Women's Work and Women's Words in the Novels of Pip Williams

In this episode, I'm chatting with Pip Williams, author of two novels featured in the Literature category on Art In Fiction: The Dictionary of Lost Words andThe Bookbinder. 

Highlights include:

• The Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford University Press as inspiration for both novels
• Finding treasure in the archives of Oxford University Press
• Inspiration for The Bookbinder and an examination of women's work before and during World War I
• The role class plays in both novels
• Women and the vote in 1918: working-class women were not included
• Finding information about the lives of working women in archives written primarily by men
• The characters of the identical twins Peggy and Maude in The Bookbinder
• Reading from The Bookbinder, featuring Calliope, Peggy and Maude's canal boat home in Oxford
• Reasons for the breakout success of The Dictionary of Lost Words
• Description of research methods
• Two excellent pieces of advice for new authors
• What Pip is currently reading 

Press Play now & be sure to check out The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder on Art In Fiction.

Pip Williams's Website

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Transcript

Carol Cram:
Hello and welcome. I'm Carol Cram, host of the Art In Fiction podcast. This episode features Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder. Both novels are listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction.

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia with her family and an assortment of animals. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher, studying what keeps us well and what helps us thrive, and she is the author of One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family's travels in search of the good life, which was published in Australia to wide acclaim. Both The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder are based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives.

Welcome to the Art In Fiction podcast, Pip.

Pip Williams:
Oh, it's so lovely to be here, Carol.

Carol Cram:
I'm really excited to talk to you about both your novels, The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder. They both really resonated for me. I'm a Canadian, but I went to university in England. I actually went to the University of Reading, which is just down the Thames from Oxford. So, I want to start by asking why you chose to write two historical novels set in Oxford.

Pip Williams:
Well, really, the reason I went to Oxford, all the way from Adelaide, Australia, is because I was interested in the Oxford English Dictionary. So, it wasn't because I had a hankering to write something about England. It was because I had questions about the Oxford English Dictionary that I couldn't answer just by Googling or reading the nonfiction that was available. And I felt I needed to explore these questions through fiction.

Carol Cram:
So, by going to Oxford, how did that help you kind of figure out what you were going to do with both books?

Pip Williams:
Well, so basically, I was interested in the Oxford English Dictionary, having read Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, which some of your listeners may have read. It's a pithy little nonfiction book about the Oxford English Dictionary, in particular about the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of the people who sent in words with examples of how they'd been used in books.

And what happened when I came to the end of that book, I enjoyed it very much, but the thing that happened is my brain was just filled with questions about, I suppose, the validity of the dictionary, because I realized it had been a very male endeavor, that all of the words that were in the dictionary that had been defined had been not only defined by men, because all of the lexicographers and editors were men, but they had been defined using words and meanings that had been written mostly by men, because most of the books that had been written, most of the reports, most of the medical journal articles, you name it, most things had been written down by men at the time the dictionary was being made, which means that the language that was being defined had to be biased in some way to men's experience.

And so that's the question I had. Did words mean different things to men and women? And if they did, did it matter that the dictionary had been made by men? And because I couldn't answer those questions, you know, using the usual kind of the usual avenues of exploration, I decided to put a little girl under the sorting table in the scriptorium where all of the words of the English language were being defined. And to write that novel, I had to go to England. I had to go to Oxford. I had to go to the archives at Oxford University Press. And when I was in the archives of the press, I found a whole lot of other stories that were set in Oxford. And that's how my second book came about because I'd nearly finished writing The Dictionary of Lost Words. I was in the archives, and I was curious about how a book was bound, because in that first book that I wrote, a book is bound, and help is required from the women who work in the bindery. 

And so, I asked the archivist if he could bring me whatever he could find about the women who worked in the bindery. And essentially what he came back to me with were a few photographs, a farewell card to the controller of the Oxford University Press, who is essentially the head printer, and also a film. And the film is about the making of a book at Oxford University Press. And in that film, it's a black and white film - it was made in the early 1920s, it's a silent film - but in there I can see a woman gathering sections of a book into her arms, and she does it beautifully.

She's elegantly dressed despite the fact she essentially is working in a factory setting. And as she's gathering these sections into her arms, the first question I had was, I wonder what book she's gathering? And then the second question was, I wonder if she stops to read the words that she's gathering into her arms? And I suddenly had a character for The Bookbinder, for the second book. And that's why both books are set in Oxford. It's just, you know, it's this knock-on effect, really, of the research.

Carol Cram:
Isn't that interesting though, that the film would spark that? And the questions that you ask are so novel-like questions. Gee, I wonder what she's reading? I wonder what she's doing? Those are the kind of questions we ask as novelists.

