Novel-writing, Winning Prizes, and Getting Grumpy – an Interview

This week, blogger Melanie Page interviewed me for Grab the Lapels, a website which features book reviews and talks with writers. Melanie asked me some thought-provoking questions about literary agents and the perils of letting my husband read my work.

 

In one of your blog posts you mention writing many drafts—five, in fact—as the result of input from others. Do you ever get to the point when you feel like the novel isn’t even yours anymore?

Now I’ve got to the stage where I feel my book, The Maid’s Room, is the very best it can be, I recently opened up my first draft and took a look. There is a hell of a lot of waffle in it and the plot goes off on tangents, so people’s input has only helped me to improve it.

My story is told from three points of view, and the first useful piece of advice from a literary agent was that one of those characters wasn’t the right person to tell it. I chose another character, and she has been the trickiest of the three. Readers felt she was the weakest, so I kept rewriting her until I discovered exactly who she is. Editors, agents, other writers, and readers can make suggestions, but often they can’t tell you exactly how to make a story leap off the page. It’s up to you to find your own magic. So no, I still feel like the novel is my own; I couldn’t make the story or the characters sing if it wasn’t.

Read the rest of Melanie’s interview here.