Like me, you’ve written drama as well as fiction. Unlike me, you’re also a performer. Did you employ performance techniques when writing the novel?
I generally write initial material quickly, and that is pure improvisation. At this stage, I try not to stop to work stuff out. I just put it down, access characters, usually through a very specific emotional-physical attitude I “get”.
Young Georgie, for instance, I “got” early on; I started feeling what it was like to be her, in her child’s body – that under those silent, little, hunched-up eight-year-old shoulders was something interesting...
So at this point you have no clear idea what Georgie’s dilemma is. You are investigating the character like a devising-performer might – bodily. How did that lead to uncovering the conflict at the centre of the character?
I’ve just looked over the first typed draft (from way back in 2005) and there’s a phrase in the pony episode: “Georgie, tugging stupidly at the reins”. When I first typed up that phrase from longhand, I would have had the exact same feeling that I feel now. I would have felt my jaw set, my bottom lip stick out, my shoulders hunch as they “take on” that humiliated, angry, misunderstood little body.
Even back in 2005 on my first read-through I would have known that this moment was “right”: that if I put her into more situations that brought out the feelings she had in that moment of shame, I’d find a story.
That makes it sound very logical, but it was a very messy process: I didn’t even know/decide she was trans until four years after starting the book.
Writing is such a bewildering process, isn’t it? Here you have Georgie, the heart of the book, and the embodiment, so to speak, of many of its themes. Yet the fundamental truth about her took years to become apparent to you!
Did performance help at all with later drafts?
When I begin rewriting, I feel myself accessing other skills I’ve learnt through performance. I’ll read aloud, and be looking for the through-line – is the scene reading “right”, does it make sense? At this stage, all the worms will come out of the can: tinny dialogue, unconvincing characters, sludgy descriptions, totally random, unrelated bits of crap that have somehow made it into what I hoped would be a great piece of writing. As an actor, I’ve done enough awful rehearsals – I know on a very deep level that this ugly stage will pass. But the pain in writing, as you know, is that it’s a lonelier process. I don’t have actors or a director to reassure me we’ll get there. Calling on that actor-experience does help power me through, though.
And after this actor/director draft, do you reach an “audience” one?
Further into the work, I find I start “watching” the story like an audience. Am I bored? Restless? Irritated? What do I not want to read? This usually helps me uncover the really deep problems.
By the way, part of the joy of having a piece published is there are more opportunities for public readings, where I perform the text, “interpret” it in new ways as an actor would. But ultimately I’m writing a work that – to the reader – should be complete in itself. The extra layer brought on by performance is a little treat for me.
And when is a text complete?
In one way, never. My process is to unearth a load of problems during rewriting and then try to resolve these as best as I can. I’ll have an instinctive feeling once I’ve achieved that. Or more precisely, an absence of feeling: I’ll read the text and there’ll be no niggling at the back of my mind. Of course every time someone responds to the text with a fresh critique – bang! – up will pop more questions. The beauty of publishing is that it draws a line under the process. Readers and reviewers may still question things, but I won’t be able to do any more, at least not on that book.
Though many of the reviews rightly praised the complexity and depth of Beautiful Pictures, the book also has lashings of suspense, mystery, dread and humour – the ordinary stuff of drama. Am I right in thinking that although you have written for stage, of equal influence on your work would be drama of other kinds?
I love film – I studied film as part of my degree – and have an obsessive-verging-on-addictive relationship to TV drama.
Like Georgie in Beautiful Pictures, I didn’t watch much TV as a kid. We had RTÉ so programmes only started around 5.30pm. Until RTÉ 2 came along in the ’80s, there was no wall-to-wall children’s programming.
Even with these limitations, I watched as much TV drama as I could, mainly American imports like Little House on the Prairie, Hart to Hart, The Rockford Files, Charlie’s Angels, Remington Steel, Columbo. I used to act out Charlie’s Angels with friends and we’d invent scenes and plotlines, often quite transgressive.
