Writing Advice from Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark wrote books that are brilliant, sharp, and full of charm. They are distinct, and they refuse to be slotted into any sort of category or style. Her most famous work, and the one you have probably heard of, is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was adapted into a film in 1969, starring the incomparable Maggie Smith in the titular role. But Muriel Spark was prolific—she penned 22 novels in her lifetime, plus poetry, short stories, and literary criticism.
As a thoroughly unique author who eschewed conventions and produced slim novels that glitter like gems, her methods and philosophies are worth pondering. Here are some tips we can glean from Muriel Spark.
Study authors you admire...
Up until 1957, when she was 39, Muriel Spark published solely poetry and literary criticism. Among her critical biographies of authors were works on Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, John Masefield, Proust, and the Brontë siblings. She had a keen eye for what it was about writers that she admired that drew her in; she could give specifics about the craft of other writers that she loved. Furthermore, she knew that, as Virginia Woolf said: “read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.” In her autobiography Curriculum Vitae, Spark wrote about the effect that studying Mary Shelley had on her early writing: “The steel and bite of the ballads, so remorseless and yet so lyrical, entered my literary bloodstream, never to depart.”
...but stay true to yourself
Nevertheless, Muriel Spark was not one to be anything other than wholly original and true to her unique authorial voice. Asked what the first book to have an influence on her was, she replied, “an empty notebook.” And when pondering for an interview which book she would most like to have written, she said, after significant consideration, none. “...I do not want to be anybody else but myself with all the ideas I want to convey, the stories I want to tell, maybe lesser works, but my own.”
Show no quarter
Spark has been described variously as “strange and sinister,” “waspish,” “without an iota of sentimentality,” and “a bard of nastiness and lies.” In her fantastic novel A Far Cry from Kensington the protagonist Mrs. Hawkins cannot stop herself from hissing “pisseur de copie” to the contemptible would-be writer Hector Bartlett (who was based on Spark’s one-time lover). Says Mrs. Hawkins: “Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it.”
Her books certainly combine venom and audacity with their singular poetic vision. In 1970, she gave a speech in New York City which shed some light on her unique writing philosophy. She averred: “To bring about a mental environment of honesty and self-knowledge, a sense of the absurd and a general looking-lively to defend ourselves from the ridiculous oppressions of our time, and above all to entertain us in the process, has become the special calling of arts and letters.”
Live life to the fullest
Spark made the most of a rich life full of experiences, and she never hesitated to mine that treasure trove for plots and characters. As a child in Edinburgh, she used to indulge in people-watching whenever her sociable parents held a gathering. Observing and making mental notes, she would then go to her bedroom and stand in front of the mirror, pulling faces and trying to imitate their expressions and attitudes. (Later in life, she said that writing was akin to acting, to inhabiting characters.) She was married very young, and moved with her husband to Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), where she lived for several years. Although the marriage was unhappy and she left both her husband and the country, the experience informed her early short stories.
Her next adventure was to work for the Foreign Office during the war, and write propaganda—surely a good fit for a pen as sharp as Spark’s. In her thirties, she suffered a breakdown coupled with hallucinations, which led to her conversion to Catholicism. This, according to her, made her into a novelist. But as the writer Margaret Drabble has pointed out, the play of good and evil in her books is never simple, and this aspect of them comes across as “quirky rather than devout.” In the 1970s, Spark moved to Italy, living with her companion Penelope Jardine, and it is here that she wrote many of her novels.
Just get down to it
In typical brisk and no-nonsense Muriel Spark style, perhaps the greatest writing advice takeaway is to just get to the writing. In Curriculum Vitae she recalls her transition from poetry and criticism to fiction, when, very hard up, she heard that the Observer was offering £250 to the winner of a short story contest: “I put aside my work on Masefield and wrote ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’ on foolscap paper, straight off. Then I had to type it but found I had no typing paper. I scrounged some from the owner of an art shop nearby in South Kensington, typed it out, put my pseudonym ‘Aquarius’ on the envelope and my name and address inside, and mailed it off to the Observer that afternoon.” She won the contest, out of over 7000 entries.
You can also see her hilarious and iconic video on how to write a book still circulating around the internet. Her practical instructions? “I write Chapter One and then I write on.”
Indeed.
