Author Sophie Green loves to explore the issues and pressures that shape women’s lives through warm and multifaceted characters. We caught up with her to chat about her new novel, Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel.
AWW: The Duchess Hotel is at the heart of the story. It’s such a warm environment that all the characters are drawn to. Is it inspired by a real place?
Sophie: It’s inspired by two real places and they’re both in Victoria. The story idea originally came to me in 2017 or 2018. I was staying in a hotel in Melbourne with my mum. There was a lady who was staying there, and it became clear that she’d been there for months.
It was a very cosy, familiar, fairly private hotel. And so that environment made me start thinking about writing a story set in the hotel. In fact, I did start writing The Duchess Hotel quite a long time ago and had a very different version of it.
I was thinking, it can’t be that hotel because that’s in Melbourne and for storytelling purposes, it’s easier to set up these sorts of stories in smaller communities. Mum had stayed at Delgany, Portsea, when it was a hotel. I looked it up and it was basically The Duchess Hotel. It’s this massive sandstone building just as you go through Portsea Village. It’s a really impressive building. I found these old black and white photos of it, and I thought, yes, that is The Duchess Hotel.
What attracted you to telling a story that revolved around a hotel?
It was more the woman herself. We started talking to her and she said, ‘Oh, I’ve been here for a few months.’ I can still see her fiddling with her earring. She said, ‘I’ve just been figuring a few things out.’ I thought, Oh, that’s interesting. She was in her fifties. She was quite well put together. I thought, in what environment could a woman like that figure a few things out? It had to be in a hotel like that.
If you’ve spent decades of your life taking care of other people, simply going to an apartment on your own doesn’t do the same job. It has to be an environment where there are people making the beds, doing the washing, doing the cooking.
So that idea intrigued me as well, because I’m interested in women’s lives and what I see to be big crisis points in a lot of women’s lives and a lot of it is to do with the fact that they’ve been taking care of everyone else for years and then they either soldier on and are miserable or they break. And she broke.
So she had to go to this hotel and then it was this rich storytelling opportunity for having a whole lot of people in a confined location. They’re right there in a hotel and they’re interacting all the time, and that meant I could have Shane. Now Shane’s been with me for many years.
I had two attempts at a story with Shane and just wasn’t working. Then I finally, when I was writing this, I thought, ‘Oh, this is where he belongs.’
I read that both Frances and Shane existed before this story did and I thought, ‘Of course, these characters exist outside of this world’, because they feel so well rounded. I can imagine you coming up with characters and trying to feel out where they belong in the worlds you create. How is it that you find these characters? Where do they spring from?
Frances was in the very original draft of The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club. Only three chapters remain of that original draft, and she did not make any of them. When I was writing Fairvale, I wanted to have an older female character who’d grown up on the land, and had particular relationships to the land, and family.
I put her in and the details of her life were pretty much as they are now, except they’re in the Northern Territory in that novel. But it just didn’t work. I had too many characters. Fairvale had five points of view and I just thought I can’t have another so she came out all together and then she just stayed with me.
My best friend Jen knows this because she read the original draft of Fairvale. She kept saying, ‘Frances. What are you gonna do with her?’ Then every now and again, we talk about Frances. Then Dutchess Hotel in its original incarnation was a much darker story. Frances was in that. I wrote about 20,000 words, I think, four or five years ago.
Joan was in that, so was Genevieve, who’s now a secondary character, and Kiralee, but Frances popped up in that. I thought, okay, I think I found the place for her. I’m just not sure that the story is right. I kept her parked in The Duchess Hotel.
Some characters just disappear. I have plenty of story ideas that don’t come to anything. I’ve started plenty of manuscripts that get to 20,000 words. But those two in particular kept hanging around and that at a certain point I realised they belonged in the same story. So now they are.
I’m interested in hearing you talk a little bit more about how you decide which character belongs where, and with who, and how hey relate to each other. In particular, Frances has a daughter in Art Hour at The Duchess Hotel. Did the original Frances have a have a daughter or is that something that changed?
No, she didn’t and also [Frances’ daughter] Alison was not originally a point of view character in The Duchess Hotel. I had Frances, Joan and Kirrily, and in the original version I had Genevieve as well. When I was writing the draft I kept thinking something’s off here. Something’s not working. I kept thinking, ‘Oh it’s because I originally had four of them’, and then I realised that Alison was coming through in all of Frances’s chapters anyway. So I thought, ‘Oh, she really, she really wants to be a main character.’
This had happened to me before in The Bellbird River Country Choir, I had a character called Victoria, and she has a cousin called Gabrielle. I originally had as four points of view. Well, Gabrielle just insisted her way into every single scene and I thought, all right, she really wants to be a main character.
