As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Chris Parker on the research process behind his novel Nameless Lake (Salt, 2023).
For me, one of the most immediately striking things about Nameless Lake is its structure, particularly in terms of how the story content is broken up into such small, discrete chunks. I wonder where your inspiration for that fragmented structure came from, and whether you feel as though fragmentation, even temporal fragmentation, is perhaps a wider quality of modern life or at least of memory.
I find it very hard to start a story at point A and work my way through to Z. My mind just won’t let me do it. I was also interested in the idea of creating small, significant paragraphs without intent – things that seemed important in and of themselves, without considering how or if they would turn out to serve the over-arching story. Some years ago I found out about the working methods of the brilliant Eric ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar‘ Carle, and to me it seemed like he had the most exciting approach to creativity I had ever heard of. Some days he would wake up and work on the text of a story. On others he would create his illustrations by cutting out and layering pieces of painted tissue paper. But sometimes he would spend the day simply painting solid colour onto sheets of paper, then leaving them to dry – creating the material for future illustrations without having any idea how or when they would be used. I can’t explain why this is so extremely appealing to me, but I love the idea of breaking down the writing of a novel into these different kinds of work, depending on what you want to do that day. I spent a huge amount of time not writing, exactly, but arranging the paragraphs I had written, sometimes moving something from the beginning to the end, or vice versa, or throwing out whole sections completely. I found it massively enjoyable, working with this material I had created, solving structural problems that I hadn’t wanted to consider earlier, because I just wanted to let the writing come without bending it to fit a particular shape.
I’m also very interested in the way writers seem to have an affinity with particular units of information. For instance, some writers seem to think in terms of chapters, or long strings of connected paragraphs. In my case, it’s the short paragraph, and when I realised these could be isolated, with plenty of white space in between, and that you could jump around in time and subject matter, that was a huge revelation to me. Reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill really electrified me because it gives the reader so much room to think, it doesn’t feel the need to rush around cramming every corner with detail. It doesn’t lead you from nighttime to breakfast time the next day, it forces you to make your own connections. And most crucially, it also gives space to observations and feelings that would go unrecorded in a traditional narrative, where there is an obligation to thread one moment to another in the interests of creating the illusion of time moving forward smoothly. If you give way to that kind of unimpeded forward momentum, lots of things that really preoccupy human beings have to get jettisoned in favour of simulating one day following the next. I believe we’re all shaped by little comments, half-understood stories, odd details that snag on our brains and crop up again and again at the core of our emotional lives, without reference to chronology or logic. I tried to be true to that when writing Nameless Lake.
At the centre of Nameless Lake is a controlling and abusive relationship hiding in plain sight, and I wanted to re-think the way stories often place the psychology of the perpetrator at the centre. I wanted to side-line the perpetrator, to focus single-mindedly on the person he has tried to obliterate, to examine the many facets of her life through the eyes of her friend. It seemed there was no other way to do this besides shattering conventional story structure into countless pieces. So the urge to remember the past by the narrator, Emma, to assemble it like a mosaic, becomes an attempt at restoration and rescue.
Leading on from that aesthetic approach, one of the repeated motifs of the novel is photography, with references both to its practice and history. Was this a consciously chosen motif, perhaps a reflection of that ‘snapshot’ structure, and do you feel there is a relationship between photography and fiction more generally?
I’m interested in photography because it takes root in the passive act of watching and grows into something very active, even aggressive. Photography seems to me an attempt to exert a kind of control over things and people by giving them implicit meaning which may or may not have any basis in reality. In that way it’s very much like writing fiction. As a writer, I couldn’t resist the story-within-a-story effect of introducing photos into a novel, the way it gave me another set of windows to look through. I also think photos are every bit as slippery as fiction. Just as words have an illusory kind of authority, images seem to be fixed for all time. But their meaning is not and it evolves according to the perspective of the viewer. As time elapses, it seems we read more and more into photographs, so they come to stand for what can’t ever be known. Nameless Lake is largely about trying to piece together the past in the aftermath of a traumatic event, so photographs became a way to externalise the power we ascribe to memories.
