A Conversation with:
RUTH RENDELL

Copyright ©1994 Off The Shelf Productions

When you first started writing, what kind of things did you like writing about? When you were writing short stories, what subjects appealed to you? What was interesting to write about?

I think that they were very much the same sort of subjects that appeal to me now. Of course, it's quite hard to remember. I didn't keep any of these manuscripts. They're all lost and gone, they're not very good. They were always about people. Often about people interacting one with another, two people: a brother and sister, or sisters, or a pair of lovers, a husband and a wife, in some situation that I knew well, because I maintain that we should write about what we know. With some irony or some twist somewhere. Not particularly crime, and without very much plot, because a short story of course shouldn't have much plot. With the longer books - well the one that was rejected was a light comedy of manners, which is very hard to do when you're just beginning, and I think it had its moments, but I'm quite glad it was never published.

When you went from having that realization, that you wanted to try doing this yourself - writing a book - to the point where you actually sent the manuscript off to the publisher, the first one that got published, how did you go about working on your writing during that period? Did you share it with other people, did you get. . .

No, I've never done that. I don't do it today, and I've never done it. Writing is, while the process going on, a very private thing for me. I understand, I quite like the idea that some people write something and they read or show it to a friend or a companion or somebody they live with, and discuss it. But to me that's impossible. If I do that, the whole thing falls apart. It's as if it's brought into the light of day, and reality destroys it. I never discuss it at all. In fact, I refuse to discuss it. I'm asked, "What are you writing about now? Tell us about it." I couldn't do it. I've always been like that. It's always been for me that it's something to be done - well, not to be done secretly of course, because it's my job, it's what I do, but to be something that is just on the paper and in my head.

How do books come to you? Where do the ideas come from?

Well not, as I'm always insisting, from newspapers. I've never had an idea from reading something in a newspaper. Usually from something somebody will tell me. A line they will say to me. A wrote a book about boys at two public schools setting up a spy network and using their spying activities to make some alterations to the sort of civic management of the town they live in. I got that because at the time it was at the cold war, and somebody I was watching television with said how very childish this was, these spy trials, and how nonsensical. And I thought, "Well, here these are spies playing at being school boys. Well, why don't I have school boys playing at being spies? And that is the way that ideas come to me. Sometimes just the sentence, that people will tell me, or some experience, but not when they know I might use it. The kind of thing that happens when somebody comes to you and says, "What a wonderful idea for a book!" is always, without exception, hopeless.

What did it feel like when your first book was published and you could go into a bookshop and see it on the shelf?

It felt very surprising. I was very surprised. I didn't expect to have something published, ever. I didn't think beyond it being accepted. When it came to the point of being published I was simply very frightened of what would happen to it, how people would react, what they would think of it, what would happen next. I wouldn't have gone into book shops to look for it. I should be very self-conscious about that. In fact, when it was published, it was very well received, in a very small way. I mean we are speaking of a very small minor police procedural book, of which there are hundreds published every year, of course.

I received an advance of seventy-five pounds for this book, which is, I suppose, about one hundred and twenty dollars. A very small amount, but it was a very small book. It had tiny little nice reviews in my own country and a publisher from New York came to London the following summer, and read it and liked it, and published it in this country. That was something very good because I was then able to live by writing, immediately, because the advance that I received from my American publishers at that time was fifteen times what I got in England.

This discrepancy has ceased, now. It wouldn't be at all like that. But that was it. And this was something, of course, of an inspiration. One doesn't expect to be able to live by writing like that. And I had written a detective story that did rather well. I had written some more. I didn't want to write detective stories for the rest of my life, so I began to branch out and write the other sorts of books.

How do find people react to the other types of books? Is that the same audience, the same reader, or did you find that were different audiences you were able to reach?

Well, I have a big body of readership who are very faithful to the Wexfords, and who love them. And they are always saying to me, "When are you going to write something else about Inspector Wexford?" And I also have quite a big readership who are devoted to Barbara Vine. And then there are the people who read them all. They seem to like them all. It would be hard for me to say, that really, that Wexfords were more popular than the all the others, but they certainly have a devoted body of readers, who don't read any of the other, who just don't like the others.

There's a story in the press kit for your new book - not really a story - there's a letter from you that talks about the different names. And that I lot of people I've said that to didn't know that. Could you tell that briefly, how you came to be both Barbara and Ruth?

Well, I had an idea for a book that I realized was not going to be anything like anything I'd done before, quite different. This was the first Barbara Vine, A Dark Adapted Eye. So I decided to take a pseudonym for it. I took my second Christian name, which is Barbara, and my great-grandmother's maiden name, which is Vine. I used this name for this book, and it went very well with readers. It was really with reviewers and critics, they are still asking why I do it, and saying that there doesn't seem to be any difference. Of course, there is a difference. My readers appreciate it. I think it has worked very well. My aim is to make all the Barbara Vines different from all the others.

Were there ways that your feelings towards writing changed from the point when your first book was published, when you began to realize that you could make a living from writing? Did the way it felt to write change in any way?

