The ministry

1.2. Margaret Drabble's writing style
How to Write a Drabble
In case you don't know, a drabble is a short form of fiction that is exactly 100 words long (not including the title). Along with being a lot of fun, their short form can also encourage people who've never written anything before to just give it a try, but writing a coherent and engaging story in just 100 words is very challenging.
To help you become a master drabble writer, Michael Brookes, one of our contributors, has kindly agreed to share his thoughts on what makes a great drabble.
Writing Drabbles
A drabble is like any story, it should have a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning sets up the story, the middle is the meat (the progression of the story) and the end provides the conclusion. Many of the best drabbles have a twist in the tale — the start and middle will take you in an expected direction and then the end turns that around.
In many ways this is similar to the traditional structure of a joke, the scene is set, something happens and then it is turned around to surprise the audience. This works well with the short form of the drabble. Even better, when the end not only surprises but causes the reader to re-evaluate the start and middle with new understanding.
How do you fit a story in so few words?
The first draft is rarely anywhere close to being 100 words and like any writing, it's also very rare that this first version is worth sharing, so editing is key to getting the required word count.
This is also a useful aspect for developing your skills as a writer, as the strict word count teaches you how to be economical with your words. Once you have a first draft, read through it, if you're only a dozen or so words out then it's a case of picking the right words for the job.
Strip out anything that isn't needed. Like any editing, you need to be brutal, but not so severe that the core message of the story is lost.
If you're further away from the word count then you'll need to look at removing whole sentences — as with the stray words, remove anything that isn't core to the story you're telling.
The scope of a story can still be quite dramatic but there should only be one or two threads to the tale. It is linking disparate elements that tends to bloat your word count, so ask yourself, what is the story that I am telling?³
What should a drabble be about?
The answer is simple, it can be about anything! Drabbles are a form of fiction, it doesn't define what the fiction is about. You can have action stories, erotic or romance, any genre that you enjoy.
Most importantly of all, writing should be done because you enjoy it, developing your craft comes with practice, and drabbles are a fun way to practice it.
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Although she has more than 20 books to her name – 17 novels, literary biographies, and most recently a memoir – Margaret Drabble this month publishes her first collection of short stories, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman. It includes nearly every one she has ever written. Printed in chronological order, they span more than 40 years. There are surprisingly few, only 13 in all, but together they make up a compelling document of social history. She is delighted to see them published in one volume, which is dedicated to her agent, the late Pat Kavanagh. As with her novels, over the years the characters get steadily older, each story capturing a different stage in a woman's life, from youthful uncertainty, through the intensities of infidelity and marital disillusionment, to the freedom and regrets of maturity. "People age," she says. "I've always been interested in what is happening to my contemporaries and what is still happening."
Drabble is now a very youthful 72 (it was her birthday last week). We talk in her study, a sunny yellow room on the ground floor of the large house in Ladbroke Grove she shares with her husband, the biographer Michael Holroyd, who works on the second floor. On the wall is a colourful picture of them in her Somerset house, both reading manuscripts, her daughter as a young girl, looking attentively on. From the London study there is a view out to the garden, serenely landscaped around a small pond by her son, the TV gardener Joe Swift. At one end is her desk and at the other a large table with a semi-completed jigsaw of a Klimt painting, "much harder than you'd imagine". Jigsaws are one of her favourite pastimes and were the starting point for her memoir The Pattern in the Carpet, a hybrid book subtitled "A Personal History with Jigsaws", written mainly as a distraction while Holroyd was seriously ill a few years ago.
The previous week, Drabble read at an event hosted by the Literary Consultancy (which is run by her daughter, Rebecca Swift), along with Helen Simpson. She was struck, she says now, by the similarities between their stories, even though Simpson's were written much later: "they are both tragi-comedies of marital relationships, and it is as though nothing has improved over 30 years. Men and women are still fighting for precedence and knocking into one another and thoroughly annoying each other in the same way they always have."
When Simpson suggested there are few sympathetic men in Drabble's stories, Drabble retorted that it was surely true of them both. Simpson reflected on the predictability of the "F question" in interviews, and it is one that Drabble will have heard often. Like Doris Lessing, a long-term friend and influence, she denies (although much less stridently than Lessing) that she set out to write explicitly "feminist" books. But, like Lessing, she will always be associated with the fledgling years of feminism, as she was one of the most assiduous chroniclers of female experience in Britain during that time.
Drabble's work has always been characterised by astute social observation, a realism borne out of her admiration for Victorian fiction. At one point, her novels, with their clever conversations and adulterous intrigues, were synonymous with the now unfashionable "Hampstead novel"; although she did live there for many years and "represented a particular point of view", she points out that she didn't actually set many novels there, as she was worried about identifying her neighbours. But what Joyce Carol Oates describes as her "seemingly infinite sympathy for 'ordinary women'" ensures that her work will endure; indeed three of her early novels are being reissued as Penguin Classics this autumn. And so it is with the stories.
