Sailor. Actor. Teacher. Flautist. Playwright. Oh, and international bestselling author of the Shetland mysteries. Is there anything Marsali Taylor can’t do? We’re thinking no, there is not. We sat down with the multitalented Marsali to talk writing, books, and the creative process.

1. 
   What book changed your life? 

Lots of books have had an influence on me, but the one that really changed my life, and the lives of everyone around me, was an unpublished diary of an old lady I knew as a child: Ysabel Birkbeck. It was two battered, crumbling black notebooks filled with scrawled handwriting, fading photographs and her own sketches. The first page called it A Ford Car Stunt,with patriotic verses below. It was her diaries of her time on the Romanian Front as an ambulance driver in an all-women front-line hospital unit in 1916-17, led by Scottish surgeon Elsie Inglis. Women on the front line in WWI – I’d never heard of such a thing! I deciphered the writing: their long sea-journey out, including meeting Serbian officers and a fancy dress party, in which she went as Puss in Boots, meeting a Grand Duchess at the opera in Odessa, three days with their cars by barge, during which they ran out of food, then the grim work driving over mud tracks to the front line and returning with wounded men. She changed a tyre with a carful of officers under aeroplane fire, and went for a ride with a handsome Russian officer to visit a General in the very front trench; they were in two retreats, behind the retreating army, and took pride in being the last cars across the Danube. They were often hungry, exhausted and terrified, but never bored, until winter in Odessa, when the London office insisted on sending out two male mechanics to repair the cars they’d nursed all autumn. Aunt Ysabel came home to lecture for funds in March 1917, via Moscow and found herself in the middle of the Russian Revolution.

Well! That was a story, and I wanted to find out much more. I volunteered for a National Library of Scotland course to write about women’s suffrage for school use (I was representing Drama) and read Leah Lenemann’s A Guid Cause, the story of the fight for women’s suffrage in Scotland (the title’s part of a Scots saying, ‘A guid cause makes a strong arm’). We’d hardly touched the suffrage movement in school, so I had a vague idea of women in London in the cartwheel-hat era, chaining themselves to railings and being force-fed, and I knew the name of Emmeline Pankhurst. To my shame, that was it. I learned that the fight began in earnest way back in 1860, and that it wasn’t just about the vote: it was about what women wanted the vote to do for them. Each of a group of women led the fight on separate fronts: the laws of divorce and child custody, child exploitation, including prostitution, women’s financial rights and equal pay, women’s education. Here, in A Guid Cause, were my own countrywomen organizing huge marches, travelling the country lecturing – Dr Inglis came to Shetland – holding vigils, writing letters to MPs and signing petitions, boycotting the census – and yes, like Pankhurst’s militants, setting fire to pillar boxes and historic buildings in a way that put the cause back in spite of the patient work by thousands of non-militants. Gradually, they won better rights on all of those, but it was the publicity over people like Aunt Ysabel and her chums, and the work done by women in WWI, that finally got us the vote at last.

I wrote two books from that, both self-published: Aunt Ysabel’s diaries became Forgotten Heroines, and my would-be pamphlet on the fight for women’s rights in Shetland became a 320p book, Women’s Suffrage in Shetland – the story of the fight nationally, and elsewhere, through the lens of one small society. It was a two-year labour of love.

2. Was your first published book the first manuscript you ever wrote? 

Oh, no, nothing like it! I began, as a green probationer teacher, writing historical romance in between marking piles of jotters, and there are two of those on my shelf, both set in the 1770s – the second one has a young Scotswoman escaping her abusive husband in revolutionary Boston and becoming an actress in Edinburgh. Then I turned my hand to crime, set in Shetland, and my first book got me an agent, but the series was cosy, nobody’d heard of Shetland, and she couldn’t get a publisher for it. There are three of those. My agent suggested something darker, and so I invented Cass, a loner with a chip on each shoulder and a death in her past. My first actual published book was Women’s Suffrage, then the first commercial one was Two Shetland Plays, and then, at last, Death on a Longship, which begins with Cass finding a dead body on her ship – and I still reckon that at that point in her life, if it had been someone else’s ship she’d have pretended not to see it.

3. Stephen King says, “The hardest part is just before you start.” What’s the hardest part of writing for you?

All the way through the first draft – though that’s exciting too, as one idea sparks off another. There’s this huge sense of relief as I get to the end that I’ve managed to pull it off – and then the second draft is pure joy, because the story’s in the bag, and I can have fun making it better.

