Imogen Osborne’s Simmer Dim was selected by our judge as this year’s Novel Excerpt Contest winner. Read the excerpt and then check out this interview in which Osborne discusses voice, point-of-view, and the importance of names.
One of the first things I noticed and loved about this story was the voice. Can you talk a little about how you arrived at Lux’s voice? Was the voice the first thing that came to you?
Thank you for this! I think the voice came quite organically when I was writing, but it’s interesting to reflect on this question now, because the narrative voice is operating on a couple of different levels in this excerpt. For one thing, I use an omniscient narrator, whose voice tends to mirror who’s in focus. Then there’s the fact that the excerpt encapsulates two time periods, fifteen years apart, so we are exposed to Lux as a teenager and as an adult woman. And then there’s some POV shifting and some dialogue too. I think I needed quite a distinct voice in order to carry these shifts smoothly.
There’s actually a reference to The Virgin Suicides in the excerpt, which feels relevant. Eugenides uses this wonderful first person plural narrator, who is at once anonymous, omniscient and kind of whimsical. I’m not doing first person plural, but I am definitely striving for that same unique blend of intimacy and authority. I wanted a voice that was funny, sharp and exasperated but also generous, articulate and hyper-observant.
What went into your decision to shift POV? We start these pages fully in Lux’s POV, and then we move to Raine, then back to Lux. Was that something that happened organically, or did you plan it?
I knew that I wanted to shift POV from the start. A prominent feature of my novel is the novel inside it, which ends up becoming a really destabilizing force. Because of this, I wanted to cultivate a sort of slipperiness on a formal level. In some ways, it’s quite a neurotic novel, and switching point of view has helped me create the sense that the membrane between the characters is very thin, and that there are multiple ways of perceiving what’s actually happening. Leaving out quotation marks for speech helped with this too. It’s a way of imposing doubt, I think.
More straightforwardly, POV switches appealed to me when I started because I thought it might be easier to tell a story if I didn’t limit myself to one character’s interiority. Now, I’m realizing that switching POV just opens up a whole new set of challenges. As I mentioned, I want the POV switches to be destabilizing, but this can definitely backfire!
Names play a really important role in these pages, specifically Alexandra/Lux, but Raine also mentions she wishes she had a different name and Christopher, in the opening scene, ponders the title of his book. Talk a little about the significance of names for this project.
Yes, names are important insofar as the way people define themselves through and against one another is important. I think for all of my characters, there’s a real struggle for self-definition. Lux, in particular, is quite tortured by the prospect that the way other people see her might not match up with how she sees herself. She sees her image as quite literally stranded in other people’s imagination.
On the title, the phrase “Simmer Dim” was really the trigger for the whole project. It’s an Old Scots phrase specific to Scotland’s Northern Isles, which include Shetland and Orkney. It describes the quality of light around midsummer where the sun dips beneath the horizon very briefly because it’s so far north. I find the word incantatory. It holds so much. Simmer refers to summer but carries with it the image of water nearing boiling point. There’s something oxymoronic in twinning such a kinetic word with one like “dim,” which to me is quite still. Then there’s the internal rhyme and the cadence of the phrase. It’s like a poem, and it became a really important way of thinking about the novel’s overall mood; relentless light, rising intensity, imbalance.
Seeing this is a novel excerpt, I have to ask about the novel itself. Is it finished?
I’ve finished the first draft and am currently working on the second, which seems like a totally different process. In a way, writing the first draft felt like running around and opening up as many doors as I could, which was really fun. Now, working on the second draft, I’m having to close a lot of those doors, which is a bit more technical.
The poet Carolyn Forsché uses a really wonderful image to describe how a poem works. I read about this in Garth Greenwell’s Substack. Forche says, imagine a spider’s web covered in little bells. Wherever you touch the web, another part of the web will ring. Obviously, poems and novels are very different forms, but I keep thinking about her image as I work on the second draft. It’s really hard to work on any part of it in isolation. It’s an exciting part of having a full draft, but it also means that writing becomes a much slower, almost navigational process. Actually, a large part of my writing process right now is just remembering what I’ve committed to in other sections!
And, finally, what’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Truthfully, I fall in and out of love with most bits of writing advice. “Write everyday,” for example, is a nice idea but rarely practical. For a while I felt like maybe a kind of single-minded persistence was key. I’ve heard about those initiatives where you’re supposed to write a whole novel in a month or something, which is so impressive but just not compatible with the way I work. The few times I’ve really ploughed on with a project I think I ended up doing it more harm than good. A lot of time was spent backtracking, untying knots.
Having said this, there are a couple of nicely vague maxims I’m fond of. “The path is made by walking” is one. Another would be “hurry slowly.”
Interviewed by Jen Dupree