The Conversation with Nadine Matheson
Welcome to The Conversation with Nadine Matheson, where best-selling author of the 'Inspector Anjelica Henley' series Nadine Matheson sits down with fellow authors for insightful, honest, and entertaining conversations. Each episode dives deep into the world of writing, from the publishing journey to overcoming challenges, the experiences that shape their work, and anything else that comes up when great minds come together. Whether you're a fan of gripping stories or curious about the life behind the books, 'The Conversation' promises thought-provoking chats and moments of inspiration.
If you'd like to be a guest or have a message or question, reach out to us at theconversation@nadinematheson.com.
Finalist -Independent Podcast Awards 2024
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The Conversation with Nadine Matheson
Kate Mosse: The Truths We Tell and The Myths We Believe
Twenty years after her critically acclaimed novel 'Labyrinth' catapulted her to international recognition in her mid-40s, bestselling and award winning author, Kate Mosse reflects on why finding success later in life can be advantageous. The conversation explores the fascinating dichotomy between what writers can and cannot control. While commercial success depends largely on timing, market conditions, and luck, the quality of one's writing remains entirely within the writer's domain.
Whether discussing the myths of effortless writing, establishing the 'Women's Prize' and her new novel, 'The Map of Bones', this conversation offers invaluable insights for writers at any stage.
No word, no story, no grave . . .
Olifantshoek, Southern Africa, 1688. Suzanne Joubert, a Huguenot refugee from war-torn France, journeys to the Cape of Good Hope in search of her notorious cousin, Louise Reydon-Joubert – who vanished without trace half a century ago.
Franschhoek, Southern Africa, 1862. Nearly six generations later, Isabelle Joubert Lepard follows in her footsteps, determined to investigate the lives of her ancestors – and to honour their memory – only to discover that the evils of the past, though hidden, are far from buried.
And that her life, too, is under threat . . .
Is an opinion platform hosted by Marvin “Truth” Davis. My life and career...
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Everybody understands it in every other area of endeavour except for writing. People understand that you can't turn up on the London Marathon day having never done any training and run the marathon. People get that. People understand you can't go to the Royal Festival Hall and sit down and play Beethoven's Emperor Piano Concerto if you haven't been practising and done your skills every day. But with writing people think that somehow you sit down and it comes fully formed.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Conversation with your host, nadine Matheson. As always, I hope that you're well and I hope that you're having a good week. I'm not doing too badly. I've been writing Well.
Speaker 2:I say writing it's been hard and I'm blaming it on the weather. I just feel a bit sluggish, I just feel like my brain's misfiring a bit and I feel like it's taken me 10 years just to write a sentence down. But but I keep reminding myself that whatever I write is more than what I had yesterday. So if I wrote 10 words, it's fine. If I write 100 words, it's fine. If I hit my target of 1,667 words yeah, it's a very random number and if you listen to prior episodes you will understand but if I hit my target, then that's good.
Speaker 2:So I'm trying not to put too much pressure on myself, because what I really want to do, I just want to do nothing. I just want to just laze in the garden, drink cocktails, eat Conettos and just read my books. I just want to do that all summer. One day, one day it will happen. Anyway, enough of me moaning. Let's get on with the show, because today I'm in conversation with the best-selling and award-winning author, kate Moss, who's not just an author she's also the founder of the Women's Prize, and she recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of her critically acclaimed book Labyrinth. And in today's conversation, kate Moss and I talk about why writers must protect their passion for writing and the surprising truth about late success as a writer. Now, as always, sit back. We'll go for a walk and enjoy the conversation. Kate Moss welcome to the conversation. Great to be here, right? My first for you is because I was thinking about this who was Kate Moss before the publication of the Labyrinth? Is it 20 years ago?
Speaker 1:Well, do you know, one of the nicest things that's such a great question one of the nicest things people said was that they didn't think I was really any different, and I think it's because I had this enormous success in my mid-40s. Were you so? I was already the person that I was going to be. You know, you know my wonderful husband and fellow writer, greg Moss. Children living a life, you know, living my grown-up life, and so, although it did change our lives completely, the success of Labyrinth nobody writes a novel expecting that to happen to them and it's all over the world and it. You know, it was an extraordinary thing. But at the same time, my life was pretty set, and so it's very different for a young person if they suddenly have huge success with their first book and they're 20 or something. It's very hard to not be blown off course, because you're still not quite fully formed in the world.
Speaker 2:But I was, you know, I was a middle-aged grown-up, so yeah, because we always ask on this podcast then, when it comes up, if you were, when success has come later, or when publication of your book has come and say later, say later in life, like your second career, are you glad it happened now or would you prefer for it to happen in your 20s?
Speaker 1:No, it's wonderful when it happens later, because, firstly, you know that it's not you. I love Labyrinth. I'm really proud of it. I love the fact that millions of readers took it to their hearts and it's still selling and people celebrate it, and it means a lot to people. It means a lot to me. But what you know when you're you know older is that luck plays an enormous part in these things.
Speaker 1:The book coming out at the moment it did, it being the book that, for whatever reason, caught a public imagination, the book that somehow people wanted at that particular time. It would have been the same book if it published a year earlier or a year later, but everything that happened to it might not have happened. So the thing is, as a writer, the only thing in your control is the text. Everything else you can work as hard as you like, but it's out of your hands, and so that's a very, very important thing to know that you've got to protect your love of writing and your pride in your work and separate that from how successful or not successful the book has seemed to be, because if you put your power in the hands of others, then you will live a disappointing life, whereas if you keep the power for yourself, then when it goes well, you can celebrate it, when it goes badly, you can go. That's awful.
Speaker 2:You can be disappointed, but then you move on yeah, I think that's why we always say like it's so important not to be fixated on trends and you just have to focus on what you need to do as a writer yeah, totally, and and it's got.
Speaker 1:You know, books have to have for want of a better word integrity. You know we can all tell a book that the writer really wanted to write, that the book's been written from the inside out, if you like, we can all tell a book where a publisher or a person has thought oh this is very fashionable, ronan, I'll write one of those because the book doesn't have integrity because it's written from the outside in. So that's the key for all of us as writers we have to do our thing and keep on doing it and hope that we will have a fair wind and what we do will hit a marketplace at the time we're doing it. It might not, but it might.
Speaker 2:But in the end you, the only thing you've got is your text and being proud of that it's so true because you know you're saying that you could have written the exact same book, written labyrinth, and it could have come out a year later or a year earlier, and then not as hit the heights that it did. Yeah, it's, and you don't, and I think you don't really think about that as a right. Well, and maybe you shouldn't think about that as a right to focus on. Is this the right time? Because you don't know, you've got your.
Speaker 1:The choice that you make is the agent who's going to represent you, and then the publisher to whom the book will be sold. And these things are all luck as well, and some people write wonderful work and they can't get an agent, they can't get a publisher, and other people it seems to fall into their laps. You know, this is the world, uh, you know, uh, for all of our efforts to make things fairer and better, and that these things are really important, at the same time, the the world isn't always fair. Um, and once you've made those decisions, you, you've made the decision on the basis is this publisher going to do a good job for me? And you have to trust them and respect them as professionals who know what they're doing. And you, you know, for me it was coming after Dan Brown, which it felt like at the time. I can remember well, both my children claim it was them, but I can't remember which one it was.
