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The Things Not Named — With Eleanor Anstruther
Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Doležal. This year I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. My guest today is Eleanor Anstruther.
Eleanor was born in London, educated at Westminster School but distracted from finishing her degree at Manchester University by a trip to India. She travelled for the next decade before settling down enough to write her debut novel, A Perfect Explanation (Salt Books) which was listed for The Desmond Elliott Prize and Not The Booker Prize. Since then she has built a career teaching and publishing as an independent artist, using her Substack,The Literary Obsessive, as a platform for serialising her work before taking it to print. These works include her acclaimed memoir, A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries (Troubador), and her second novel, In Judgement of Others (Troubador). Her latest novel, Fallout (recently acquired by Empress Editions) is due for publication April 2026.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Joshua Doležal: We were early Substack pioneers. I don't know that we were on the cutting edge, but we've been doing this for quite some time. Three years, I guess. How long have you been Substacking?
Eleanor Anstruther: I think I joined in 22. And that feels to me like an early adopter. I mean, obviously it was founded in 2017, but I'm not sure how many fiction writers were there before 22. And I felt like quite a lot, quite a lot of the cohort who have become friends, like you and Kim and a whole bunch of people, we all joined around 22, 23, so there was definitely a moment there. I'm really glad I landed then because, I don’t know if you've noticed, but in the last year, there's been an explosion, which has changed the nature of Substack, which is fine with me.
I'm all about change and evolution, so that's fine. But it definitely isn't what it was in 22 as an experience.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah, totally agree, it's hard to even remember writing life before Substack because it's become such a staple for me over the last four years, but all of us who had a writing life before have brought that sensibility to our platform even as we're evolving. So I'm curious h ow you were shaped as a writer in your early days, when you knew you would become a writer, some of your early influences and how you began studying the craft.
Eleanor Anstruther: Sure. Well, I come from a family of writers, so I think that was one of the blessings and privilege of becoming a writer and forming the craft, that I was already swimming in that sea, and it didn't seem a complicated or even impossible leap to make. I think it was more about realizing the thing I've always done, which was write, was something I could do as a career.
And I didn't realize that until the idea of my debut was handed to me by various events. My debut is a fictionalized account of how and why my dad was sold by his mother to his aunt. Which was obviously an absolutely golden piece of storytelling to be handed, but also a difficult one to cut your teeth on.
So I think I was about 34 when I embarked on that novel. It took me twelve years probably to write, fifteen in all from start to finish, from first word to on the bookshelf. I was mentored by the late Sally Klein at Cambridge which was amazing.
I met her on a plane. It was one of those, again, completely serendipitous moments. We sat next to each other on a flight to Colorado, and by the end of it, she'd offered to be my mentor. So I learned the craft then. It was a difficult book to write because it was obviously based on a true story. So I had all the facts, but I was stringing emotional content between the facts, which was complicated.
And also I think you and I perhaps have also talked about the complications because it wasn't memoir, but there were still living people whose lives would be affected by it. And it was just one version of a story. But of course, my version has become the version. So that came with a lot of complications.
I got a book deal off that, and I was completely like every single emerging writer. I just assumed I'd write a book, it would get a deal, and I'd be famous and I'd win the Booker, and that would be the end of it. And there'd be no more effort to go into it. Which wasn't exactly what happened. It took twelve years to write it. It took almost a year, eighteen months, to get a deal. The last publisher that we submitted to said yes. Very small advance. Salt, brilliant indie publisher. And it did do well. It got listed for a couple of prizes and it did fine. But then after that I assumed, great, I'm done. But my next three novels did not find a deal.
It was a one-contract deal and the next three novels were turned down by everyone we sent them to. Which was how I came to Substack because I just was at my end. I was on my knees.
Joshua Doležal: Well, and you've found your way back after self-publishing a bit. I understand that you have a deal with Empress.