Pip Williams:
That's right. And interestingly, the third question was when I said, I wonder if she stops to read what she's gathering? The next thing was, if she does, I wonder what would happen? And that's when I had a novel, because suddenly I realized that if this woman who essentially is employed to bind the books to, you know, so to do activities that contribute to the binding of books, her job is to do it as quickly as possible. If she stops to read, someone would come over to her, her supervisor would come over and reprimand her, and perhaps say something along the lines of, your job is to bind the books, not read them. And that line came into my head as I was watching the film. And of course, I couldn't write that book right then because I hadn't finished Dictionary of Lost Words. But I did write that line down, and I wrote my idea for the main character, Peggy.

And I wrote a little bit of that scene, actually, of her gathering the sections into her arms and being told that her job is to bind the books, not read them. And I suddenly had a novel because not only did I have a character that had an ambition, a goal, she wants to read, she wants to learn. In fact, she wants to be a student at Somerville College, which is the women's college across the road from Oxford University Press. But she's got something in her way. She's been told she can't do it, that that's not her place. And so, you know, the novel unfurls from there.

Carol Cram:
Yes. And that brings me to my next question, that, you know, women and women's work plays a huge role in both novels, but class is particularly prevalent in The Bookbinder. I don't think we realize, those of us who live in Canada or the United States or even Australia, just how pervasive class was in England at the time. Can you comment on why it was so impossible for Peggy to even want to study at Somerville?

Pip Williams:
You're absolutely right. So, the first book I wrote, The Dictionary of Lost Words, really focused on the experiences of a middle-class woman, Esme. And in Bookbinder, I was much more interested in the class differences and how class compounds all of the things that women struggle to achieve at that time in history. 

Yes, so Peggy is about 21 when the book starts, and she has an identical twin sister, Maude, and she has been working at Oxford University Press since the age of 12 because she didn't go on to what we would call high school. And really, she's got everything stacked against her because, as you say, class in the UK is really pervasive. And it still is. All countries have class systems. They're more subtly expressed, I think, in Australia and Canada, but we still have them. But in England, there's nothing subtle about it. Everyone knows what class they're in, and you can see the differences just walking down the street. Even in Oxford today, you can see who is town and who is gown. It isn't difficult to figure that out. 

But a hundred years ago, Town and Gown, which is essentially, you know, working class and the scholarly class in Oxford in particular, that was very, very delineated. It was very stark. And Town and Gown would hardly ever interact unless it was in a master-servant situation. And so Peggy has all of these hurdles that she has to overcome if she ever wants to be a student at Somerville College, which is her dream. 

And they're impossible, actually, because like I said, she's born working class, she leaves school at 12. Not only is she a woman, which bars her from so many parts of society, doors are closed to her, quite literally in some cases, figuratively in others. But we have to remember that women didn't have the vote in England in 1914. 

So, she has all of the gendered barriers, but she also has class barriers because Oxford University is a very middle, upper-class institution. And it's difficult for someone from the working class to access it if they're male. It's difficult for someone from any class to access it if they're female, but for a working-class female to access it, it's almost impossible.

Carol Cram:
It also resonated with me personally, because I'm actually writing a novel about a mill worker, a woman in the 1880s-1890s in Northern England, who was also trying to break out of her class and just how many strikes against them they had. And I think we sometimes forget that the suffragette movement really was more middle and upper-middle class women who were spearheading it.

Pip Williams:
Yes, absolutely. And we do forget that. And in fact, you know, World War I - and The Bookbinder really spans those years between 1914 and 1918 - World War I was quite instrumental in getting women the vote, because suddenly when so many men left the country to fight, it was up to women to step into men's roles in order to keep the country going. And up until that time, one of the reasons to not give women the vote is that they didn't contribute to society in the same way that men did or could. But suddenly it was shown how women were so capable of doing anything that men did. Surprise, surprise. And so it was a pretty hard argument to make by 1918 that women didn't deserve to have a say in the parliament of the country.

And so in 1918, a bill was passed that allowed some women to vote, but those women were middle- and upper-class women. You had to have property or a degree, and you also had to be over 30 if you were a woman and you wanted to vote in 1918. It took working class women another 10 years to get that same privilege which was in 1928, incidentally the same year that the Oxford English Dictionary was finally finished, but it took another 10 years for them to get the vote, even though they are the ones that stepped into so many of those men's jobs. They're the ones that drove the buses and manned the trains and walked the police beats and all those sorts of things. But they weren't entitled to get the vote. And so, as you say, again, the suffrage movement at that time was skewed towards the rights of middle- and upper-class women.