Another preoccupation within the novel is insularity, and the inner experience of the individual as potentially difficult (or impossible) to communicate. I know your professional background is writing for television, so I’m curious to know whether this opportunity to work outside of the visual-aural medium fed into the sense of insularity within your characters.
Yes, definitely. I think the gap between life as depicted in drama and how it is really lived is getting wider by the day, because of all the time we spend in our heads. We can’t escape the reality that life is re-orientating itself away from face-to-face encounters. The mental gymnastics of trying to second-guess what another person is thinking or feeling seem to take up more of our energy, and there’s so much about the structure of digital communication that builds in these moments where self-doubt can fester. Think of the time that can elapse between sending a WhatsApp message and getting a reply. As for the mechanics that make drama tick, the idea of extended families gathering in a room and speaking their thoughts has started to feel as fantastical as science fiction to me. There’s also this question that every screenwriter is confronted with, and dreads: “do we need this?” Which means, can this piece of dialogue or action be cut, does it impede the efficient and frictionless delivery of the story to the viewer? For me, there was always a kind of shame involved in receiving this note. It’s like you have failed to observe the commonly-agreed hierarchy of what matters and what doesn’t within a story – as if this is something decided by public consensus and fixed in stone. And this imbeds itself pretty quickly in your mental landscape, so you begin to police your writing for anything that might be considered extraneous to the main narrative. You do a lot self-editing and over time you begin to think, well, what kind of story am I not telling, by pruning away these unwanted parts that nevertheless feel massively significant? What if all these orphan moments are the story? Screenwriting is like operating a dam, knowing when to open and shut valves to generate power, but a lot of creativity can’t or doesn’t want to be used in this controlled way and you can’t stop it leaking over the edges.
Nameless Lake feels to me like a very European novel – not in the sense that it is European in character (although I think comparisons could be drawn with authors like Robert Musil and others), but in that its geography is widely spread throughout the continent. I would go as far as to call it something like a ‘city break novel’, though that this too glib, in trying to characterise how freedom of movement and tourism form a kind of natural backbone to the novel. I wonder if that was consciously done, and how you feel about freedom of movement more generally.
Well, I began the novel in the peak Brexit years and finished it during the second Covid lockdown, so I’m sure at some level it was shaped by those tensions. I haven’t travelled a massive amount in my own life, but every time I’ve found myself in an unfamiliar place, the experience has driven my thoughts inward. I think it’s the mild shock of seeing ourselves in a different context, the way it forces to you to consider how your life might have unfolded outside your home surroundings. I’m also inspired by European writers who seem able to combine essayistic elements with their fiction without sacrificing forward momentum, like Jenny Erpenbeck, Patrick Modiano and Antonio Muñoz Molina.
Finally, I’d like to touch on what is perhaps the central theme of the novel, that is the move from our adolescent to our adult selves. Simply put, when you look back on yourself as a teenager, as your narrator does throughout Nameless Lake, how do you feel about what has changed? How do we, as adults struggling through modern life, reflect healthily on what has been gained and lost?
I’m going to answer that obliquely by saying that writing this book has caused a profound change in the way I look back at myself and things that have happened in my life. The book is in no way autobiographical but, perhaps inevitably, many of the situations grew from tiny spores of memory and lived experience. And a lot of what motivates me to write comes from trying to unpack the reasons why these things have stayed with me while others are long forgotten. Before I wrote the book, I think I may have been hoarding and guarding these fragments, because I had an insatiable desire to know more about the wider context of the times I grew up in – the 1970s and 1980s. This urge, and the desire to look back at my own life, has completely left me. I wonder if all novelists experience this shift in focus. I now find myself obsessed with both the distant past and the near future – which is in its own way even more unsettling.
Chris Parker has written for television shows ranging from EastEnders and Coronation Street to Bedlam, a Sky drama series he co-created for Red Production Company. He is also a prolific animation writer, with credits including Peppa Pig, Bing and Clangers. Nameless Lake, his first novel, was published by Salt in July 2023.
Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.