Eleanor Anstruther: I've done two since then. I serialized my memoir and two novels on Substack: In Judgment of Others was the first novel I serialized there and then published that myself, which was amazing experience. And actually I've built a career on teaching and publishing as an independent author. And that could never have happened if I hadn't gone through the mill of having been declined by so many publishers.
So now I look back and think, great, I've built this arm of my career where I know about publishing as an independent. But Fallout, which was the second novel I serialized on Substack, I really did want to, again, be handheld by a publisher. Because it's a very different experience and there's pluses and minuses to both.
But Empress Editions publishes midlife women's voices. And I'm the first of their literary wing. Mostly it's been nonfiction and romance, but I'm the first, so that's absolutely amazing. It's coming out 26th of April next year. Couldn't be more happy. They're an American publisher based in Cambridge, but it will be global.
Joshua Doležal: Well, congratulations.
Eleanor Anstruther: Yeah. I'm really excited.
Joshua Doležal: Going back to Sally Klein and your mentorship with her. So what were some of the particulars? Not to put you under the microscope too much, but in terms of craft were there particular techniques you learned from her or a discerning sensibility when you were learning from Sally what good writing meant and how it was distinguished from mediocre writing? What were some of those things you learned?
Eleanor Anstruther: Well, Sally, as everyone knew, was incredibly strict. She was the very first person to tell me to murder my darlings. I'd never even heard the phrase before. And she insisted. I took my manuscript to her every month as I grew pregnant with twins. I would get on the train every month getting bigger, fatter, and fatter with twins, and take her my manuscript and sit in her office in Cambridge.
And she would strike through what wasn't good enough. And I remember one time I'd been reading a lot of Virginia Woolf, and I remember saying something about how basically I'd aped Virginia Woolf and it was probably some sort of stream of consciousness throwing all the rules away, et cetera, et cetera.
And she banged the table and said, but you are not Virginia Woolf. And I remember that being like. Okay. What she means is I have, not only will I never be Virginia Woolf, but I have to go away and learn the rules. And the rules as I understand them are…and I suppose this is how I lean towards my own writing.
I favor brevity. So where one word will do instead of ten , I'll use one. So I'm very straight to the point. I read my work out loud, absolutely every word of it. A finished novel, I will have probably read out loud to myself at least twice, if not three times. And when I hear it out loud, if I get bored listening to it, I know it's dull.
If I feel that it's pretentious or I'm falling over the sentences, I know I've complicated things. If I'm showing off, if my mind drifts. I think one of the things I learnt, which was incredibly useful, whether it was from her or it was just from practice in plotting. If you have a brilliant idea in a plot, don't save it up as some magnificent reveal somewhere near the end.
Because if it struck me at the beginning, if I try and fool the reader and reveal, you can bet your life—every discerning reader will have figured it out right at the beginning. And what you're not doing is having faith that the novel will reveal something even more brilliant if you just give that reveal at the beginning.
So I learned to not think I was cleverer than my reader. You're never cleverer than your reader. So always give it away at the beginning of the first draft, obviously, because something else brilliant or more brilliant hopefully will turn up.
I made a note of the writers that have really influenced me before we spoke and all of them, they're very plain speaking. They're mid-20th century female writers. There's no artifice. I think because they're women and because there was no sense of their ego being pumped culturally. Do you know what I mean?
They were just women who were bringing up children. They were living in the kitchen, and if they were lucky, they were finding five minutes to write and they didn't have time to be pompous to show off. They just had to get the story down. And they didn't think about anybody thinking they were great.
And I think you can always tell when a writer wants you to think about them instead of their story. Right? It's a bit like when you go and see a play and your eyes are slightly wandering to the wings or the rest of the auditorium. And these women, and for instance, Edna O’Brien, Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley Jackson, when you read them, their focus was absolutely on the story they were telling, and they were not thinking about how clever they were, what their reputation is, whether people will think they're brilliant, any of those things. So that as a piece of craft advice to really, really put the story first. And I was talking to Sally Reid the other day and she said something brilliant.