And one of the reasons for that, I think, is that working-class women were working. One of the things that was really important when I was writing this book was to try to understand and try to find evidence of what life was like for working-class women at this time in Oxford, and generally in the UK. And there are plenty of books that can tell me about certain conditions. But mostly what history tells us about is men's experience, and then history tells us a little bit about middle-class women's experience. And what I was interested in doing is looking at the art perhaps that had been made by women a hundred years ago to try and get a sense of what their lives were like. 

I looked to poetry and memoir and even to visual arts. And it was fantastic, and it gave me a lot of insights, much of which I have used in my books. But what I realized when I examine it is that for a woman to make art, to quote Virginia Woolf, they needed a room of their own and 700 a year. And working-class women didn't have that. And so you do not see much art from working-class women a hundred years ago. And so even that avenue of research was limited when it came to trying to understand the lives of working-class women.

Carol Cram:
Oh, I totally understand what you mean. I find it very frustrating trying to frame even memoir written by the girls that worked in the mills, which is what my character does. She works in a cotton mill in the 1880s, 1890s. Very little about the women and what they did has actually been written down or preserved. And it's so ironic, you know, that they said, oh, it wasn't till the first World War that they suddenly realized the contribution women were making. But a huge percentage of women worked all through the 19th century. But as you said, they were busy and they didn't have time to get politically active.

Pip Williams:
Yes. And it's so interesting because you were just saying how hard it was to find information about the mill workers, the women mill workers. I bet there's a lot of information about the men. And that's what I found at Oxford University Press. I could have written several books about men who worked at the press, because there was so much information, so many anecdotes. They had this gorgeous kind of newsletter which they started in 1919 after the war. And it was for everyone at the press. And the press was made up of, say, about seven or eight hundred men and a hundred women, most of whom worked in the bindery. And this newsletter was for all of them, it had all sorts of things in it, but it was filled with anecdotes of people's working lives. And I couldn't find a single newsletter over many years that had anything about any of the women who worked at the press, but plenty of anecdotes about the men.

And similarly, you know, there were boxes of information about all of the things the men did at the press, but not the women. And I think, you know, we talk about history having gaps in it, and those gaps are shaped like women. Those gaps are shaped like indigenous people. Those gaps are shaped like migrants. But actually, archives have similar gaps. And this is where historians and novelists go when they can't find the books. They go to the archives. But the archives were also male projects. Most of the archivists and archives that have been set up have been set up by men for the preservation of men's memory, if you like. And so, when I'm in the archives of Oxford University Press, which was a very male dominated workplace, I see that. I see that the women who worked at the press were almost invisible, interestingly, just like their work. So, you know, the women who worked in the book bindery, they did all of the things that you don't see in the end. You know, they do the folding and the sewing, and that all eventually gets covered up by board and leather and gilded titles, which is done by the men.

Carol Cram:
That's right. The better their work is, the more invisible it is.

Pip Williams:
Yes. And that could be a quote on a sort of chauvinist male t-shirt, couldn't it?

Carol Cram:
I think what's really important though, as novelists, is that we have a role in filling in these gaps. The fact that the archives tend to be more male-dominated. We can look for the stories that have not been written, but they exist. And that's sort of a great role that historical novelists can do, particularly women's stories, which is of course what you are doing.

Pip Williams:
Yeah, and I think that what we're doing, and actually a lot of people are doing this at the moment, not just women, but First Nations people and people who have migrated to various countries, they're starting to tell their stories and they’re necessary stories because the history books and the archives aren't telling them. 

But I think that novelists do have this role in filling in the gaps of history. And where it becomes difficult is when there is very little evidence of the existence of some people in history. But one of the things that, you know, this comes up a lot when people are talking to me about my books or about historical fiction in general, is, you know, this idea of people being so different a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago that we can't possibly put ourselves in their shoes because we have a modern sensibility. 

But one of my responses to that is, although I can't find a whole lot about working-class women at the time I'm interested in writing about, I can find some things, so sociology research is one place to turn. And I did find information about women who worked in binderies, actually in the United States, a beautiful report written in 1913 by a woman and she had a team of young women helping her to collect interviews from women who worked in binderies about their life in the bindery. And it's wonderful because I actually can hear their words because their quotes have been written down in this report. So that's quite rare to find something like that. And I was very lucky to find something like that. 

But the other thing that I realize is that humans haven't evolved that much over the last couple of millennia. And we still have the same range of emotions today as we did a hundred years ago or 200 years ago. And we can, as novelists, can tap into those emotions, our understanding of emotions, to write our characters. And of course, we would express them differently, but I think it's naive and wrong to think that women a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago, wouldn't have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness of being kept down when they had ambitions to do something else.

