Francesca Robbins: 'If fiction is going to tell the truth it can’t hide away from the dark places'
BY Katie Smart
8th Feb 2023
In 2019 Francesca Robbins was longlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Prize and she studied on our Writing Your Novel – Three Months course in London. After the course she went on to win the 2022 Bath Novel Award with her unpublished historical novel Victoriana.
We caught up with Francesca to find out more about her time studying with us as well as the research and inspiration behind her Bath Novel Award-winning novel Victoriana.
You studied on our three-month Writing Your Novel course with Charlotte Mendelson in 2019. How did your time on the course impact your approach to writing?
It had a huge impact. Every week brought new revelations! Before starting what would become my novel, Victoriana, I hadn’t done any creative writing since school. One big thing was learning how to read as a writer, which is very different to reading for pleasure or through an academic lens. It took me quite a while to really understand that.
I also uncovered an unconsciously held belief about writing that was holding me back. In some corner of my brain I believed a truly talented writer should just be able to sit down and type out their novel without too much editing, the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' as Wordsworth puts it. I was very naïve at the beginning, as you can tell! By the end of the course I understood that good writing is made in the editing, and that learning how to be a writer is an ongoing, lifelong process. That Muriel Spark interview where she sits at her typewriter and says 'I write Chapter One and then I write on' had a lot to answer for — I took it too literally!
The biggest overall impact was confidence. I was really struggling to consider myself worthy of the title ‘writer’ when I started the course — a serious case of imposter syndrome. Eventually, learning alongside such talented people made me respect myself more as a writer, as did the input of the utterly brilliant Charlotte Mendelson and the team at CBC.
Many of our students meet lifelong friends and beta readers on our courses. Are you still in touch with any of your course mates?
Yes, we still have video catch-ups and a WhatsApp group to share news, book chat, and generally cheerlead each other. We were lucky, none of us had that competitiveness you sometimes see among writers, and it quickly became a safe, generous, and collaborative space. I think it was a bit of a perfect blend.
I did find beta readers in the group whose opinion I value highly. On the course you have to be really vulnerable and endure the inevitable cringe of having a light shone on the bad bits of your work, but it builds trust. When you have seen the quality of another writer’s work, it’s hard to deny their point might be valid if they suggest you ‘kill your darlings'! And when I was still in the purgatorial, half-written phase, reading my course mates’ finished novels gave me perspective and hope that I’d get to the end of the manuscript one day.
It’s been such a joy to see them land agents and list in comps. The first of our cohort’s books is about to be published — One Last Chance by the very talented Sarah Jost (out 13 Apr 2023 from Piatkus). I was lucky to read an early draft and can confirm it’s absolutely brilliant.
Congratulations – your novel Victoriana won the 2022 Bath Novel Award. How does it feel to be recognised by such a renowned award?
Bonkers. I keep forgetting and remembering again with a massive (delightful) shock. I actually first heard about the BNA from someone on the Curtis Brown course in the pub one evening after class. She generously gave me a run down of all the writing competitions I had never heard of and should enter.
Before winning the award, you were also previously longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and the Curtis Brown First Novel Prize. What advice do you have for writers who are nervous to enter their work to competitions?
I was nervous too. The Curtis Brown First Novel Prize was the first thing I ever entered. I felt embarrassed to have such pretensions — who did I think I was trying to write a novel? I think most writers have oceans of self-doubt within them.
But I was lucky to have a very encouraging and practical partner who had blind faith in me (I hadn’t let anyone, including him, look at my writing). His approach was: 'What’s the worst that can happen? You’re never going to meet these judges. You’re never going to know if they think it’s rubbish. You’ll lose nothing but you might gain something.' Words to live by.
In hindsight the extract I submitted was very rough around the edges, but the feedback from the judges was that they saw a strong voice and potential. That’s the difference between submitting to an agent, where it really does need to be as good as possible, and submitting to a competition. You might just catch someone’s eye.
But it turns out my husband was wrong — as I like to remind him. I did meet the judges, because long listing in the competition led to my place on the CBC course.
Victoriana takes some inspiration from Gothic literature. What are some of your favourite aspects of Gothic fiction?
There is something about the unflinching eye of Gothic fiction that appeals to me, what T.S.Eliot calls the ‘skull beneath the skin.’ He was writing about Webster, who still feels ferociously modern after four-hundred years. I think about another Jacobean play, ‘The Changeling’, at least once a week. That’s what appeals to me about the Gothic — the gut-punch of truth and psychological realism you get from these texts, however fantastical, or sometimes even faintly ludicrous their tropes are. That’s what I search for in fiction, that visceral connection. I love lighter fiction as much as anyone, but if fiction is going to tell the truth it can’t hide away from the dark places. It needs to expose them. That speaks to something deep in all of us.
The novel is set in the Victorian era. Can you tell us a bit about your approach to research and why you picked that period?
Well, I wrote dissertations on Victorian literature and Jacobean tragedy in my final year at university — I like to think of the novel as a love-child of the two eras. That meant I had already read deeply in nineteenth-century literature and secondary texts on the period, so it felt a very familiar and comfortable space to move around in. I’m not able to physically access the big libraries at the moment so I buy and borrow books and have found some really useful resources on the internet. I will definitely be more organised and systematic with research for the next book though.
As for why the Victorian era — they built so much that is still standing and cast such a long shadow, that to me they have always felt fingertip close. I started writing when I was living close to the south London site of the Crystal Palace, the emblem of the era, and I set the novel in the ancient woods nearby.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I have had to take a six-month writing break since submitting to the Bath Novel Awards last Spring. I’ve just read the first draft again and will get back to the grindstone now to get it in shape for submission to publishers. Nerve wracking, but fingers and toes are all crossed.
Applications for our next London-based Writing Your Novel – Three Months are open now.