If she reads a story back and if the message is more important than the plot, she rewrites it, because the story is the thing, and if there's a message in it, readers tend to take all kinds of different messages from your work. But I've noticed that when a writer has got some big message to tell the world and they hang a plot on that message, it's usually quite dull.
Joshua Doležal: It's too didactic.
Eleanor Anstruther: It's like, cool your boots, man. We'll take whatever message we want to get from this. And maybe you're not God Almighty, and maybe the message you want to tell us isn't so unique and new. I write, small domestic kitchen dramas, but against big political backdrops.
Joshua Doležal: It's fascinating to hear you speak about the difference between story and message, because for all of his sophistication in style, that was one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's weaknesses and he even admitted it, self deprecatingly. A penchant for allegory was one of his faults – his stories will come to the end and then there's this tidy bow tied on them.
Whereas The Scarlet Letter is haunting and enduring largely because of…
Eleanor Anstruther: Because of its minuteness.
Joshua Doležal: It's the indeterminacy of some of those relationships that makes them compelling.
Eleanor Anstruther: Right. I try very hard not to gender this but, just to gender it for a minute, and this is really in defense of men, because men, male writers of the 20th century tend to fall for this, getting high on their own supply, much more than women.
Because culturally they are given every reason to think they've got something important to say. And so it doesn't really help them as writers to think about plot because they are encouraged everywhere they go to think about the message.
And I think that that plot, which is not easy, and writing, which is not easy, gets slightly sidelined because they think, well, the message is the important thing. and it absolutely does a disservice to them. And I think there are plenty of brilliant. Male 20th century writers who began to just fall over themselves around that because their egos were pumped up out of proportion and we lost great writers.
Joshua Doležal: Would you put Philip Roth in that category?
Eleanor Anstruther: I would put Philip Roth. I wouldn't put Cormac McCarthy there.
Joshua Doležal: Right.
Eleanor Anstruther: I think he escaped. Remind me who wrote Rabbit Run? Updike, he’s right on the edge. I loved the Rabbit Run books. But he was done no favors. So that's why I read mostly 20th century women. Not because either gender has the potential to be as brilliant, but because they, for all that was tough about living under the caution of the patriarchy, it did mean that women wrote much cleaner to the page because they weren't being pumped up to think they had something important to say.
Joshua Doležal: Well, this might be an academic distinction and possibly a difference between British and American literature, but I think 19th century American women’s writing is perhaps the opposite of what you're saying, because much of it was explicitly tied to women's rights. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, for instance, “The Revolt of Mother,” Kate Chopin. Many of those stories I think are driven as much by message as by character and plot.
Eleanor Anstruther: I think you're right. I mean, one could argue that if there was ever a time to be driven by message, it was then, but that doesn't necessarily make it a great read. I'm not fantastically familiar with that genre, I have to say.
Joshua Doležal: Well, you'd mentioned this list of other 20th Century women writers. So what are some of the names on your list?
Eleanor Anstruther: Well. Dorothy Hughes, I read In a Lonely Place again this summer. I really hate the word genre, but they all are working in different genres. So obviously it is a crime thriller. Shirley Jackson, who I'm reading Ruth Franklin's biography of her at the moment, it's so good. Penelope Mortimer, who wrote The Pumpkin Eater, Elizabeth Taylor. The toughest thing that Elizabeth Taylor dealt with was that she was called Elizabeth Taylor exactly at the same time as Elizabeth Taylor. So she really did not get the credence that she should have got for Angel, which is absolutely one of my Desert Island books.
It's short. It's about a writer who's just awful. There's not a wasted word. I would say the sort of contemporary of that level of art is Claire Keegan, who wrote Foster, who I think is probably one of our greatest contemporary fiction writers. Edna O'Brien and Rumer Godden, The Black Narcissus.
