Meet the tutors: hannah vincent
Hannah Vincent is a novelist, short story writer and playwright who has been teaching on the Creative Writing Programme for many years. Here she talks about what inspires her.
When do you first remember wanting to be a writer? I never aimed to Be A Writer but I have always written. When I was eight I filled a notebook with the adventures of a family of mice.
Your first novel Alarm Girl was published in 2014 by Myriad, it is about a young girl’s experience of being sent to live with her father in South Africa in the wake of her mother’s death. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the story and your journey to publication? Travelling overland through eastern Africa in the early 90s, I came across a news story about a woman who had died on the eve of her child’s birthday. Her family’s speculation about how she died lodged in my mind and the story became bound up with the landscape in which I learned about it. I tried writing it as a play initially but couldn’t make it work. Twenty years later, when I was studying creative writing and focusing on prose fiction, the story came back to me and I found I could write it more easily as a novel. I had been submitting regularly to Myriad’s annual writing competition over the years so once I completed my manuscript it made sense to send it to them. I’ll never forget the moment they told me they wanted to publish it - one of the best moments of my life.
Your second novel The Weaning, came out in 2018. It has been described as ‘dark in the best possible way’! and it focuses on sensitive issues such as loss and mental health. Can you tell us more about this book and what inspired you to write it? I funded my MA studies by working as a childminder. My own children were growing into teenagers and I yearned for the intensity of our early years together. This yearning, combined with the intimate relationships I forged in families beyond my own inspired The Weaning.
You have also written a collection of short stories She-Clown and Other Stories, which was short-listed for the Edgehill Prize and the Manchester Fiction Prize. Could you tell us about the concept of a ‘She-Clown’. What is she and why did you decide to use her as a symbol for this collection? She-Clown is all of us. She’s a way of examining the contortions we all put ourselves through to render ourselves acceptable to the patriarchy. Men have to contort themselves as much as women to fit into the patriarchal structures we all inhabit, but for women the performance is especially taxing. Most of the stories in this collection focus on female characters but whether we are women, men or trans/non-binary, most of us are performing ourselves most of the time, I think. Even on our own there’s some kind of performance going on, right? (No? Just me, then).
Does your writing process differ when writing short stories to novels, and if so how? My writing process is the same whether I’m writing short or long form. I just nibble away, tweaking and tinkering at the draft. Some short stories take as long as a novel to write.
You started your writing career as a playwright, your stage plays were performed at The Royal Court and The Royal National Theatre and your radio play Come to Grief won a 2015 BBC Audio Award. Do you think your experience of playwriting affected the way you now write fiction? Starting out as a playwright means I feel comfortable writing dialogue and I understand that dialogue isn’t simply what people say, it’s what we do to one another in speech. I think studying drama gave me a sensitivity to the arrangement of characters in a physical space, too, and how this relates to power and status (Keith Johnstone’s book Impro is great on this).
What’s the most challenging aspect of writing? Finding the right word, crafting the most pleasing sentence, organising the most satisfying ‘turn’.
And the most enjoyable? The pursuit of the right word, the most pleasing sentence and the most satisfying ‘turn’ -I enjoy the challenge! I wouldn’t bother writing if this wasn’t the case.
You have taught creative writing at various establishments for a number of years including the Creative Writing Programme. How does teaching impact your own creative process? Teaching reminds me what I still have to learn about writing after nearly 40 years of practising. Selecting texts to share with students engages me with expert practitioners of the form and discussing with students how writers achieve certain effects helps me understand the craft involved. I’m a big fan of workshopping. I often find that the issues a student might be struggling with in their own writing are the issues they tend to notice in their fellow students’ writing. This is precisely how teaching impacts my own process. Teaching enhances my creative process in a very practical way because several former CWP students are now trusted first readers and dear friends. Plus, of course, paid teaching work provides a regular income which writing doesn’t. Like everyone else, writers need to eat.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given about writing? Write every day. That’s what I was told on the first day of my (Drama & English Literature) undergrad degree at UEA. ‘Doesn’t matter what you write,’ the lecturer said, ‘but try and get a few words down every day.’ Great advice. If I write regularly, the blank page ceases to be daunting because the page is rarely blank. Soon I find myself living with the novel, story or play I’m writing and it becomes part of me.
What’s your go-to book about the craft of writing? I appreciate Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Nikesh Shukla’s Your Story Matters for the understanding and encouragement they offer to writers at any stage of the writing life. Peter Ho Davies’s On Revision is helpful and humane if you’re editing and I wholeheartedly endorse Jane Alison’s smashing of patriarchal attitudes to story structure in her book Meander Spiral Explode.
You’re marooned on a desert island with the complete works of Shakespeare and a spiritual text of your choice. What fiction book do you want to have with you? And would you prefer a notebook and pen, or laptop to write with? Jane Eyre, please! I find she is the gift that keeps on giving. I’ll write with whatever’s available – pen & paper, laptop, notes app, feather, shell, coconut tree bark, charcoal, blood, bogies, excrement…
What’s on your reading list right now? I’m bingeing short stories at the moment – Liadann Ni Chuinn, John Cheever, Saba Sams.
What are you working on at the momently? I recently completed a big fat novel about what it takes to become an artist. Now the tough work of trying to find a publisher for it starts so I’m distracting myself by writing a handful of shorts and I’ve also begun a new novel set among the UK sauna community.
One of Hannah’s short stories Stew Woman is available to listen to on BBC iplayer here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wxzy and BBC Sounds here https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001wxzy
Hannah will be teaching on the online Creative Writing Programme on Wednesday evenings starting in September. If you’re interested in joining her, then why not sign up for a taster session?