'The Dark and the Light': An Interview with Richard Lambert

When I read Richard Lambert's The Wolf Road in Autumn 2020, I knew that it was hands-down one of the best books I would have read that year. Particular scenes and characterisation are still remembered with clarity; the way in which animals formed a huge part of the novel and the way in which the author portrayed their uniquely separate world was equally striking.

Now Lambert has a new book out - Shadow Town - and to celebrate its publication, I am delighted to have been able to ask the author a few questions about his writing and the part that poetry plays in his writing life. 

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Your new book is for a slightly younger audience than The Wolf Road. Why did you decide to write for this age group and was it easier or harder to accomplish?

The age group for the book came from the main character, Toby. I started with Toby – unexpectedly. I was on a train journey and without thinking started writing a scene – about a boy and his dad. This became the scene where Toby says goodbye to his dad that’s in the novel. Toby is a thirteen-year-old boy who tries hard socially but who is constantly getting things wrong and misunderstanding things. I think one of the places he came from was going into schools to do creative-writing workshops and noticing children who misunderstood things or whom the rest of the class group find annoying. And I remembered being like that myself when I was a child. Also I wanted to write an adventure story for children – because I loved those kinds of story myself when I was young.

What is most important to you in portraying young people in your stories?

I feel I have far less knowledge of young people than schoolteachers or parents, so I am constantly questioning myself and whether I’m getting the young characters right. Two things are important for me, though. One is that I don’t underestimate the children’s intelligence – both my characters’ and readers’ intelligence. And the other is that I don’t write a bleak, unhopeful story. I still feel scarred by some of the books we were made to read at school when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen. So I worry that my stories are too dark, and I hope the dark and scary aspects are redeemed by lightness, life and hope, which I try to have in the stories. I want my stories to reflect life, both the dark and the light.

What is the difference for you between writing prose (especially for children) and writing poetry?

I write poems on impulse – so I don’t plan them, and they usually come out short, and usually they are quite personal. But with stories, I plan them beforehand. I visualise scenes in my head before I write. So I can see the place and the people, dimly, like in a dream. And I plot out the stories carefully. When it comes to the writing of prose, the sound of the language is important, and telling the story. When it’s going well, there’s a real flow to it.

The sentences are really important to me, too. With my first published novel, The Wolf Road, the sentences were much shorter, almost staccato at times. They felt to me quite plain. That had a strong effect but I felt that was a lot to do with my writing ability – I wasn’t capable of writing longer sentences. So I spent quite a lot of time after that trying to write longer sentences, and seeing how other writers did that. I wanted something larger, and sentences over which I had more control. I somehow felt I could include more of the world if I could enlarge my technique. And I’ve begun thinking of paragraphs and sentences like little poems in themselves, so I want them to have a shape, and to be interesting on their own terms.

Who are your favourite poets and how do they influence your writing?

I have lots of favourite poets, and they change. But I love John Clare, the nineteenth-century farm labourer, and his nature poems. I love the poems of the Irish poet Michael Longely, for their gentleness. Also the modernist poet Lorine Niedecker, who grew up and lived in a tiny town in Wisconsin in the middle of the last century and worked as a cleaner in the local hospital. The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who wrote warm, witty, and wise conversational poems. All very different.

The sound of words is important to me. When I read, the sound of the language really affects me. Even if I’m reading silently, I’m still sort-of forming the words into speech in my head. And that’s the same for prose as poetry. So I’ll often read a writer if I like the sound of their language. But I think that love of sound in language has been increased by my reading of poetry. And that informs my writing. Also the need for concision. Editing a poem, I'll think for ages about losing a tiny word like 'the' or inserting or removing a comma. So that affects my prose, too. And when reading a poem, it's often the visual image that hits me, so I've become attuned to the importance of the image. The sensory detail.

New readers coming to your writing will find it vivid and starkly memorable: are you a writer more interested in the visual or the aural impact on the reader?

Well, both are really important for me, I think. The sound of words is vital, but I think visually a lot too – I see all the scenes I write. When I'm planning, it's like I am running a film constantly, then adjusting some part of the film – dialogue, actors, lighting, costume – and reshooting the scene.   
But I have thought about this question sometimes myself, what is it that I’m most interested in, and I’ve often thought what I’m less excited by as a writer and reader are concepts, ideas and thoughts. I just feel I have less capacity for that than other people do. And that what excites me is the aural and the visual. That’s enough for me. 

What energises you as a writer and what exhausts you?

I think the thing that energises me also exhausts me – it’s the imagined story and the world I’m creating. It feels like physical effort. Perhaps like a game, or doing some physical activity like playing football. There’s a surge of physical energy, and I follow that in my flow of writing, then I am pretty tired afterwards. Editing is slightly different, it’s just slow, plodding work, and slightly more intellectual, cutting, deciding if something works or not. I’ve got slightly better at not despairing if something isn’t working. I can more easily cut a sentence or paragraph, a scene, or even a whole chapter. But overall it feels physically and emotionally tiring. Like everyone’s work, I imagine, is demanding.

What do you hope young readers remember from your work?

Enjoyment and fun. A visceral thrill. 

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Shadow Town by Richard Lambert was published by Everything with Words on Thursday 21st October. 

With many thanks to Richard Lambert for answering my questions and to Fritha Lindqvist for her help in preparing this blog.