They all are telling me the story and I'm not thinking about them. We can dress it up in a million ways, but we are storytellers. I really understood this this year actually from reading Anne Tyler as well, and Elizabeth Strout. It is supposed to be fun, and I use that word slightly guardedly because it seems such a simple, silly word to be using for such a vast range of subjects. But ultimately it's a pleasure. It's something we do for fun and something nice and do you know what I mean?
And so I've started thinking much more about my reader in the next couple of books I'm writing, just being kinder to the reader. And I think that loops back into this idea of message. The other thing that I certainly fell for was writing as my salvation. Like it was going to turn me the person, the author, into something , which is crazy and far too much to ladle onto what is just simply a story. And the writers that I really love, it seems to me none of them invested such weight on their books that they had to achieve something for them. They achieved something for the reader, and that is where the weight should be, but not for them as a person.
Joshua Doležal: Let me be specific about technique for just a minute. So when you're thinking about the reader and serving the reader, pacing is part of that. I've used a term, the accordion of time, to talk about how sometimes you draw the bellows out on a scene and sometimes you squeeze them together to fast forward through days, weeks, months. Knowing when to do that, how long to linger before it becomes dull, is an intuitive judgment call. The balance between the drawn out and the squeezed together moments. How do you judge that or how do you think about that? Is it just a sense that you feel your way through a story? You don't want to stack a bunch of drawn-out scenes on top of each other. How do you balance the pacing of your stories?
Eleanor Anstruther: Yeah, well I've been thinking about that just today because I've been editing a novel that I wrote about three years ago for serializing, and there's two things I noticed about me, the writer three years ago, versus me now around pacing. One of them was that I constantly used the past perfect. They had sat down instead of they sat down. Which was a way of slightly distancing myself yet again from the action so I didn't have to feel so much. Which slows the pacing down because the reader isn't right there: they sat down. So I've noticed, I've done it all the way through this novel.
I'm taking all of that out and suddenly it's sitting up and it's alive again and it's moving, even though it's, I don't know, 80,000 words, which is long for me. The other thing I've noticed, yes, is there is an instinct to exactly how long you draw in the breath before you let it out again.
I think I was, there was too much exposition. I often front-loaded novels with far too much exposition at the beginning, rather than just getting straight on into the action, which loops back into, let's serve the reader here. We need to get going. And once you're in love with the story and the characters, then we can give a little bit of backstory and that obviously affects pacing as well.
So what I've done is tighten, I know with In Judgment of Others, which was the first novel I serialized – when I came to edit that for Substack, I took the third chapter, which was the breakdown, and moved it to the beginning because we needed to get right in on the action and then get going.
It's an instinct I think. And I think, again, reading it out loud, because if I've got to read that novel out loud, I can absolutely feel when it's dragging.
When I'm like, okay, we get it now. I mean, my agent often wants me to spoonfeed a bit more. I assume the reader is going to get it and they're going to fill in the gaps. So I like to really pull back and let them fill in. But I think ultimately for those listening, thinking about pace, you’ve got to read the work out loud and feel it.
You should be able to read your novel three times and not get bored.
Joshua Doležal: So, as I'm hearing you, number one is concision in your craft sensibility. Number two is story over message. And part of that is keeping things moving, getting into the action, not frontloading a lot of reflective narration, a lot of meaning-making for the reader, but jumping straight into the inciting incident or the problem that drives the story forward.
Eleanor Anstruther: Yeah.
Joshua Doležal: So let me ask, would there be a book that maybe you didn't finish or something you didn't add to your list of worthy influences?
Eleanor Anstruther: Well, no, I can answer the opposite because I just don't tend to read things that I don't like. There's been plenty of books, which, and I won't name any of them because it's hard enough to get a book to stand up, so I'm not going to do that. But there've been plenty of books that I've started and just absolutely like, nope, not for me, or have various feelings towards it.
But I will say. I recently read Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, which it could easily be argued, puts the message above the plot. I think it's 900 pages. Maybe it's 700. It's 700. It's massive. I would normally never touch a book of that size.