Speaker 1:We always have a thing, you know, going on holiday to the airport. I'd finally finished this book, I'd been writing it for 10 years and we were going to Carcassonne, where it was inspired by, and you know, we went there every summer for three or four months and we always went to the airport bookshop and the children could choose a book for the flight. We all chose a book for the flight and one of them pulled down a book off the shelf and said oh mum, this sounds quite like the book you're writing. And of course, at the time I read this back of the Da Vinci Code and I thought grail legend set in France. Oh no, oh my God.
Speaker 1:But actually what happened was I think that it was such a huge book and men read that book, men who'd not picked up a novel for years and years and years and years and years. And then when they'd finished it, they had an appetite for reading and Labyrinth came along. After that, a lot of people going oh, if you like the Dan Brown, you might like this, but it's actually a bit more real history and all of that kind of thing. So that was luck. Nothing to do with me or the publishing as you know it's. We don't know who's going to be published out there. You know publishers keep this all. So again, it comes back to the fact you've got to do your thing and have commitment and pride and confidence in it and hope that it goes your way yeah.
Speaker 2:What was your route? Yeah, no, it's true. What was your route to publication, like like you and can you?
Speaker 1:it took you 10 years, yeah, well that was because I had a full time job and young children and you know I was writing in the morning and the evening, not because it took a long time to get published.
Speaker 1:I was. You know my publishing story is not very helpful for most people because I was a publisher. I was a publisher and so I had been in. You know, I've spent 40 years, actually more of my 60. No, that can't be more, because I'm only 63. Yeah, 40 years, that makes about it In publishing, so or in and around books. So I worked in publishing. I left publishing and started started writing. To set up the Women's Prize, I had a book show on the television, I did a little reviewing.
Speaker 1:So when it came to me being a writer, the story that I always tell is the man who is still my agent all these years later. And we were out having lunch and I was moaning because when I was pregnant with my daughter, I didn't enjoy being pregnant at all, I wasn't very good at it. And then I was moaning because when I was pregnant with my daughter, I didn't enjoy being pregnant at all, wasn't very good at it. And then I was pregnant, now expecting, expecting my son, and I said you know, the book I could have really done with when I was pregnant first time around wasn't there. And now I'm pregnant again, it's still not there. And he said why don't you stop moaning and write it? And I thought, okay, I will, you know, tossinging my hair over my shoulder, and he went away and said, ok, I've talked to Virago, they'll publish that if you write it. It was like what I thought. We were just joking.
Speaker 1:So I was kind of propelled into writing by a friend who became my agent and so my story isn't typical, because most people are outside the industry and they are. There's a lot of gatekeeping that goes on. It's one of the things we do with the Women's Prize, with Discoveries. It's a huge mentoring and writing programme where unpublished writers it's an annual competition can enter up to 10,000 works, an unpublished novel and the short list and the longlist and the winners. They all get courses, they all get mentoring, they all get advice in how you go about trying to find an agent and trying to find a publisher, because most people, if they're outside a very tight circle of people, don't know how to get into publishing. They don't know how to get their book published, whereas I was in the exact opposite position. You know, the only people I knew were publishers. So you know it was much easier for me my route to getting published than it is for most people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, does it? Do you find it frustrating at all that the gatekeeping is still there? You know, when you look at how long you've been in publishing and you look at all your involvement, like the Women's Prize and then your own publishing journey, and then we still hear the same stories about gatekeeping.
Speaker 1:No, I don't. No, I don't, because I think things have radically changed, but I also think that it has become fashionable to see gatekeeping as entirely bad. It isn't entirely bad. Yeah, we are witnessing what the lack of gatekeeping means in the world at the moment, particularly through technology and those kind of platforms. So the idea that everything should be out there and that no gatekeeping is a good thing is not true in my opinion. So what you need is some gatekeeping which is about truth, about honesty, about quality. What we do not need is gatekeeping that is about you don't look like me. Therefore you're not coming in. Yeah, so there are different types of gatekeeping.
Speaker 1:So I would say, in my 40 years in and around the rock face, as it were, there's been a great deal of change in that. There's been a great deal of change in that. There's much that you know. Access to market for women is much, much better than it used to be, although we've still got work to do in non-fiction. Access to market for people who don't look like me is better. It's not good enough, but the acknowledgement that there has been gatekeeping that has kept out black writers, other writers of colour, brown writers, disabled writers, working class writers. Even the fact that there is an acknowledgement of that is a step in the right direction, because when I was starting out, there was still the idea and this I obviously came up against when setting up the Women's Prize.
Speaker 1:Time and time and time again people would say to me yeah, but, but Kate, if the women were any good, they'd win the real prizes. You go, guys. That is a lovely, very childlike view of how the world works. But that's not how the world works. There is no level playing field. So even it's, it's not there yet.
Speaker 1:But an acknowledgement that the playing field is not level is a radical change from when I started publishing. So now there are conversations all the time about prizes or mentorships or projects or publishing houses that will focus on one particular demographic that's underrepresented. We do it with the Women's Prize and the Discoveries in particular, that our purpose in that, our goal, is to break open some of the barriers to underrepresented writers and voices and say, okay, you don't look like the person on this book jacket, but that doesn't mean your story isn't brilliant. Yeah, so that's so. That's the thing that we always need to think look at things from all the angles and then go okay, this part of this is good and this part is not good. Yeah, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Speaker 2:I think that's like. That's always like one of the biggest challenges. It's not people being convinced that they can write or being valid, have their writing validated, it's that they can tell the stories that they want to tell. Because I remember when I was mentoring writers, that was always the questions like oh, can do you think I can tell this story?
Speaker 1:and I'm like, of course you can tell the story, that's your story if you want to tell it and you have the right to ownership, and also the idea that, you know, obviously all of my working life has been focused on getting women into spaces and other people have different priorities, obviously. But what I came up against time and time and time again was the idea that a white man writing is somehow a neutral voice that's literature, and everybody else is kind of a niche voice. So women, yeah, oh yeah yeah, but it's women, so it's not for men to read, whereas obviously women read men all the time. And of course I think that is very acute.
Speaker 1:Uh, with black writers and brown writers and disabled writers, the idea that, oh well, if you're writing a lead character who's disabled, then obviously it's for people who also are disabled. No, it isn't, it's a novel for everybody. You know it's the idea of any writer should be free to write what she, he, they want, and it should, should expect a readership of everybody. You know that's the point of novels is to stand in other people's shoes, not to hold up a mirror.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing it's like. And then you'd go into a bookshop and they want to put you in a particular space. It's like, well, no, just because you're a black author or an Asian author or disabled author doesn't mean that you need to have your special shelf. You should be able to to. You want to be on all bookshelves anywhere in the bookshop in the 80s.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't know if you know the great American librarian, uh, dorothy Porter, who was, um, an extraordinary woman, um, between the wars, and then, obviously after the second world war, um, uh, american it was how she defined herself, african-american. And she just gently created a revolution because she discovered that Black writers in America were only in Black writing, or slavery. But what if the man happened to be a chemist? So she realized that that was precisely the problem that black writers, american writers, were not being put in every part of the library, they were only being put under those categories. And it was what my lovely, much missed friend, andrea levy, once said to me.
