of the 18th century Lady Grange who was kidnapped to a small Scottish island and then wrote a trilogy of radio plays inspired by that idea but quite different from it: an interweaving of two stories, past and present. Normally, I'll do mind maps on large sheets of paper. More recently, Pinterest has been helpful. I make the writer's equivalent of a mood board for a project. When I write the first draft it will generally be a single long document. I'll work straight through and I don't use any complicated writing software, only Word. I write to find out what happens. I may know the ending of a book or a story but I don't always know how the characters get there or why they are behaving as they do. Not immediately, anyway. When I wrote the novel of the Curiosity Cabinet, (after the plays rather than before), I wrote two separate stories, past and present. Then I printed them out and put the two together as a physical document before starting to work on the novel as a single entity. My agent at the time asked some astute questions which resulted in a few rewrites. The novel was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize and published by Polygon, when it went through another editorial process. You can do plenty of self editing, especially if you're prepared to leave time between drafts. But it can be incredibly useful to work with a good editor who can spot the things you know in your heart you need to address. I'm no fan of critique groups although some people find them useful. But you can't please everyone and so much is subjective.
9) Do you show your work in progress to anyone?
Hardly ever. I wait until I'm fairly satisfied with it and that can take a long time and a great many drafts. I wouldn't even talk about it. I have a few like-minded people I might confide in, my husband and son among them. But it can be the kiss of death to a novel if you show it to the wrong person and get the wrong response. It can all collapse, like a house of cards.
10) How did you manage to fit writing in with other demands on your time? Are you good at managing your time?
I'm reasonably good, although I have lapses. I'm an obsessive list maker. I have been known to write things I have already done on my lists just so that I can cross them off. But I find them helpful in allowing me to organise my time. I live in a very active and friendly community and although this is lovely in lots of ways, it also creates other demands on my time. I thought when our son grew up (he is a video game designer, living and working in Dundee) everything would become easier, but so many people I know are either retired, or heading that way. Working from home always seems to present some problems. No matter how often you say you're working people don't really think you are. Which is why I often work at night when it's peaceful.
11) How do you relax?
Mostly with my husband and with good friends both in this village and elsewhere. I have a friend who is a visual artist of the same age and we walk along a nearby beach from time to time, comparing notes about life and work. I garden, sporadically. I'm green fingered but not very good at maintenance and weeding so chaos ensues. I collect antique textiles which often find their way into my fiction (like the Sampler in this collection of stories). I love theatre, cinema and music although winter can present travel problems here. Perhaps unexpectedly, my other passion in life is Ice Hockey. I first fell in love with it when I taught English, mostly to young paper factory engineers in Finland, many years ago. The only thing they wanted to talk about was hockey. A couple of them invited me to a game and I was hooked. Later, there was an excellent local team (Ayr Scottish Eagles - although lots of them were Canadians) which we supported for a while. Our son even played till he was 16. Now we only occasionally get to a game in Glasgow or Dundee or watch it on television, but I'm still passionate about it. I even wrote a novel with a Scottish hockey background (Ice Dancing) and will probably write a sequel eventually.
12) Who are your favourite living writers?
There are almost too many to name. I love the short stories of William Trevor and Bernard MacLaverty and plays by Brian Friel. I could also single out Jane Harris (The Observations, Gillespie and I) and I've just discovered Icelander Yrsa Sigurdardottir. I'm reading her deeply creepy and entertaining novels far into the night. I'm a Bill Bryson fan and my other favourite non-fiction writers are John Carey and Kenneth Roy, both of whom write about potentially dry subjects in prose so elegant that it slides down like honey. And (disclaimer coming up) I have a friend called Gillian Philip who writes clever, fiercely imaginative and entertaining novels which, although they are marketed as Young Adult fiction, I enjoy more than a great deal of supposedly adult fiction.
13) Tell us about some of the books you've enjoyed in the past year.
My big discovery of last year was China Miéville. I heard him speak at the World Writers' Conference in Edinburgh in 2012, online, of course. I wasn't invited, and I loved what he said so I investigated his books. I read The City & The City and can't remember when I was last so captivated by a novel. His novels defy labels. They are rich in ideas and words in the best possible way. Heady. I get very tired of pared down fiction which seems to be shaped to the demands of some hypothetical market. When I read another of his novels, Railsea, I liked it so much that although I had read it on my Kindle, I just had to have a paper copy as well. I'm glad there are more of his books, waiting to be read. I'm not often tempted to write fan letters these days, but I may make an exception with Miéville.
