Sam Mills’ Shelf Life

Sam Mills is the author of The Quiddity of Will Self and The Watermark, along with three young adult novels, including the award-winning Blackout. Her non-fiction publications include Chauvo Feminism, The Fragments of My Father, which was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize 2020, and the forthcoming Uneven, a cultural history of bisexuality. Sam has written for a number of publications, including the Guardian, Independent, 3 AM and London Magazine. She is the co-founder of the independent press Dodo Ink and lives in London and Paris.

How and where are you?
I’m sitting in a café on the South Bank with a tea, a notebook on the table and a suitcase next to me. I am living out of a suitcase at the moment. I spend time with my partner in France, time in the north/Manchester (where Dodo Ink is based), time in London, where my Dad lives and needs support, as he has schizophrenia and dementia. I can’t write well at home. I need to be in a café, with a buzz around me.

I am feeling both anxious (about the world, my debts, my future) and cheerful, because we’re deep in my favourite season. I find summer depressing, and being in the sun tiring. I love autumn’s mistiness and the beauty of the dying leaves and the long dark nights. I feel exhilarated and alive and at my most inspired between October to December.

What are you reading at the moment? 
I’ve just finished reading a proof of Susan Barker’s Old Soul which is out early next year. I don’t normally like horror novels, but I loved this. The writing is elegant and eerie; it was like a glorious nightmare I didn’t want to wake up from.

I would also recommend Love the World or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland, out with the New Menard Press. It’s raw and beautifully written book about a trans woman on the eve of turning 30. We wanted to publish it at Dodo, but didn’t have the funds to do so at the time – sadly money often prevents us buying books we love.

And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming? 
I love going to the movies and luckily when I’m in London, I live near a Curzon. That moment when you’re sitting in a cinema and the lights go down and your worries fade away as you enter another world: it’s magical. In part, I enjoy films because I don’t write scripts; my response is more innocent and intuitive, whereas if I read a novel, I constantly analyse it and pick it apart. I’ve enjoyed Aftersun, which begins quietly and builds to a devastating ending and Saltburn, because I’m from a working class background yet I ended up studying at Oxford, so certain scenes really resonated.

Because I write in cafes, they dictate my soundtrack. Les Fleurs by Minnie Riperton comes on a lot these days and I love it – it’s such a rapturous song.

What did you read as a child? 
My Mum fed my love of reading by bringing me bags of books from jumble sales. I ended up devouring a lot of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. I adored Dahl’s rich imagination and his sense of humour and ridiculous caricature villains. Though people have attacked him recently, I think his books shine with tenderness as much as cruelty; the love between father and son in Danny the Champion of the World is gorgeous. The first ‘adult’ novel I enjoyed was probably Dracula…

Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learned from them? 
Les Liaisons Dangereuses was a big one for me when I read it as a teenager. I was probably excited about the fact that it had been banned in 1823 too and it was therefore a ‘forbidden’ book. As a superb epistolary novel, it introduced me to the idea of how an author might play with ambiguities of voice and character. Over time, writing and reading has trained me to feel empathy for every point of view. There are no real villains in Les Liaisons Dangereuses – every single character, no matter how virtuous or immoral, is complex and sympathetic.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, because of Laurence Sterne’s playfulness with images and words. The death of Parson Yorick, illustrated by a black picture, was a revelation. I’ve always enjoyed weaving visuals into my novels, such as the playing cards in The Quiddity of Will Self.

E.M. Forster – I enjoy the warmth in his writing, and the eccentricity of his writing style – for example, the way he might give serious judgement on a character’s moustache.

Will Self was a big influence. I don’t like the current trend for sparse prose – when I’m reading a book, I want a rich prose feast. I like his sesquipedalianism, his delight in playing with language, and the strange imagination and outrageousness of his earlier fiction: Grey Area is still one of my favourite short story collections. I think novels such as Great Apes helped me feel I could be bold and daring as a writer, dive into novels with wild concepts and enjoy seeing if I could pull them off.

Rachel Ingalls was an author I discovered around 2012, when a writer friend Ian Boulton recommended her to me. Mrs Caliban helped me think about exploring romantic relationships from strange angles.