The feelings that we feel today, if we are frustrated in our ambitions, or we are frustrated in our relationship, or we're frustrated in our friendships, would be similar to the feelings that women felt a hundred years ago or 200 years ago. I honestly believe that. And so that's why I think as novelists, we can put ourselves in the shoes of women whose lives we don't know a whole lot about because all we have to do is imagine some of those barriers that have been put in their way, and think about how we would respond to an equivalent barrier today. And it would be similar. This is how the suffrage movement starts. Women have been fighting for equality forever. So, you know, I feel like that's our job as novelists, to mine that kind of, you know, the history and archives, but also the humanity that we know.

Carol Cram:
Yes. And I think it's essential because as you say, stories need to be told, stories from all across, you know, First Nations and marginalized people, et cetera. And yes, okay, we don't know exactly what people thought maybe 200 years ago, but yes, we can understand emotions. People have not changed. When I'm writing my character right now, I can hear my grandmother's voice, my great-grandmother's voice. You know, I can understand a lot about where they came from just because I was brought up by them, even though it was a long time ago.

Pip Williams:
You know, we are on a continuum. We're not separated from these women of a hundred years ago. We're linked to them. You know, there is a bit of them in us, and that's what we tap into.

Carol Cram:
Exactly. And actually, that brings me to my next question. Another theme in The Bookbinder is about the ties of family, particularly the care that Peggy shows for her twin sister. What was the inspiration for Maude? I gather that she's autistic, what we would call autistic today.

Pip Williams:
<Laugh>. So I don't actually label her. The way I describe Maude is that she sees the world differently in the world, sees her as different. She would not have been diagnosed with anything in particular back a hundred years ago. And so I don't do that for her. But yes, lots of people will come to their own conclusions. 

But she communicates in a particular way as well, what we would these days call echoalia. So she echoes the words and phrases that she hears around her, and this is how she composes language, really. And you need to understand how she does it in order to understand her. And that was one of the tricks of writing her as a character because she doesn't say much, but everything she says is important and, and slightly coded.

And so writing that, you know, I had to concentrate quite hard because I needed readers to understand her, even though she didn't speak in the way that we're used to. But the reason Maude exists, as far as the story is concerned, is if we go back to the image of the woman gathering the sections. And, once I knew that this was a young woman who desired more than anything to read and to learn, and that this was a young woman who wanted to go to Somerville College and be a student of Oxford rather than just a worker for Oxford University, I realized that she will have all sorts of barriers in her way that are just to do with her gender and her class. And they were fairly straightforward barriers, you know, that these are the things that we all know about that would keep her from her goal.

But I wanted to, I suppose, complicate that even more. I wanted her to have something else in her life, something far deeper, really, that might get between her and her goals. And not just her goal to be a scholar, but even love, for instance, other things that she might desire. And I just thought, again, about women today, and what is it that stops women today doing the things they desire to do? What stops women going and doing a degree or a postgraduate degree? What stops women taking a promotion? What stops women taking a job in a particular city? You know, the things that stop women from doing the things they desire to do with their lives is care of a child, care of a partner, care of a parent. These things stop us from pursuing our dreams all the time. And so I wanted somebody like that in Peggy's life.

I wanted her to have to care for somebody and for that love that often comes with caring to complicate her life. And so that was, that came very early in my planning for the book and more. And the fact that they're identical twins just made it more delicious for me to write because there are so many things about being an identical twin. I have cousins who are identical twins exactly the same age as Peggy and Maude. But there's so much about being an identical twin, I think, that is interesting. In a novel like this, this idea of being singular. Peggy, not only is she striving to get out of the Press, she's striving to leave this life that's been prescribed to her. And she wants to be different to all of the people around her. She wants to be different to the life that she's been told she has to live. But at the same time, she's got this identical twin sister, and every time she looks in the mirror, she sees somebody else. And that was just a lovely thing to be able to play with in the book.

Carol Cram:
And what it did was it gave so much more depth to the character of Peggy. It would've been kind of more one dimensional if it was just that, okay, she was working class and she couldn't get into Oxford. And you know, those are the barriers, but the fact that another barrier was love was wonderful because it was extremely realistic, as you say, as women in particular, not that men don't have care, but it does tend to be what they call it, the emotional labor that women tend to be responsible for. So that's what made the book so interesting, or the character Peggy so compelling, is that we could so sympathize with her wanting to get out, but also not wanting to get out because she wanted to be with her sister.