Speaker 1:So things can be, different between you and me, she said, is if you go to your publisher and say I'm going to write a book about fairies at the bottom of the garden, they'll go. That sounds great, kate. She said, if I go to my publisher and say I want to write a novel about fairies at the end of the garden, they'll go. That sounds great, but we'd rather you wrote about Windrush. So we will never be, have got where we want to be until every artist can write what she, he, they want to write, regardless of who they are and what they look like. Because that's the goal and that's the point about the women's prize is to say every woman on that list, you can't make a judgment about her being a woman, because they're all women. So ironically, it makes it possible for people to judge those writers as writers because they're all women. So it takes that from the world.
Speaker 2:I loved Andrea Levy. I remember picking up um which one of her books was it Every Light in the House Burning and there was like several reasons why it resonated with me. Because I just felt like it was just like such a West Indian saying from your parents or your grandparents like you're leaving every light in the house burning. So as soon as I read, I'm like, oh, that feels like it kind of feels like home and then you've read the book and it's just.
Speaker 2:You said it's just a story. It's not trying to put out some kind of message or make some kind of political point or redefine who you are, like as a black person, like you've got in history. It's just a story that's it.
Speaker 1:And I think the point is that some writers want to do want to write their communities into literature, they do want to write politics into literature, that's the point. And others don't. And the you know it's we won't have finished our work here, as it were, in terms of access and inclusivity and stuff, until every single writer can write what they want, regardless of their background or their history. You know, not to be responsible, um, you know, for a whole community, that's, that's the thing. You know, last year, on the women's prize had a really incredible novel, um, non-fiction actually it was, but I mean it was written so lyrically about rastafarianism and and the author said, you know, the questions all the time were yeah, but you know, is this right that you're putting such an honest view of rastafarianism on the page? Because blah, blah, blah. She said I'm not, I'm writing, for I'm writing my story and that's legitimate. So you know we've got. We've got further to go with those kinds of things, but compared to when I first started out, we've come a long way.
Speaker 1:And I do think we are in times of despair and we are in times of genuine threat, world threat, in a way that has never existed really for me at my age, and therefore all of us as writers our responsibility to talk about hope and the good things too, never stop fighting, never stop trying to make things better, but acknowledge all the good things that have happened, not only talk about the bad, because the people who are sowing discord, they know that despair leads to inaction and hope and possibility leads to action. So we have to keep the positive things out there. We have to keep the alternative visions out there at the moment. Visions out there at the moment, because what the forces that are aligned against us, as we, most of us, might think, are doing, is absolutely sowing discord and despair in order to make everybody passive and hopeless, because that's how it works so and they always, and they always do it by they.
Speaker 2:They go for education first, they go for the books first. It's so funny because I was talking to Linwood Barkley last week and I asked him I love Linwood and I asked him, I said because of you know everything that's been happening politically, but she, I'll say US wanting to make Canada a 51st state and all that nonsense I said do you feel like you have like more responsibility as a Canadian writer, like to put out your stories, like to combat that? And then there was another thing. So yesterday I always have stuff on in the background. What?
Speaker 1:did he say what was?
Speaker 2:his answer yeah, like, like he does, but also just reinforcing the fact that he is telling, telling the stories as a counter balance to yeah, yeah do the craziness that is coming out there. Yeah, yeah. And then yesterday I said I always have stuff going on in the background because I can't work in silence and I don't know exactly what I was listening to, but I remember the person on the radio saying people need stories. In these times that we're living in, people do need stories they really, really do.
Speaker 1:It's like this is a ridiculous thing to say, but it's like that bit in in the Lord of the Rings when you know all is lost and the hobbits are, you know it's all terrible. They just say, you know, they sit down and say, well, tell, tell me stories of the old times. It's the one thing that would still be left, even when disaster is at the gate. And then, of course, disaster is averted. But no, absolutely but. But also this is the point about books, um, being banned, taken from libraries, um, all of this kind of thing. This is the time that all of us who are writers, uh, people who support writers, publish all the rest of it. We have to step up now. We can't be bullied in silence. We can't be. You know that is happening. And in the world of work, that is happening. You know already companies are saying, okay, well, we will drop all of our DEI initiatives. It's like why? I mean, you know, don't, don't give in to the bully. It's just extraordinary.
Speaker 2:I find it so frustrating and so unbelievable because it's like on two parts for me. The part of me, obviously, that's the lawyer and seeing law firms capitulating. And then you know, as a writer, seeing how like I think it was Columbia University in the States was like the first to capitulate, thinking that I don't know, maybe think you're going to get something out of it, some kind of benefit, but you don't, you're just, you're just losing out. And I just thought we said you have you have to stand up for what is what is right and fight back.
Speaker 1:They do. I mean, I was told something very interesting yesterday, which I haven't had a chance to verify, but you might know, as a lawyer An American friend of mine said, the reason that the law firms in America have capitulated is that because of the very strange structure that the all these executive orders that are being put out and all the rest of it they can, anybody who doesn't comply can be banned from going into federal buildings, which means you basically bankrupt your entire business, because if you can't go into the courtroom, you think your business is gone. So it's not quite as simple as let's just roll over. It's like, well, if we don't roll over, we have no business. So you know, you think god, yeah, that's a very different anyway that we've got. We have really digressed now.
Speaker 1:But I mean, but the point is that you know, throughout history it has been the writers that have kept the truth alive and has been writers that have continued to say there is an alternative to this. What you're being told is not true, and there's never been a moment in history where unparalleled misinformation and disinformation and lies are there in plain sight. But because there is no longer a shared narrative, because everybody gets news from their own particular channels that are then algorithmed to suit them. There is no vision of a truth, except we know that that is not the case. So it is time for writers to step up, and it's a. It's a frightening place for everybody to be in, a very frightening place for American writers and journalists and things, but there are people with principle, and I don't know if you saw today ludicrous letter from whoever is currently involved in education oh, linda McMahon, did you see that? And they, harvard, have sent it back with all the spelling corrected and this doesn't make shit.
Speaker 2:They've marked it as it's absolutely brilliant okay, it was the first thing I saw this morning when I woke up, because normally I get up really really early, but this morning I was just like I can't, I need, I'm just tired, and but I woke up and it was the first thing that I saw and I thought let me put my glasses on, because I need to like revel in this, because they corrected everything, and I thought that's what you need to do, because it was brilliant.
Speaker 1:My word of the month said you know, you know, harvard can't run its finances, or something like that. And then, low below, at which institution? They said this contradicts the comments. They, above you have to decide which. Just fabulous, you see, that's the thing. So you say it's about education, it's about the power. Throughout history, women have been denied the right to publish and write. There are countries in the world now, most obviously afghanistan, where girls are not allowed to go to school, women are not allowed to speak in public. Um, there is erasure of all sorts of communities and writing going on, and so we, the writers, have to have to make our voices even louder it is.
Speaker 2:Baffling is not the right word, but but you know, when you say the Women's Prize started 30 years ago, and then you think about all of the progress because 30 years ago I was 18. So you know that period is such a significant period of my life. But then to get here to 2025 and you feel like why is it? We should not be going backwards and like all of the battles that we fought, that should be the end of it. It shouldn't be like a repeat series.
