BECOMING A WRITER: MAVIS CHEEK
Mavis Cheek is the critically-acclaimed author of sixteen novels including Amenable Women, Aunt Margaret’s Lover and award-winning Pause Between Acts. This summer, these three titles will be re-issued with new forewords written by Mavis, together with newly designed jackets. They are being published by Psychology News and distributed by Vine House Distribution. We are delighted to feature Mavis on our site!
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A great quality for an author is the inability to do anything other than writing that will pay the bills and keep them from the gutter. When I left school at the age of sixteen, I was a blue-eyed, wide-eyed, doe-eyed girl with a brain hidden under a weight of ignorance, and with a blissfully innocent attitude to life. This meant that I had no idea when I was taking risks and I just said Yes. Which is how I ended up with a plum job with an art publishers ( working with David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Patrick Caulfield and a host of other
pretty important artists about whom I knew nothing at the time).
When they asked me at the interview if I could work a PABX switchboard as opposed to a Doll’s Eye – and not knowing what on earth they were talking about – I just said Yes. And I was in. I will draw a veil over the consequences of my complete lack of skills in the telephonic department and the subsequent muddles that ensued – but I was pretty and wore mini-skirts and spoke proper – so I learned and remained and, eventually, got into the gallery side of the business and had a whale of a time for twelve years.
It was the swinging ‘sixties in London – and art was at the heart of it. It mattered not at all that I came from a poor background, ill-educated background – for that short happy decade it was more about how you looked and behaved and what you did – than who you were. For a while it was fashionable – almost essential – not to be Top Drawer.
Knowing about contemporary art was not a foundation for a solid career in anything. I’d found one half of my brain – then came the urge to find the other half. After those twelve happy years I went to College – and – to my (and possibly the rest of the world’s) surprise – discovered that I was quite bright – and that something I had taken for granted all these years was, in fact, my one great skill. I knew how to use words effectively. I had always written letters to friends – I loved doing it and they were often quite surreal and funny and – I was told – friends enjoyed them. But now I could use this skill for my future. I had passed everything with distinction – therefore I would go on to do a higher degree.
But – strangely – just around that time – I started to feel a bit sick in the mornings – and a little bit odd – and began to develop some decidedly dramatic breasts. Yes – indeed – at the grand old age of thirty – I was pregnant. I was thrilled, shocked, thrown. I’d always wanted children but had been told I was unlikely to conceive – this was a wonderful miracle – and a path changer. No more Groves of Academe – it was motherhood and domesticity for me. My daughter was indeed a wonderful wonder – but something inside me niggled away – all that learning – Literature, Art, History, Political Ideas – I needed something else. As I said, I took risks without considering consequences – and this time the risk I took was: I’ll Be A Writer.
When my daughter was two – I joined something rather sweetly called ‘A Writers’ Circle’. It was full of eccentrics and would-be writers – some better than others – but it was a platform and a discipline. I wrote something every week and trotted along to the group and read it out for their appraisal. You very quickly learn two valuable lessons for becoming an author from those kind of experiences – how to self-edit and
how to take constructive criticism (and sometimes how to take gratuitous insults – one dear old lady – in her ‘eighties – said that, sadly, my writing didn’t have enough ‘romance and action’ for her – by which, I later realised, she meant ‘sex and violence’).
I wrote short articles, and then dared to write short stories – but it took me three years to begin to write a novel.
It was a serious undertaking – pushing out the bounds of 20C literature, no less – and I used an experience from my own life – a ‘what if?’ for I had been courted by an older man for some time (despite being a mother and living with my partner, father of my child) – which was wildly flattering but an absolute no-go – so I turned the possibilities into a novel.
A marvellous way of having the experience without really having it, if you see what I mean. Oh dear, the writing was deadly serious. The group quite liked it (despite the most definite lack of sex and violence) and on the advice of a friend, in publishing (well, actually, in the accounts department) who had given me two names – I sent it to an agent. Who sent it straight back. Nothing daunted I sent it off to the second agent. She wrote that it was not a book for her but that I did have something and if ever I was passing her door she would spare me five minutes to talk to me about what she thought of the book.
Naturally, two days later, I was passing her door. We talked for more than hour. What was wrong with the book, in her opinion, was that every time something humorous popped up in the storyline – I put a lid on it. She thought there was a lot of comedy lurking under the lid that ought to get out.
