This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Araminta Hall's novel Dot is out now and we'll be reviewing this soon on Novelicious. In the meantime, Araminta has answered a few questions for us.
Can you tell us a little about your average writing day?
As with most female writers, my writing day is fitted in around my domestic, which sometimes I find infuriating and sometimes a great distraction. I drop the kids at school, walk the dog and clear up the most offensive mess at home before sitting down at about 11ish. I then try to get in a couple of hours before squeezing in a few chores before the school run and then negotiating my children’s endless social lives and after school activities. I kid myself that I can write in the evenings or at weekends, but I’ve yet to actually do this.
As far as what I do when writing, it differs as to where I am in a novel. When doing my first draft I just write, as much or as little as happens during the time I have. During the second draft I print the manuscript out and go through it with a pen, scribbling so many changes and notes over it all that only I could ever hope to decipher them. Re-writing most often sees me staring blankly out of a window, agonising over individual words.
When you are writing, do you use any celebrities or people you know as inspiration?
I think it’s really hard not to let people you know (and yourself) to creep into your writing. We all have such fascinating traits and eccentricities that I love hearing about and including in characters. For example, the Grandmother in my latest book, Dot, has a series of bizarre believes, all of which really belonged to my own Grandmother. That said however, I have never entirely based a character on one person. And I have never used a celebrity as an inspiration, mainly I suppose because we don’t know anything about their actual characters.
What is your favourite Women’s Fiction book of all time and why?
I love all of Anne Tyler’s novels because she writes such simple and yet perfect stories, which go right to the heart of what it is to be alive. And of course she is just so great at relationships and our interactions. I’m slightly tempted to add Jonathan Franzen to this as well, as I so hate the term ‘Women’s Fiction’. Both Franzen’s brilliant and amazing books would have been so differently received were he a woman and yet the subjects he deals with are completely domestic, traditionally the preserve of the female writer.
What is your writing process? Do you plan first or dive in? How many drafts do you do?
I plan in a very loose sense, in that I know the story I want to tell, I know the main characters I want to include and I know the themes I want to explore. But I don’t write any of this down, instead I just dive in and let the book evolve. I think I almost treat the first draft a bit like a plan, it’s certainly where everything develops, so that by the end of that process I can make the novel fit together. Sometimes characters also change over the course of writing, so in your second draft you can make them more believable by tweaking how they have responded to things. I actually completely re-wrote Dot four times, but mostly I would write two main drafts, with lots of changes along the way.
What was your journey to being a published author?
I have always written stories and wanted to be a writer, ever since ‘being something’ became a realistic idea. It is however not an easy thing to want to be and there is certainly no structured career path! After leaving university I started working as a journalist on women’s magazines, which was great fun, but when I had my first child I decided to go freelance so that I could have a bit more time to concentrate on writing a novel (little did I know!). It wasn’t however until after my second child was born ten years ago, coinciding with the magazine I was working on folding, that I took a proper step back from work and used any free time I had to get some words down. This was in fact when I started writing Dot, although it was very confused and I knew I needed some help. So, in 2006 I took an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University, which really helped me to focus and taught me a lot about editing. I was three weeks off giving birth to my third child when I got my MA and so managed to write about 3 words in the next six months. I came up with the idea and wrote Everything and Nothing, my first novel, the following year. I sent it off to some agents and got a positive response, but the process dragged and a couple of months later I still didn’t have an agent, so in a fit of madness, I sent it direct to Harper Collins, who offered me a deal within a week, which is still the best email I’ve ever received.
What do you think is the biggest myth about being a novelist?
That you earn lots of money! And that you spend all day writing. My life is no different to how it has always been and I still spend the majority of my time rushing round supermarkets and ferrying children around. The only really great difference is that now I don’t feel guilty when I write and, of course, it feels wonderful when people enjoy what you’ve written.
What advice can you give to our readers who want to write a novel of their own?
It sounds simple, but just do it. Don’t wait for the muse to strike and don’t wait for the right moment or time. Just get some words down on the paper as they won’t be the ones you show anyone. And if you don’t have words on the paper you won’t have anything to re-write, which is where your novel will start to appear. Also read, read and read. Pick what you like and read that as those are the books you’ll probably end up writing. I hate snobbery around books and as far as I’m concerned there aren’t any bad books, just ones that I personally haven’t enjoyed because, thank God, we all have different tastes. I truly believe that you are not a writer unless you are a reader and it really is the only place that any of us can properly learn our craft.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment I am working on a historical novel; the diary of a man from 1900 to 1967. It is very loosely based on the life of my great-grandfather who survived the sinking of the Titanic. I am loving it as it was such an amazing period of time, where we crossed into the modern world. I have never researched a book before, but I found it very enjoyable and in fact have to keep reminding myself that I am writing a work of fiction and so not everything has to be completely accurate. I am also enjoying telling a story from only one viewpoint, which I’ve never done before, which is so fun because of course I am now in the territory of the unreliable narrator.
Thanks, Araminta!