Speaker 1:But I'm afraid you know, as someone who writes fiction inspired by history and someone who writes history, that is the pattern of history. It has always been a pendulum that swings backwards and it swings forwards, and the irony is that there is there are two things that always happen when there is an economic crisis, there is a determination to blame other people and to put women back in the kitchen Happens every single time in history. And when there is a long period of relative stability relative stability as there has been the post war consensus from 45 onwards. Of course, there have been horrible and appalling and devastating wars in certain parts of the world, but there has not been another global conflict.
Speaker 1:After a certain amount of time, complacency steps in and everything about freedoms and the ideas that I suspect we hold in common of equality for all, equality of opportunity for all, people being judged on what they do and say and behave, not what the colour of their skin is, what they look like, all of these kind of things, those things that seem evident and you believe that everybody, any right thinking person, would feel the same. People start to see an opportunity to drive a coach and horses through the middle of that. So the patterns that we're seeing now. For people who know their history, the moment at which it became clear that this second administration was going to be devastatingly dangerous was the moment with all of the tech bros on the front row yeah, not the elected people, because that is precisely what happened in munich under national socialism, where the industrialists essentially paid their bribes and were in the front row instead. So it's the same playbook that you use the democratic structure to get the power, then you dismantle the structure and that's what's going on.
Speaker 2:I think that's why, whenever I'm on social media and I'm seeing people posting and say, oh, I'm so surprised, I'm so surprised, I'm like I don't know why you're surprised. I am not surprised because I would say I love history and I studied history. Yeah, you should, you should be paying attention and I say, like, I studied history at uni and I just love history generally. I'm like I said, if there's a pattern and you can see the pattern, so none of anything.
Speaker 1:Everything that's happening should not be a surprise to you at all yeah, absolutely, and um, but, and also the thing that you know in in my book, warrior queens and Revolutionaries, which is putting a thousand women who should be in the history books, who are not in the history books, back into it, and I've written a YA version of that, really called Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, which is coming out in September, and one of the things I say in that is Just remember that every single right that any one of us has has been fought for by somebody. Rights are never given, they're never given. The people with power do not want to share it. They never have. So it's that we have to be. We have to protect the rights, because they will can be taken away, and that's what we're seeing now. You know, for a feminist of my age, the idea that Roe v Wade would fall in my lifetime, it's just extraordinary. But that's the point.
Speaker 1:It only takes one or two people and suddenly, yeah, anyway, we're very long way from publishing now, but you're right, we're in the real world and we are the people that need to be writing these things.
Speaker 2:So no, but it's true, and I just think, um like, irrespective of whatever genre you're writing in, your work does reflect the world that you're living in, so you can't escape from that at all.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, you know my my latest series of books, the Jube family chronicles, which is set against the backdrop of the Huguenot diaspora. So when I started to research for this series of books the Joubert Family Chronicles, which is set against the backdrop of the Huguenot diaspora. So when I started to research for this series of books back in 2012, and it all started when I was in South Africa, in fact, and stumbling upon a piece of history that was unknown to me, about a small handful of Huguenot refugees who'd fled to the Cape in the 17th century, fleeing persecution in France what you know. People say, oh, you know. So you decided to write about refugee crisis. I said, no, I came across a piece of history.
Speaker 1:But now, in the time that I've been researching and publishing the series of four books, there is a world refugee crisis. Now, most people don't want to read about a refugee crisis. There's too much of it on the news. It's too painful for people. People don't want to read about a refugee crisis. There's too much of it on the news, it's too painful for people, people don't know what to do about it, and so they withdraw from it. But when they read one of my novels they think, oh yeah, so they're just people like us who suddenly their home was taken away.
Speaker 1:So that's the power of fiction, that these big emotions that we wrestle with in our everyday lives, in the pages of a novel we can process and deal with and think and heal. Sometimes, some of these big emotions we can deal with those on the pages of a novel, because it's all about a person or a family. It's not an abstract idea, and that's why I think fiction is so important at the moment. And what all of us are doing is, of course, my fiction is set very much and completely in the period of time in which it's set. I'm not using it as a metaphor for the modern day, but readers bring their modern day selves to the reading of the book, and that's the point. So your role, I suppose, as novelists, is to leave enough white space between your writing and the reader's reading that they can paint in the colours too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it reminds me of what we always say to jurors when we're doing our closing speech, and what the judge will say to the to the jurors also is that you know you will bring in your own life experiences to this verdict and your life experiences, your common sense, so you will put a part of yourself in there, putting yourself in this person's shoes, whether it is the defendant or whether it is the complainant.
Speaker 1:You will, you can't help but put yourself in there and you kind of have to you kind of have to, but you also have to acknowledge your own biases and yeah, um, that it isn't about you. Yeah, that's, that's the thing, isn't it, when you know a reader in the end that you know a wonderful novel works in a way, because a reader is taken away from themselves and put down in a different place, and of course, that is that, that's why people read. It's escapism, it's why, at the moment, so much fiction that is selling very, very well is escapist, because you know people have had enough, frankly, of the state of things you do you need to escape it, I feel.
Speaker 2:That's why I always say I love comic books so much. It's like, it's like I can just, I can just disappear into this world that someone else has created whenever I want and then bring myself back, and it's also why I tell myself now is that I do not. I try to avoid the news at the weekend because it's all consuming?
Speaker 1:yes, and it is. And that's back to the idea of hope, and there needs to be a balance. We are not effective campaigners if we are just too burdened down, and it's why, when people are sometimes rather aggressive about why people are not supporting this cause or that cause, I'm always very careful to say the thing is that you shouldn't be making a judgment on why they're supporting that and you're supporting something else. The fact is that you both have a priority and you're both doing something. Doesn't make them wrong that they're not supporting your cause because they're supporting something else. So you know we can't do everything. So you know, choose our battles wisely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's why I always say everyone has a different role to play. There are going to be some people who are going to be on the front line, so you will see them all over social media, you know, talking about the course but there's going to be other people in the back room doing other kinds of work. So just because you don't see someone out there being loud and vocal doesn't mean that they're not doing anything. Just don't make.
Speaker 1:Well, that's right, I mean the performative thing, and that's of course why my book's called Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries. Yeah, both are needed.
Speaker 2:Kate, when did you know that historical fiction was your genre?
Speaker 1:Well, I never did really. I mean I wrote Labyrinth and then I say that I write adventure. I don't describe my work really as historical fiction, it's just that that is the category that it falls in at the moment. But I had written four books before Labyrinth, and the difference with Labyrinth was that I let the book guide me. So with the earlier two novels particularly, I was sitting on my own shoulder editing before I'd written, you know, and so it, and my two great areas of passion as a reader are, I suppose, what we would call literary fiction and crime. So I thought I would write some literary fiction, and that's not me. And so it was. With Labyrinth I let the story find me rather than me trying to impose something upon an idea, and that made the difference. And then suddenly, there it was. And then I wrote other books in that field.
Speaker 1:But in some ways you know those earlier books the Labyrinth, sepulcher and Citadel we now call the Longadoc trilogy. They have elements of fantasy in them. You know they're time slip novels. Uh, there are mystical things that happen in them. The Joubert family chronicles is much more um, a straightforward historical series. Even the goes backwards and forward, but there are no mystical elements, but I also write gothic fiction and ghost stories, yeah. So I don't feel that I'm particularly tied. And I've written some crime stories, you know, for the Marple collection in particular, and I have mystery in all of my novels. So I don't feel that I am particularly tied to the genre of historical fiction. It's just that that's where my books end up in the book.
