The novelist Muriel Spark had a routine for writing a novel.
Like many writers, she was fussy about her materials. She had to have spiral notebooks from James Thin, a stationer in Edinburgh. Each had 72 pages. She wrote only on the right-hand pages, reserving the others for revisions.
Usually, five notebooks made a novel.
Unlike many writers, she didn’t rewrite. The BBC has a recording of her explaining the process: you put a title on the first page and your name under it and then you begin with Chapter 1. … It struck me as funny. She wrote the book from front to back, no skipping about. The story ended close to the last page of the fifth notebook. One draft was enough. She didn’t like editing.
All this is astonishing to me. I’m from a different school, if not a different planet.
The part of her method that intrigues me is her use of “character lists.” She had the usual list of characters, but she also had pages on each: appearance, mannerisms, personality traits, quirks. She had an index that showed where each character entered, left and returned to the story.
Before Spark started writing, she had the story in her head — and in the notes in her character lists.
• Sources: Colin McIlroy, “Muriel Spark and the curious art of writing”; National Library of Scotland, Discover magazine, Issue 48, Summer 2023. It’s here:
https://www.nls.uk/discover-stories/muriel-spark/
BBC’s 85-second recording, “How I write, by Muriel Spark” is here:
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