Carys Shannon on the coastal landscape and grief behind her debut Welsh noir

Louise Gardner joins Carys Shannon to discuss the inspirations behind the latter’s debut novel, ‘Truth Like Water’, released in October. The Welsh noir mystery follows the story of “lost women — some who can be found again, and some who can’t.”

Hi Carys. What inspired you to write Truth Like Water?

I used to commute from Swansea to Cardiff every day on the train. It was a great (pre-smart phone) time for reading and thinking. Somewhere just after Bridgend, the train passes a long stretch of woods. One day, I was staring out of the window, looking at the trees and bog as we sped past. I thought I saw something in one of the pools.

For a second, I was convinced I’d seen a body in the ditch; it was a visceral feeling. I jumped up from my seat and ran back along the aisle to look. I was quick enough to glimpse a doll in the water, and I walked back to my seat feeling very foolish. As soon as I sat down, Catrin’s voice came to me, and I got out my notebook and started to write down everything she said. In that earliest draft, she was much younger and very unreliable – like me, she really thought she’d seen something. It was the very early seed of the novel that has become Truth Like Water, though it is a completely different piece of work now.

Your bio explains that you grew up in north Gower, Swansea. Was that location used as inspiration for the setting of Truth Like Water?

I don’t name the village in the novel, and that’s deliberate. It is based on the area where I grew up – right on the estuary – but a fictional version. In my early drafts, using the real place sometimes meant writing my own memories rather than Catrin’s life. I had to go back through the book very carefully and take out anything of “mine” that had slipped in.

I decided then to fictionalise the place, and doing that gave me greater freedom. It stopped me from censoring myself because I’d written something that was not exactly “how it was”. I think the question of real or fictionalised locations is a really interesting one. For me, the freedom of a fictionalised setting helped the story to really become Catrin’s and to move it away from me. The landscape is as I remember it, though, but it is definitely told through Catrin’s very specific experience of it, and I’m really happy with that.

Were there any real-life experiences that inspired your story?

My mum died very suddenly when I was just twenty-two – it was hugely traumatic and a complete shock. As well as my own grief, there was a great deal of emotional fallout within the wider family, yet there was no attempt to talk about it. It was a very lonely position to be in. So, I suppose that the desire to write about grief and what happens when it is suppressed or minimised came from there, as well as a real earnest commitment to show the complexity of what each character is facing within that. Sometimes, people can’t talk about it – they simply don’t have the tools or they’re not ready to – and that is also important.

Where did you write Truth Like Water, and what was your writing process?

It took me a long time to finish the novel, and that process happened over many years as I worked on it, left it, then came back to it. I started when I was in Swansea, wrote a very rough first draft as part of my MPhil in Writing at the University of Glamorgan (now South Wales), then continued in fits and starts as I moved around flats and cities in Spain.

I was very unfocused because I didn’t know how to write a novel, so I was finding that out, really, and I wrote without a clear plan, feeling my way into it. During that time, it was entered and longlisted in different novel awards, and I knew I had something, but life often got in the way. During the pandemic, like a lot of people, I had time to get back into it, and I re-wrote the book completely with renewed focus. It then won the Jericho Writers Festival of Writing award. From there, I got some valuable feedback, a formal editorial report and a meeting with an agent. All of that was hugely motivating and helped clarify what was and wasn’t working already.

I went on a few misadventures then, writing into what I thought people wanted the novel to be; that’s when it got shortlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award. I thought I’d finally made it, and everything would be plain sailing to publication from there, but I didn’t win, and the agent didn’t sign me, but she did give me some very good advice. She said, ‘I don’t think this version of the novel is the book you’re trying to write’.

I was so disappointed, and I felt like I’d blown my one chance, but it did me a huge favour. I went back to the book and saw how I’d gone away from what I wanted it to be, that I loved the characters and the estuary too much to let it be anything other than the truest version of the story. So, I rewrote it again, and that version is the closest to the current novel as it stands.

What would be some advice that you would give to your younger self?

You do not need permission from anyone else, just write.

What does success look like for you (both as an author and a self-representing author)?

Success for the novel is about Truth Like Water finding its true readers. That’s what I dream of – for it to get into the hands of people who will love those characters and the estuary landscape as much as I do. Then, after that, success would simply mean that I keep writing. I want to maintain my curiosity, which means continuing to learn and try out different forms and genres, pushing my voice to see what I can do. And I want to create a body of work as a writer – I have so many ideas and I’m impatient to realise them. I’m self-representing at the moment, but I would work with an agent if they were the right fit. I think it’s really about finding the person who will champion your work but also understands who you are as a writer and doesn’t limit you for the sake of the marketplace. Parthian have been fantastic in that sense, so they’ve set the bar very high already!

What was the first book you remember loving as a child?

That’s such a hard question! I loved reading, and I was an absolute bookworm who read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I think The Animals of Farthing Wood was an early favourite. I read all of Colin Dann’s books – as a dreamy child who loved animals and lived in a rural place, the idea that these non-human lives were happening in all the places I could see from my bedroom window, and with as much drama as our own, was very compelling.

Who are some writers that you admire, or who inspire you?

I am constantly reading and try to read widely – there are so many writers I love, so this list is always getting bigger, but to choose a few: Sarah Waters is the writer who made me realise I wanted to write novels. I read Fingersmith and just wanted to be that good. I love Monique Roffey’s writing and have read all her books. Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River was a book that really made me think about how to line up all the twists and turns so deliciously that the satisfaction for the reader is immense. That’s a real masterclass.

One of my favourite writers is Eowyn Ivey – the way she transports the reader and writes landscape into her work takes your breath away. I loved Clare Fuller’s Unsettled Ground, and all her books really. A book that shook me was My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell – it’s brilliant and necessary. Leone Ross is an incredible writer – I was lucky enough to study with her and she’s just phenomenal. Sita Brahmachari is another inspiring writer I was fortunate to work with recently, and she really helped me to see the strength of my own voice, which I’m grateful for. I could go on, but I’m going to stop there!

Truth Like Water was published last month by Parthian.