Speaker 2:I. I think it's such a good thing, like not to be tied down to one particular genre, because I was talking to another author yesterday on the podcast and she was asking would I write any other genre? And I said yeah, I would. Because I said I feel for me as an individual, I'm so multifaceted in the things that I like that I would feel like I'd want to see that reflected in my writings. I said so if you see me write a rom-com one day, like, don't be surprised because obviously I'll do it under a pseudonym, but yeah, I mean, that's what I like.
Speaker 1:I think the thing is that the person that we are as a reader is not necessarily the person we are as a writer. Yeah, I think that's the mistake that a lot of new writers make. They assume that they will write in the area that they most love to read. But that's not necessarily. Your reading voice and your writing voice are not the same. They might might be, but they're not necessarily the same.
Speaker 2:No, I feel the same way. I don't know why it keeps going back to being a lawyer. I always say my, I say at home personality, this personality, that is not lawyer Nadine. They're two completely different people. And so, yeah, the same works with my reading, yeah, what I like as a reader and what I choose to write, also, yeah, well, it's about listening to your own voice.
Speaker 1:That's the thing yeah.
Speaker 2:So what else do you advise writers, especially when they're battling with imposter syndrome, which we talk about? That doesn't seem to go away no, um, but I'm not.
Speaker 1:I. I worry about imposter syndrome and all of those things. I think that, um, to be a writer, to be an artist of any kind, you have to be resilient and therefore putting pressure on yourself is a waste of your talent. So when people say I've got an imposter, I said you shouldn't be thinking like that at all. Just get on and do some writing. The only way through those things is to do the work. That's the point. There is no shortcut. You shouldn't be thinking about whether you deserve to be in the room or any of those kind of things. Just concentrate on the text. Is this sentence working? Is this paragraph working?
Speaker 1:A lot of the times people say to me I don't have time to write, and I said no, I'm sure you don't, with a full-time job and a family and carrying responsibilities, have time to write the novel you've always promised yourself. But you do have time to write. Because that is the issue that people forget that those of us who are published have worked and worked and worked on that text. So when new writers sit down and they read it and they don't think what they've done is very good, they compare it with the published stuff they've read, rather than the early version of any of our work. And so what I say you know.
Speaker 1:The most important thing is that you take away the fear of writing. You don't keep putting it off until you've got the perfect moment to do it. You write rubbish all the time. You write the description of the person sitting in front of you on the bus You're probably just fiddling around on TikTok, but you could be doing a description of their hat or their hair or the expression on the face or the conversation they're having, so that if you write all the time, scribble things, have a pad by the kettle three minutes, just do the description of the steam as it comes out the kettle.
Speaker 1:Then you take away the fear of words and the fear of failure. And everybody understands it. In every other area of endeavor except for writing, people understand that you can't turn up on the London Marathon Day having never done any training and run the marathon. People get that. People understand you can't go to the Royal Festival Hall and sit down and play Beethoven's Emperor Piano Concerto if you haven't been practicing and done your skills every day. But with writing people think that somehow you sit down and it comes fully formed. So take away the fear of failure, take away the fear of words and just scribble things all the time, because then, when you do have the time to write that novel or biography or play that you've always promised yourself you're going to do, your muscles are ready, your writing muscles are ready.
Speaker 2:So that's the most important thing listeners would have heard me on this podcast say a million times when I've been asked like, how did you write your books? I always say in the early days it's like I used to have to steal time. And stealing time is just. I think it'll be those short moments between court hearing, whether it's five minutes or whether it was three hours, which could easily happen. I would steal that time in in the morning, in the evenings. You said, on the trains, on the, you just have to steal moments of time. And if you're sitting there waiting for that, that perfect golden hour or, I say, that perfect software program, have to find your perfect space in your house. It won't, it won't happen there was oh my god, there was no.
Speaker 2:There was one time we had a, really, I say, a intense heat wave a few years ago and it was so hot and I think I was I must have been doing my edits and it's just like there was nowhere cool in my house and the only place I did find that was cool was under the stairs and I, literally I sat for about half an hour because I'm like I'm hot. I'm just so hot that nothing's working and I thought I must have gone under the stairs for something. I just thought, oh, it's cool here and I sat down, I think, on a paint. I sat down on something with my laptop for like half an hour and worked under this like Harry Potter.
Speaker 1:I worked under the stairs, brilliant, no, but need to mask and also, I mean that's the other thing. It's like, you know, people come up to you and and they, you know, they say I have a question for you and you think it's going to be about characterization or plotting or whatever. And they say you know, I can't decide what chair to get right. If the chair is your focus, your head is not quite in the right space. No, I just yeah.
Speaker 2:I got. When did I get this chair? I got this chair a couple of, I think about two years ago, maybe two years ago, and I got it. I bought it with my grand national winnings but it wasn't. I like I have scoliosis. I'm like I know I need a good chair but I may do, you know, with cushions and things. But then at a point I was like, no, I'm gonna spend my grand national winning, yeah, very good.
Speaker 1:I think that's exactly the right thing to get that money in order to do this thing much better.
Speaker 2:Yeah but I wasn't waiting for the perfect chair before I sat down to I was. I never would have. I wouldn't have finished anything at all.
Speaker 1:No, no, you can't. You know that that's the thing and that we all know that getting a draft down the real work is in the edit and the polish yeah, and just get it down and then start to refine it and make it work, you know.
Speaker 2:Listeners, it's time for a very short break. If you're enjoying this conversation with Nadine Matheson and want to help keep the podcast going, why not buy me a cup of coffee? Your support goes such a long way in keeping these conversations flowing. Just check out the link in the show notes. You know, being in publishing for all those years and then moving into publishing as a writer, did you still I think I'm trying to say did you still have to battle with those issues that we all have as writers, or did you feel more prepared for it?
Speaker 1:Well, I was more prepared, I think, because I knew that all the writers have self-doubt and have oh my God, I'll never be able to write another book again, or this is no good. You know, I remember having an email kind of conversation with the great late Maeve Binchy, such a huge, towering figure, in the 70s and 80s, and she said this was after the success of Labyrinth. And she said well, you can't feel this, Kate. She said but whenever I deliver a manuscript, I can barely sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything. I'm just thinking, oh my God, you know they're going to hate it. And I said you can't think that, Maeve, You've had, you know, 15 number one bestsellers. She said said I do. And she said but you don't feel that. I said I do, I. I imagine them all standing around a phone in the boardroom saying, right, okay, who's gonna ring her and say we can't publish?
Speaker 1:it that is imposter syndrome, though I think that that is an absolutely sensible. Both protective but also arrogant writers are mostly not good writers. Arrogance gets in the way of being a good writer. Confident, yeah, that's great, but arrogance, the idea that you know better. There are some very great and, I would suggest, mostly male writers who, as the arrogance took over the work, declined.
Speaker 1:So that sense of have I I done it for the first time that people outside of my own head are going to read this book. We all feel that. So, um, you know, but being in publishing meant that I obviously, and more significantly I would say, the women's prize, because that's been 30 years, so that's a long time. It means that I know a lot of publishers and I obviously know a lot more authors than most people do. You will know a lot because of your podcast. Many authors don't really know any other authors unless they go to a literary festival. So I knew that many of the things we feel, we all feel, and it's not to do with your book is number one or not, or whether you write crime or whether you write rom-com, it's just to do with the process of being a writer, whether you write rom-com.
