Lorna Elcock: The Windhover

I'll also be at Gryffe Valley Book Festival, Braemar Literary Festival alongside Kiran Millwood Hargrave and fellow Women’s Prize Discoveries shortlisted author Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin, Wigtown Book Festival, and at Waterstones in Edinburgh with James Robertson. I’m really looking forward to all of it, especially meeting readers and hearing what they think.

What inspired you to write The Windhover, and what came first for you: characters, setting, plot, or something completely different?

I had been hoping for a good idea for a novel. None came. Eventually, I began writing what I thought was a short story about three children in the cold basement of a big, dilapidated house, being got ready for bed by their fierce grandmother. I formed the view that one of them, the eldest, was – in a way, but only sort of – my mother, who, with her two siblings, spent part of her childhood living in Scottish youth hostels. And it occurred to me that the dilapidated house must therefore be a hostel too. I didn’t have much more than this but there was clearly something in it because off I went.

For me, plot comes last, and is the hardest part. It seems I must get to know the characters first, ideally letting them roam around in a nebulous ‘manuscript’ for at least a couple of years before anything resembling a story begins to emerge. This results in very deep foundations which, I think, allow for a particular richness or thoroughness in the story eventually – so I would have to say that, for me, character is the crucial thing. But this method makes the writing process very slow. Perhaps it won’t always be this way and I’ll run into a better method in due course.

In The Windhover, you show - to devasting effect - family dynamics and the lasting impact of poor and selfish decision-making by the adults upon the children in their care. The relationships between the young siblings are particularly poignant – which of the three children did you find most challenging to write, and why?

Ewan gave me the most trouble. He is the youngest and since the novel is written in very close third person I had to find a believable, compelling way to write from very deep inside his consciousness – which required a good bit of imagination, because it’s a long time since I inhabited the consciousness of a six-year-old child. It was so difficult that for a while I decided not to have Ewan as a viewpoint character at all – I had begun with all three children but I soon felt that he was probably beyond my capabilities, so I let him go, confining myself to his sisters Moira and Alison instead. Then, later, I was given the very helpful suggestion that if I was trying to tell the story of women’s lives in Scottish working-class families it might be wise to include a male perspective on such matters – their having, surely, some thoughts on this themselves – and so I brought Ewan back. It was an important turning point. Without six-year-old Ewan’s viewpoint I would never have gone on to discover that I had something to say about him as a 30-year-old, too – and so I would never have gone on to find the overarching story into which the novel, eventually, settled.

Planning your novel – the dual timeline, multivoiced story set between Rannoch in the Scottish highlands and London – must have called for some rigorous organisation! How did you manage this?

With great difficulty! I’d love to say I just knew how to do it, but in reality it was entirely down to trial, error and my almost fanatical determination to keep going until the whole thing worked. After a few muddled drafts I came across some extremely practical writing advice from the author Claire Fuller which I immediately adopted and wouldn’t now try and write without: she advocated using the ‘headings’ function in Word to allocate to each chapter and section its own place in a table of contents, which then appeared in the ‘navigation’ sidebar and let you easily keep track of what you had written where. By that stage, I knew that I was going to be hopping between different timelines and that within each timeline I was going to be hopping between different characters’ viewpoints, but it wasn’t until I put each of the sections and their chapters into this contents system that I was able to keep hold of all the strands of the story in the particular way that this sort of novel demanded. Once the system was in place, I just carried on along again in my intuiting and fumbling and stubborn refusal to give up, until – after ages and ages more – the thing was done.

She saw various iterations of various sections of the novel and was very positive and encouraging even in the early stages. Then when the manuscript was finished at last, a year or two after our meetings finished, I sent it to her. Thank goodness she liked it! – she offered, and we began.

What were the best – and worst! – pieces of advice you were given as you embarked on writing your novel?

I was given the wonderful advice that, whatever happened, the main thing was to keep going. Which was just as well because various things happened. And when they did, I remembered the advice – and I kept going.

I soon learned that any generic soundbite whether from social media or found via a random, desperate scrape of the internet is to be avoided (although by the same token you ought probably to ignore my thoughts in this regard). Writing advice is personal, just as writing is. The better advice, it seems to me, is more likely to be sourced from hard work and real life.

Which novelists have influenced your writing, and what debut novels have you enjoyed recently?

Everything I write is indebted to several founding texts in modern Scottish literature: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, Neil M. Gunn’s The Silver Darlings, Robin Jenkins’s The Cone Gatherers. While writing The Windhover, I spent a lot of time re-reading Katherine Mansfield’s stories about the unhappy Burnell family, ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, and Chekhov’s stories too. I came back a couple of times to Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse after someone clever pointed out to me that there was some evidence of its footprint in my book. When trying to work out how to structure the novel, I looked to some more contemporary novels including Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.

I have just read Frances Crawford’s A Bad, Bad Place. I don’t usually read much crime but if this is what crime writing is like then I have been missing out on something brilliant. I’ve also just finished This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin, which is extraordinary. Not too long ago I read The Wardrobe Department by Elaine Garvey which excited me so much that I wrote to her publisher to ask them to please tell her that I loved it. It felt like she knew something which I did not yet know: this is, I think, mostly what I read for now. How have they done that? How can I do it too?

And looking ahead, what’s your next project going to be? Will it be another novel or something completely different?

I am working on another novel, set again in Scotland but this time in the present day.

And finally, what advice would you give to anyone thinking of entering the Caledonia Novel Award 2027?

When thinking about answering this question I went off and looked at my emails and discovered that I entered the competition myself with an early draft of The Windhover – six-and-a-half years ago. The entry did not get anywhere and I’m glad it didn’t because at that time the book was in no way good enough and part of learning how to write it was that I had to go on, alone, and take the time and effort to make it better. But I would say I lost nothing from having tried and failed at that point. I knew I had something, and I was working out how to make it good. Entering competitions and failing to place in them was a helpful discipline and an important part of getting the novel written. So, in short, it’s worth a shot. If it’s a no this time, you’ll still have learned something. And if it’s not a no – hooray for you!

      (Author photo by B. Roulston)