During the Q&A part of the night, which rounded off Joanne Harris’s talk at The Central Library, she was asked about inspiration and her writing process, “I don’t go and sit in the shed and wait for the muse to descend,” she said, “Yorkshire people don’t have a muse, I don’t think we get issued with one.” And that neatly sums up her practical approach to her craft. Writing for her is not, it would seem, down to flashes of inspiration, of catching lightning in a bottle, but more about the collecting of characters, stories and plots from the teaming mass of everyday life.
Having begun writing horror, very likely as a reaction to being banned from reading anything remotely fantastical by her mother, it was her third novel, which finally allowed her to become a full time writer. Fights with her American publisher that the book was too parochial, too focused on food, too French, too full of old people and lacking in sex and action, went unheeded and despite this, or possibly because of it, Chocolat became an award-winning best seller.
And although this is the work she is best known for, aided by a wonderfully cast film (Depp, Binoche, Molina,) a series of subsequent books have kept her as queen of the middle-brow fiction market and her latest, Gentlemen and Players, returns her to a world she spent 15 years of her early life, the classroom. Write what you know, they say, and this is exactly what she does so well, a fact borne out by reviews praising her attention to detail and confidence that comes with knowing your subject so well.
As a story teller Harris is rightly placed in an upper echelon of popularist, modern writers, as a guest speaker she is equally funny and engaging. And as someone who only really knows a couple of her earlier books, it was enough to propel her name onto the mental shortlist I carry around in my head for those days when I am browsing for new titles to read.