Speaker 2:It's just to do with the process of being a writer. I always feel and I said this last week in my Substack piece that one of the things I learned is the importance of finding your tribe as a writer. I mean, you know you have your friends and you have your family, but you need writer friends to understand when you're, let's say, throwing a tantrum because you've got your edits back, or there's a comment in the copy edits which you just think makes absolutely no sense, or when you are going on through that submission path and dealing with well say, dealing with rejection and all through review. You need, you need a tribe, you need your community to sit there with you for it yeah, and also to know what it means.
Speaker 1:You know it's. It's about having people around you with the expert knowledge you know, because someone who doesn't know why a comment in the margin would be enraging. But all of us have had that. You know, the copy editor and editor are doing their best for your book, but yet you are inflamed by the stupidity of this particular comment. But of course the point is, whatever you've done hasn't quite worked because it's snagged them.
Speaker 1:So you always have to step back and think OK, why is it snagged them? Their comment might not be right, but clearly something didn't quite work here, otherwise it wouldn't have leapt out at them. So that's the thing is. It's always to step back and go deep breath.
Speaker 2:Don't be furious for people who are trying to help you have to get out, you have to get out of your own way, kind of um, I was so sparked with my last book. I had this. I kept saying I had this scene. I was, I felt like I was married to this scene. It'd been there from day one and I just loved this scene and every time I got my edits back it was no, it needs to go, it needs to go, and I held on to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, yeah, because you would always know, that, yeah, I mean, but that's one of the things that I quite often say, uh, in advice to students or to groups when I'm lecturing. I say you know, nowadays, with almost everybody uses a computer to write. Now, I mean not everybody, but very many, many, the majority, vast majority of people do. I said, you know, the best thing you can do for yourself when you're, before you send it in, for the final thing, is to change the font, because you see things differently. You don't realize that it's like a pattern and that actually you're kind of almost seeing the echo of previous versions and you're no longer really seeing it with fresh eyes. But if you change the font, you see it through fresh eyes and that quite often helps you to edit out the repetitions and things that now don't quite make sense, because you're still reading an echo, a shadow text.
Speaker 1:And also I do do this even though my books are very long. I go through and I say what? And this is back to your scene what purpose is this paragraph serving? What purpose is this chapter serving? And if it's just gorgeous writing and you love it, it has to go. Basically, every book, every sentence has to earn its place no, it's true I.
Speaker 2:It took me until I don't know if it was the second, third, I don't know fourth draft maybe and I was like, no, she's right, I know she's right, it does nothing, it serves no purpose. It's just that I like it. And the thing is, once you go through that process, it's easier to highlight and just delete and move on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, because in the end it is Our job as writers is to deliver the best version of the book that we are capable of writing. Not somebody else's book, not if you could do this, that and the other, whatever, but the best version of the book that you are capable of writing, and we can all do that.
Speaker 2:So, kate, I'm going to ask you about your, because I need to know if I got it right. The Map of Bones, that's the latest one.
Speaker 1:the paperback yes, that's the fourth and final one of the Hugh Bear Family Chronicles.
Speaker 2:All right, so would you like to tell the listeners of the conversation about the map of bones? And then I have two questions to ask you about that.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, the map of bones. You can read it as a standalone novel. You don't have to have read the ones before it, and that was quite deliberate, because people come into stories at different places, so everything that you need is within the book.
Speaker 1:It's essentially a story told between two women, one in the 17th century, one in the 19th century. It is set almost entirely in South Africa. It is the story of a group of Huguenot people who fled to the Cape in the very, very early days of the colonization of the Cape and were pioneers and set up farms and in the process pretty much founded the South African wine industry. And there were about 300 people who went, and history is complicated. The history of South Africa is particularly complicated. It was always a slave society, but it was not a slave society of the people who lived in the Cape. Almost all of the enslaved people came from places like Madagascar and the East Indies, and the colonizers were Dutch. The Huguenot refugees were French, of course, because they were Huguenots.
Speaker 1:But it is also possible to admire the Huguenots without condoning the colonization story.
Speaker 1:And that is what is very complicated about South African history, because there are so many different people and so many different communities, and so, for me, though, the novel is about lost women's stories, the courage and the bravery of people who find themselves uprooted from everything they know and have to build a new life somewhere else.
Speaker 1:So, if you like, it's a tribute to the stoicism of refugees, whoever they are, wherever they come from.
Speaker 1:And it's in the second part, in the 19th century, it's a woman from the same family who has come to find out what has happened, because two generations of shoemaker women have gone to the Cape and they have disappeared without trace. We don't know what has happened to them, and so, in the 19th century, isabel is there, determined to write these women back into history. So it's about female fortitude, about women telling stories to other women to keep those stories alive, and it's about the choices that some of us are free to make and other people are not free to make in a world, and it's written really like a thriller. It's an adventure story, really, and I don't deny that when I came to the end of it, after 12 years of writing and research of this family living in the heads of this family, this Yubai family, over all of these years, heads of these, this family this year, their family over all of these years when I wrote the epilogue, which is absolutely a full stop to the story.
Speaker 1:It's only the second time in my whole career that I've been a bit weepy at the computer as I've been doing it saying goodbye to these people, like you've been with me for 12 years and I've seen a long time in those 12 years. But it's great because then I'm liberated now to think of what I'm going to do next and moving on. So that's been great.
Speaker 2:Well, the first question to ask you about the Map of Bones is did you face any challenges when writing this book?
Speaker 1:Yes, it's. It's incredibly challenging, of course, writing periods of history that are very complicated and have issues that are still globally resonant. In South Africa obviously it is absolutely whose land is it anyway? And questions of race and colonisation and enslavement. It's also problematic because when you're writing a book set in a particular period, so this novel is set, you know, in 1688 and 9, and then also 1862.
Speaker 1:In the early period of time, you have to find a way of using the language that people would have used, but some of that language is very offensive now.
Speaker 1:So that is the biggest challenge when you're writing historical fiction set in a particular time is how do you make sure that it is authentic for the time, that you are not putting modern words and ideas into the mouths of 17th century people, but also that it is not unpalatable for a modern audience. So that, for the Map of Bones, was the biggest challenge actually, and the importance obviously, was talking to my South African friends who come from all different communities, talking to professors and historians of all communities in South African universities, having spent, you know, been in that part of the Cape every year since I first started to dream of these novels, except for COVID, and therefore knowing a lot of people and then finding, therefore, a way of language. That meant sure that I never broke out of the 17th century, but also I wasn't perpetuating ways of talking about people that are not appropriate. So that was it. Language was the issue for the Map of Bones.
Speaker 2:And if you could spend an afternoon with any of your characters in the Map of Bones, who would you choose, and why?
Speaker 1:I would actually spend the time with Isabel, who is the protagonist of the 19th century part of the story, because I've done a lot of work about Victorian women so that's English, white women predominantly and the decisions that they were making when they still didn't have any power and any rights. So this is before they have the vote. It's when all of the very, very repressive marriage laws exist so that women are essentially property and you still yet see these incredible women who are deciding because of that, not to marry, that they are going to live their lives. They are not going to be restricted, actually, and so Isabel, for me is that, and that's why I found writing the epilogue so moving. I won't give away any spoilers, but she has made a decision that she is going to be a woman on her own, strong, powerful, with agency, in charge of her own life, and to write that woman who is powerful and happy she's happy not being married and not having children.
