Helen Cross: Writing? It’s about listening

Oct 1 2010 By Lorne Jackson

Lorne Jackson talks to author Helen Cross about her creative process – more a case of sly observation than in-depth research.

Helen Cross – novelist, scriptwriter, teacher – has a terrible and thrilling secret that she is moments away from divulging.

Is she hesitant? Not a jot.

As she leans across the pub table where we’re chatting, a rebellious schoolgirl grin hop-scotches its way across her face.

Then she confesses all: “I never do research. Never! I make it all up.”

She laughs delightedly.

At first I think the remark is a sarcastic reproach to my last question.

Maybe it was too obvious to enquire about the author’s working methods. I should have taken it for granted that she does oodles of background study.

Isn’t that what professional novelists do, after all?

If you choose, for instance, to write a novel set on a farm, then you must interview a farmer. And the farmer’s wife.

Then prepare a series of hard-hitting questions for his pigs, geese and Friesian cows to answer.

Plus, it wouldn’t hurt to spend a month in a chemist’s laboratory, analysing the molecular compounds lurking deep within the caked mud of the farmer’s Wellington boots. It all adds up to that highly prized aura of authenticity, you see.

Tom Wolfe swears by research. He spends years unearthing facts that might prove useful. Sometimes he immerses himself so profoundly in his subject he neglects to write the novel.

Martin Amis is another true believer. At the end of an Amis novel there is usually an exhaustive and exhausting list of nonfiction tomes he scanned before getting on with the business of making stuff up.

That’s not the Helen Cross way. It turns out that the Moseley-based author – who will be leading a short story workshop at this year’s Birmingham Book Festival – isn’t being facetious.

Research really is a no-no.

Which I find especially surprising since her latest novel, Spilt Milk, Black Coffee, is about a white single mother who has an affair with a young, religious Muslim man.

A subject that requires delicate handling, I would imagine, and a certain amount of background info.

However, there is method in Cross’s absence of method. Her way is not an excuse for waywardness.