An Interview with Megan Bradbury

Can you tell us a bit about your process for writing Everyone is Watching? How did the idea come to you and how did you grow it?

The book came about by accident. I stayed in New York City for a few months in 2008. When I returned to the UK, I couldn’t get the place out of my mind. I locked myself away in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh (where I was living at the time), and I read as much as I could about the city. At this stage, I didn’t have any intention of writing about it. It was only after I started making notes on the sources I was reading, and then began to turn those notes into more expressive forms of writing – a hybrid form of essay and fiction to begin with, and then, later, fiction – that it occurred to me this might become a book. So, Everyone is Watching largely came about through reading, making notes, finding links and associations between the subjects I was interested in, and then finding an organising principle to hold it all together.

This process took a long time. I read for about a year, then spent around eighteen months to two years writing, then another two years or so trying to organise and arrange the material. For a long time, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I persisted because I loved the subject. 

I work one-to-one with writers, and I always tell them to write about something they love, something that fills them with desire, because that’s what will make them return to their desk again and again and again.

The narrative has multiple strands. How did you keep track of them all, and then bring them together? Did you have to discard anything you loved in the name of the final edit?

The novel is about four important cultural figures from New York City’s history: the urban planner, Robert Moses; the poet, Walt Whitman; the fiction writer and memoirist, Edmund White; and the photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe.

It took me a while to come round to the idea that I wanted to write about the four figures specifically and not fictionalised versions of them, but once I had, keeping track of them was relatively straightforward because I had spent so long with them in my notes and writing up to that point. 

During the first two years of working on the book, I had also accumulated lots of material about other artists and artworks associated with NYC, artists like Nan Goldin, Richard Serra, Alvin Baltrop, Jacob Riis. I very much wanted to include these passages in the novel, but for a long time I didn’t know how. I tried giving each of these artists their own narrative strand before I realised that I was more interested in the artwork itself. I did lots of rewriting during this time, expanding the artwork passages into bigger sections and then cutting them right down again. 

The book is largely about how things are made, and each character in the novel is intimately involved in the process of making. There are lots of other figures I could have included, Diane Arbus, for instance. I tried writing about her for a while before I realised I don’t much care for her photographs. I didn't have to get rid of anything I was particularly taken with. It was more a question of finding ways to justify the subjects and characters I was desperate to include. The book comes from that struggle of allowing the project to be what it wanted to be whilst also consciously looking for a shape for it. 

Once I had decided on the arc of each character's story, it became easier to figure out the order of the fragments. I organised them largely thematically wanting them to end and begin in places where the handover made thematic sense. I then put the art sections in the gaps in between the four main strands and positioned them according to the theme they stood for and by thinking about what in the adjacent sections they might draw attention to. 

It was more like creating a collage than writing a novel. At one point, I printed out all the individual fragments of writing and lay them out on the floor to see how they might connect. I liked the three dimensionality of this process and realised that my projects up to that point had not worked in part because I hadn’t handled the material in this way. I now know I need to get my hands on the words and move them about.

The novel moves between different people, different timelines. But one thing that remains common throughout is it’s setting: New York. What drew you to the city?

New York City really made an impression on me. When I stayed there in 2008, I hadn’t ever lived away from home or been anywhere really. I was born in the US but up to that point I had never returned to the country since moving to the UK as a child, and so for me the visit was quite emotional. I was born in Connecticut, not New York, but lots of memories of my childhood came back to me in the city, sensory details: the way the sirens sound, big fridges and kitchen cabinets, the plug sockets, the flip light switches, that kind of thing. I also loved how the city offered up both a sense of chaos and order – the regimented grid street system, for instance, which gives you false confidence in knowing where you are. I often looked for stores I had previously visited only to find them gone. It gives you the impression that the city swallows things up, hides things from you. Of course, it was only that I had misremembered the street. That kind of thing happened a lot. I enjoyed being lost. The structure of the city also places contrasting things beside one another – a topless bar next to a grocery store, for instance, or a private detective agency beside a stationer. I loved this juxtaposition. I am very interested in juxtaposition as a writer. I like placing odd things beside one another on the page. I didn’t know that I liked to do that before visiting New York. New York is dense, loud, busy, and permissive, yet also regimented and authoritarian. It’s big but also small. It shows you everything at once. It encourages you to look for patterns. It gave me permission to think about these things in relation to my writing. 

I had never considered writing 'about' a subject before writing Everyone is Watching, but the city encouraged me to think that way, to make my own connections and to write about those connections. New York City also makes you more bolshy, and this was certainly something I needed at the time. You want to do something? Then do it. This is what it taught me. 

New York encouraged and challenged me. It certainly changed me. This experience has informed my writing process ever since. I owe a lot to New York. I remember going to a talk once and the speaker began talking about New York, and he said, 'You walk down a New York street and suddenly you know exactly where you're going', and this was exactly my experience. Sometimes you need something random and unexpected to unlock your thinking. New York did that for me.

Your characters are all historic figures, some older than others. How did you go about researching them, getting to know them and then making them your own?

The process would have seemed intimidating had I decided what I was doing in advance. There's no way I would have written the book had it come about like that. As it was, by stumbling over these figures accidentally, the work didn’t feel like research. I was on a mission. As I read, certain bits of information about these figures stuck with me, and this information would come back to me later when I was writing other scenes. The research kind of attached itself to me. I found I could recall things without having to try very hard. It occurred to me later that this was because the subject was so interesting to me. It’s hard to fake interest in a subject. I find it hard to hold information in my head unless it’s important to me. 

