Historical fiction writer Lucy Steeds talks to us about her debut novel 'The Artist' set in the Provence region of France in the 1920s, and how her synaesthesia helped her write an immersive, visual story that holds the reader close.
Lucy Steeds is a graduate of both the Faber Academy and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She began writing The Artist while living in France and currently splits her time between London and Amsterdam. The Artist has — in manuscript form — already been listed for the BPA First Novel Award, the Yeovil Literary Prize, the Page Turner Awards, the Fiction Factory First Chapter Competition, and was a Finalist in the Spotlight First Novel Award and the Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer Award. The Artist is published by John Murray on 30 January or you can find it on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I was very lucky to grow up in a house full of books and my parents had a fantastic rule that they would never tell me to go to bed if I was reading. This has given me both a lifelong love of literature and also insomnia. Our local library was in a beautiful old building and I remember running rampage around it with the voracious randomness of a child, picking out books based on whims and how much I liked the cover.
I also listened to a lot of audiobooks, which meant I absorbed the rhythm and sound of sentences on a sort of cellular level. I can still recite a lot of E. Nesbit and P. G. Woodhouse because the words are lodged so deeply in my brain.
I gave myself a year to write the novel that had been brewing in the back of my mind, and the Faber Academy was the structure I needed to take that novel from something nebulous to something solid. It meant I had routine, a deadline every two weeks, and most importantly, feedback from fellow writers. Giving and receiving feedback on different writing every week was invaluable; it focused my mind and allowed me to write The Artist as a reader as well as a writer.
I have a big desk in front of a window which lets in lots of natural light. Outside is a tree which gives the feeling of writing inside a treehouse in summer. On the desk you will find: several mugs of tea or coffee gone cold, an assortment of pens and notebooks for when I write by hand, a candle, a laptop, and the remnants of some recently-devoured snack.
I would love to be one of those writers who rise at the crack of dawn but unfortunately I write best at night, in the small hours when everyone else is asleep (see aforementioned childhood sleeping routine).
The Artist is about three people: Joseph, an aspiring journalist, Tata, the reclusive, enigmatic painter, and Ettie, his sharp-eyed niece. Joseph believes he’s been invited to Tata’s crumbling house in the south of France to write an article about him, but when he arrives he discovers quite a different arrangement altogether. Over the hot, crackling summer that follows, all three characters circle each other within the house, shedding secrets until they finally collide.
It’s about art, ambition and longing, and is full of paint and food and the heady sultriness of summer.
If you enjoyed The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton or In Memoriam by Alice Winn, I think you’d like this one.
I am an insatiable researcher and it is one of my favourite things in the world. (But! It must stay off the page. Research, absorb, and then write with the knowledge tucked inside your pocket rather than blazing on your chest like a medal).
Other than books and archival documents, I took a few things as my entry points into The Artist: paintings, food, and landscape. The world of the novel is very much informed by paintings of the time, in particular the work of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Sorolla. I used to go to art galleries and challenge myself to sit in front of a painting and write about it for up to an hour, which is where some of my most surprising writing emerged. For food, I had the great pleasure of spending a year in France and eating my way through the local market. One of the things my editor and I checked very closely was that all the food in the novel is in season during the summer months. Quinces, figs and clementines all had to be excised at various points.
Other than that, some of my favourite research adventures included seeking advice from an octogenarian French railway historian about 1920s train journeys, interviewing a painter to understand how she sees the world, and reading my way through an archive of nurses’ diaries from WWI. All jewels stashed in my pocket.
I always knew this was Ettie’s story, but the challenge was how to unravel her mystery in a natural way. There are so many secrets in this novel, and so the trick turned out to be telling the story from both Ettie and Joseph’s perspectives. They loop around each other in a carefully choreographed game of cat-and-mouse. I wanted to ask the reader: are you looking properly? Whose eyes do you trust? It was a way of embodying one of the epigraphs to the novel, which is a favourite quotation from John Berger: ‘We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.’
Another novel, coming together in drops and rivulets.
I don’t think I could ever prescribe one book for everyone, but a constellation of the following would make excellent companions: Still Life by Sarah Winman, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, A Month in the Country by J L Carr, A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and the poetry of John Donne.
The transformation of a story that once only existed in my head into something wild and alive which other people have taken into their hearts. It’s the best kind of alchemy in the world.
I have synaesthesia, which is the pairing of two different senses in my brain. It manifests as letters, numbers, words and anything to do with language having visual, colourful characteristics. It makes me a very visual reader and is both a blessing and a small, needle-sharp warning as a writer: I always need to ask myself ‘How would this scene feel if you couldn’t visualise it? How do I describe this painting in a way that makes people see it even if they can’t picture it?’ I never wanted to write a book that holds the reader at arm’s length; it needs to pull you in, and hold you close.