The way it felt to write changed, but not because I was making a living out of it. I have never let myself be affected, I never wanted to be affected by that. I don't think about readers when I'm writing. I certainly don't ever think of something being translated to the screen, or being made into a film, or being used in any way. I think it would be very bad for me if I did. I think it might destroy the whole thing. So, I don't think like that. I don't think that the fact that I was making a living out of it changed me. But perhaps when you have written as many words as I have, your attitude. . . you don't have the same, let's say, starry-eyed delight in writing. It is still what I'd rather do than anything else, it's still what I really like to do, what I do every morning, and would not exactly know what to do in the mornings if I didn't do it. But it doesn't have that wonderful pristine feeling of absolute delight that it once had, and I think it would be very strange if it did.

When did you first get the idea for your new book, The Crocodile Bird?

I wanted to write a book about a feral child, a child who had been raised by wolves or bears, or in a strange environment. I had wanted to do that for a long time. But when I began to read about it, I found that, of course, it wouldn't serve my purpose because those children don't grow like Romulus and Rebus did, having been raised by a wolf, at the age of three, they turn into quite rational human beings. They don't. They can never have. . .their emotional development is retarded. They never learn to speak properly. They are, in a sense, animals.

So I decided I wouldn't do that. I would keep something like this, and then I began to think of the concept of the Victorian girl brought up in a very isolated place. Perhaps with a mother teaching her at home, having very little contact with people. And then I thought, "Well, what happens when you do this with somebody in our society? And they are exposed at the age of mid-teens, say, to our society as we know it now?" And when I had thought of that, I had my character of Liza. Then I thought, "Well, who's she going to live with? Who's going to be her mother?" Then I thought of the character of Eve.

Does the story change for you in any way when it's read aloud from when it's read silently?

I don't think so. I know it very well by the time I've finished writing it. Because I would have gone over this text dozens of times, so that I probably know bits of it by heart. I don't think it changes for me.

What kind of a response to you get when you meet your readers, and when you read to them in book shops?

Well, you have to remember that people I'm going to read to in book shops come along because they are great readers of mine, and probably devoted readers. They're not going to be people who don't like my books, or it's very unlikely. So, I get a very enthusiastic response from people, people enjoy it. I suppose a better guide would be the letters I get. Because I don't always get enthusiastic letters. I mean, I do get a lot of nice letters, very intelligent, enthusiastic people. But another thing that readers like to do is write to a writer and correct mistakes. Sometimes they are not mistakes, and the reader is wrong. But, I'm afraid, they are sometimes mistakes. It's very hard to write anything, however careful you are, how much you check, without making some small mistakes. I hope not to make mistakes. If they are mistakes, I hope they will be very small. But there will always be somebody out there who is going to write to you and tell you what they are. They seem to me to spend their time not exactly reading, but going through a book with a magnifying glass and a small comb, looking for little errors.

What does it feel like to you when you finally finish a book, and you've spent a lot of time on it, and gone over it many, many times, and it's finally done and you send it off and have to leave that book? What is the feeling for you as a writer, at that point?

Very much less emotional than you might think. Because by the time I've finished it, it is not at all like this popular conception of what an author does - writes the last page with a flourish and gasps. It's always like having had a baby. You've done it. 'Tisn't like that. Because when I finish, I go over the book innumerable times, and really, when it finally goes to my agent, just because I have done it so much, and I say, "Okay, I will send it to your next Tuesday," and Tuesday has come and I've done it.. It goes and I have feeling of doubts about it. I think that most writers have these two opposing feelings co-exist. One, this is the most wonderful work of art since War and Peace, and also this is the most awful trash, and why did I ever write it? You have both those feelings, and so, there isn't a great feeling of triumph and success and wonder and achievement when you've finished it. It's just time to think about writing the next one.

What's most rewarding for you about having had a chance to write all the books that you've written?

I have liked winning prizes, I have liked being short-listed for prizes, and winning them, that's been very nice. But I suppose some of the best things are knowing that you have readers who have found your books, and they have given them so much pleasure. People tend to talk to the fiction writer as if you were only in it for the profit or for the achievement, for the success, for the great body of work. But a lot of it is for the immense amount of pleasure, and it's been a healing pleasure for a lot of people. A lot of people write to me and tell me that they have been very ill, or a close relative has been very ill, and they have discovered my books, and they have simply read one after the other, and it has helped them to get better. I think one could see oneself being in a way a sort of therapist, almost a doctor, and it really. . . I think that I have got great pleasure out of thinking that people have benefited in this way, who really enjoyed reading my books, and have longed to get to the next one. There's a lot of satisfaction also, in knowing that people feel that once they've got hold of a book of yours, they can't put it down. It distracts them from everything else, it takes them from all their duties, they just have to finish the book. And that's a very satisfying thing.

Well, Ruth, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

Interview by Steve Moore, Off the Shelf Productions, 1994. All rights reserved. Printed here with kind permission.

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