Author Sam Mills on the writing and eventual publication of her inventive and thoroughly entertaining new novel, The Watermark.
I first came up with the idea for The Watermark in the summer of 2010. I wanted to write about a Nabokovian writer called Augustus Fate, who decides to solve his writer’s block by kidnapping two young people, drugging them and planting them in his novel, giving his limp characters greater richness and depth. A control freak, he becomes obsessed with dictating their every plot move. Jaime and Rachel succeed in escaping his story, but continue surfing through books, seeking a return to the ‘real’ world, although the longer they spend in these narratives, the less certain they are of what constitutes reality. I knew that it would be an ambitious, labyrinthine work. But I didn’t imagine that the project would take so long, that I wouldn’t finish the book until the pandemic or see it published until 2024.
It took a few years to whittle down the stories they would travel through from eight to five. It kicks off in Oxford 1860, jumps to an alternative utopian Manchester in 2014, (alternate between the 2008 crash never occurred…), to a Russian story set in 1920, with magic and folklore, where my characters turn into birds (illustrated in a graphic novel section by Christiana Spens), to a section set in London 2047, where the couple nearly divorce and one has an affair with a robot artist, and finally, Edwardian England, where death and tragedy strike. I wanted time to exist with a Narnian bent, so that Jaime and Rachel evolve from adolescence in Victorian England to a midlife crisis in London to being old and wheezy in Edwardian Oxford at the end, for them to play out the whole arc of a lifetime’s love affair without time in the ‘real’ world leaping forward.
Free Will Versus Fate
I’m always fretting/mulling on the free will versus fate question. When I started the book, my mum was dying of cancer at the age of 65. She had become quite depressed and defeated in her final years, and always spoke about luck and fate rather than freedom, because I think she felt trapped – her in her job, in being a carer to my Dad. So it came from a raw place, my wondering on how much control we do have over our lives, how much we are shaped by fortune, religion, serendipity, genes, upbringing, society, and how much we can transcend those factors. In each story, I wanted to play with the tension between narrator and character, an uncertainty as to who is writing the story. In the Victorian narrative, for example, Fate takes the Nabokovian stance that he must be absolutely in control of his characters, and so Jaime and Rachel felt oppressed and puppeteered; in the Manchester section, they have the luxury of free will and freedom to create the plot, but also feel lost and burdened by responsibility. I wanted to break the traditional rules of a speculative novel whereby you build your world with stable precepts and anchor the plot with set rules. I wanted characters to speculate and theorise about how things work (they became enchanted with the cliché idea of a mythical figure, The Storyteller, who will save them) only to find their ideas collapse, fail to cohere or pan out. My characters are often left bewildered, representing the unknowability of life, the uncertainties of fate.
Although it took a decade for me to finish The Watermark, I wasn’t able to work on it full-time. Family crises, lack of money, lack of energy, slowed me down. Of those 10 years, I spent around 4 on the book. I look back and associate the writing of it with certain life phases and key events. I wrote the Manchester section when I was living in that city, setting up the indie press Dodo Ink, and dating someone who lived there. In 2017, I broke off to work on a memoir after my agent got excited by a piece I’d written about my Dad, and suggested I turn it into a book – which became The Fragments of my Father. Around 2020, I was broke and struggling, so a generous grant from The Royal Literary Fund saved me from bankruptcy. Then the pandemic hit. I usually write in cafes, so found it very claustrophobic to be stuck at home. I didn’t even have a desk, and often ended up sitting up in bed writing, laptop on my duvet. I finally resolved the tricksy ending of the book, sought a new agent, signed with Cathryn Summerhayes, and finally, in Spring 2022, it went out on submission.
Selling The Watermark
It went out to 18 publishers. At first, there was lots of enthusiasm, lots of interest. But, as the weeks went by, one by one they dropped out. Then came the last day for bids. I got an email through saying that Anne Meadows from Granta wanted to speak to me. We had a chat about the book. It seemed very promising. I went off to my local Curzon, desperate to see a film, to lose myself in darkness and the oblivion of another story in order to stop sitting there and pressing ‘refresh’ on my inbox every 30 seconds. Batman was the only film I hadn’t seen, so Batman it was. When I came out, there was an offer from Granta to publish. For a few weeks afterwards, I didn’t feel particularly happy. This will sound melodramatic but we’d been so close to not getting a deal that the panic lingered; I felt as though I’d been crossing a road and narrowly avoided a car crash. Gradually, it sank in. We signed contracts and the deal was announced and I found myself hurrying down Shaftesbury Avenue for a lunch with my editor, let down by Google maps and running late, an exhilaration filled me: it’s been sold! It will be published. I sat down opposite her, breathless and happy, and thought: I got there in the end.
(c) Sam Mills
About The Watermark by Sam Mills:
Rachel and Jaime: their story isn’t simple. It might not even be their story.
Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is struggling with his latest creation. But when Jaime and Rachel stumble into his remote cottage, he spies opportunity, imprisoning them inside his novel-in-progress. Now, the fledgling couple must try to find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels. ‘And as they move from Victorian Oxford to a utopian Manchester, a harsh Russian winter to an AI-dominated near-future, so too does the narrative of their relationship change time and again. Together, they must figure out if this relationship of so many presents can have any future at all.
The Watermark is a heart-stopping exploration of the narratives we cling to in the course of a life, and the tendency of the world to unravel them. Kaleidoscopic and wildly imaginative, it asks: how can we truly be ourselves, when Fate is pulling the strings?
Order your copy of The Watermark online here.
Read more Meet the Authors of Speculative Fiction on Writing.ie here.