The same thing with Duchess. Alison was just coming through so strongly, and I could see that she needed a storyline of her own.
I often say they tell me what to do when I’m first developing a story. Once I know where it’s set and what year it’s in and how I’m bringing them all together, I then sit quietly and say, ‘All right, who is around who would like this story told?’
I’m always interested in an author’s process, particularly for a book like The Duchess Hotel which has so many complicated, intertwining storylines and relationships and they all have to kind of click together. Are you a plotter, or a “pantser” – someone who writes by the seat of their pants?
I plan rigorously because I work a full-time job. I used to be a pantser, thinking that’s what one did. I do think every writer has to find out their own method. I certainly stress the importance of knowing your own nature as a writer
I write really quickly. I get a lot of words out in a quick spurt, and it therefore makes more sense for me to plan. The character development comes first. There’s a framework I use from an American writer called Francesca Lia Bloch who writes magical realism young adult fiction. She has a book called The Thorn Necklace in which there’s something called The 12 Questions. Once I saw that in her book, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s handy.’
I used the 12 questions for each character. So, before I start anything, I get to know them. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about who they are, and their history and any sorts of details. And then I will move on to what I call a major plot points document, which is when I chart the arc of their story.
And that’s more an emotional arc than it is a plot arc. Where are they starting? And where do I think they end up? Then I think about crisis points and challenges and all sorts of things. I put that in a separate document and then I might do some more broad notes about the shape of the story and the time it’s set in and what goes on in the seasons.
Then my master document is what I call the grid, unimaginatively, and it’s a colour coded table in Microsoft Word where each character gets a colour so that I can see the flow of their points of view as I go. And I will plot about 10 to 15 chapters ahead, knowing that it will change.
The book is so character and relationship driven, but it canvasses a lot of social issues. I was interested to read that when you were thinking about Joan’s storyline, you were exploring the 4B movement in South Korea. Can you tell me a bit about what attracted you to that and why you wanted to delve into that?
It’s around the idea of de-centring men. Joan is of a generation – and there are several generations and it’s still happening – where, the way our social system is set up, women have to engage with men in order to get money and often the only liberation came through getting married because that’s how you had access to money and status.
I always bring the World Wars into my novels in some respect, because I do think those are hugely significant social events, apart from military events and political events, that continue to have an impact on the way our society is structured. And I wanted to bring the Vietnam War in with Shane because I think that is an unspoken influence in a lot of people’s lives in terms of psychological impacts on families and health.
So, if we look at the history of the 20th Century and the impact of wars on women’s development, in particular what they were allowed to do. [In] World War II women worked and felt the freedom of having money to spend and no one overseeing what they were doing and then the men came back for war and women were basically told to get back in the house.
Joan is in the wake of all of that and the social structure that said, ‘Okay get back in the house. The men need to do the work now and you need to make sure they can do their work and provide that life.’ Which is all well and good if the men play their part as well.
That’s the fundamental part of it. A lot of women want to have that life and they’re happy to do it, but the men need to play their part. And so many of them don’t. And in Joan’s case, Isaac didn’t, and the 4B movement and de-centering men is a lot around that. These men for generations now have not been doing what they’re meant to do so we’re just going to take them out of our lives altogether and we’re just going to set up our lives separately.
Part of my job as a novelist, I think, is to keep track of all those social movements now, as well as what was happening then. Because my novels are set in the past, what’s happening now can’t be brought in as a social movement. But I can certainly think about what readers are thinking about and what’s important to them.
One thing that I really wanted to ask about is Joan’s love – and indeed her need – for art and creative expression. As a reader, you really get this strong sense that she’s been suffocating without it and she’s filling her lungs at The Duchess. You practice an art. The art of writing. Is the way you describe Joan’s need for creative expression, how you feel about writing?
How I feel about writing is also how I feel about teaching yoga, which I’ve been doing for quite a while. I don’t think I’d be writing without yoga teaching, because the way I teach is an intensely creative activity. I don’t teach the same class twice and I will change the class when I’m in it.
That’s how I was trained – that you adapt to who’s in front of you. And so, this is how it relates to writing. I can do all the planning in the world for the novels, as I do for my class, but I need to be able to shift and change in the moment and that’s actually where that hum in the veins comes from. It’s leaping without a net into a creative circumstance, which is can be terrifying, but that’s where the hum comes from and the excitement and the electricity, because you don’t know. If you’re prepared to take that risk and jump into the unknown knowing you have the bedrock of planning to catch you, then it can be really, really exciting.
Buy Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel here and read our book review here.
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Book Review: Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel by Sophie Green
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