Walking with Sarah Jane Butler, author
The writer shares her love of walking, the richness that comes from writing slowly, and how her connection with the East Sussex landscape informs her words
“Walking is the best way I know to be fully in a landscape because it allows you to pay close attention, and to experience it with all your senses if you let it. That’s why it’s such a great place to explore characters.”
Sarah Jane Butler is a self-proclaimed slow writer. For 30 years, she worked as a copywriter – crafting words for other people. But alongside her professional practice she was also writing fiction – writing poems and publishing short stories, while taking time and care to write her first novel, Starling, published by Fairlight Books.
We met many years ago through our membership of writers’ organisation 26. And although we share a connection through our mutual love of writing, we’d never had a deep and meaningful chat about it. So after reading Starling and seeing how walking in nature is threaded through the story and the main character’s life, I just had to know more. We chatted about where she got the idea for the story, her connection with the Sussex landscape, and its role in both her life and creativity.
Hi Sarah, thanks for chatting with me – please tell The Writer’s Walk readers about yourself
I’m Sarah Jane Butler, and I’m a writer. That sounds like a confession but really it’s a statement of utter joy – I love being a writer. But for most of my working life, I wrote for other people – I’d have said I was an editor or a copywriter – and I wrote my own stories in tiny fragments of my life. For more than thirty years work came first.
Copywriting taught me so much, not least never to be precious about any word I’d written, and that I can always write something no matter what else is going on. And good listening. I had the amazing privilege of working with voluntary organisations alongside people with complex, challenging stories that it was my job to tell. It was brilliant for so long. But now I’m relearning how to bring a little chaos into my writing – so many years of imposing other people’s order, even in the liveliest copy, had begun to hem me in. I’m loving the freedom of writing for myself at last, age 61.
I’ve lived in the same small village in East Sussex for almost thirty years, and I grew up nearby so I’m deeply rooted in this landscape. It’s a place of deep-sided valleys, woods and tiny odd-shaped fields, with streams and springs everywhere. It’s very important to me and I help lead our local wildlife group, working with farmers and residents to protect and rebuild our biodiversity. And I’m part of the core team of Project Ripple Effect, a citizen science project run by University of Sussex and Friends of the River Medway - we set it up in 2023 and have about 30 volunteers out testing the river for chemical pollutants and invertebrates. It’s been so good to do something practical and positive with other people and to learn about the river – beneath the surface it’s even more miraculous than I could have dreamed. Mayfly larvae are my new star creatures!
When I’m not doing that I’m probably growing vegetables in the garden, cooking, or snoozing. I do a lot of snoozing. Or chilling with my friends and family – I live with my husband, and our two grown children, a brand new grandchild and our mums all live within an hour of home. It can get quite busy so I take great care to carve out time on my own – that’s vital for my sanity and my writing.
“I’m deeply rooted in the Sussex landscape. It’s a place of deep-sided valleys, woods and tiny odd-shaped fields, with streams and springs everywhere. It’s very important to me and I help lead our local wildlife group, working with farmers and residents to protect and rebuild our biodiversity.”
Your fiction debut was Starling – a beautiful story about a young woman who lives a nomadic existence, travelling in a converted van with Mar, her strong-willed mother until Mar leaves without explanation while Starling is out foraging one morning. It’s a magnificent ode to living a life at one with nature. How did you get the idea for it?
It’s hard to pinpoint one starting point for Starling but I had a picture in my mind very early on of a young woman walking away from something painful and frightening. She was in a landscape that I felt I knew. I didn’t know who she was back then but her story was always going to be set in the natural world. It’s so rich and offers a writer like me so many opportunities to reveal character. It’s also what I know best – I haven’t lived in a town since 1986!
I also knew I wanted to explore what it might be like to grow up with a radical and tricky parent. We need people who are uncompromising and who tell us the truths we try to hide from – I’ve long admired human rights defenders for their courage and determination, protectors of the natural world too. But how do their children feel when their parent puts a cause before them? Mar is utterly unbending in her commitment to living lightly on the planet, in a way that I’m not, though I admire her in some ways. It’s not easy to be that relentless. I’ve made compromises, as most of us do – so I like to question those decisions.
Mar is an uncomfortable character so it was important to me to have others, equally committed to living well with the earth, who were easier to connect to – though even Em isn’t perfect. I’m never interested in perfect people!
Many years ago I was extremely lost walking in a mid-winter forest in South Wales. I was with a friend and we’d quite simply forgotten how early the sun set in January, and we found ourselves in the pitch dark with no idea how to get back to our base. We saw a small flickering light in the trees and followed it to a bender made of poles and tarpaulins in the heart of the wood. We called out. The young woman who lived there invited us in – her bender was a place of warmth and beauty, big enough for a double bed, a burner, rugs and places to sit in the silence of the forest. She was due to give birth in a few days, and the midwife was going to come out to her there in the woods. I had a one-year-old and was awestruck, a little bit jealous, and also glad to be going back home to running water and electricity. That young woman planted the real seed for the story of Starling and her community, I suspect. There are always other ways to live, if we’re brave enough.
