Author Patrick Gale joining us on for a chat on Tuesday 16th June between 1 and 2pm

[RachelMumsnet]

Patrick Gale, author of Mumsnet Best Award winner, Notes from an Exhibition will be joining us for a chat and to tell us about his new book, The Whole Day Through. If you're unable to join us on Tuesday please send your questions in advance to Patrick here.

Thanks PG.
How very dare you - I'm Cornish through and through, my luvver.
I'll add your backlist to my Amazon wishlist and look forward to reading and neglecting my wee boy.
x

PS Without being too nosy, is mental illness something close to home? I had PND so am convinced I'm a frustrated genius, rather than just a mad bint.

Thank you, this will be a good claim to fame for me to bring up at my book club meeting ( ashamed to belong to a book club with my appaling lack of known authors)
I am drawn to one of your older books, The Cat Sanctuary as I love cats but I fear that something nasty may happen to them in the book; do you like cats? as that will probably answer that!

PPS My hubby was an author at HarperCollins. He asked if that's where you still are? Some of our pals work/ed there (dontcha know). We know all the best people.

Hi Patrick,

I've just found The Whole Day Through in WH Smith in St Ives, Cambridgeshire so I bought it and have a blissful afternoon planned sitting in the sunshine and reading it.

reluctantly I must go and do some work - thanks so much for being here today !

has he gone?

Hello all. Sorry. This hopeless connection defeated me and I vanished for about ten minutes. I'll stay on until 2.30 so nobody feels shortchanged. I'm also going to answer any older questions I've not had a chance to read yet, so if your lunch hour is over, sorry but do call back later on for your answers...Beware baby laptops. They have NO POWER!

Hi Patrick... if you are still there...???

After popping in a few days ago just to say thank you I have thought of a question!

I find the biggest strength, for me, with your novels are always your characters. They are very complicated and 'real' as a result of this they have complex reactions to the settings and plots you put them in.

How do you go about creating your characters? I mean the physical process (do you have scrap books, note books, do they become real to you - like Jane Austen is said to have spoken of her characters like real people, do you mindmap, do you draw them...?) and also mentally - do you have an idea how your mind actually creates them - just what passes through your head to make your characters so believeable?

Dear Prozacpoopsie, yes mental illness is something fairly close to home, though less now than in the last few years. One of my siblings had a really tough nervous breakdown during my childhood and more recently I had a boyfriend with bipolar disorder (also a painter, funnily enough) who killed himself. The latter was partly why i was so insistent Rachel would fail in all her suicide attempts! Read Kay Redfield Jamieson if you haven't already. she's brilliant on the links between creativity and "madness" of various kinds.

Thanks, Teafortwo. I always start a novel with character-building. I think the most lifelike plots aren't really plots at all but simply what happens when you bring two or more characters together. I build my characters pretty slowly, over about a year, before I actually start writing the novel they'll appear in. Ideally it should feel when I'm writing that I'm simply giving the most accurate account I can of scenes that are playing out in my head. By the time I'm writing, it doesn't feel as though I'm making stuff up. But then I do have a theory that most novelists are basically, mildly mentally ill!

Hello Shineoncrazydiamond. My favourite authors? I seem to like the quiet ones. I love Ann Tyler and Colm Toibin and I loved Carol Shields. I think Rose Tremain is pretty wonderful and so is my new discovery, Marina Lewycka, who I sense is a much more serious writer than her publishers are marketing her as. And of course, MaryAnnSingleton, I love Armistead Maupin's work. He was a bit inspiration to me early on in my career as was Iris Murdoch, and I'm lucky to count him as a friend... If any of you are looking for novels to entice reluctant readers of the 12-14 age group, I can recommend The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. Very scary but also really thoughtful adventure that throws up lots of interesting questions about gender and ethics while managing to be an edge of your seat thriller...