It was Sean McNulty who put it in front of me. Who runsAuraist: picking the best-written books on Substack and with whom I've had many conversations about what literary fiction is. He's a brilliant thinker. But he said, you have to read this. Alexis Wright is an aboriginal writer, a woman from Australia, and it is both a comedy and a tragedy.
It's about a town called Praiseworthy, where the apocalypse is coming. The main character is a guy who becomes obsessed with going out into the bush and kidnapping donkeys to bring back and set up a donkey company. It's nuts. The writing breaks every single rule you can possibly imagine. And it's one of the best books I've ever read in my life. It's absolutely phenomenal. It blew my mind and I recommend it to everybody. So I think you could argue it puts the message above the plot. But it works on every single level.
Joshua Doležal: So what makes it work?
Eleanor Anstruther: I think her skill as a writer. I would say it's better actually than Ulysses. It's what Joyce was trying to do. That's what I felt she succeeded at. I know that's a bold statement, but I really feel that that's the case. I mean, I don't like Joyce, so everyone's going to be up in arms, but someone like Joyce was attempting and plenty of emerging writers will think stream of consciousness is easy. I just sit down and I just write a whole load of s**t and I call it stream of consciousness. You know what I mean? But what they haven't understood, they don't have that dance with language and words. They haven't understood it on a deep vibrational level where they are riding so high on that language that they're just dancing with it and it's like taking a drug and you dance with them and it's much more than the sum of its parts.
Something magic happens when you read someone like Alexis Wright. Yes, there are words on the page and yes, there are characters and yes, there's a plot, but it's so much more than that and that's the only way I can describe it. It's a magical mystery land. And I can only dream of having that competence, it's phenomenal.
Joshua Doležal: Obviously principles of good writing change over time. So the modernist emphasis on concision or brevity, the idea that less is more, doesn't hold true in the case of a novel like Praiseworthy, it sounds like. And in some ways we're living in a time when the soundbite or the clip, there is brevity, meaning the content is short, but sometimes it's excessive. It's flamboyant. It's what would've been called purple prose in a different time. And so it's not concise.
Eleanor Anstruther: Doesn't mean what it says.
Joshua Doležal: But it's bite sized.
Eleanor Anstruther: Which is the worst of all worlds.
Joshua Doležal: But it sounds like there's also a parallel development where, it's almost a David Foster Wallace aesthetic, where the sprawling story is, there's a place for it. There are writers who are publishing books that are large, that…
Eleanor Anstruther: And I think there's no place for it. Unless you're Alexis Wright. There's no place for it. If I can jump in here, there's a massive difference between writing some incredible dance with language and just sprawling all over the page, and the amount of novels I have come across contemporary novels that just weren't edited properly—somebody should have got in there with a red pen and said, all right, we get it already. You can cut at least 400 words. But again, every time I read a or come across a book that I never finished, I always think to myself, this writer who has a degree of talent or an enormous amount of talent, they had a very good idea.
That's what Alexis Wright did. She had this brilliant idea and she stepped off into thin air with it, and the world caught her. And that's what made it magic. And you can feel that. You can feel you are constantly walking on a bridge that only exists as you throw sand in front of you one step at a time. You know? And it takes that sort of courage. My concern because I'm not particularly concerned about AI at all, actually. I'm a proponent. I think it's going to be okay. I think it can be a very useful, copy edit tool. It can save a lot of time. For Fallout we're putting a QR code at the end and people can go in and it'll link them to a whole load of resources. And also, the great true magic of writing simply cannot be recreated. By a program. It can get as near as dammit. And if you want to produce a million, a million middle grade, not, not school, but middle, average, just literally beginning, middle, end, fine.
But everybody, you read a book with your heart and your knees and your arm, you know what I mean? You read it with your body and you can't recreate that with an AI program. The really great, if you think of the novels that you love so much that you would take them away to Desert Island, and you could read every single one of those, they affect your body, not just your love of words. Do you know what I mean? And that's the bit that absolutely cannot be recreated. So I'm not concerned at all. I've got friends who are screenwriters, and I think there's been a real issue for them. And I do understand that that's an industry that's being very negatively impacted by a lot of the rise of AI.