‘That,’ she said, ‘From talking to you – is your natural voice. You are funny.’ For a moment I was heartbroken. Not a serious author, then. Just a funny writer. Well, that’s not art. But when she asked me if I had an idea for another novel. I had made a complete twerp of myself getting a
crush on a famous actor – quite disorderly for a mother of a (by now) seven year old who was supposed to be in a stable relationship. I had begged a friend who knew him to introduce me – only so I could adore from afar – and the friend said, ‘Well, I’d love to darling but you know he’s gay…?’ For about a day my life fell apart. Then, miraculously, I fell about laughing at my utter stupidity. A second novel was about to be born. And this one would make people laugh, and be published. And it would win a prize. And fifteen more would follow.
That book was called ‘Pause Between Acts’ which is said by many to still be my funniest book. The agent was right – comedy was my metier,
my authorial voice, and I’ve been laughing my way through with it ever since.
Mavis Cheek
Winner of the She/John Menzies First Novel Prize
Joan’s answer to life after divorce is happy seclusion. She rejects the outside world and embarks on a contented existence of isolated self-indulgence. But when she meets the roguish, desirable actor Finbar Flynn, the walls of her citadel begin to crack.
‘Mavis Cheek seems to have cracked the conundrum of how to write decent novels with popular appeal’ The Times
Buy the book here:
Flora Chapman is in her fifties when her husband dies in a bizarre ballooning accident. Seizing upon her new found freedom, she decides to finish the history of their village that Edward had begun. A reference to Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife who he rejected for being ugly, captures her imagination as she begins to delve deeper into the life of this neglected figure. Meanwhile, in the Louvre, Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves senses the tug of a connection and she begins to tell the story of the injustices she suffered and just how she
survived her marriage.
A fascinating tale of Sisterhood and Survival.
‘There has always been a touch of the Alan Bennett about Mavis Cheek. Both writers share an uncanny talent for capturing
the cadences of the way we speak, and for re-creating them on the page so delicately and with such charm that it takes
your breath away.’ Daily Mail
Buy the book here:
Aunt Margaret, surrogate mother to Saskia, has just waved goodbye to her niece as she sets off for a teenage rendezvous with her father for a year. Now, buoyed up by an unexpected legacy, Aunt Margaret decides to kick up her heels and have some fun and places an advert – ‘Woman, 39, seeks lover for one year – April to April, no expectations.’ What ensues is not entirely without incident!
‘A very agreeable confection, light in texture but laced with morsels of richness’ Sunday Times
Buy the book here:
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Mavis Cheek was born and grew up in Wimbledon. Her first job was with contemporary art publishers, Editions Alecto – working with artists such as David Hockney, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley – where she learned about modern and contemporary art. After twelve happy years at Alecto, Mavis left to study at Hillcroft College for Women from where she graduated in Arts with distinction. When her daughter Bella was born shortly after graduating she began her writing career in earnest. Journalism and travel writing at first, then short stories, and eventually, in 1988, her novel Pause Between Acts was published and won the She/John Menzies First Novel Prize. She has published fifteen novels and her short stories are in various collections.
Mavis has served on both PEN, Writers in Prison and The Society of Authors committees and was for three years the judge of the McKitterick Prize for Fiction. She is a Fellow of MacDowell Colony, USA and has been the Royal Literature Fund Fellow at both Chichester University and the University of Reading. She is a full member of The Royal Literary Fund’s Writing Project which aims to bring clarity in writing into the workplace. In this capacity she has run workshops for organisations such as the charity LifeCycle (which aims to get people up and cycling) and the Youth Employment Service. Her voluntary work began with running weekly workshops in HMP Holloway (women) and HMP Erlestoke (men), school visits and writing workshops with various groups. She is also the Founder and Patron of the Marlborough Literature Festival which aims to put authorship, rather than celebrity, back at the heart of literature festivals. It has been a resounding success and proves that
good writing will always be admired and cherished.
Since 1989 Mavis has run residential courses for the Arvon Foundation; for the Centre for Literature at Ty Newydd in Wales;
at Dartington,; Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre at Moniack Mhor; masterclasses for the Stratford on Avon, Beverley,
Charleston, Sherborne Festivals, among others, and at Marlborough College and various other venues and institutions at
home and abroad from palaces to prisons. She lives and works in London.
Find out more about her on her website https://www.mavischeek.co.uk/
Follow her on Twitter @mavischeekbooks
Category: On Writing
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