You took several years to write Starling. What did you learn along the way?
So much! I knew absolutely nothing about writing a novel when I started. I’d written short stories and kept finding myself trying to write new ones but they always grew out of proportion so I knew I wanted to tell something bigger and more sprawling that I couldn't fit into a short story without ruining it.
I did masses of research and wrote the opening of Starling so many times. I just couldn’t get any further. In the end I signed up for a three-month online novel-writing course with the Unthank School of Writing and it saved me because – as well as helping me think about how a novel might work – I was forced every week to move on and write something new. I had to stop polishing the same old phrases, which is eminently satisfying if you love playing with words, but you’ll never write a novel that way.
I was unwell for significant chunks of the nine years it took from first notes to the publication of Starling. I have ME and it became much worse part way through so I had to take a year off work and writing. For long stretches I also had caring responsibilities for several people in my family and they always came first, though it was really important to me to keep thinking about Starling and to write when I could, no matter what else was happening – writing, and thinking about writing, helped me to stay sane in some difficult times.
I learned too that writing poetry is great if you’re not well. It’s short and you can keep coming back to it and see it new each time. And because it’s at once so condensed and so open, it’s like an explosion in your other writing – if you’ve just written a poem your prose is going to be so much more alive.
“I was unwell for significant chunks of the nine years it took from first notes to the publication of Starling. I learned that writing poetry is great if you’re not well. It’s short and you can keep coming back to it and see it new each time.”
You’re working on a second book. Can you tells us what it’s about?
This book is non-fiction, and its working title in my notebooks is very prosaic: River Book, though we know that will change as I find my way into it.
River Book is about how, despite my lifelong connection with the river Medway (my Dad was the river engineer when I was a baby, and I lived beside it as a young woman) I began to question my belonging there after years of spending less time in and on the water. We no longer lived beside the river and my health meant I often didn’t have the energy to swim or kayak. I felt that I no longer had the right to say I had a place there. I wanted to think about this – what does it actually mean to feel you belong somewhere, or don't? So I travelled very slowly from my home in the Medway's upper catchment all the way to the estuary – I walked, swam, paddled and cycled over 18 months – and by the end I’d found a river community that welcomed me, and so many people with interesting and complicated relationships with rivers. So I’m writing from my own experience of knowing a river in many ways and exploring humans’ connections and disconnections to rivers, looking at river lives across the world and through time.
You describe yourself as a slow writer. What does that mean for you, and do you have any tips on embracing the ‘slow movement?’
I’m not a slow person by nature and I’ve had to learn to take things slowly. What this mostly means is that I work really intensively for short bursts. I can write about 500 new words a day and if I try to write more for consecutive days I start churning out blandness. (Obviously I used to write a lot more when I was creating copy.) For ages I felt inadequate because the internet is full of people crowing about their massive daily word counts, but I’m happy to be slow. I've realised that loads of writers I admire work to more or less the same rhythm as I do – I think that if you are creating work that’s driven by character rather than plot, and has a certain richness of language, writing slowly works well. It definitely does for me.
Writing slowly means I have time to get into a flow and let the words come, to explore the language and metaphor for every scene. I like to visualise myself in a scene as I write it, as if I were a film camera: what is my mind’s eye highlighting at this particular moment for my characters? And I consciously ask myself what emotions the characters are feeling right now in this scenario. It’s going to be interesting writing non-fiction but I think I’m still going to bring that visual and emotional approach to each scene – I want readers to feel something when they read about Dave and Margaret, living in their 80s above their abandoned riverside restaurant that was destroyed in a massive flood years before. They can’t leave – no one would buy it. And they fear and love the river in equal measure, seeing daily the mark Dave made on the wall downstairs to show how high the waters rose, far above his head.
I need space away from the words. Once I’ve got the day’s words down, I let them simmer. They might have thrown up a question about a character’s motivation, or what two people are going to say when they finally meet, or why I’m interested in exploring something. I’ll ask myself a question, go for a walk or lie on my sofa, and see what comes into my mind. That’s just as vital to my writing process as actually putting words on the page. And in fact I’m absolutely fine with taking days or even weeks away from my writing. I’ve always come back with new perspectives and ideas that have made my writing richer.
I take time out to read and meet people too, and to go to galleries and plays. It can look like I’m slacking and running away from my desk, but even if my writing isn’t in the forefront of my mind when I’m doing something else, those encounters so often spark ideas or challenge me to think again.
Your character Starling leaves the van she’s always called home and walks away to build a new life for herself. It feels like walking is a thread that runs through her story, so I wondered what role walking plays in your writing and life?
