An Author's Process - Guest Post by Emylia Hall

Today I have a really awesome essay from the author Emylia Hall. I was sent a copy of her debut novel, The Book of Summers, and was given the chance to host a guest post from her. I got to pick the topic, and after reading her book, millions of ideas were running through my mind. I finally settled on asking about her writing spaces and processes.

Travels with my book
by Emylia Hall

The aspect of the writing process that I most enjoy is the travel. Skipping the bonds of time and place and going just about anywhere, that magical feeling of sitting down at your laptop, or taking a notebook in hand, and transporting yourself. Fittingly, my first novel is also about travel – of both the practical, and the emotional kind. It’s the story of a young girl who spends her summers abroad with her Hungarian mother, in a place that seems untouched by the concerns of her world back home. They’re endless summer days where the night skies are lit by fireflies, glow-worms mark the edges of the forest, and languid, hidden pools tempt with their cool waters.


Emylia's writing space in the French Alps.

The Book of Summers was inspired by the family holidays we took as a child. My father was an artist and art teacher so come summertime we were all at liberty; we’d pack up the car and drive across France, Germany, Austria and Hungary, often for a month or five weeks at a time. Many of my memories of those sun-kissed days are written into The Book of Summers. However the narrative, the drama, is driven less by personal recollection and more by my interest in the relationship we each have with our memories. The human facility for recall – so exact, so very real, that sometimes if we closed our eyes we could just reach out and touch – seems to be our greatest gift and, somehow, our greatest tragedy. We can never go back, and the gilded days of childhood tempt us most of all.


Emylia's writing space in Scotland.

The Book of Summers began as just a few hastily-tapped paragraphs, saved on a floppy disc and tucked into a drawer when I was still working and living in London. After moving house, and moving countries, the disk went astray but there was something about the idea that stayed with me; the allure of the foreign, the clash of strange and familiar, a coming-of-age story about complex but well-meaning family relations. Several years later, in 2006, I was living in the French Alps - tired of my hectic London job in advertising my boyfriend and I were working in a ski chalet; I was the chef and he was the cleaner. It wasn’t the kind of work we were used to; we rose at dawn and worked until late at night, but we felt so, so free. When I wasn’t cooking in the chalet, or flying on my snowboard, I began to write. I remembered all of my childhood ambitions and knew that this was what I wanted to do more than anything. Inspired by the natural beauty of the mountain landscape, and delighting in the relinquishing of so much responsibility, my creative spirit soared.

I returned to England in 2007 and began to write The Book of Summers. My boyfriend and I rented a small flat in Bristol and lived on a shoestring budget. By day I worked part time in a marketing agency, otherwise I wrote – and with every page I travelled; desk-bound, soul flying. My novel and I also went on real, as well as imagined, journeys – I love the feeling of possibility and infinite freedom that comes with being abroad and it feeds into my writing. Some scenes were written on the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary, at a terrace table, as I looked out over the shimmering water and remembered childhood days. I spent a rain-soaked week in the Austrian mountains, re-writing and daubing my manuscript with red pen. Even when I wed in Vegas and honeymooned in Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, the book came with me; a quick-thought scribbled in a roadside diner or a Santa Fe café. In wildest Scotland I worked for a week staying in a converted freight container at the edge of a loch, and in that bleak but beautiful landscape I wrote pages of background notes that delved deep into the emotions of each character; their battered souls and imperfections. At night it was very dark and very quiet and the story slept with me.


Emylia's writing desk on her home turf.

Five years after I first began writing The Book of Summers it was published, and I delight in the journey we went on together. Perhaps all writers have this relationship with their novels; they look at them and remember how they were written, where, when, and what the view was like from their window. The travels of my childhood are within its pages, as are the travels of my adult life. And best of all, I know that as a new reader picks it up and starts the story, they are travelling too. If that’s you, I thank you, and I hope you take pleasure in the journey.

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Thanks for taking the time to share this with us, Emylia! Check out her novel The Book of Summers, which I'll be reviewing next week.