Pip Williams:
Yeah. That's a lovely way to put it, Carol. She, yeah, she does want to get out and she doesn't want to get out. She's torn. And you know, without any spoilers, sometimes you wonder whether in fact she's using Maude occasionally as an excuse.

Carol Cram:
I think psychologically she definitely is. And I like that as a novelist, it gave me an idea for my own character, so thank you for that.

Pip Williams:
It was also, I should say, it was really important for me though that Maude wasn't just there for Peggy. She’s a well-rounded character, and I wanted her to also have her own storyline in the book. And I won't go into what that storyline in is. I want my books to have people in them that I have around me all the time. So it was important that this book had that kind of diversity of character that I see in my life all the time. And I didn't want Maude being there simply as a trope. She's not there because she's vulnerable. She's there for her own reasons, if that makes sense.  And her vulnerability really is something that's projected onto her. It's not necessarily something that comes from her, which is, you know, which is a difference.

Carol Cram:
It's a very different thing. And she does grow through the course of the novel, and it's very satisfying to watch the character of Maude develop through the novel. 

Pip Williams:
I really loved writing Maude because, you know, she also challenged me in so many ways. And in many ways, that's reflected in her relationships with some of the other characters in the novel. She challenges them as well. And yeah, so I really enjoyed that.

Carol Cram:
So would you like to do a reading from The Bookbinder?

Pip Williams:
Yeah, I would love to. This is quite early on. It's in chapter two, but it sort of introduces Peggy and Calliope. Calliope is the narrow boat that Peggy and Maude live on, on the Oxford Canal.

It was a relief to look upon Calliope. She was dark blue with gold lettering, like the binding of an Oxford World's classic. She was practically touching, staying put, and the closeness had always felt like a comfort. I held open the hatch for Maude and stepped in after her. 

Calliope smelled a little sweet after having been shut up all day. A little earthy. The hatch swung closed behind me and I breathed it in. It's the smell of books, Ma used to tell people when they asked. It's the paper decomposing. They'd screw up their noses and Ma would laugh and say, I've come to love it. 

Ma had brought two books with her when she first moved on to Calliope: Translations of The Odyssey and the Tragedies of Euripides, Volume II. They'd belonged to her own mother and were worn from reading. Her collecting had only started after we were born. She picked up books at curiosity shops and fêtes, and sometimes she bought them new—Everyman’s Library editions for a shilling each. Most, though, were from the Press. They were bound, but they had defects. Whenever I asked if she'd been given permission to bring one home, she'd never quite answer. It's waste, she'd say. Not good enough to sell. Then she'd hand it to me. But good enough to read, don't you think? I always said yes, though, when I was small, I could barely understand a word of them. 

Ma stored her books on a row of narrow shelving that ran between the windows bow to stern. When those shelves were full, Oberon Roundtree built her another row. Soon after that, he built another. When we were 10 years old, he told her a fourth row of shelves could not be accommodated, so Ma bought a small bookcase from the bric-a-brac woman at the Covered Market. It had been dragged from the river at low tide and looked worthless, but Ma cleaned it, then sanded it, then oiled it. She placed it beside her armchair, just inside the hatch. Then she filled it with her favorite novels and all her Greek myths. Why do we have so many books? I liked to ask. To expand your world, she would always say.

When she died, my world shrank.

Carol Cram:
Oh, that's wonderful. I love the whole relationship between her and her mother, who of course has passed before the book opens. And just to that wonderful close relationship that she had with her really comes out in this. Having recently lost my own mother, that really kind of resonated with me.

Pip Williams:
In both the books, there's a sort of dead mother in the background. And in this book, particularly Helen, who is Peggy and Moore's mother, she's died three years previous. And yet I think she's a character in the book. She's in the book from the beginning to the end. She's always still there with Peggy, a really important and influential figure in her life. And Peggy recalls her constantly through the book.

Carol Cram:
Yes, I know, I really liked that. So, let’s talk a little bit about your debut novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, which was an international bestseller. And no wonder. It's just a wonderful book, but I'm wondering, what do you think about it really captured the public's imagination? There was something about it that was different.

Pip Williams:
Yeah, it's always, you can never plan for these things. Can you, if you could… 

Carol Cram:
We would all be billionaires? 

Pip Williams:
It's a book that, you know, to be quite honest, I didn't even tell my publisher because I had published a travel memoir, and I didn't tell my publisher I was writing it. And whenever I mentioned it to a friend, their eyes would glaze over because I'd say, oh, I'm writing a novel about a dictionary. You know, which immediately people kind of can't imagine anything more boring, really. And so it never really spurred a conversation. 

