The Very Real Ups And Downs Of Life As An Author, As Told By Christobel Kent
Introduction by Caroline Gladstone
Christobel Kent was born in London and educated at Cambridge. She has lived variously in Essex, London and Italy.
Her childhood included several years spent on a Thames sailing barge in Maldon, Essex with her father, stepmother, three siblings and four step-siblings.
She now lives in both Cambridge and Florence with her husband and five children. She started writing quite late but has since written prolifically and very successfully. Christobel’s first four books are set in Italy and are crime novels, her English-set novels are tense psychological thrillers, and she has also written a six book detective series featuring ex-policeman Sandro Cellini.
Here, Christobel talks to SomeGoodIdeas about how her career started, the very real issue of writer’s block and the twists and turns of how she came to be the recognised novelist that she is today.
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There’s no rule as to when anyone should start writing, but there are certainly advantages to starting late. It’s not quite accurate to say I first set pen to paper when I was forty because I’d tried, on the first slow afternoon on my first job, at the age of twenty two and having read an awful lot, to bash out the beginning of something. Not even a novel: some wistful sentences about a young woman in a Cambridge quad that even made me blush as I typed them then, and the memory of which now makes me laugh like a drain. I wrote them on the manual typewriter that back in 1984 was standard issue, and without getting to the end of the paragraph I ripped the page out, screwed it into a ball and chucked it.
There would be many more slow afternoons, behind the dusty windows of that eminent literary agency on the top floor of a decaying Georgian house in North London, but I didn’t try it again. Instead I did my job, that of dogsbody, of filer of contracts, answerer of phones, typist and taker of dictation, and –last and most important– first reader of the slush pile. The slush pile, a stack of dog-eared unsolicited typescripts, no longer exists in literal form, as most novelists send their stuff in by email, and more often than not it has to come accompanied by all sorts of recommendations and personal connections before anyone will heave a deep sigh and open it, but my time spent ploughing through those submissions was invaluable in my formation as a writer. That is, it put me off completely.
The impulse to write a story, to create a narrative out of one’s life and experience, to make sense of the world, to console, instruct or entertain, is so common as to be near universal. When we play hide and seek, or chess, or snakes and ladders; when a vicar preaches a sermon, when we tell a lie or frame an anecdote or shiver as night falls, we are constructing little narratives. That’s the first thing I learned in my first job: almost everyone wants to have a go, and almost no-one is any good. The problem I stumbled on in my own attempt was a fairly key one: I had, at that point, nothing to say. The fact that I hadn’t practical experience enough to be any good at saying it, was secondary.
My second job, teaching English in Italy, was grist to the mill in the long term, but I enjoyed myself far too much in just living to give writing a second thought. I then worked at a publishing house as eminent as the literary agency, publishers of VS Naipaul and John Updike, Gore Vidal and Wole Soyinka and Jack Kerouac: I’d like to say reading them was what spurred me on but in fact the useful bit was getting experience in actual writing for money. In that my job was writing press releases and letters and summarising our list for trade magazines, ten words per title. Discipline, in other words, in not wasting words. The young love the sound of their own voices, and need to be told to keep to the point.
Then I had children, and scrabbled about writing freelance blurbs, and got the romance knocked out of me by changing nappies and negotiating with toddlers and all too briefly looking after my dad as he died, learning a shred or two of patience and of what life means and at the same time building up a head of steam. Understanding that the will to make that story hadn’t gone away, and the something I needed to say was taking shape, something about love and fear, beauty, kindness, anguish and excitement. A lifetime in publishing added to that equation the understanding that you need to entertain, if you want to sell books, you need to keep the audience on the edge of its seat one way or another and to do that you need to plug into their primal, universal longings and fears.
Still, I didn’t write. And then, with four children under eight, my husband got a year’s sabbatical position in Florence and we moved to Italy, and that was my catalyst. Italy was so full of drama and beauty, stories played themselves out under my eyes on the streets, faithless antique dealers, handsome restaurateurs, junkies, aristocrats, shanty towns full of immigrants and travellers and all in the shadow of this extraordinary, blood-drenched, vivid, fascinating, brilliant city. The magnificence of its art and architecture, the beauty of its hills and gardens: the stories told themselves.
And still – tripping over children, carrying them around the city in backpacks, cooking for them - I didn’t write. Then we came home to England, my children were suddenly all in school or state-funded nursery, and I missed Italy so badly I could have lain down and cried. On the first day of term I pushed an empty buggy back to an empty house, sat down in front of my computer, looked unseeing at the dust under the sofa and the dishes in the sink – and I began to write. Need and longing and life-experience and stories all came together, and I wrote Italy back into my life.
My first novel, A Party in San Niccolo, dealt with a young mother escaping her children on a short holiday to Italy, where she trips over a murder or two. To my astonishment Penguin gave me a two–book deal: it took me forty years to write this one, I thought, what makes you think I can write another in eleven months? Somehow of course, I did. I wrote three more standalone, Italian-set thrillers for them, then my beloved six-volume Sandro Cellini Florentine detective series for Atlantic, and only then did I begin to write psychological thrillers set in England, seven by now, all for Sphere, of which The Loving Husband is the best known and The Widower the latest. The next, In Deep Water, comes out in 2022. It’s the best job in the world, and I can’t think of anything that would make me stop.
