We sat down with Kate van der Borgh, author of And He Shall Appear and a graduate of Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel course, to discuss her literary influences, musical inspirations and balancing writing with work.

You studied on our Writing a Novel course with Shelley Weiner. What made you choose the course, and how valuable was it to the writing of your novel?

It was 2019, I’d just set aside a very scrappy first draft of my novel, and I thought: bloody hell, there must be a better way of writing a book than that. So I went online and read about the Faber course. At that time, I hoped it would give me some good practical tips on how to write a second novel – but in the end it inspired me to go back and work on the first.

I’d say the course helped me with the novel in three big ways. One: it taught me loads about writing technique, even though I’d done (and even run!) writing training before. Two: the peer feedback was unbelievably helpful. And three: the course encouraged us all to make time and space for our stories. This last point is so important – in this busy life, it’s easy for writing to fall to the bottom of the to-do list.

Did you make writing friends during your Faber Academy course? How important has peer feedback been to your process?

Absolutely! Making writing friends is one of the things I’m most grateful for. Folks from our 2020 class still catch up now and again, in person and online.

Having brilliant people comment on your draft is such a privilege. Every time my work was up for review – and I mean every time – my classmates would spot something that either unlocked a problem or highlighted an opportunity in the story. I still remember the moment one of them said of my character: ‘I just don’t think he’d say that.’ It blew my mind that this amazing writer had given such time and thought to these characters of mine and knew them so well (she was absolutely right, by the way).

And He Shall Appear has been described as ‘a dark academia thriller’ – could you tell us a little bit more about it? What gave you the inspiration for your novel?

I think of it as a sort-of-ghost-story. It features a narrator who goes from a Northern town to study music at Cambridge and initially feels a bit lost. Things look up when he makes friends with a starry, charismatic (and posh) peer called Bryn – until, that is, the narrator starts to suspect that Bryn’s charms are literally supernatural. Years later, when the narrator returns to Cambridge, he’s afraid that Bryn might be waiting for him, even though Bryn is long dead.

In writing the book, I definitely mined a lot of my own experience – I grew up in Burnley and studied music at Cambridge, and I felt a bit lost there for a while too. But I also loved much of my time in college. And thankfully I never had cause to believe that my best friend had occult powers.

Music features prominently in your novel. Did you have specific songs or a playlist that you listened to while writing it?

In the story, the narrator is fanatical about a composer called Peter Warlock. Unsurprisingly, I’m a fan too! I listened to quite a bit of his work while I was drafting. I also listened to a lot of Bach’s keyboard works – The Goldberg Variations, or the Well-Tempered Clavier – because I find there’s something hypnotic about that gorgeous counterpoint, the way it all fits together like clockwork.

I don’t tend to listen to vocal music when I’m writing, though – I wish I could, but I get too easily distracted by the words. If I’m honest, I probably write best in silence.

How did your own experience as a music student influence your writing?

Oh, I poured my own experience into the story, way beyond the Cambridge setting. I drew on my own hopes and anxieties – particularly around class, which is something I thought a lot about during and after my degree. It was quite weird, and often uncomfortable, to put myself back in that student mindset, of being far from home and feeling very unsure of who I was.

At the same time, the story is also about time, history, memory, and how slippery these things can be. It’s been twenty years since I graduated, and I’m fascinated by how untrustworthy my memory seems now. At this point, treasured memories start to lose their colour. Friends reveal themselves to have different interpretations of certain moments. You wonder: did I really do that, or am I embellishing? I think a lot about what this all means for our sense of self – or selves, across our lives? – and I hope some of that comes across in the book.

Could you tell us about your writing routine, and how you fit writing into your everyday life?

Eugh, I wish I had anything approaching a writing routine. I wrote And He Shall Appear over several years when I was working as a freelance copywriter, and initially I’d fit the novel into gaps around client projects. But I really struggled – a friend once said that copywriting and novel writing ‘drain the same battery’, creatively speaking, and that’s exactly how it felt to me. There were many days where, after a day at my laptop working on branding projects, I couldn’t bear to open the manuscript.

Saying that, writing in the gaps wasn’t too bad when I was starting out and building the draft. But when I got to the stage of big, structural edits, I had to take some time off copywriting altogether (which I was very fortunate to be able to do). I just couldn’t manage that high-level thinking in snatched hours. I needed entire days to look at the bigger picture of the novel and see what would happen if I switched around whole scenes, whole sections. Ultimately, it was a case of muddling through.

I realise this isn’t very helpful, but I hope it helps other muddlers to feel less alone.

Which writers and novels have influenced you the most in your writing? Did any of these influence And He Shall Appear?

There are loads of inspiring women in the horror space right now. Carmen Maria Machado, Mariana Enriquez, Tananarive Due, Julia Armfield. Even outside the horror label, women seem to write ghosts and hauntings so very well – I’m thinking of Sarah Perry, Hilary Mantel. For me, when it comes to good old-fashioned ghost stories, Edith Wharton is right up there with M R James.

Saying that, And He Shall Appear isn’t out-and-out horror – you might call it horror-adjacent. The spookiness is of a slightly old-fashioned type, of things more suggested than seen, only with a distinctly contemporary setting (student parties, curry houses, pubs). Ultimately, the haunting nature of the past, the unease of nostalgia, is as important as any actual ghost – and in that respect, I definitely thought a lot about The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. They’re two of my all-time favourite books, and they handle so beautifully that experience of trusting too much in the past, and of being blindsided by time.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

For what it’s worth, since I know no better than anyone else: read great books. Talk to other people about why those books are great. Have other writers feed back on your work, and feed back on theirs too.

And don’t be distracted or dismayed if you can’t follow the (highly aesthetic) writing routines you see on social media. Everyone is different, and the daily word counts that work for some people can be demotivating for others. Just accept that writing a novel usually takes bloody ages, and remember that you will get to the end if you keep chipping away bit by bit.

What are you reading right now?

Well, having spent about a year being very intimidated by the sight of The Bee Sting on my shelf, I finally started it this week – and I’m tearing through the thing. It’s brilliant. So funny and so sad. Definitely makes me want to read more Paul Murray now. I’ve also been reading Zadie Smith’s essay collection, Changing My Mind, and every sentence is a marvel. It’s the kind of writing that feels like a wonderful meal – you feel all satisfied and nourished afterwards.

And finally, what’s next for your writing?

Good question. I’m working on a second novel, but I’m in the early stages, testing out a few different ideas to see which will stick. I’ve found that, sometimes, things that work in your head sometimes don’t sit well on the page, and other things that don’t feel promising suddenly come to life in the writing. Ask me again in a few months . . .

Writing a Novel is designed to support aspiring fiction writers to develop their craft over six months, with courses in London (at Faber’s HQ in Hatton Garden), Newcastle and online.

A six-month programme of seminars, sessions will cover all the essentials of novel writing – including character, story, structure, plotting, voice, dialogue, conflict and more.

Find out more about the next iterations of Writing a Novel.