Speaker 1:I found that a really exciting moment and I'd like to sit down with the fictional Isabel and go did I get you right? No, all of those motivations, the reasons you were doing things, the reasons you were determined to excavate the history of the women of your family that you didn't know anything about, the history of the women of your family that you didn't know anything about. Does that feel true to you? Because that felt very important to me. You know she and she's a writer, so she is the most me, I suppose, of any character I've ever written. I've never actually written a writer before, not really. I mean, I have been, you know, but but not not in this kind of way. You know historian, so yeah. So I'd like to sit down with Isabel and see, yeah, did I get her right? Did she think I got it right? I like that.
Speaker 2:I like that answer. Right, it's the final four questions. Okay, so, kate, are you an introvert or extrovert, or a hybrid of the two?
Speaker 1:Extrovert, Are you? Yeah, I'm not a dancing on table showy off in that kind of way. I'm not the person who shouts loudest all the rest of it, but I love people, very sociable. I look forward to being with people. I live a very busy life, which is lucky because we've got a very busy household and multi-generational household and all of this kind of thing.
Speaker 1:But yeah, so I am an extrovert rather than introvert. I mean I like my silence and my periods of quiet and um to be on my own. I enjoy that too, but I I'm not an introvert, I just like the balance of noise and silence and light and dark, you know so your labyrinth toy wasn't anything that made you think, oh my god, I've got to be out there?
Speaker 2:or were you just like, no, I can't wait? Yeah, no, I loved doing the labyrinth toy wasn't anything that made you think, oh my God, I've got to be out there? Or were you just like no, I can't wait to be out there?
Speaker 1:I loved doing the labyrinth tour. I love standing up in front of an audience. You know, that is the extrovert side of me. Yeah, and it's, it's wonderful. I believe passionately in live engagement. I think that it's one of the antidotes to the manipulation that everybody is subject to now. We are in a period of techno-feudalism. We are using the tools that are being used to oppress us and there is actually no way out of that. That's the problem, because never before has such a huge amount of power been concentrated in the hands of such a tiny number of people, not in the history of the world world. But live engagement is the antidote to that, because if you're there, you can see it, you know. So, performing on a stage in front of four or five hundred people every night loved it but then I'm at my desk, you know you need to balance.
Speaker 2:I think this is one of the reasons why, when I'm teaching advocacy and teaching communication skills, I'm like I need to do it in person, like I've taught it online but I've said it's not the same. I need to be in the room with you. I need to be. It sounds weird like I need to be seeing your essence and feeling.
Speaker 1:I need all of that and you need it too that's it, and it's the silent, it's the body language of that. You know all of these things which you just don't get on the screen. Yeah, although we're both very chatty people, so we're doing OK.
Speaker 2:We're not doing too badly, OK. So, Kate, what challenge or experience and I always caveat it by saying good or bad so what challenge or experience in your life shaped you the most?
Speaker 1:shaped me the most well. I'm going to slightly wriggle out of that in that I, I I think that cumulative experiences are more significant than the one big moment, unless of course, it's a road accident or something like that. But I've been lucky enough not to have something like that. You know, I have had friends who've been in very difficult, you know, physical situations or dangerous you know, and all of that kind of thing, and but I would say, for me it's cumulative experiences. So, certainly, founding the women's prize, there wasn't one moment but there was learning to deal with the level of attack that I got. Setting up the prize, it it was a lot. And if I don't know how well I would have coped in the days of social media, because it would have been magnified a thousandfold as it was in those days people had to write articles in the newspaper attacking me or they had to try and get my home number.
Speaker 1:You know, one person did at one moment and told my husband he should be ashamed of me, for he should be ashamed of himself for letting me do this, you know and you know, and radio show after radio show, I would go on and I'd be attacked for the idea of it and told that women weren't any good at writers and I was putting women's rights back. You know all very aggressive, very personally unpleasant stuff. There's no one moment. But the cumulative effect of that made me who I am, which was, oh you know, girls are brought up still we try not to, and also we are doing much better, generation after generation. But girls are brought up to be nice, to not rock the boat with the idea that if you do the right thing, then everything will go well. But that isn't true. You can do the right thing, then everything will go well, but that isn't true. You can do the right thing and you will be treated terribly or things will not go your way.
Speaker 1:And so what I learned with the cumulative attacks of setting up the women's prize was you won't get everybody to agree with you, however logical, however well reasoned. Oh no, I don't know. I'm telling you as a lawyer, you know this. Yeah, however you prepare your case, however much the data speaks for itself, there will be people who don't want to listen. And so, learning that with those people you go okay, we, we agree to disagree and moving on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the most important lesson, and I think that that's a lesson that is very needed at the moment where, again, there has been a deliberate manipulation into things, into black and white You're either my enemy or you're my friend, and if you don't agree with me on this, then you'll be on the pale on everything else. This is not the nuanced world, this is not the real world, but this is a very good way to control people and set people against one another. And so that lesson of sometimes you can like and admire people and you don't agree with them, that's okay, and that's what I learned through the Women's Prize you, you just have the confidence to keep saying the thing you believe in and take as many people with you as you can, but you won't take everyone, and that's okay.
Speaker 2:So if you could go back to when you were 25 years old and give yourself one piece of advice, kate Moss, what would it be?
Speaker 1:25. That's quite an interesting random one, isn't it?
Speaker 1:um, yeah, I like it it would have been easier not to start smoking than to have to give up, maybe In a professional sense again, I'm slightly wriggling out of this. I I've worked really hard over my life to look forward, to learn the lessons of the past, to learn and admire and support and respect the women in whose footsteps I walk and also the men in whose footsteps I walk. But I very much don't ever allow myself to think if only I'd known this then or that then, because you didn't. So I suppose I would go back further than 25, because I think I was relatively formed at 25. I would go back to school and say the same thing that you know I was a.
Speaker 1:I was a swat, wasn't very popular at school, didn't know how to be myself and fit in. And I would say to my school girl self you don't have to fit in, that's the thing. You're not going to be in the gang of popular girls who look pretty and have got all of that stuff. It's never going to be you. That's okay. Yeah, you can have your own tribe, and so I think that's it. I would go back further and that's what I tried to say. You know, I'm giving a big talk tonight at a secondary school and I will be saying to the girls and the boys you don't have to be the same as each other, you do have to respect each other's difference. That's the thing.
Speaker 2:I think that's so important to know because I always thought when I was, yeah, teenage, 15, 16, I never, I never like was stuck with like one group. Yeah, so I was. I was more like, yeah, I'd always I say more like a butterfly, I'd float around, so I feel like that was my personality.
Speaker 1:I learned that by the time I was 15, 16, but when I was first at secondary school, you know I can remember those feelings of it's just so painful when you know you're going to sit on your own in the canteen at lunchtime. But then of course, that's why I did really well at school, because you realize that, oh, if you're in the library working, then people leave you alone.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I think it's a very big challenge for girls and, I'm sure, increasingly for boys. Being the popular, successful person at school is not it's not usually the best blueprint for life.
Speaker 2:No, it doesn't.