14) Who are your favourite dead writers?
I must name Barbara Pym whose novels I discovered many years ago and still re-read often. The same goes for all of E. F. Benson's brilliantly funny Lucia books. My late mother was a big Charles Dickens fan and I've inherited her affection for Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield in particular. I'm obsessive about Wuthering Heights and Emily Bronte. My novel Bird of Passage is a homage to Wuthering Heights, although I'm a bit cautious about admitting it. If I had to pick one writer, it would be Robert Louis Stevenson. I dramatised Kidnapped, Catriona and Treasure Island for radio in a great many episodes, and I think Stevenson has influenced my own writing. Just working with his prose taught me so much. His imaginative world is superlative. Besides which, I think Alan Breck is the most attractive hero in all literature.
15) Are there any types of book you don't enjoy reading?
I don't want to name names, but there's a kind of edgy, relentlessly masculine contemporary fiction that doesn't suit me. I often feel that they get their female characters completely wrong and they don't care, possibly don't even notice, but nobody takes them to task for it. If women writers do the same while writing in or about a male persona, they are challenged. But then there are superb writers, like Trevor, MacLaverty and Friel who can get inside a person's mind, male or female, and get it absolutely right. And Mieville of course. So perhaps it has little to do with gender and more to do with writing styles and how they appeal on a personal level.
16) You have written many novels and numerous short stories. Which form do you prefer?
On balance, I prefer novels. I love to become immersed in the world of the book. But when I'm writing a short story, it feels the same, the experience is just shorter and more intense. I'd like to experiment with the novella form. Most of my novels turn out to be quite long, but I like the sense of playing around with ideas and characters I get when I'm writing short stories. A novella would give me that much more elbow room and the shorter form sits well with eBooks. I have some plans.
17) Have you ever had a work rejected?
Oh yes. I can't begin to count how often. In fact I've had a couple of experiences of immediate acceptance recently and I've been amazed by them. The worst is what my writer friend Maggie Craig calls The Rave Rejection. We love this, it's wonderful, but we don't know how to market it. This is one reason why many professional writer friends are becoming 'hybrid writers' and mixing traditional with self publishing in eBook form. The funniest rejection I ever had was from an elderly, grumpy, male literary agent who told me that my novel The Curiosity Cabinet was a library novel fit only for housewives! It has since done rather well in spite of the slur on me, libraries and housewives. I was also told that my work was not experimental enough to be really literary, but far too well-written to be popular. You can't win with that one, can you?
18) Can you give any advice to someone wanting to write books?
Read a lot and write a lot. It's the only way. Stephen King says so too in his excellent On Writing. You should read widely and thoughtfully. Try to figure out why you find one book better than another. Why something works so well. Why it appeals to you, personally. And write. You have to practise your craft in order to learn how to do it.
19) Do you hang out with other writers or stay away from the literary world?
I have plenty of writer friends. I hang out with them online, because we are a scattered group. I'm currently serving on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland and I enjoy SoAiS events but this is a big country and we live all over the place. My dream would be to have a small flat in Edinburgh so that I could go to book events and the theatre without worrying about the long journey home. That'll have to be when I become Scotland's first eBook millionaire though!
20) Do you enjoy promoting your books and meeting your readers?
I genuinely enjoy talking to readers. I can remember the first time I had a play produced, and we had the 'read through' and I thought, 'these people are taking my work seriously and asking me questions about it and enjoying it.' It's a lovely feeling. I'm always very happy when readers take the time and trouble to tell me that they have enjoyed a book or a story. It's endlessly surprising how - as a writer - you find that your very personal 'made up truth' (to quote Bernard MacLaverty's description) strikes a chord with another human being. Even when somebody just says 'I loved your book' it's a bonus. There is no feeling like it and I'm always grateful.
Catherine Czerkawska's new collection of stories is just published as an ebook and is available at Amazon for £2.99.
Read more author interviews:
20 questions for Val McDermid
20 questions for Daphne Wright
20 questions for Joanna Rossiter
20 questions for Judith Kinghorn
20 questions for Louise Doughty
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