A lot of those shows were detectivey with a puzzle at the centre begging to be solved, and that’s made its way into my writing. I love to drop hints – and make them visual or kinaesthetic, something that the reader senses but not explicitly, the sort of thing Columbo would spot. Those shows ran for ages too, with endless storylines and constantly new puzzles. When I write I want to give that to the reader, present them with a world that goes on and on, that they can get lost in.
I started watching more sophisticated long-form TV drama in the ’90s – Our Friends in the North and This Life. Crucially, this was at the same time I’d returned to acting. I was observing the performances more, how they added meaning through gesture, silence, movement. I was also critically assessing the scripts – when the dialogue and action allowed for greater meaning, or didn’t. That shaped my prose – my focus on scenes which are about action and sensation, rather than in long discursive passages.
You’ve told me you watch reality TV.
I’m busted!
Is your fondness for reality TV apparent in your work?
What drew me to Big Brother in particular was the anthropological element: how do human beings negotiate power in an enclosed world? How do they create narratives for themselves through how they look, what they do and say, even as other people are pulling the strings on the stories they are “starring” in? I was fascinated by the psychology experts who analysed the contestants. One woman was big on animal behaviour – how the contestants used grooming or body language to mark their status. Another man talked about name-calling – the more visual a name, the longer it sticks. (Crooked Hillary, anyone?) Most of the scenes I write involve a shift in power dynamics and I am also obsessed with names, so that material fed a lot into my craft. In the mid-noughties, BB got quite dangerous. Once the programme-makers had to intervene in a fight and I found that exciting; the masks were off, the id was out. What most interests me in writing is finding ways to unpeel the characters who come to me with their masks fully on.
The Wunderkammer episodes suggest you know your way around games.
I worked in the interactive/digital media sector in the 1990s, when it, and I, was just a baby. The interactive scripts I wrote then were often about abstract concepts – history or economics or science or technology – and the challenge was to find intuitive, tactile and sensory ways of bringing them to life. The Wunderkammer came that way: I got an idea: what if I describe this little book, about a Bohemia that doesn’t exist anymore, in a tactile way; as an object, not a piece of text? As I got deeper into the Sudetenland, the other objects came to me. Often they’d be triggered by a concept: how do you embody the emotional load engendered by mass, militarised rape?
Many of the projects I’d worked on in the ’90s had a very conservative agenda. Finding the Wunderkammer’s voice let me play with those storytelling forms in a way that felt more integrated – and that was deeply satisfying.
Which brings us to the fact that Beautiful Pictures seems almost uncannily apposite in its dramatising of the dark political tensions of the present – yet you began writing it 10 years ago!
I think the resonance says more about human nature and the tendency of history to repeat itself than any kind of prescience on my part. But I did grow up as a Cold War teen, I protested against Reagan, saw what Thatcher did to the unions. I’m part-German and this book was always going to have a German angle, which meant looking at fascism and its consequences. A year before starting it, I’d marched against the Iraq invasion. Hundreds of thousands of people marched, and weren’t listened to. Democracy seemed to be failing. Looking back, I’m sure this was one of the triggers behind my initial choice of subject. Then, eight months after I’d started, the London bombing happened and somehow writing about Germany got meshed with writing about now. On an unconscious level, I must have started thinking about cycles of violence and complicity. The theme of displacement came through researching Bohemia, which I didn’t know much about before 2009.
What's interesting is that a draft of the novel was doing the rounds of publishers in 2011 – before Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, the civil war in Syria, the awful mass drownings in the Mediterranean – though it took until 2015 to be picked up. So perhaps it was only ready to be read now.
Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland is published by New Island
Philip St John's fiction has been published in New Irish Writing and various anthologies. He has twice been awarded literary bursaries by The Arts Council of Ireland. In November 2017, his latest play The Restoration Of Hope will run at the Mermaid, Bray and the New Theatre, Dublin