Speaker 1:It doesn't carry fruit or travel, and also you're too busy being gorgeous and popular, but if you're not and you're sitting in the library, your grades are better, aren't they? So that you know that. You know I, I'm very good at seeing the the light and the dark in every situation.
Speaker 2:yeah, all right. So okay, this is my new one. What is your non-writing tip for writers? Now I say it could be just drink water, but you're non-writing, I'm not a water Nazi, like all of you young people.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, it's just like what. Just stop with the water now. Um, no, no, far too. After that, uh, walking movement the most important thing is, um, you know, I do a lot of exercise. I don't do violent exercise, I did run for a bit, but I basically jog. Now, you know, and I look rather like Buzz Lightyear, you know, falling with style. But I walk and walk, and walk.
Speaker 1:And when you're walking now walking, that's when the naughty things in your book start to unravel. If you've got music in your head or you're always making phone calls, people don't give themselves any peace and quiet. So they're my tips Walk and just walk, not doing something else. You can have your phone on to get your step count in, but don't, you know, do one thing at a time. Let your brain rest, look after your imagination, look after your creativity, and so, you know, when we finish talking, I will go for a walk, and I will walk for probably an hour and a half out in the rather bitter wind, but the beautiful sunshine, and when I come back I will be fresh and ready to write.
Speaker 2:I always walk in the morning and the same, but I don't, I'll have sometime, I'll have, I might have music on, but when I walk by the river and I just want to, just I just want to hear the water because I just love. That's right. Be where you are, yeah.
Speaker 1:Be where you are, yeah, be where you are, modern life is about never letting somebody be in one place. But I say that my wonderful husband, who writes fantastic cosy crime and also climate kind of thrillers. He always used to listen to music when he was writing, but he doesn't anymore. So you know, some people need different things and that is the trick, as you know, with being a writer is it's not about there is no one size fits all. It's about finding work works for you best. Finding that out and then trying to create the circumstances, insofar as you're able, with your responsibilities and your full-time work and your child care or your elder care or whatever. It is trying to make sure that you have got the best situation for yourself.
Speaker 2:I agree. And so finally, kate Moss, where can listeners of the conversation find you online? I know where they can find. You mean that? Do you mean that?
Speaker 1:yeah, I am on Instagram as Kate Moss writer. I am pretty much, though, withdrawing from the other platforms because I can't quite give up Instagram, but because of the campaigns that I'm involved with over AI and the theft of writers' works, being involved with meta platforms is complicated and actually just wrong. So I am on Facebook occasionally and I am on Blue Sky and Threads occasionally, but I am very close to making a decision to not be on any of those platforms including blue sky I can't, I can't seem to get hang of blue sky.
Speaker 1:Okay, I mean, I will keep blue sky because it's different. Yeah, um, it's not owned by, uh, in the same stable. Yeah, I will keep going on with it for a time, but I haven't. I haven't managed to find a voice on Blue Sky so far.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard. I mean that's why there's a lot, because I got back. I came off the other one, the toxic Twitter, last year. Sometime last year I removed myself. I'm like there's no reason for me to be on there.
Speaker 1:Well, that's right, I'm not gaining anything from it. But I mean, yeah, but there's nobody real on Twitter anymore. It's um, exactly. But it's also more that when you are watching somebody actively dismantling democracy, actively moving world towards authoritarianism, you cannot in all conscious be on there on the thing they own. But the problem is is the phrase I used earlier, techno feudalism is that it is the driver of of everything. So to be entirely off all the platforms is is very complicated.
Speaker 1:There's a brilliant um audrey lord essay called the master's tools Will Not Dismantle the Master's House, and it was. It's a brilliant essay. You know she was obviously a lesbian, feminist, american, 70s, extraordinary poet, extraordinary writer in every single possible way. But the essay is it's an angry piece of writing, but it's saying essentially you can't use the structures of white misogyny in order to dismantle white misogyny. You know we need to do something else, and that's where we are now with techno-futurism. So you know, anybody listening.
Speaker 1:I'm on Instagram. Come and find me there. Come and show me what I'm listening about Blue Sky. I'm still there, but I am imminently about to delete threads because, but, you've got your website, we can find you there.
Speaker 1:I've got my website, but also, I think um a period of reflection about, I think, for all of us. I know you, you are on substack. I have got that set up. I I haven't had time to do that. I think we are in a an enormous period of realignment in many of these kind of ways, and I think one of the things it's back to walking in silence in the woods is that the pressure of modern life is for immediate response and immediate gratification, without any thought or reflection, and in fact, taking ourselves out of that to decide how we are going to engage with the broader world. I think for me, I think that time is approaching. It wasn't the right time to do it when I was on a you know 36 city tour, but we can all see in publishing terms, as authors, as people involved in supporting authors, that social media doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work in terms of selling tickets or books. It did used to, it doesn't now. So therefore, you ask yourself, what is the point of it for me?
Speaker 2:you know, I don't feel the need to share my breakfast with people no, I always say that you don't need to know, I don't want to show you great.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a jolly nice looking poached egg. But you know, hey ho, and other people do that's. You know that's kind of their their thing. But you know, I'm 63, I don't need to be. You know, being an influencer in that way I can influence by setting up a prize to honor and celebrate women's writing and running it for 30 years. You know that's being an influencer in a different sort of way. So I think it's. I'm in a period of reflection about my digital profile and um, but Instagram is the answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that you wanted 25 minutes ago before I let you go, though, what's next for you after you know you've finished your family chronicles with the map? Yeah, I finished that.
Speaker 1:You're having your period of reflection, you know, reflecting all over the place, um, walking about the place? Um, I will. I published my first YA non-fiction book in September. Uh, feminist history for every day of the year, and it has, as you'd imagine, 366 entries. Um, sometimes mostly people, women, and other times maybe a particular rally or a particular day in the calendar I have. In between it has essays, different types of essays, you know, shaming I've got an essay about can boys be feminists too? All of these kind of things I'm looking forward to doing that.
Speaker 1:My daughter is expecting her next baby in the next couple of weeks, and so I will spend a lot of the summer reading and being granny. I love looking after my grandson. It's a great pleasure to me, but I work a lot, so I've actively blocked out time to be that, which would be lovely, and I am dreaming about my next things. I have a short story that I'm writing for a Sherlock Holmes collection. I'm writing a short nonfiction nature book in a series. The first spring has just come out and it's published by Michael Morpurgo. Bernardine Evaristo is doing summer, I'm doing autumn and Val McDermott is doing winter, and that will come out next year as well. And I might very well have a short novel, a ghost story, next year. But next year will be small pieces of publishing ready to publish the next new big book in 2027, and if I told you I'd have to kill you. So that's all right, you don't.
Speaker 2:You don't have to tell me, it's just good, it's just nice to know that Never kill a lawyer, never kill a lawyer. You can't kill a lawyer. Oh well, that just leaves me, kate Moss, to say thank you so much for being part of the conversation.
Speaker 1:It's been such a pleasure to be chatting to you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for listening to today's conversation with Nadine Matheson. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Be sure to tune in every Tuesday for a brand new episode featuring more amazing guests. Don't forget to like, subscribe and leave a review. It really helps the podcast grow and if you'd like to support the show, you can buy me a cup of coffee or sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes and if you'd love to join the conversation as a guest, feel free to send an email to theconversation at nadiemaffersoncom. Thanks again for your support and I'll catch you next time.