But I think there are a number of things. I suppose if I reflect on, I think the main thing really that has captured people's imagination is the idea. And it's the idea that dictionaries are not the objective texts that we thought they were. It's this idea that was sitting in plain sight. I honestly think, I mean, when I had the idea, I literally looked at the dictionaries on my shelf, and I was shocked that I had never considered them to be anything but objective texts.

And yet, I'm a social scientist by background. So it was my job to kind of scrutinize things and think about all of this stuff. And I worked in gender studies and so on. And I had never considered for a moment how dictionaries were made, and that they were as fallible and flawed as every other human endeavor because they are made by human hands. You have to ask yourself, well, whose human hands? And in this case, it was men's. 

And so of course they were going to be gender biased. And I had never thought of it before. And I think when I wrote the book, essentially, that's the idea that I'm sharing with people, is the idea that dictionaries and by default other books like dictionaries, encyclopedias, constitutions—all these documents that we revere, we haven't scrutinized who made them.

And as soon as we do scrutinize who made them, we realize that these documents must be biased towards the sensibilities and experience and meaning of the people who made them. And I think it's that idea that took off. I think the other thing that helped the book, though, in Australia at least, is that it came out quite literally two days after we went into lockdown, after the whole world went into lockdown in March 2020. 

And in Australia, what happened was, you know, everything closed down, bookshops closed, but we all went online and my book was one of the first books to be part of these online book clubs. And so people, I suppose, were introduced to it, some read it, and it was a book that had nothing to do with modern day. And I think that was quite a solace at that time, that this was a book about a historical time when we didn't have to worry about a pandemic, because in The Dictionary of Lost Words, the book finishes before the Spanish flu starts. And so we didn't have to be reading in my book, no one had to read about modern times or a pandemic.

Carol Cram:
I think the title allowed us to get lost, actually, which is what we were all looking for at that time. It just happens to be a coincidence. But it's interesting. Oh, The Dictionary of Lost Words. Oh, yes. That sounds like a great book to read right now when we're all lost, when we're all locked down.

Pip Williams:
I hadn't thought of that, Carol.

Carol Cram:
It just occurred to me, isn't that funny? You just never know what this thing is. You cannot predict these things. I think another reason, as you're saying, is just that the behind-the-scenes of how the dictionary was created, and then with that extra layer, the fact that yes, it's biased, but both those things together, the actual how it was done, which I never knew, not being a lexicographer, was fascinating. I think people do love novels that teach them something.

Pip Williams:
Yeah. I mean, and you know, that is a really fine line to tread, because as a novelist, what you don't want to be doing is lecturing anybody or telling anybody how to think. And yet, you know, for that novel and The Bookbinder, I had to do an enormous amount of research to get things right, because for me, it's really important for me. 

And I know it's different for every historical novelist, but for me, I do like to get the history as we know it, the facts, the dates, all those sorts of things. I like to get them right and keep them in their place, and then weave my fiction around those immovable historical times and dates and so on. And so there's a lot of research, and particularly in The Dictionary of Lost Words, a lot of words that I had to make sure I had the right definitions of. Every word, even the dates of publication, are accurate because I knew that some people would be reading it and retaining some of the history. And so I didn't want to mess around with the history. But at the same time, it's a novel, it's a story. And I didn't want it to be bogged down in history either, or bogged down in facts. And so while it is obviously full of all of those things, I hope that they have been woven in a way that they are just part of the fabric of the story rather than these loose threads that obviously stick out as research, if that makes sense.

Carol Cram:
Absolutely. And the reason for that is because of the character of Esme. Without Esme, then, yeah, it would be a lot of facts about the book or about the dictionary, but really what we care about when we're reading the book is Esme. And why is she so appealing? She's actually quite a tragic figure in some ways, isn't she?

Pip Williams:
Yeah. And she's also, I think people find her more tragic than I ever found her. I have to admit that because she did live through a time that was very, very volatile. And so she experiences things that many, many, many women experienced at that time because it was, you know, a time of war and change and so on. But the other thing about Esme, and I did this on purpose, is that she's quite, well, she's a little eccentric in terms of her upbringing. She's been brought up by a father, which was quite unusual for the times. And she's been allowed to go to his workplace. She's very reserved. I would call her introverted. She's quiet, she's ordinary in many, many ways. And I really wanted to write the story of an ordinary woman, because so many stories, particularly around women's I suppose emancipation, so many stories are written about characters more like Tilda, who is a friend, someone who becomes a friend of Esme.