Starling makes two significant journeys on foot that more or less bookend her story, and they’re quite different emotionally although both times she’s walking alone through the natural world. I loved exploring how she’d interact with the landscape on each journey – how days of rain would make her feel, for example, or encountering strangers. Walking is the best way I know to be fully in a landscape because it allows you to pay close attention, and to experience it with all your senses if you let it. That’s why it’s such a great place to explore characters.
I walk every day if I can. Mostly I walk from my house into the fields and woods around my village, often going no more than a mile or two because my energy is limited by living with ME. I’ve had ME for almost 30 years and these days it reduces how long I can walk for quite significantly. As a young woman I surged about the landscape, often running, always pushing myself to go as far as I could. But I noticed far less than I do now. I can take an hour to walk a mile, because I’ll examine the plants, stop and listen to the wind, sit on a stile and watch a kestrel hover. I couldn’t have written the details of the natural world that Starling is immersed in if I didn’t have this experience myself.
There are times when I can’t walk, and it’s very hard. I never take it for granted, and am filled with joy when I’m well again and able to step out of my front door. Walking is central to my happiness, and it’s where I think too – it’s right at the heart of my writing life.
“Writing slowly means I have time to get into a flow and let the words come, to explore the language and metaphor for every scene. I like to visualise myself in a scene as I write it, as if I were a film camera: what is my mind’s eye highlighting at this particular moment for my characters?”
How would you describe your walking style:
Happy Hiker
Reluctant Rambler
Sunday Stroller
Wild Weekender
Hmm. Maybe Slow Savourer?
Headphones or head in the clouds?
Definitely head in the clouds – mostly my mind’s full of words so there’s no room for anything else, and if it isn’t I want to savour the silence!
What’s the most memorable walk you’ve ever done?
Oh, it’s hard to pick. But I think I’ll choose a day I spent in the hills behind Kilchoan on the Ardnamurchan peninsula on the west coast of Scotland, because it made me so deeply happy. We were camping there by the sea’s edge and my husband set off for a couple of days’ sea kayaking. A boy in a nearby tent and I had been talking about the nature around us – he was about 14 and wonderfully knowledgable, far more so than I. He came over to tell me he’d found sundews – a native carnivorous plant – up a track behind the village. I’d know it by the blue twine around the gatepost, and from there I should simply head uphill. So I packed some food and set off, climbing quite steeply – and there they were, scattered all over the hill – tiny golden discs fringed with scarlet tendrils, each dotted with a sticky dew to entrap a passing insect. It was a complete surprise and I’d never have known if that boy hadn’t told me where to look.
I kept going up the hill, beyond the paths, till I reached a small summit and sat to eat my lunch. Kilchoan is the furthest west you can go on the British mainland, I think, and I could see sea on three sides – over the sound to Tobermory on Mull to my south, out to Tiree in the far western distance, over the small islands of Eigg and Rùm to the high ridges of Skye to the north, and inland to the shades of Ben Nevis to the east. And below me, a small lake.
I’d seen no one all day and all I could hear was the wind in the grasses so I clambered down the hill to the water’s edge. It didn’t matter that I’d brought no towel or costume: who was going to see me? And I didn’t care if anyone did – it felt utterly natural to strip and enter the water in my skin alone. The water was only just deep enough, but I swam, surrounded by golden hills under the late afternoon sun until the chill began to find me.
It’s over five years since that day and I treasure it still for its beauty, wildness and freedom.
If you could take a walk with anyone, real or fictional, alive or gone, who would it be? And why?
I’d go down to the river with my Dad. He was the river engineer when I was a child, and he’s right at the heart of my river book but we never had the chance to really talk about what the river meant to him because he died a few years ago after a very long time of living with dementia. He loved the beauty of the river, and painted it, but he didn’t know much about its wildlife – he had books about concrete and could get emotional about a beautiful bridge but birds, fish and insects weren’t his thing. We had the river in common though, and I still paddle the wooden open canoe he made. I’d love to walk the river with him and hear his lifetime of its stories.
“I can take an hour to walk a mile, because I’ll examine the plants, stop and listen to the wind, sit on a stile and watch a kestrel hover. I couldn’t have written the details of the natural world that Starling is immersed in if I didn’t have this experience myself.”
One word round
One thing you always take with you on a walk?
Phone (I take lots of photos of plants)One thing you always do on a walk?
Talk (to myself)One word of advice for aspiring fiction writers?
Read (widely, critically and analytically)
Can you share a walking-inspired writing prompt for our readers?
Go for a walk in your character’s shoes. Walk with their gait and energy and let go of those inhibitions! Ask them questions, hear how they answer, notice what they see. When you get back, take your character for a walk on the page. Find the splinters of light on your character’s inner life that your walk in their shoes has shown you.
Thanks for sharing your writing experience with us, Sarah. I loved hearing about how you explore your characters by exploring the landscape you walk in. There’s a lot to be said about being a slow writer – and slow walker!
Happy walking and writing until next time,
Sarah
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