The WD Interview: Pat Barker
The Booker Prize-winning author of Regeneration shares the role characters play in developing novel ideas and explains what appeals to her about reimagining mythology.
[This article first appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]
Pat Barker is a writer’s writer. Though she’s accumulated numerous accolades over her decades-long career, including a Booker Prize and a Guardian Fiction Prize, and was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her services to literature, she still concerns herself with things like what it means to write effective dialogue and looking past the bad first draft to see if a story has legs. “The thing about writing is it’s not difficult,” Barker says, now in her early 80s. “The rules of good writing are incredibly simple. It’s just that it takes you 50 years to learn.”
This sense of humor about her writing life filled our conversation ranging from her opinion on whether a writer’s unfinished work should be published posthumously (“I do actually have a horror of leaving an orphan book where you can imagine your publisher and your executor and your agent say, ‘Oh, well, it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? But on the other hand, perhaps we can just about rescue it and push it out.’ I don’t want all that. I want any book that’s published under my name to have been finished”) to what she told herself about winning the Booker prize to be able to keep working (“It’s such a stroke of luck. But that’s all it is. … Julian Barnes said it was ‘posh bingo,’ and I said, when I won it, it was three lemons in a row. And that’s the way to look at it. If you start seriously thinking that you have written the best novel of the year, then you are in trouble. You haven’t. You’ve written the novel that five random people agreed on, on a particular afternoon. That’s what you’ve written.”)
Joking aside, Barker is best known for her novels set during times of war. Her Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road—which won the Booker in 1995) follows the poet Siegfried Sassoon, psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers, and soldier Billy Prior as they deal with the horrific effects of trench warfare in World War I. Likewise, the Life Class Trilogy (Life Class, Toby’s Room, Noonday) begins with art students Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant, and Kit Neville in 1914 and traces the intertwining of their lives from the earliest days of World War I through the destruction of London during the Blitz of World War II.
Currently, Barker is in the midst of her Women of Troy series, beginning with The Silence of the Girls. The 2018 novel, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, retells the story of The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan queen who was awarded to Achilles during the Trojan War. Briseis’s story continues in The Women of Troy, as the Greeks’ departure from Troy is delayed due to unfavorable winds, courtesy of the gods they’ve offended during the destruction of the city. The newest book in the series, The Voyage Home, shifts the narrative from Briseis to that of Ritsa, a healer who has been given to Agamemnon’s war prize, the virgin Cassandra, as her slave, as they travel from Troy to Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s wife awaits.
When asked what appeals to Barker about writing a trilogy or series, she says, “The great thing about writing a trilogy is that you can’t get away with just repeating. You have to have central characters, but you can’t just have them thinking and doing and saying exactly what they did in the previous book, so you are obliged to dig deeper into that person.” Which is exactly what she’s done with the stories of Briseis and now, Ritsa.
And while Barker is dedicated to completing Briseis’s story in The Women of Troy series, she says she won’t be embarking on a new trilogy or series: “… of course, I am now too old to write another trilogy. So somehow or other, I’ve got to come to my senses and write a single book or books.”
We began our conversation with what interested Barker about revisiting ancient mythology.
Before I got The Voyage Home, I went back and read your Life Class Trilogy, and there was a line in there about the silence of the girls as Achilles and Agamemnon fought over them. That book was published in 2007, at least in the United States.
You know, I’d forgotten that I wrote that. So, when people ask me when The Silence of the Girls was published, “When did your interest in The Iliad and the women in The Iliad start?” I thought it was comparatively recent. Whereas in fact, it went back quite a way. I’ve forgotten I wrote that about, Elinor Brooke sitting in the Cafe Royal noticing how silent the women have become, and how objectionably loud the men have become.
So, if you didn’t remember you had that interest before, what did spark the idea for this trilogy?
We’ll perhaps call it a series, yes, there will be something next. Certainly, because the character [Briseis] is not finished.
What did spark it? Well, I suspect an even earlier introduction to The Iliad, because I read it out of general interest. Like lots of young women, my predominant experience was, well, the grandeur of the language, and how almost inconceivably ancient these stories are, some of the earliest stories that we, as human beings ever told each other that took final form, or not final form actually, in The Iliad. But there were these girls, and the girls were saying nothing, and I think quite a lot of men, not all men by any means, would read that, and they wouldn’t hear the silence. But I think almost any woman would hear that silence. So obviously the thing to do if you’re a woman writer is to try to break that silence, to try to express what the women are feeling and not able to say.
Did you know the scope of what these three books would cover before you started writing the first one?
No, and I don’t think I really knew, even at the end of The Silence of the Girls, because I do tend to get very down on myself at the end of the book. When I sent off The Silence of the Girls to my British publisher, Penguin Random House—it’s the same publisher on both sides of the Atlantic now—I thought it was absolute rubbish. I said that in an event at which my editor was present, and he couldn’t believe it. But it was absolutely true, because the book that you actually hand over is never the book that was in your mind when you started to write it. Every book falls short, I think, of what the writer intended. That one fell dramatically short because I was seeing it against the backdrop of The Iliad, which is one of the greatest books ever written.
