Hilary Mantel on How to Write a Novel: Theatrically

Cultivate your inner grandiosity, would-be novelist – because without plenty of inner grandiosity no real imaginative work will come forth.  

I’ve told student writers something to that effect many times.  Lately I have been trying to tell it to myself– to remind myself.   But there’s no better reminder than Hilary Mantel’s essay about the process of adapting her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Out the Bodies  – for Masterpiece Theatre, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for Broadway.  Here is the cultivated inner grandiosity of the authentic artist:

In Stratford-on-Avon, in London, and now in New York, playgoers would ask the big question: How does it feel to see your characters come to life?

I answer with another question: When were they dead? Inside my head, they are whirls and blurs of energy in a show that never sleeps, where even in the small hours the blood runs down the walls. I construct the scenery and source the props, arrange the sound effects: church bells, the cry of hounds. I am my own lighting expert. When a candle comes in (tallow or beeswax, pricket holder or socket), mine is the hand that holds it. I carry it through the dark passages of my narrative, and shelter the flame as we cross the Narrow Sea: out of England and into France, from France to the battlefields and counting houses of Italy, to the wool markets of northern Europe, the waterfronts, the brewers’ yards, the palaces.

There have been no days when my theater is dark.

It’s amazing to realize that Mantel wrote both novels, saw them to publication, accepted Booker Prizes for each, and now has presided over multiple dramatic adaptations – all in the past ten years.  

But what’s truly amazing – and the piece makes this clear – is that the novels were written in the first place.  

The novel (says Mantel) is a paper theater built inside the novelist’s head.  

• 1 Jun 2015
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• #books#hilary mantel#wolf hall