And Tilda is an actress. She's a suffragette. She's outspoken, she's sexually liberated, she's the kind of woman that stories are often written about. And I really wanted to write a story about someone more ordinary and see how they might make their way in this changing world. I think possibly because I think of myself as quite ordinary, and I've always wondered, I do this, it's been a thought experiment since I was a child, where I always wonder who would I have been a hundred years ago? And I would never have been one of the suffragettes who's willing to go to jail and then starve themselves on hunger strike. I just know that about myself. I don’t know that I would've been that brave, but I hope more than anything I would've done something, I would've worked within my own personality and my skills and sensibilities to make a difference, which is what Esme does. And I think that's why I wrote her that way.

Carol Cram:
Yes, she does. She finds a way that she can contribute by creating the dictionary of women's words, which is so fascinating. Again, really resonating with me because of what I'm writing at the moment. So I read in one of your interviews that you shift back and forth between writing and research. Like, some people do all the research and then they write, but you sort of do them together. How do you do that?

Pip Williams:
So I do a bit of reading before I start, and often it's the reading I've done without any thought for a novel that will trigger a novel. So, as I mentioned, Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, I just read that for pleasure, but it triggered the idea for the novel. And then I just read a couple of other books that were about the Oxford English Dictionary before I got started, just so I had a sense of the context and the timelines. And then I just start writing. Once I started writing, I was still doing a lot of that background research. But once I start writing the story, I think it's really important for the story to tell me what research I need to do.

Otherwise, the research will be dictating the story, and that's not what I want it to do, because you might as well just read nonfiction if you are going to let the history and the research tell you what to write. I really, really wanted to be led by Esme, by my character. As an example, when she gets her period for the first time, I thought, well, how would this little girl turning into a young woman respond to this happening to her? Well, the first thing she'd do is she'd want to know about the words that are used around this event. And that's exactly what she does. She starts to look up the words that people are using around her. 

And so I just went to my state library of South Australia where they have the most beautiful set of first edition Oxford English Dictionary volumes. And I looked up the words just like Esme would have, and that's what I mean about the story dictating the research. So whenever Esme told me I needed to look up a word, I'd look up a word and whenever Esme did something that I needed to understand a little better, I'd do the research so that I understood it well enough to write it authentically. And so that's how my research then goes backwards and forwards between the story.

Carol Cram:
Well, I think that's actually a very good way of doing it, because you're right, if you do a ton of research first, then, you know, there is a tendency to want to include it all. And that may not be very good for a story. I think I do something similar to that as well. I always want to get to the story much faster and then sort of fill in the gaps as I go.

Pip Williams:
And you can always, even when you're writing, you might do this, Carol, and I'm so intrigued by your novel that you are working on, but you might do this where you're so interested in the story that you just write the story, and every now and then in brackets, you have a little note to self, you know, what kind of shoes would they have worn or whatever. But you just keep moving on. You can fill those little gaps later on a research trip or a deep dive.

Carol Cram:
That's exactly what I do. I have little highlights all the way through it about, you know, make sure you find out what did they eat for breakfast? And that kind of thing. Sometimes I feel, well, I should know all that. And I think no. 

Pip Williams:
Well, I think one of the things about research is that, and in a way, and the story I told you about finding the film footage of the young woman gathering the sections of a book is an example. I found that during my research for The Dictionary of Lost Words, and I was so taken with it, so enamored by it that I in some ways wanted to use it in The Dictionary of Lost Words, but it was irrelevant to The Dictionary of Lost Words. It was one of these beautiful bits of research that you come across that you have to be careful not to include simply because you love the fact. If it doesn't suit the story, it does not go into the story. But what I could do instead is put it aside into a new notebook and make it the basis of a new story. But that's what happens sometimes when you're doing research. You come across little nuggets and sometimes you're desperate to include them, but you have to put them aside.

Carol Cram:
Yes, you do. And that's why we have notebooks. I know, it's wonderful when you can do that. And it's just really, you have to be disciplined not to go down that rabbit hole when you really have to stay true to the story that you're actually telling.

Pip Williams:
Yes, yes.

Carol Cram:
What kind of advice would you give to a new author?

Pip Williams:
I would, I would say not to do that <laugh>, I would say, write what you are interested in, write what you're curious about. And usually they are things you don't know much about. The stuff you will write about that, you know, is human emotion, human reactions to things. That's the stuff that you know about that, that you should include in your writing. 

But I think to sustain a writing project over—both of my books took three years. If I had known everything about book binding, or I had known everything about dictionaries, I would've been bored out of my brain in six months.

But because I didn't know about these things, I could sustain that curiosity for three years. I was constantly surprised and engaged in the writing of the books because I was learning so much. So that's probably my biggest pieces piece of advice is follow the curiosity. 