At what point did you decide to continue the story with the next two books?
It’s always this nagging when a story is finished. And unfortunately, for my sins, I seem to finish a book at the point where it’s the end of a movement, but it’s not the end of the piece. There is something left on set, just like the Regeneration Trilogy, when at the end of Regeneration, Siegfried Sassoon is going back to war, but he’s still not convinced that the war is anything other than a dreadful mistake. Yet he has to go back and face the horrors of that again. No way is that the end of the story. You need to follow this person. You need to bring your central character to a moment of more than momentary peace. And that is the end of the story. I’ve now written three trilogies, and I don’t seem to be very good at ending it at the end of one book.
I wanted to talk about completing the story of a character because with The Voyage Home, you did shift narrators. With the first two, Briseis was the narrator, but in this third book, it’s Ritsa. What challenges did you face writing from this different character? Or did it open things up for you?
I think it opened things up for me, and it also restored me to the earliest voices in my work, which were very much the voices of working-class women in the northeast of England. Very poor women, women who were up against it. And Ritsa, although she’s living in a very different society, her relationship to the other characters in the story is very much that she is the bottom layer. She is the ground feeder if you like. She’s a slave. Before she was enslaved, she was a healer. She was a woman with independence. She was a woman with a professional reputation, a home of her own. So, although she hasn’t fallen from the great heights of Briseis, who was a queen in her previous life and then a slave, she, nevertheless, has suffered a very dramatic loss of status. She has become Cassandra’s slave, at her beck and call 24 hours a day. She doesn’t like it very much. She doesn’t like Cassandra very much.
Nevertheless, her voice is a very pragmatic voice, a voice which is focused on survival rather than on ideology, if you like. She wants to be alive at the end of the story, and she’s in a better place at the end of the story than she was at the beginning. So, I think from the point of view of the reader who is identifying with Ritsa, this is an awkward trajectory.
I do think this very simple thing is quite important, that you don’t want to take your reader into a pit and leave them there. Apart from anything else, I think it’s quite immoral to do that. I think you should always offer hope. And it’s honest, because if you are actually despairing, you wouldn’t be writing. The act of writing is itself an affirmation of hope that things can be better.
That’s so interesting considering that you write so much about war.
I do write about a lot of traumatic events. But I also write a lot of recovery stories. And I would say that the survival rate in my books is higher than the survival rate in life. In that sense, I’m a very optimistic writer.
Going back to the narrators, I can guess why you chose to have the few chapters in The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy that are from Achilles’ and Pyrrhus’ perspectives in the third person, since they’re the men and this is about the silence of the girls and giving them a voice. But I was curious about, in this new book, why you chose to give Cassandra’s and Clytemnestra’s perspectives in third person.
Yes, and Ritsa’s in first. But in a way, it’s brutally simple: Ritsa’s alive at the end. You can’t get trapped inside the viewpoint of a woman who is not going to make it all the way through. I mean, I think some books do this, or they flip into the afterlife or something like that. But mainly if the word I is being used, you expect that I not to be in a coffin at the end of the book, because otherwise they’re describing their own death and can’t describe what happens after it. …
It’s a way of saying, although these characters are very evenly balanced in the call for the reader’s sympathy, nevertheless, the first-person narrator is generally the person the book is about. In my books, the first-person narrator tends to be an honest narrator. They are telling you what they know. They might be misleading you, but if they are misleading you, it’s only because they don’t know the truth themselves. I don’t play games with the reader in that sense.
In another interview, you talked broadly about why retellings of mythology are experiencing a surge these days. But I’m curious, for you personally, what appeals to you about reimagining myths?
It’s that imaginative power of knowing that you are dealing with the story which has been around for at least two and a half thousand years. Because the stories that formed The Iliad, for example, had been around probably a thousand years before it was actually captured in the form that we now know it, and there’s a danger in thinking that capture, The Iliad, is the final form. But of course, it isn’t. The myth can’t be frozen in that way. The myth goes on, so that Shakespeare in 1602 writing about Troilus and Cressida is also telling one of the stories in the myths that made The Iliad, and so on into modern-day retellings. It’s endlessly rich because it delves into some of the deepest emotions and convictions of human life. I think it’s very humbling to be part of a chain of writers telling a particular story. You are a custodian of the story. In the end, it is not about you, and that’s what I like about it.
Have you found any benefits in writing about wars or events that are so far in the past, compared to trying to write about something that is in the relatively recent past?
There’s a great benefit in the sense that if you’re writing about the contemporary scene, the reader already knows what they think about the contemporary scene. The point about writing about myth or writing about the relatively distant past is that the reader doesn’t have the knee-jerk reaction, Oh I know what I think about that. So, you come in under their radar, and you move past the automatic prejudices and get them to look at the basic situation again, and to feel different things about it. For me, that’s the main reason.
The other thing of course, is this: Even the very distant past, you are still dealing with homo sapiens. The human brain has not evolved during that time. So, as [A. E.] Housman said, the person who’s looking at the storm on Wenlock Hill in Roman times is essentially the same man who’s looking at it now. The trees have changed, but the human brain has not changed. It’s a way of getting down to a deeper level of human complexity.