Because I was working so loosely, jumping from source to source, I began to see links between the subjects that I’m not sure I would have seen had I approached my research in a more organised and directed way. For instance, in reading about the leisure complexes Robert Moses built throughout the city, I began to think about how a city balances urban and natural spaces. This led me to read about Walt Whitman, who I knew was an urban poet but also a nature poet. I thought it would be interesting to see what he thought of the city and who he thought a city was for. His reverential descriptions of the city advocate a space for all people. For Whitman, a city is special because it contains everyone. This is not Moses’ view. His focus was on the car-owning, middle class, suburban New Yorker. Moses wasn’t interested in the city as a human space as Whitman was. The contrast between Moses’ elitist vision, and Whitman’s democratic one interested me greatly. From there, I began to read about Robert Mapplethorpe whose work I understood had a singular style and focus. I was thinking that perhaps it could be shown that he saw the male physique in a similar way to how Moses saw a city’s population – something to be moved and positioned according to his own desire. I then read Edmund White’s work to understand how the design or neglect of city spaces can affect how people interact sexually. I hadn’t intended to write about Edmund White, but the more I read of his work the more I realised that his contemporary view of the city was crucial in contextualising the changes that have occurred there since the 60s and 70s, the era that defined him. 

By the time I had gone back and forth in this way, thinking of how their work and vision could be used as a filter through which to understand the city, I had built up a lot of material. And because the information was all so interesting to me, the characters felt very close to me. I thought about them every day for years. My husband lived with them too. He eventually got used to pictures of skyscrapers and Mapplethorpe’s leather photos all over the house.

When it came to later drafts of the novel, I spent a long time refining the narrative voice of each section so that each reflected an aspect of the figure’s character. Mapplethorpe’s sections are romantic but also cool, clipped, concise, like his photographic style. Moses’ sections are interested in action and forward-momentum. Whitman’s are looser, more ethereal, more conversational. White’s are more introspective. It was important, however, that I didn’t try to impersonate them. That would have been a disaster!

What advice do you have for writers beginning a project of this scale and complexity? Anything you wish you’d known?

I mentor other writers, and the first thing I always encourage them to do is to make a mess. Accept from the outset that you won’t know what you're doing until you’re quite a way into something. As such, don’t try to make any decisions about the big things – structure or plot, for instance. Take whatever the thing is that interests you the most – the kernel of an idea, a voice, a subject, a character – whatever it is, and start with that. In my case, the starting point was New York City. This was the subject I danced around. Focus on that small thing and let it grow. 

Make a mess on the page but keep that mess efficient. Write everything in one document. Just keep adding to it. Don’t go back and alter what you’ve written. Let your ideas carry you forward. If you have an idea about something that doesn’t seem to fit with what you’ve already written, write it down anyway. 

Try not to be intimidated. Even with a subject that seems huge and out of your league, you must try to remember that there is a reason why you are drawn to it, and that reason, whatever that is, is justification enough for writing about it. You have a unique viewpoint, a unique mind. Uncover what your unique view is and shine a light on that.  

The most important thing about early drafts is trying to capture that energy and desire that comes when you have a fresh idea. It’s hard to add this back in later. Capture that energy. As soon as you feel you have written everything out, then that’s the time to make decisions about your next steps. This might involve searching through this messy draft for more coherent pillars and beginning again. Whatever those decisions might be, don’t reach for them too soon. It takes a while for an idea to become something substantial. 

Another important thing to bear in mind is that it can be hard to explain to others what you are doing. What makes sense on the page can sound ridiculous when you try to explain it to someone else. If this is your experience, then don’t explain; keep this work to yourself. But, conversely, if you need a forum in which to discuss your ideas, then mentoring, like the kind I offer, can be a brilliant way to support this work. Speaking with another writer about your ideas, and receiving regular feedback from that writer, someone who has been through this process themselves, can really move you forward. I was lucky enough to be mentored by the wonderful Jean McNeil and Cathi Unsworth whilst writing my novel. They gave me the confidence to push myself. This is what I try to do for others. 

So, my advice boils down to ‘make a mess and be weird’. It took me a while to feel confident enough to do this. Perhaps that delay was important for me, I don’t know. If I could give my younger self advice, apart from ‘Do some exercise!’ I would tell myself to go for it and to ignore everyone who ever told me to ‘write what I know’. ‘Write what you love’ works better. That’s what I’m doing now. 

Megan Bradbury a British writer, collaborator, and mentor, and author of the critically acclaimed novel, Everyone is Watching (Picador, 2016). Described as a ‘beating heart of a novel’ by Ali Smith and ‘kaleidoscopic’ by Eimear McBride, the novel was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and was listed as one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2016. Bradbury is a graduate of the Creative Writing Masters programme at the University of East Anglia, and has been awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship, an Author’s Foundation award, and numerous grants from Arts Council England. She has written for the Irish Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is also an experienced artistic collaborator and a previous recipient of the Escalator Literature Prize. Find out more about her here: https://www.meganbradbury.com/

This May she is delivering a lunchtime masterclass for us on 'Weaving the Strands of a Story' where she will be talking about constructing a multi-narrative story and working with different perspectives. Book your place here.