Joshua Doležal: Well, one of the parallel concerns with AI is that if there is a marketplace for commercial publishing that's driven by units, AI is perfectly aligned to that. So AI could produce content that's optimized for all of those metrics. Right? And in fact, in some cases is cutting into authors’ book sales. So if you had a high enough profile and you had a book coming out, then on Amazon there would be all these pirated, imitative versions of your book or books by you a nd they compete with your actual book sales. So there are some pernicious sides of that.
Eleanor Anstruther: But it relies on the idea that people are idiots.
Joshua Doležal: That's I suppose a faith that one has to have. Willa Cather said art and religion are close kin. And so to me, craft is one of those things that you really do have to believe in. You have to be a true believer in art, to persist and to find other true believers. Because the experience of writing can't be replaced. Whether or not there is a commercial outlet for it is almost beside the point. We'll probably keep doing it anyway.
Eleanor Anstruther: That's definitely the school that I sit in and absolutely craft is the church that I pray at, and that is my religion. And anybody who comes and works with me knows that I consistently ask people to raise their standards – lower their expectations when it comes to the publishing industry, but raise your standards absolutely to the highest point when it comes to craft.
Do not let anything out of the gate that isn't your absolute best because I think that's beholden on all of us. If we do want to see a change in attitude, then each and every one of us, it is absolutely beholden upon us to produce the best work we can and not shortcut and not just send out any old s**t because it does the entire industry a disservice.
Joshua Doležal: Your craft sensibility was forged in the traditional way through print books, through all these other traditional structures of discernment and
Eleanor Anstruther: And reading, of course.
Joshua Doležal: Right, but what you were reading passed through a traditional curation, and then you had a mentor who was steeped in the same tradition. Writing for Substack and being part of the Substack community is a very different thing, and I'm wondering if it's changed your writing fundamentally, if there's anything different about your fiction as a result of having been writing on Substack for three to four years.
Eleanor Anstruther: Yes. I think it's opened my eyes to how to make that slight shift into being slightly more commercial. In the past, and I think this is one of the problems with the books that I was attempting to sell apart from the first one, was that they weren't commercial. They were very literary fiction in that sense, that chapters would be different lengths, I would frontload them, all that stuff. Whereas writing on Substack and serializing really taught me this view of commercial fiction – I thought it was slightly beneath me – I apologize now to everybody. That was a terrible opinion to have because there's an incredible skill at commercial literary fiction, which is what I now endeavor to do and the commercial bit is very simple. Get in on the action right at the beginning. It's okay to follow a known structure, okay to start with a bang, get people in. It's how it works. Chapter length should be the same length. It's very simple. For me it's like 2000-3000 words a chapter.
So serialization has opened my eyes and got me off my high horse and said, this is how you are both literary and commercial, which is what I need to be. And it's exactly what Fallout is. There's an integrity to it, which absolutely is of the standard that I believe I want to put out. But it meets certain commercial criteria and they are to do with pacing and length, literally word count. So there's that.
The other thing that I've discovered on Substack is that my obsessive diary, which is exactly how I wrote my memoir, which is just writing little tidbits every day, really not giving it too much thought. It should never take more than a couple of minutes to read. It never takes me more than half an hour to write.
So I do these quite off the cuff things every day pretty much. But what I get as feedback from people, because they are so low risk and I don't embed them with any sort of expectation that they're in some way going to make my name or win me some prize, they have a lightness of being to them, which people really love, and I'm trying to take that lesson into my novel writing.
To hold novels a little bit more lightly, not embed them with saving my life, Eleanor Anstruther, right? Like this is going to be the one, because that weight stops them from being light to the touch when people read them. So that's something I've really been thinking about lately and something I've definitely learned again in the format of Substack and the way that we write there.
Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in a few weeks with River Selby. Stay tuned next week for another installment from my fatherhood memoir.
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