The title – taken from the longest story – was chosen by her American publisher, but she agrees it works well for the collection as a whole. Nearly all these "snapshots of women's lives", as she calls them, show the protagonists attempting to put a brave face on the disappointments of everyday life, or the schism between their public and private selves. She is candid about drawing on personal experience and often disguises real people as characters: one is based on her ex-husband, the actor Clive Swift, another on a manipulative friend, now dead. "The Merry Widow", about a woman's sense of liberation following the death of her domineering husband, was in fact written just after her mother's death.
And what about "one of the biggest American writers of his generation" who tries to seduce a successful young playwright from the north at a smart London party? "Oh, that was Saul Bellow," she says immediately. "He was a hero of mine, and I didn't at all mind him making a pass at me. In fact I felt really pleased. But then I realised as a feminist I shouldn't have been so amused. But I did like him very much. I still read him with admiration." Antonia Fraser tells a similar anecdote about Bellow making advances to her in a taxi when they were Booker judges in 1971. "We are not alone in that," she says, laughing. "Find me a woman he didn't make a pass at!"
From ingénue author of groundbreaking novels such as The Millstone to grand dame (she was made DBE in 2008), Drabble seems to have been at the heart of the literary establishment for ever, part of a generation that included Iris Murdoch and Lessing. "Yes, I've seen a whole literary world roll by," she says wistfully. She has many memories of friends such as Beryl Bainbridge: "Beryl had amazing staying power, an extraordinary stamina – for writing, for drinking, for smoking – she kept on till the very end. Doris has had amazing stamina too."
A few years ago Drabble herself announced that she was giving up writing, through a fear of repetition. "I felt when I'd finished The Sea Lady that I'd come to the end of something, and I was quite pleased with the way that novel ended with a sort of harmonious farewell." Has she really written her last novel?
"I hadn't bargained with the fact that I wanted to keep writing. I'm working on something, but I've made it almost impossibly difficult." There is usually a point "around 50-60 thousand words", she says, where she thinks "this is terrible, I won't do it, and then you pull yourself together, you realise where the design flaws are and you have another go". But for the first time she isn't sure if she will finish this novel. "Perhaps it is because I don't really need to. I'm doing it because it is of interest, and problem-solving is good for me."
Like many women writers, when her children were young she used to "grab" writing time when she could. Now she writes in the mornings, when she does "a good few hours". She works best, she says, in the British Library or in her house in Somerset. "I'm not so good here because I'm distracted by the fact that Michael is working upstairs." I mention those articles that appear occasionally about literary partnerships (usually including Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn, Rose Tremain and Richard Holmes) that evoke discussions about technical snags over a convivial lunch or an evening glass of wine. No, it isn't like that at all, she says. "We hardly ever discuss work. I read his page proofs. We know what is going on because it colours our conversation, but we don't talk about how it is going."
For years, Drabble and Holroyd maintained separate households – she in Hampstead, he in the top floors of the house they live in now. "If we weren't married, they'd say we were living together. As we are married, they say we are living apart," Holroyd once quipped. It was an arrangement that suited them well in terms of their writing lives. "Who knows, it may come back to that," she jokes.⁴
Her west Somerset house serves a similar purpose. She tries to go a couple of times a month for a concentrated burst of work. She doesn't mind being lonely – "if you call it solitude it doesn't seem so bad" – and she takes long walks, another of her salvations. Although she loves the west country, her heart is still in Yorkshire, where she grew up. "When I go back to Sheffield I feel very close to it – although the whole family has moved away, there's something about the people, about the manners that I recognise."
In terms of her politics, which she describes as "left-of-centre egalitarian", she has stayed faithful too – "they [the politicians] shift but I don't!" – and a vein of social responsibility (strongest in her middle novels) runs throughout her work. She is not optimistic: "My position is very familiar to Guardian readers. I don't feel there's a party that represents me now. It's hard to feel that there's a sense of social progress. I used to feel that we were all moving forward, but we weren't really."
Drabble's early biography is well known: the middle sister of the novelist AS Byatt and the art historian Helen Langdon, she also has a brother, Richard (a set up not dissimilar to that other famous Yorkshire literary family – except Richard, a barrister like their father, is "not at all Branwellian" she laughs). All three girls attended the Quaker Mount School, where their mother was a teacher, and then went to Cambridge. Both parents were the first in their families to go to university, and there was never any question that their children would do the same. "I remember my first evening at Cambridge, people were talking about things that I didn't know about, and I was quite well educated and not totally socially inept, but still I felt there was a whole world here, and my mother felt that so intensely she couldn't get over it."
