Ask the Author: Miranda Miller
Answered Questions (11)
Miranda Miller
She woke up in the middle of the night and put her hand on the light switch. Another hand was there and gripped hers with cold slimy fingers.
Miranda Miller
I would go back to Jane Austen's London, to help my research for the novel I am writing at the moment. Most of her characters, of course, live in the country but they often go to 'town' when something scandalous happens: Maria Rushworth runs off with Henry Crawford from a house in Wimple Street; Lydia and Wickham hide in the City before Mr Darcy finds them, and London is also the setting for poor Marianne's discovery that Willoughby is a cad. What would I do there? I would get out my notebook, talk to as many people as possible and find out how people then really talked, thought and behaved.
Miranda Miller
East West Street by Philippe Sands; The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry; A Death in the Family by James Agee; Rome by Robert Hughes - plus anything else I pick up in a library as I'm a compulsive reader.
Miranda Miller
When I was a child I was intrigued by a story about my father's mother, who had left her first husband and two little daughters in South Africa to return to England with my infant father and second husband. When my father asked her who the two pretty little girls whose photos were on her dressing table were, she replied,'Oh they're my nieces in South Africa.' Something about the mystery of this - and the idea that mothers could up and go and deny that they were mothers at all - appealed to me and I did in fact use part of this story in my novel 'Loving Mephistopheles.'
Miranda Miller
What an interesting question! I think I'm going to choose Christopher Tietjens and Valentine Wannop in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (1924 - 28). He is a highly intelligent, unhappily married civil servant and she is a passionate suffragette and feminist. They change each other in interesting and complex ways in the course of this long tetralogy, which was adapted by the BBC a few years ago. He was played by Benedict Cumberbatch and she was played by Anne- Marie Duff, one of those rare examples of a dramatisation of a book I love that is entirely satisfying.
Miranda Miller
As yet, I haven't really suffered from it. I don't mean that I find writing easy, and I have often got stuck on particular scenes (I find endings particularly difficult). I write very slowly and rewrite a lot. If I sit down at my desk in the morning and feel blank I force myself to stay there for at least a couple of hours. Usually, something happens. If it doesn't I just go for a walk or a swim and try again the next day.
Miranda Miller
The sheer fun of having an idea and sitting at my desk trying to turn it into a novel.
Miranda Miller
Never give up. People will tell you you're rubbish and you might get a lot of rejections. However, if you passionately believe you have something original to say you will eventually find readers.
Miranda Miller
I've just finished 'King of the Vast,' the third and final volume of my Bedlam Trilogy, which will be published later this year. The main character is John Martin, who was a very successful apocalyptic painter in Regency and early Victorian England. His brother Jonathan tried to burn down York Minster and was sent to bedlam. My novel is about the relationship between them.
Miranda Miller
It seems to be a lifelong addiction. I started my first novel when I was 20 and have been writing, or planning books, ever since.
Miranda Miller
From looking at the wonderful paintings of Richard Dadd - have you seen The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke in Tate Britain? I also visited the Bethlem archive in Beckenham in Kent, and learned about life in the hospital in the 1850s.
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