F.A.Q
Why do you write?
This is difficult. I can only say it is a compulsion, having seen the world in a certain way, I feel this overwhelming need to communicate it. It’s not even that I think my view of the world is necessarily the only one, or even more valid than anyone else’s. I can only go to Gerard Manly Hopkins’ poem ‘As kingfisher’s catch fire’ where he says each thing ‘selves’, cries out its name. ‘The just man justices’ and I . . .I write.
Why then do you write such ‘grim’ stories?
I don’t think I do. I write what I see as true (truth is an important concept with me and one I am exploring in some depth in the novel I am currently writing). From early adolescence I have been aware of the pain (even self-inflicted) that as human beings we seem heir to and it is this I want to show. I am also very aware that the young in particular are often inarticulate and unable to express this. I want to be a voice for them. I do not regard the world as an essentially evil place (despite my very religious upbringing). To the contrary I value the natural world, the underlining compassion in most human beings once they are aware of suffering and what I see as the transcendence of the human spirit. Darkness perhaps, but light as well.
Are your characters based on real people?
Sometimes they start out that way but after a while they take on a quite separate identity of their own. Even when I am writing about my own (fictionalised) experiences, the narrator becomes someone quite different (maybe how I would like to have been). Kathleen, for example, in ‘Listen for the Nightingale’ shared many of my experiences and feelings but she was not me. In a way it was as if I gave her a lot of the pain I had suffered when I was young and afterwards I felt a bit guilty – this is hard to explain but my characters do become very real to me. While I am writing about them it’s like I am actually living with them, we are sharing one another’s lives. Sometimes this makes me feel very bad like in a recent (as yet unpublished) story where the narrator for very confused reasons felt compelled to drown her baby. I kept postponing writing it but in the end I had to because I knew that’s what she had done
Another story I didn’t want to write was ‘The Bear’ but it was so real to me that I kept on seeing it until at last I wrote it down.
When I’ve finally finished a story I feel a real sense of loss. My characters go back into the shadows and I feel bereft until someone else emerges and I begin again.
Your stories are character-driven rather than plot driven?
Definitely. The plots are the hard bits. Names are hard too. I have this character in my mind, I can see him or her (usually her) quite clearly but it is often hard to find the right name. Sometimes I get a name but then later change it because it isn’t ‘right’. Philippa in ‘Burning Bright’ was originally called Regina but I wasn’t happy with it. I have always been self-conscious about my own name – no-one had a name like ‘Zenda’ when I was a little girl so names are really important to me. Even minor characters have to have the ‘right’ name. In a very real sense names do determine identity at least for me.
If you have any questions about my work please contact me at zendavecchio@hotmail.com and I will endeavour to answer them.