Drabble has touched on her troubled relationship with her mother in various novels, such as Jerusalem the Golden (1967), about a girl who escapes an unhappy home in Northam (a fictional town Drabble has used more than once) to go to university, and most directly in her quasi-autobiographical novel The Peppered Moth (2001), in which she "wrote brutally" about her mother's depression. In The Pattern in the Carpet she writes: "I'm still angry with my mother . . . but it doesn't count any more. It is past cure, past hope, almost past regret." Has she forgiven her? "I feel so sorry for her. She was not good to my father in those final years. Her circumstances weren't objectively bad in that she had a nice house, a kind husband and four children, but something had gone so wrong in her life. Forgive isn't really the right word, because I don't really blame her. She did nothing bad to me."
Both her parents were depressives, in different ways, she says. She is open about her own depression, which first affected her as a small child, and is thankful that she's had "far more exits from depression" than her mother had. Although she "always keeps the telephone number of the Samaritans to hand", she has never taken anti-depressants because she is "frightened of what they might do", and has had only a brief period of therapy when Holroyd was very ill, which she found helpful. "I've got a very volatile temperament – up and down. But I don't get into that inert phase that I've seen in other people. Sometimes it is a bad day, but I always have another go, I go for a walk or do something."
In her memoir she describes writing as "an illness. A chronic, incurable illness. I caught it by default when I was twenty-one, and I often wish I hadn't." Does she think she would have been happier if she had done something else? "Yes, probably I would. But being happy isn't necessarily all there is in life."
She would have preferred a "more integrated life with other people", which she enjoyed for a period working on The Oxford Companion to English Literature, so ubiquitous for generations of students before Google as to be known eponymously as "the Drabble", rather like Fowler's. Drabble, however, is not at all pessimistic about new technology: she is evangelical about her Kindle, which she has just taken to lunch at the Wolseley, the complete Henry James in her handbag.⁵
Drabble is something of a reluctant novelist, falling into it as a convenient occupation while she had small children. "I didn't want to be a writer at all," she says simply. She really longed to be an actress and joined the RSC in 1960, where she was an understudy for both Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench. "My whole three years at Cambridge I spent putting on wonderful plays – Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare. And you were with a group of people who really enjoyed doing it. I miss that."
It was during this time that she met Swift, whom she married straight out of Cambridge. "It was a different pattern then. Contraception wasn't all that brilliant. The pill hadn't been invented. I had my third child and then they invented the pill, otherwise I would probably have had a child a year."
Rather to her surprise, she found being a mother "completely delightful", and the joys and consolations of motherhood are keenly felt in her fiction. And she adores being a grandmother. One of the benefits of having got married so young, she says, is that you are still young enough to find your grandchildren – she has four – fun. This evening one of her grandsons, Danny, who is "supposed to be reading physics and philosophy at Oxford", is appearing in the semi-final of Britain's Got Talent as part of a boy band. "They sing modern stuff. Danny's impersonation of Amy Winehouse is just brilliant."
It is too early to tell, she says, if there will be any more novelists in the family. Two is perhaps enough: the fact that both Drabble and Byatt are among the pre-eminent writers of their generation has not been without its difficulties. Their much-reported "feud" must be tiresome, at best, for both (Byatt always declines to discuss the matter). As very young novelists, both wrote books – Drabble's first, A Summer Bird-Cage (1965), and Byatt's second, The Game (1967) – about rivalrous sisters, which, more than 40 years on, still rankles, at least for Drabble (Byatt apologised for The Game, she says now). "It is just an incomprehensible relationship to me," she says, wearily. "I was the little sister who thought she [Byatt] was clever and wonderful, and she thought I was in the way all the time. I think it is so normal for an elder sister to resent the younger one. It's just unfortunate that we were interested in the same things. We still are interested in the same things."
Everything would have been fine, she thinks, if she had become an actress instead of a novelist. They both claim not to read each other's work. Really? Yes. Drabble read Possession because she knew "that would be nothing to do with our family life. There's a brilliant sequence where they go up to the North Yorkshire coast. I thought God, this is really terrific, because I love that coastline, but I was rather glad that I'd written about it myself before I read her on it, because you don't want to tread on other people's ground – but unfortunately the ground belongs to us both."
Surely, now both Dames in their 70s, with all the most prestigious literary prizes between them (Byatt won the Booker for Possession in 1990), the old rivalries are less acute? Yes, she says. "We've had perfectly pleasant encounters over the last few years." Drabble held a big party for her 70th birthday a couple of years ago. "All the cousins and the elder generation, various ex-husbands and my sister came along – and I thought, here we all are in one room absolutely fine, but we can't really do it on a daily basis."
There's a whole new generation, she says, "which makes things seem nice." And that reminds her that it is nearly time for Britain's Got Talent.