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Caro Ramsay |
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Caro Ramsay was born in Glasgow and now lives in a village on the West Coast of Scotland. Absolution is her first novel.
Absolution was the first piece of creative writing I had ever set my mind to. It started with an idea sparked by The Waterboy’s song – A Girl Called Johnny – and its intriguing lyric about a girl who discovered her choice was to change or to be changed. Those words must have resonated somewhere in my subconscious with my experiences of being laid up in hospital for weeks on end with a sore back – conscious, healthy but unable to move. In any public reading I do, the first question is inevitably about my portrayal of ‘Anna’ in Absolution. Anna, her face and hands horridly burned with acid, lies in a sterile cocoon in hospital yet her strength and personality, especially her vulnerability, never fails to strike a chord with an audience.
When writing was a hobby, I used to lie down on the floor surrounded by cushions and dogs and scribble with a fountain pen. Then it got serious; I became a proper writer and got a tax bill to prove it. I made a timetable with a ‘words for the day’ plan, a discipline I need otherwise I would lie around eating chocolate and watching Murder She Wrote. I thought, for my writing career, I needed to stop and apply bum to seat, fingers to keyboard and use a proper desk and a desktop computer. But that makes my back hurt so I’m back to lying down again – maybe I could start a fashion.
I have always been fortunate that I have a day job I adore. Now I wish I did a job I detested and would be glad to walk away from. I just want more days in the week now. I’m walking a difficult tightrope at the moment. The balance of my osteopathic practice and my writing has simply led to a twelve-hour working day, seven days a week. No doubt it will all settle into a rhythm once I get into a more steady routine. Book two, Tambourine Girl, is the first book written to order so to speak and, so far, I’m ahead of the game.
As publication date for Absolution gets nearer, there is a growing sense of trepidation every time I open my e-mail, wondering what lies in store for me now. E-mails from agents, editors, publishers and PR people are like buses, nothing for a few days and then twelve emails arrive at once. They are greeted by panic and flurries of frantic activity on my part. It’s all very exciting and enjoyable, but there is a constant nagging worry – will it all be all right. One of my colleagues is in the early stages of planning her wedding and we have eerily similar conversations. Venues, invites, clothes, hair, how much do you tell your mother (who will worry about it no matter what)…
Every week there is an invite to speak somewhere, a request for a photo shoot, a donation of a book for a charity auction, an invitation to do a workshop. I was rather chuffed to be photographed at a ball, which I have attended for the last eight years but this year, because of Absolution, I was set aside and questioned about the designer of my dress (I lied) and a week later there I was in Number 1 magazine, three pages behind Heather McCartney. I showed it to my Granny who just tutted and said, ‘Just remember to keep one hand on the towel hen!’
I confess to still being totally nonplussed about how I got published and why it happened to me. I sent the typescript to agent Jane Gregory who edited it (slapped it about a bit as we would say), she sent it to Penguin who were very pleased and said we’ll have this thank you. I paraphrase that but, to me five hundred miles away on the end of the phone, that is how it sounded. Then it started selling round the world…
One lesson yet to be learned is to say ‘no’. Lots of folk ask me to have a look at this and give an opinion on that, and much as I would like to, it’s all time and it’s all time I don’t have any more – working full time, writing book three, editing book two, the constant research, sorting out the PR diary while playing telephone tag with important people. I am collaborating with a friend on a comedy script for the Comedy Unit – the original home of a programme called Still Game. Her writing partner left her in the lurch and she asked me to give her a hand. Working on the comedy takes much valuable time because it involves having meetings, and meetings about meetings. Then I met Niall Clark at the Comedy Unit and he told me he had another crime writer sitting where I was a few years before, also talking to him about doing comedy. ‘I’ll tell you what I told her, you’ll be too busy to see it through.’ Her name was Denise Mina.
I am also involved in a musical called Waterloo Angel. This was written by a guy I sat beside in primary three and we have been causing trouble ever since. On the basis, if I can do it, anybody can do it, he wrote a musical, which is now being taken very seriously by big people in London. I am called in for smidgeons of plot development, a few lines of dialogue, then I rest on the settee, my creative muse exhausted and sip red wine, eat chocolate and watch Murder She Wrote, while he goes to his music room and works hard.
Some strange questions come up while being interviewed – why somebody so involved in healing can take so much pleasure in such dastardly deeds. My intelligent answer is the pursuit of truth in diagnosis is the same as that in criminal investigation, just look at how popular the programme ‘House’ is (a doctor whose bedside manner is very close to my own). The practical answer to the question I suppose is that anybody who cuts up dead bodies, and studies the disease process, has a natural springboard for my type of literature. Another honest answer, in my case at least, is that while I sit and listen to ‘press one for… press two for…’ I plan the long and lingering death for those responsible. But seriously, human personalities are the core of crime fiction, but human frailty and the reasons for crime, the motives for murder are constant...and endlessly fascinating.
