Martin, I really enjoyed the first installment of your Cinderella tale: Cinderella’s not a fella!
Could you please tell me something about the inspiration for this story and perhaps why you decided to publish Cinders as a serial?
MT: Thank you, Janet. For several years now, I’ve been interested in the power of myth. Fairy tales, I think it could be argued, often evolve from myths or have mythic elements in them. By ‘myth’ here I understand the kind of story that a community or civilisation tells itself in order to gain some understanding of fundamental aspects of human experience (Joseph Campbell and Vladimir Propp have each written interesting and important books on this, for anyone who is interested).
I wanted to take the building bricks of a well-known fairy tale (in this case Cinderella) and try to construct a new version – one that lives partly in a fairy tale world and partly in the 21st century (like magic realism, but more magical than realist).
The idea of publishing it as a serial came from the excitement and anticipation I imagine was associated with the Victorian trend of publishing popular tales (such as many of the original Sherlock Holmes stories) in serial form (in The Strand magazine). I actually first read Sherlock Homes in the antique bound collection of The Strand Magazine belonging to one of my favourite uncles. Nowadays, TV (and to a lesser extent radio) continue this tradition, but it seems rarer in the written form – I wanted to re-establish some of that sense of impatient anticipation among my readers (to create a buzz about what happens next, you might say).
Martin, There is a lovely combination of innocence and yearning in your first instalment and this gives your story a very touching emotional centre. We care almost straight away for your hero and I enjoyed his old fashioned freshness and steadiness. Will he remain central to your story (know I am prying!) but no harm in asking-or will the story evolve as you write on? Dickens enjoyed the pressure of a deadline, and even altered his stories when he grew fonder of a character than he envisaged. Have you the plot all decided upon or could it change with a touch of magic?
MT: I think it would have been a bit too scary to start out on this project without having a clear idea of how it was going to proceed. This became even more important once I’d decided to start publishing it in instalments. This put pressure (of a good kind) on me, since I think of it as a kind of tacit agreement with readers – if you buy part of a story, you have the right to expect the author to follow through and finish the whole thing.
In fact, that’s become another element I like about the serialisation. It feels as if there is a pact between me and each reader: they want me to finish the story and I don’t intend to let them down. That said, the great thing about having an outline is to treat it like a safety net rather than a straightjacket.
It’s highly likely that the path will deviate – for example, I have become more interested in the wicked stepmother, Seerzegruzzun, and her daughters, Ettaherta and Malahab. I expect them to take on other layers of character and behaviour, as the tale progresses. The ending now feels fairly fixed, but as we move towards it, who knows..? (Notice how I have sidestepped your inquiry about Cinders’s dad?)
Martin, that’s really interesting and fascinating about the ‘pact’ you make with your readers. So writing involves trust all every side?
How do you keep the entire plot clearly in your head-through a wall poster or do you use something else?
And finally, knowing you are a playwright and academic, was wondering if this writing practice is very different from your other writing?
MT: I sometimes talk to my dramatic writing students about how as writers we ask our audiences to spend money on tickets, to venture out (often on wintry evenings) and to give up several precious hours of their lives in order to watch what we have written. So, what we write had better be worth all that investment (financial and otherwise) with which the audience entrusts us. In the case of prose fiction, the element of trust is largely the same (minus the travel element).
With some stories, I stick post-its all over my wall, but with this one I’ve used a net piece of writing software which allows you to place a synopsis alongside each chapter; very handy! The writing process for fiction is certainly different than that for scriptwriting. In the latter, the dramatist has to remember s/he is working in collaboration with other talented people (actors, directors, designers etc.) and therefore has to leave space for them to be creative (eg by not trying to tell actors how to deliver lines). In fiction, it’s my world and my job to help the reader come alive inside it. You might say it’s a very personal invitation, from me to you.
I once heard Kurt Vonnegut describe reading (fiction) as a process of ‘meditating using someone else’s mind’. Hard to beat that as a description. Philip Larkin, who by all accounts was a miserable old devil, advised that writers should not be afraid to be memorable. I try to follow that exhortation in all my writing.
I have a terrible condition called Logophilia* and I’m trying my damnedest to infect the reader with it. My fiction is liberally sown with neologisms and, I hope, novel ways of looking at things. I want people to get to the end of a any chapter of Cinderella’s not a Fella and feel the urge to go back and read it again. My drama tries to make the characters and their words fly off the page and into three-dimensions in front of your very eyes.
As for the TusiNotes study guides, as you know, we aim to give students and teachers insights and approaches to the set texts that they won’t find anywhere else. There are, just as an example, several fine guides to An Inspector Calls already out there, but by looking at the text from a dramatist’s perspective, I think we offer something more than the standard guides (which is one reason we decided to call it a ‘Gradebooster Guide’).
(*Love of words: copyright Martin Thomasson, by the way.)
Very many thanks Martin. Is there anything else you would like to add to our discussion of your writing on Kindle? And I must add, I am just rereading your second installment and love its witty knowingness, all traced with a very real sadness too.
Don’t wish to spoil it but I did shudder at your villain’s offer of help! Wanted to shout at your hero to turn back,to give up his tinkering with his car, but then you painfully revealed that even the most kindly human being can be fallible and such ‘weakness’ leads us all astray….’ At this moment, the moment of their first meeting, she sees the fear in his eyes and it warms her.’
MT: In some ways, of course, there are major differences between writing a study guide and a piece of fiction. However, there are some connections. I try to approach my guides from a writer’s perspective – as you know, it’s always our aim with TusiNotes to offer something that hasn’t already been covered in other guides.
In the case of both An Inspector Calls and Under Milk Wood , I wanted to give the reader a sense of how the pieces work as drama, so the analysis of the language, character, structure and techniques employed by Priestley and Thomas form a central part of the ebooks.
In Cinderella’s not a Fella, (though I hadn’t thought about this before you asked), I realise that my approach was once again to take something familiar and try to uncover (and in this case also add) aspects that aren’t really there in the many versions I’ve so far come across of this fairy tale.
Most importantly, I realised that Cinderella in the original (and many of the updated versions) is the ultimate ‘passive protagonist’. Everything in the story is done to her or for her. She never takes control of her own destiny. I felt it was high time for that to change. Similarly, I wanted to reexamine the idea of a happy ending for a twenty-first century woman. Having made her more active, resilient and determined, I had to ask myself, what would Cinderella really want?