What comes first for you when you’re starting a new project? The idea for the story or a character’s voice?
I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it “the breath on the mirror.” If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly.
I wish I could tell people how to hasten that process, but I don’t know how to. It can take ages to get to the point where you are hearing the characters talking, or it can happen almost immediately. I think the only real tip I’ve got is if you’re writing in third person and the characters are not coming to life, switch to first person. Even if you don’t intend to stick with it, at least write something in first person and do the sensory things. …
When you let the characters talk to each other, as you’re figuring out this story—
I can’t stop them. [Laughs] If it’s working, they won’t shut up!
Are you actively writing this down or typing it? Or are you allowing it to happen in your head until you do get that spark of the story?
I allow it to happen in my head, and I’m grateful that it’s happening. Now and then, if I think somebody says something vaguely significant, I will write it down in a notebook and wait for the moment in the story where they’ll reach the point of saying this. But, the first-person narration—and part of the last three books now have been first-person narration—is, in fact, dialogue. It’s a monologue. The person is talking to the reader. So, first person and reliance on dialogue do go very much together.
I think dialogue is absolutely key to everything, and it’s very difficult because you can read books on characterization, narrative, conflict, and all that. But dialogue is so dependent on the individual ear. You probably could get more from a scriptwriter or somebody teaching theater writing than you could get from somebody teaching a novel on dialogue.
I actually have quite a bee in my bonnet about dialogue when I think about it, because I think a lot of the things that are said are nonsense. Like “every person has to sound completely different from every other person,” and it’s not the way things are. I mean, if you’ve got five blokes going into the bar of a golf club for their hard-earned pint at the end of the day, you can make them sound completely different because you can say that one is Scottish, one is Welsh, one is Irish, one is a visiting American, and they will sound different. But it misses the point because what they are doing is to make the same sounds about the same subject. What they are saying is, “We belong here.” There’s no actual content in the speech at all. It’s the weather. It’s who was par or whatever—I know nothing about golf on the course—and things like that. It’s just saying: “We belong here, and we don’t threaten you. We are prepared to be friends.”
It’s exactly the same when the kittiwake lands on the ledge and watches a thousand other kittiwakes. It says, “Kittiwake.” If it says anything else, it’s in trouble. It’s the kittiwake theory of dialogue. It’s the voice of a community, not the individual voices. Just like, for example, as you get in James Baldwin sometimes, where you get people in the religious community and they’re saying things like, “Praise the Lord.” They are saying, “We belong to this community. We share these beliefs.” They’re not saying anything that reveals them as an individual. And obviously, you need dialogue that reveals the individual, but you also need the voice of the community out of which the individual voice emerges. But, you know, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about dialogue. [Laughs]
Do you have a writing routine: time of day that you write or a target word count?
It varies at the moment. I write in the mornings. It’s 1,000-plus words a day, which I’m just starting a new project. All I need it to do at the moment is grow. And I need to stifle the voice in my head saying, This is rubbish. It’s not worth doing. The only way to do that is to plow on day by day because you can’t make any sensible judgments about a project until you’ve got a first draft. I used to have a little thing on the top of my screen: “It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be finished.” And you worry about it being good when it’s there. Until that point, it doesn’t matter really. It just has to be there.
So, you’re not one of those writers who has to revise the previous day’s work before you move on to today’s work?
No, I leave sometimes in the middle of a sentence, deliberately, or in the middle of a word so I can finish the end of the word and the end of the sentence with no thought at all. Then just move on.
It’s all about conning yourself at the early stages. You’ve got to con yourself into finishing. Because everybody, at some stage, everybody who isn’t a complete—I won’t use four-letter words—thinks their work is rubbish some of time. I would distrust any writer who never thought their work was rubbish. So, it’s a matter of shutting that voice up long enough for you to be able to see what you’ve got.
I talk to writers all the time, but I still find it so reassuring to hear writers of your stature feel the need to con yourself, to make yourself believe that your work can be something good, even if it’s not right now.
You’re only as good as your last paragraph, and if you’re writing a very rough first draft, your last paragraph is always rubbish. If you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a problem of belief, and somehow, you’ve got to find a way to believe, even though your last paragraph was rubbish. Winning prizes and stuff like that, which you might think would help, it doesn’t help in the least.
Is there any advice that you have for the readers of WD that we haven’t talked about?
Keep going, but don’t focus too much on the externals of recognition and publishing. You have to enjoy the journey.
About Amy Jones
Amy Jones is the Editor-in-Chief of Writer’s Digest and was the managing content director for WD Books. She is the editor of the Novel and Short Story Writer's Market and Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market. Prior to joining the WD team, Amy was the managing editor for North Light Books and IMPACT Books. Like most WD staffers, Amy is a voracious reader and has a particular interest in literary fiction, historical fiction, steamy romance, and page-turning mysteries. When she’s not reading, Amy can be found daydreaming about Italy or volunteering at her local no-kill cat shelter. Find Amy on Twitter @AmyMJones_5.