Alas, fruitshoots, The Cat Sanctuary does indeed have cats in it but something pretty nasty happens to them towards the end. I like that book, even though it was pretty early on. I dared to write a novel that was completely female and got my wrists slapped for daring to encroach on feminist territory. Odd, really. I haven't a misogynist bone in my body but because I like writing female characters it's inevitable that some of my female characters have a bad time and I regularly find that gets me accused of misogyny in a way that I doubt would happen if I wrote under a female name... Any thoughts?

Oh I love An Unquiet Mind - such a wonderful and clever book.

I love the 'light' in your writing. I hope you know what I mean by that - not sure I can explain it further. Is that influenced by Cornwall do you think, or do you think you'd write like that if you lived somewhere murky?

I wondered how you feel when you read all these comments from red-blooded women of a certain age who are swooning over your picture Patrick?

I think it's very clever to be able to write from a female point of view if you are a man and vice versa. I couldn't write from a man's point of view as I can't imagine how they think!
Maybe you should have written as Pat Gale and left people guessing!

and I think your theory that most novelists are basically, mildly mentally ill is also true of artists!

It was great to talk to you, I will definately buy some of your books but might steer clear of The Cat Sanctuary!!

Dear AHundredtimes. Light is certain in big supply where I live in Cornwall, but I suspect the light you mean is more an emotional/spiritual thing. I certain try to inject my work with a sense of possibility and i suppose i tend to err on the side of forgiveness, which perhaps injects a light into even my darker stories.

No, I did mean the 'air'. It's in your prose!

Patrick: I just wanted to thank you for writing Rough Music and A Sweet Obscurity, both of which tie, I think, as my favourites of yours.

(I appear to have signed on for an Arvon course where you appear, but (a) am a long way down on the list (b) would have to dust down my shaming Great 21st Century Novel and contemplate it in despair.)

Believe me, LaineyW I'm 47 (not 46 as the nice man from the Indie so kindly said I was) so swooning from red blooded persons of whatever gender is always gratefully accepted! Enjoy your sunny afternoon's reading. I've had such a good time chatting here and only wish I'd had a faster connection. Any Gloucestershire mums out there who want to come along to Tetbury tonight will find me doing my schtick at the Yellow Lighted Bookshop at 7pm. All good wishes, PG

Big thanks to Patrick who has signed off for now. He will be answering the advance questions later this afternoon and the full archived version will be up on the site tomorrow. Thanks to all those who sent in questions and again to Patrick Gale for joining us.

dear Saltire, Never tell a novelist that you lend their books to people; we have a living to make and we get no royalties on personal loans!! I tend to read non-fiction when I'm writing, often around the subject of the book, so have recently been reading a lot of venereology stuff. In between I devour fiction, often in a haphazard, unplanned way, either reading books by friends or books that have simply come my way. But yes I always read anything by colm Toibin, Ann tyler, Vikram Seth, Alan Hollinghurst, Damon Galgut, Armistead Maupin, Patrick Ness or Charlotte mendelsson. I've just finished an adorable new novel from Tiffany Murray (not out yet but look out for her.) And I have certain books I re-read whenever I'm feeling sad or have a cold or whatever. Persuasion and Mansfield Park are firm favourites, as is Middlemarch and Love in a Cold Climate. God, I'm such a girl, aren't I? I'd say I read Will Self and Wilbur Smith but you wouldn't believe me.

FrannyandZooey asks who my favourite characters are. from my own books, I'd have to say the hero and heroine of my latest novel, The Whole Day Through because they're so new that I still feel very protective towards them. They're also rather hopeless emotionally which I respond to because I'm pretty tough by comparison, I suspect. As for other people's characters, I love Mrs Madrigal, from Tales of the City, and the heroine in the awful hat in Brief Encounter and I've always had a terrific crush on the rather uptight naval hero of Persuasion... As for your comment about the author photograph, you're too kind and my publisher's marketing department are too flattering. the reality is distinctly greyer and more wrinkled but the sofa is much the same, despite the best efforts of one of our dogs to ruin it.