4. Do you know the story’s ending before you start? 

Generally, yes – I know who did it (unless it seems so obvious as I write that I change it at the last minute) but now I don’t plan too tightly beforehand, because that takes the fun out of finding out. I let the characters lead, as I get to know them.

5. When you’re having a difficult writing day, what do you tell yourself to get through it? 

I don’t tell myself, I go back to my plan, which I update as I go. I’m generally three chapters’ worth of ideas ahead, but if I get stuck, I go back and see what’s happening to everyone else off stage while Cass is busy taking us with her: what other suspects are up to, and what the police are doing. That always gives me ideas.

6. Do you read your reviews? Some … I read the reviews when the book first comes out, the blog tour ones of course, and if I’m done working for the day I might take a look at Amazon reviews – but I’m usually too busy. I know now that I always get a handful of negative ones if a book’s on a 99p offer – people who wouldn’t have bought the book if they’d stopped to read a bit first. Lovely stuff like ‘This book has far too much sailing!’ ‘This book has description!’ or, my favourite one-star, crushingly, ‘This author is a cat lover.’ Guilty as charged…

7. Besides being persistent and correcting your spelling errors, what’s your best advice for a new author? 

Identify a time that you can write every day in peace. Late at night, early in the morning, straight after lunch, whenever. Warn your children / partner / housemate that this is your time. No disturbance unless the house is on fire, and even then, only if they can’t put it out themselves. Start with just ten minutes, or fifteen, or give yourself a word limit: 100, 150, 200. Every day. You’ll find that the story grows in your head while you’re doing other stuff, and soon that ten minutes won’t be long enough, and those 200 words become 400. Don’t correct your spelling errors at this point  – or re-read either, except for yesterday’s work. Keep spinning that story. Corrections will come once you’ve got it done.

8. What’s your definition of writer misery?

It happens three times a week. I’ve just got started at my desk after lunch when the ride-on mower on the football pitch outside my window starts up. It makes a noise like a helicopter landing, and is too intermittent to tune out. It goes on for ages – their record was 4 hours 10 mins – and all creative work has to stop until it does. Drives my composer husband and me round the bend. It’s a school pitch – my former school – and we’ve done our best to negotiate with them, but they’re not having it. Sports trumps the arts….

9. What’s your definition of writer happiness?

Being settled into my writing routine for a decent amount of time – I mean, several weeks. No trips south, nothing going on – I get loads done, and even keep up with emails.

10. What’s your favorite book on writing? 

D’you know, I don’t think I’ve ever read one … but I’d recommend all would-be writers to try different writers’ groups till you find one where you feel at home. I resisted that because I felt I’d be better to use that evening writing, but our local Arts Development Officer started one in our area, and goodness, those are now my best mates. We meet monthly and are planning our annual writing day out, in early November, in Yell. Everyone brings a 15 minute exercise for us all to try, and something for lunch. We all go home with a headful of ideas.

11. What book are you reading right now?

Three: factual, A Life and Death in Tudor England: Thomas More, Joanne Page … I wanted a summer challenge, so I’m in the middle of the Frederica Quartet by A S Byatt, and about to start book 3, The Babel Tower … one of our readers’ group summer books is Soundings Edge, a Hornblower-style sea thriller by Adrian Westbrooke, and I enjoyed it so much I’m now on book 2, Latitudes Edge…  no, make that four books, I also have a review book, Into the Badlands by John L Williams, which is an amazingly vivid account of him going to the States and interviewing crime writers. It was first published in 1991 and has been reissued – fascinating stuff.

Marsali Taylor’s writing career began with plays for her school pupils to perform in the local Festival. Her first Shetland-set crime novel starring quick-witted, practical sailor Cass Lynch and Inverness DI Gavin Macrae was published in 2013, and there are now fourteen in the series. Reviewers have praised their clever plotting, lively characters and vividly-evoked setting. Marsali’s interest in history is shown in her self-published Women’s Suffrage in Shetland, WWI diaries Forgotten Heroines, and Norse-set crime novella, Footsteps in the Dew. She’s a regular reviewer for the e-zine Mystery People and a columnist for Practical Boat Owner. Hobbies include sailing her 8m yacht, drama and learning to play the flute. She lives on Shetland’s scenic westside with her composer husband, five extremely spoiled cats and, at the moment, one big and six small kittens.