Charlotte Wood on Leaving Out

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Charlotte Wood about her new novel, Stone Yard Devotional.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: One of the things your narrator writes in a small passage is – I think she had been reading a diary or reading a news article of someone who was in the Holocaust – and the woman said what is most striking to me today about the diary I kept 75 years ago is what I left out. Nobody will read this, but me, even so, I imagine there are things I’m leaving out. And I think that white space in our lives and our own journals and the things we write is such interesting, intentional space. And I wonder, also, as a writer, if that was hard for you?

Charlotte Wood: Yeah, well, this book was a real experiment for me in leaving out.  You know, this is my 10th book. And with every book that I write, I’m trying to find something new for myself, you know, something new technically speaking, maybe, trying a new thing, trying to get better, basically all the time. And so, the idea of leaving as much out as I possibly could was really – even though it’s quite a serious book – but that was kind of a fun thing for me to do to go, Well, how much can I actually get away with you? And I have an editor I really, really trust. And I thought, well, she will let me know. And there were a couple of things when she was working on the first edit, and she said, Look, I’m totally on board with this no explaining thing, however; a couple of times, the complete lack of information actually draws more attention to it, which is the opposite of what you’re trying to do. So that was very, very good advice. So, you know, a couple of tiny hints of things I put in there as a response to her. But I think one of the things about not having too much explanation and leaving a lot of space is that it leaves space for the reader to experience their own lives. And I’ve had quite a number of readers say to me, I thought a lot about things in my own life that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. And a while ago, I heard an interview with Anne Enright, who I know you’ve interviewed, she’s a writer I love, the Irish writer.  She said in this interview she likes a book, the kind of book where, as you’re reading it, every so often, you just put it down in your lap and look into the middle distance, because it’s made you think about something. And then you pick the book up, and you keep going. And I thought, Yes, that’s what I mean.  I’d finished the book by the time I heard that. But I want that sort of space, and I wanted to create that sort of space for a reader.

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Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of non-fiction. Her novel Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.  Her previous books include The Luminous Solution, a book of essays on the creative process; the international bestseller, The Weekend; and The Natural Way of Things which won a number of prizes including The Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Saturday Paper among other publications.