Piecing together a world of his own

Graham Rawle's new novel is made up entirely of clippings of text from 1960s women's magazines. It was a fascinating project, but it took five years, he tells Anna Carey.

Graham Rawle's latest project had an unforeseen side-effect. The artist and writer soon realised that his new scheme was going to take a long time, and it ended up taking more than five years.

"I became quite reclusive," says Rawle. "There were times when I was working 18 hours a day. And people would keep asking me to stuff, and I had to keep saying no. But what happened was that my friends who didn't really know each other, who might have met at our house, started meeting up without me! I had been the common denominator, but they decided they didn't need me any more."

Luckily, Rawle's friends didn't abandon him forever. "It was nice to find that they were still there when I stopped," he says. "They didn't actually forget I existed."

And when they see the finished book, they'll understand what took him so long. Woman's World is a novel created entirely from clippings of text from women's magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. Set in 1960s suburbia, it's the story of a glamorous woman called Norma, who bases her life on the women's magazines which she loves and whose words tell her story.

But which came first for Rawle, the story or the extraordinary medium? "It sort of came together at the same time," says Rawle. "I'd thought about doing a novel made out of bits of text after my last book, Diary of an Amateur Photographer. I used bits of found text at the end of that, and although it was only about 300 words, it took a long time to do. But the final text had a really nice quality about it, slightly stilted and a bit clunky, that I liked. If you're using that method you have to make use of what you've got, so you never quite say what you originally meant to say. So I wondered if I could make a whole book like that."

Rawle, who is best-known for his long-running collage series, Lost Consonants, which appears in the Guardian, took five years of a seven-year period to complete the book. He took two years off to work on another big project in Germany. "I wrote the story as a novel first, but at the same time I was collecting little fragments of possibly useful text from women's magazines - when I was writing the interview scene [ in which Norma unsuccessfully applies for a driving job] I cut out any bits I could find about secretaries or interviews or bosses." Once the story had been written, Rawle began the huge task of finding the text amid the accumulated piles of magazines.

But in doing so his original words were transformed. "Say if I'd written a sentence like 'a man walks into the room', I might find a line like 'a man danced lightly over the linoleum' so I'd use that instead. Little by little, the words that I'd written were replaced by the words that I'd found."

This was a central part of the project's appeal. "If you find every single sentence that you want, there's no real point," he says. "What makes it interesting is when you can't find the words you want, you have to make do with what you have to get the story from point A to point B. The further you get from your original words, the more creative you have to be."

He gives an example. "I wanted to say 'she was angry and left the room', but I couldn't find those exact words. And then I found a bit about different boiling points [for making different sweets], so I finally ended up with the line 'red rage rose within her like the mercury in a toffee thermometer, and she had to leave before she reached the boiling point for fudge'."

One of Rawle's trickier challenges was choosing names for his characters - he had to find words that would come up again and again.

In the end, the central characters were called Norma, Roy, Eve, Mary, Mr White and Mr Hands. Some names were chosen because they often appeared in advertisements - like "white" and "hands" - while others, like Roy and Eve, could be found in other words.

"Women's magazines were obsessed with royalty, so you could get 'Roy' from that," explains Rawle. "Eve was very easy to find because you can get it in words like 'even' and 'everybody'. And also 'sleeves', so you can find it a lot in knitting patterns."

Rawle's source material gives the book its unique voice. "I was using a lot of stuff from advertising, which is slightly bonkers anyway," he says. "But a lot is taken from the magazines' romantic serials, and they were written in this really odd, clumsy, flowery moral style - every sentence has about 10 adjectives in it. And often you can turn it on its head - you can take a sentence that was originally describing something quite beautiful and use it to describe something gritty and grim. You realise that [ Norma's] world isn't like the world that the women's magazines describe."

That's something of an understatement. As the reader gradually realises over the first few chapters - and look away now if you don't want to know Norma's secret - Norma is not an ordinary woman. In fact, she's not a woman at all. She's a transvestite called Roy, a shy, lonely man who has created an alternative feminine persona from the women's magazines he loves.

"At first I didn't know whether to tell people the secret, but it's such a strange way of writing a book that I needed to explain why this woman is telling her story through words from magazines," says Rawle. "Once you know it's a man, who has no female voice, you realise that's why he's using the magazines."

To get inside Norma's world, Rawle researched the lives of cross-dressers in a less tolerant age. "My research was all through reading about people at that time, and everyone said it was so difficult," he says. "But because these magazines were so full of instructions on how a woman should behave, they could be seen as a how-to manual for 1960s cross-dressers. And that concept is what inspired the book."

His source material also reminded him of the bizarre standards these publications set women such as his own mother. "There are instructions on polishing lightbulbs," he says. "Lightbulbs! Who needs to do that? It's ridiculous! My mum was born in the back streets of Birmingham, and people around her when she grew up were trying to find money to buy food and shoes. They would have been surprised to find out that they were meant to be polishing the lightbulbs."

Rawle has a lot of sympathy for the women who were expected to accept the requirements of the feminine mystique. "Women like my mum were expected to do these things all day, polishing this and that and cleaning the windows twice a week, and for who? Who cared if the lightbulbs were polished? My mum says that even when you weren't cleaning you were meant to be embroidering or making a lampshade out of shells or something - anything rather than go out to work."

Woman's World is Rawle's first novel, but he has worked in collage for his entire artistic career. "There's something about taking elements from lots of different sources and bringing them together to create something that's entirely new - and a new world emerges. I like the fact that when you bring the stuff together it retains something of the original source."

He gathers most of his primary sources from car boot sales. "I probably used about 1,000 women's magazines in this book, but I've got thousands of magazines that I've collected over the years."

He may not need his magazine collection for his next project. "Woman's World has been picked up by a producer at Columbia Pictures, and she wants to do a 90-minute film for TV," he says. "So I'm going to write the script with my brother, who is actually a screenwriter and knows what he's doing.

"I think it's going to be very tricky, but actually when I first started writing it I could see it as a film - when I was talking to my editor I was referring to scenes instead of chapters. The big problem is creating Norma's voice, but we're now talking about doing a sound collage, with different words being read inlots of different women's voices."

Rawle won't be starting another collage novel."I think in Woman's World the method of creation is integral to the plot, and to devise another story in which the collage technique was necessary might be a bit contrived. And besides," he adds, "it really did take a very long time. It might be nice to just write something without having to cut out every single word and stick it down on a page."

* Woman's World is published by Atlantic Books. £15.99.