On 3rd March Falmouth University’s current writer in residence, prolific author Emily Barr, gave an inspiring talk about her experiences as a journalist and travelling to exotic places all across the globe while writing her books.
Barr began her writing career as a journalist for the Guardian. ‘The best experience I had was being chauffeured by Michael Winner’s butler… It was bizarre and one of those moments that I keep wondering if it actually happened.’ She declared that her venture into writing fiction came from her regular columns in the sports section of the paper to which she wrote a fictitious account of living with a sports-mad partner.
Her writing career took a rewarding turn after she landed a book deal with her first novel Backpack, published in 2001. Since then, she has almost published a book every year – and seen a lot of the world in the process including Vietnam and Venice, just to name a few. On writing for a career, she said: ‘there are enormous highs, but very low lows.’ However with a six-figure deal for her latest book, to be published by Penguin in 2017, I think it’s safe to say that she has reached one of the highest points of her career!
Barr treated the audience to an extract of her latest book, The Sleeper, a psychological thriller about a woman who disappears on the sleeper train from Cornwall to London. She made some interesting observations of the publishing industry criticising the limitations of the ‘chick-lit’ categorisation for women authors. ‘I hate it,’ she said, ‘I can’t see why romance books like One Day written by David Nicholls are never categorised as ‘chick-lit’, it is just allowed to be a book in its own right.’ She went on to add that if a woman had written it, it almost certainly would have been dubbed chick-lit.
Speaking about her travels to Svalbard in the Arctic, the location of her next novel The One Memory of Flora Banks, Barr told us about a woman who suffers from memory loss. ‘It really was a peculiar place,’ she began showing us a beautiful photograph of white, glacial mountains against a blue sky, ‘it no longer felt like we were on Earth – you’d draw back the curtains at 3 o’ clock in the morning to find the sun still shining.’ During the summer months Svalbard has 24 hours of daylight, known as the ‘midnight sun’.
At the end of the talk, Barr offered advice about every writers’ worst nightmare: writer’s block. ‘When you can’t write, just do it anyway!’ she said. She also recommended that if you’re writing a novel set in a place that you are unable to travel to, perhaps for financial or practical issues, the next best thing is to get in touch with someone who is from that particular country and/or read as many books as possible about the place.
This was a truly inspiring and insightful talk and I cannot wait for her latest book to be released in January 2017!