Q & A with Annabel Lyon

New Westminster author Annabel Lyon has received critical acclaim for her first novel, The Golden Mean, in which she imagines what it would have been like for legendary philosopher Aristotle to teach his most famous student, the young Alexander the Great.

The novel has been shortlisted for a trio of book awards, the Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Remarkably, Lyon, 38, wrote it over a seven-and-a-half-year period, which included being a new mom to her daughter, now four, and son, now two.

She has a blog related to The Golden Mean (annabellyon.blogspot.com), which includes tidbits such as research that didn’t make it into the novel.

For more on how she managed to write a novel while sleep-deprived from baby duties, Lyon spoke to the NewsLeader this week from Toronto where she was appearing for the International Festival of Authors.

Q: When did you actually start working on The Golden Mean?

A: I started working on it in the fall of 2001 and my kids were born in 2005 and 2007. So I did have a big base to start from, after they were born, something to go back to that was already really solidly there. It wasn’t like I was trying to start something brand new after they were born and I think that really made it a lot easier.

Q: Had you already started writing when your kids were born?

A: I was writing it all along. I wrote a draft before I did any research hardly at all. It was almost like storyboarding a movie. I did about a 40-page mini-draft which had all of the acts and all of the scenes all kind of sketched out, not really properly written, but I knew what everything was going to be. And I actually never left that framework through the writing of the whole thing, I stuck to it. What made it easier was that it was historical fiction, you know, I couldn’t really change the facts ... Anybody going to start a first novel I highly recommend you do historical fiction (laughs), because it’s way, way easier. You don’t have to think that stuff up yourself, it’s just already there.

Q: While you were writing it at some point you had a newborn?

A: I had a couple of periods where I worked on it pretty intensely after they were born. The first one was, I had my daughter and I was pregnant the second time and I really wanted to get to the end of another draft of the book before the new baby came because I knew after he came along I was going to be pretty busy for a while. And then, after he was born I started working again when he was about eight months old, I guess. I started taking one day a week and going back and working on it again for another intensive period of about six months.

Q: So there was a period there when you just put it aside?

A: Oh yeah. I mean, when they were newborn there was just no way. My kids were never good sleepers (laughs), consequently I wasn’t a good sleeper, I was a basketcase.

Q: Would they interrupt you while you were writing?

A: Yep. So what I had to do was wait until they were asleep, or else I would have to actually leave the house on my husband’s day off. He would take them and I would have to go to the library with my laptop. Because even if he was taking them and I was off in another room, I was so really aware of what was going on with them and they knew I was there and wanted to come and play with me and stuff. I had to physically get away from them to write.

Q: I understand you were able to work in quite small chunks of time?

A: Yeah, especially when they were very small and none of us were sleeping through the night. I knew I wasn’t going to sit down and be able to put in an hour’s worth of concentrated time so I would just say, “okay, one sentence, two sentences” and I eventually arrived at about 200 words a day and that was my target. And I thought, “before you sit down to watch TV in the evening or whatever, after they’ve gotten to bed, just 200 words, 200 words, which is really not that much.” I thought, if I do that, I can get a novel’s worth of material by the end of a year.

Q: What would be the smallest chunk of time that you’d have to work with?

A: If I was going through the day and nursing or whatever and thought of a sentence, I would find a way to scribble that down. I found that with 10, 15, 20 minutes I could get something done in that time.

Q: And how were you able to turn on and off like that?

A: I think it’s because, again, I already had a big chunk of it ... well underway, it was a world I could kind of dive back into easily enough. When I had time away from them I didn’t go to the movies or hang out with friends or go to the spa or do any of that kind of stuff. I worked on my book because that was my time to be me with my adult brain and engage with that. So it was always something I carried around with me, it was something I was always thinking about in the back of my mind. And I used little tricks. One day I was just really, really tired, couldn’t think what to write, so I just started writing a description of my daughter and that actually made it into the book as a description of Aristotle’s baby.

Q: While you were with the kids would you have the energy to come up with things that would make it onto paper?

A: Little descriptions. I mean, Aristotle’s two kids in the book are basically my kids. The descriptions there are descriptions of my own children. It’s fortunate that he had a girl and a boy the same distance apart and that worked out (laughs). But yes, when I was doing stuff with them I would sort of think, “oh yeah, time, so it was 2,300 years ago, like who cares?” Time doesn’t change certain things, like how a parent interacts with a child, so I could incorporate stuff like that.

Q: Do you find people ask you a lot about how you managed to do this with the kids?

A: Yeah, they do. I don’t know, people seem to have twigged onto that. Any working mom will know, it’s just a balancing act, it’s what you do. I’m not more special because I happen to have produced a novel than if I were a lawyer or any other kind of job. I just have to balance the family life and work life. It’s very, very hard but you do.

Q: Do your kids understand what’s going on with your book?

A: No, they call it “mommy’s horsey book” because it has a horse on the front. No, they don’t know what’s going on. They understand that mommy’s working more out of the house and away from them than I’ve had to in the past and I think that really annoys them and gets on their nerves (laughs). They don’t have unlimited access to me anymore.

Q: Do they understand that you actually wrote a book?

A: I think so. They can see my picture on the inside and my daughter’s just learning to read so she can sound out my name and stuff like that. That’s not extraordinary to them. It’s like, oh yeah, maybe everybody writes books. Maybe all the books up there are written by everybody they know. They have no idea.

+More Entertainment Headlines
<Back to Mobile Edition