An Interview with Marcia
Novelist Marcia Willett didn't put pen to paper until the age of 50, but she is certainly making up for lost time. Her first book was published in 1995 and she has just seen her 17th novel, Memories of the Storm, hit the shelves last month.
"I'm a great inspiration for second careers!" she laughs. "When my husband tried to persuade me to write years before, I never particularly wanted to write a book and thought I would have no idea. I always returned to my first love, reading. Eventually he did persuade me. We had a bit of a financial crisis and he asked me to try. He said it would all flow out and he was right.
"When I did start writing, all these ideas and characters were pouring into my mind. In the first couple of years I wrote two books a year. There was so much coming out, I suppose because I started so late there was a lifetime of stuff in there."
It is very rare that I identify with a novel's characters and plot so much that I cannot wait to discover how it all turns out. In fact, in this case, I threatened Marcia with a disgruntled email if a satisfactory conclusion was not forthcoming, and was so engrossed in the final chapters that I finished the book sitting at a bus stop because I was getting funny looks for trying to read while walking. (You'll be glad to hear no disgruntled email was sent.)
"What I see first is the character," Marcia said. "Generally one of the fairly major characters will begin to emerge in my mind. For this book, I saw the character of Hester and her family. Wherever they are, their landscape comes with them. It's been like that ever since I started to write. I don't choose where I'm going to set the book.
"The locations are real and the houses where the people live are just a leap of imagination at the end of real places."
Marcia, who lives in Devon between Exmoor, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, thoroughly researches the geographical setting of each of her novels and Memories of the Storm was no different.
"I was aware that the major player was going to be the river," said Marcia. "'The house is on a river', I told my husband, Rodney, who said, 'There's only 23 rivers in the Westcountry, which would you like to choose?'
"I knew it had to be quite a big river. I looked at the Dart and the Tamar and the Exe, but I couldn't find Hester. That's how it works for me. I went down the River Barle and thought, 'Now I'm close'."
All Marcia's novels are set in the Westcountry. She was born in Somerset, but has been settled in Devon for 27 years. It could all have been so different - until she was 18, she was destined for the Royal Ballet School. Cruelly, she grew out of the necessary proportions - her neck was too short, of all things - and after a brief career as a dance teacher, she married and settled into the life of a naval wife and mother.
Now writing is her full-time career, and she is already working on her 18th novel. "I've been fortunate since the first book," she said. "As the end of one book becomes clear to me, the character is beginning to emerge for the next book. I'm never left with a big gap. Once the character appears and the landscape needs to be investigated, having finished the previous book my next job is to explore the place where the next book is going to be set.
"The characters completely take over your life. They become almost more real to you than your friends, because it's such an oblivious and closed world and so crucial to you at that time.
"I'm absolutely thrilled that Rodney persuaded me to do it because it has been an utter life change. It's so extraordinary to see the books in 18 different languages and I get wonderful emails from all over the world. I think 'can this be happening to me' - it's so extraordinary, probably because it's later in life. To start that at 50 is extraordinary and wonderful."
Published in Devon Today, May 2007