Rachel Cusk is inspiring, not just because she writes beautifully, but I remember the unfair vitriol heaped on her when she published Aftermath. It seems astonishing now, given that there are so many female writers writing good books in the same vein. When she won the Goldsmiths, I saw an interview with her where she said that she is a writer who has got ‘where I’ve got by not winning prizes and by being – not rejected exactly – but certainly not given that flattery and recognition and it’s produced the work that I’ve made’. I admire her strength in carrying on writing despite the savaging, and going on to prove everyone wrong by producing brilliant book after brilliant book.

What’s the worst review you’ve received? 
I know it exists but I decided not to read it. Likewise, when I’ve had good reviews, I’ve skimmed them quickly, used a soundbite on social media to show appreciation and then let them fade; I couldn’t tell you much about those either.

I think writers should avoid reading bad reviews. From chatting to other writers about this, I think that once you drink that poison, it will linger in your system for years, and do damage to your prose or your process. It sounds arrogant, declaring you’re not going to read your bad review. After all, you ought to be humble, learn from it. But this theory doesn’t play out well in practise. I can think of two very successful authors I admire who received widespread acclaim and yet decided to change their style in response to a negative review by a significant critic. Their writing has slowly gone downhill as a result. Something idiosyncratic and special and peculiar has been phased out; their writing has become more tidy, conventional, pleasing to critics, people-pleasing.

Tell us about your creative process
I like a routine. I read (or heard?) an interview with David Lynch where he said the advantage of a routine is that you don’t have to think about where/when you’re going to write, which means your mind is freed up for creative thought. So I go to the same café every morning; I aim to get there by nine; I have a coffee and I begin. I write first drafts in notebooks. I’m fussy about the covers, which have to reflect the mood/feel of the book I’m writing; on the other hand, since I’m forever losing pens, I favour crappy biros. I scribble a chapter, type it up, edit it, then go back to my notebook to rewrite, then type it up again – and this process repeats until eventually something takes shape. I like to plan and have a shape for a novel before writing. If I’m writing a book with a wild premise, then it needs a classical structure to underpin in; I’m not so wedded to structure that I follow formulaic ‘Hollywood’ concepts such as ‘the inciting incident’ or ‘mid-point’, but I did like John Yorke’s Into The Woods for his analysis of Greek plays, Macbeth and Being John Malkovich, a film that he argues follows a traditional structure beneath its eccentric plot.

I feel gestation is just as important as writing, especially when it comes to my novels. I worked on The Quiddity of Will Self between 2000 – 2010 and for the first five years I rewrote the opening over and over, maybe a hundred times, as I tried to work out what the novel was going to be. In 2006, when I came back from America with jetlag, and I was lying in bed fuzzy and disorientated, my soul still in some liminal time zone, I suddenly saw the whole book and the five parts it would be. The Watermark was another book that took a long time to evolve, because the idea of booksurfing and interplay of free will v fate interested me but I wasn’t sure how to explore it. I would work on it for a few months, drop it, let it simmer in my subconscious whilst I worked on something else, then circle back it. Having several books on the go and alternating between them keeps me fresh. By contrast, my memoir The Fragments of my Father was written over 14 months, though it was more of a traditional book.

How has your experience of the publishing industry been? 
Up and down. I have really enjoyed being published by Granta and Melville House for The Watermark. But, having been published for 20 years now, I have learnt that publishing is genteel on the surface, ruthless underneath. I have seen a lot of talented writers dropped for not selling enough. I’ve been dropped once or twice. It takes so much time and energy to get an agent and published, and just as much time and energy to stay published. But I am addicted to writing, so I keep going.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? 
That a good writer should be a voracious reader. I never did a single creative writing course – I learnt everything from reading and studying other authors.

What are you currently working on?
I’m fact-checking a non-fiction book, Uneven: on Bisexuality, which is out in January with Atlantic. It’s a cultural history of bisexuality, with memoir woven in, exploring the lives of bi icons such as Oscar Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, David Bowie, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Madonna.

I’m also scribbling notes for a new novel, which is going to be a reworking of a doomed book called The Economy of the Afterlife that I wrote between The Quiddity of Will Self and The Watermark and never got published. It’s a satire about class, transhumanism and our desire to be immortal.