And the other advice is to, and this is going to go against so much of what your listeners have probably heard, but to aim low. The first book I wrote was a memoir, a travel memoir. And I have to admit that I didn't enjoy writing it because most days I would turn up to the page with a word goal of it. It changed over the years, but it would start with 1500 words, and it went down to a thousand, then 750, then 300, which is Virginia Woolf's kind of magic number.

And no matter what it was, I would fail to achieve it. And so at the end of each writing day, my mental health would be on the decline. And I spent more time being disappointed in myself than I did being happy with my writing self. So when I started writing Dictionary, I decided that I would set my sights really low, and I quite seriously gave myself a word count of one. That was my goal, just one word. That's all I had to write, because I realized that writing one word was actually as hard as writing 300, because the most difficult part is sitting down and opening your laptop or your notebook and writing the first word, the first word is the hardest word to write. And so for me, having a word goal of one meant that the time commitment was low, it meant that could take 10 minutes.

So I always had enough time in any day to write one word. So I didn't have to have a free day. And I also, realized that once I wrote one word, well, the apparatus for writing was already set up. The laptop was open, my bum was on the seat, I was in the office or the coffee shop in my case, and I could never stop at one. And so almost every single day that I write, I exceed my expectations. And it has made a massive difference to my mental health and my attitude towards writing is so joyful now because I succeed so often. And for me, success is having written that one word. But often I overachieve, and sometimes I write a whole paragraph, I write 20 words. Sometimes I reach Virginia Woolf's 300, and sometimes I reach a thousand. But it doesn't matter. I'm not elated because I reached a thousand, I'm just happy because I wrote one.

Carol Cram:
Oh, I absolutely love that piece of advice because I tend to get myself mired in, oh my goodness, I'm a failure because I didn't write a thousand words today or whatever. It's silly, but I could always write one word. And I think the point there is feel like success. Don't set your goals so high that you can't be successful because then you're always going to be beating yourself up. And I mean, I think the key word that you said there is joy. I mean, if we're not enjoying this, then our readers won't enjoy it.

Pip Williams:
Are you? I totally agree. Yeah, I really agree. And also, you want to enjoy it. Who signs up, whoever says, I want a job that I don't enjoy and that makes me feel bad about myself. Nobody would apply for a job if that was in the job description. I have always wanted to write, and I have always, as a child, I got enormous joy out of writing, and once writing becomes, I suppose, a job or a project, you don't want to lose the joy that has brought you to it in the first place. And so that's why I knew I had to change, I suppose, my approach to writing, because I did want to keep enjoying it, otherwise I should stop doing it if I'm not enjoying it. Because really there are better ways to earn a living. 

Carol Cram:
Exactly. It's definitely a danger when you start writing more than one book, and the first book is sort of your passion project, but once you start writing more and you think, oh, maybe I can actually do this, people read them and oh wow, there's a career here. Then it does become work and it's very easy to lose the joy, and we absolutely cannot do that. So my new goal now, yes, one word. Good. Well, I managed that today, so that's good. I'm a success. 

Pip Williams:
I know. And because it doesn't take long to write one word and you almost never will just write one. 

Carol Cram:
So what are you currently reading? What's on your nightstand? 

Pip Williams:
I've been reading Claire Keegan's work recently. She's an Irish writer and she mostly writes short stories and novellas. Small Things Like These is her most recent book, and the other book that I read of hers was Foster. They're just stunning, exquisitely written, small, tiny books really. I have also really enjoyed Geraldine Brooks's Horse recently and Still Life by Sarah Winman. I read quite a lot. I'm a very, very slow reader, but I tend to have a few books on the go at the same time. So yeah, there's a few books that I've been reading.

Carol Cram:
Yes, I tend to do that too. I often have an audio book going and then a regular book going, and then a Kindle book going. So those are good ones. I actually know about Still Life. I haven't read it, but I do have it listed on Art In Fiction because the whole Art In Fiction website and the database are all books inspired by the arts. Both of your books, of course, are in the Literature section. 

Pip Williams:
Yes, and I love Sarah Winman. She's just one of my favorite writers, so I highly recommend Still Life. Beautiful book. 

Carol Cram:
Thanks so much, Pip, for talking with me today. It's just been delightful. We've covered so many interesting avenues. 

Pip Williams:
Oh, Carol, I've so enjoyed it. Thank you for inviting me on.

Carol Cram:
I've been speaking with Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder, both listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction at www.artinfiction.com. Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Pip’s website at www.pipwilliams.com.au. You'll also find a link to a 20% discount on a subscription to Pro Writing Aid, a fantastic editing tool for writers. If you are enjoying the Art In Fiction Podcast, please help us keep the lights on by donating a coffee on the Ko-Fi website. The link is in the show notes. 

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