Diana Evans, award-winning author (Orange Award, Betty Trask Award, Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlistee) about the art of observing the world and turning it into fiction, ‘working up’ characters, treating writing as a job and how to overcome writer’s block.
How do we, as writers, turn raw emotions and observations into fiction? In this episode we interview Diana Evans (Ordinary People, 26a) about her creative process, how she discovered her true voice and how she creates characters. We also discuss practices that help Diana with writer's block, why she treats writing as a job and the importance of having other people read your work and being a part of a writing community.
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SHOW NOTES
[03:32] How music influences Diana's writing and how John Legend's soundtrack influenced her book Ordinary People
[07:22] The messy journey Diana went through to discover her voice and what she does and doesn't want to write about, which began in journaling
[10:43] Diana shares some of her practises to help her with writer's block, including reading poetry, leaving your work for a while, and forcing her way through writing
[12:38] On treating writing as a job, and some of Diana's writing rules and habits like having a schedule and not beating yourself up when you don't meet your target
[19:07] Diana shares why she distances herself from the characters and the world she's writing about
[20:41] How Diana's peers helped improve her writing and how sometimes, the simplest way to write and tell a story is actually the easiest way
[23:05] The importance of having other people read your work, and being a part of a writing community
[25:39] Diana’s writing philosophy, the importance of journaling and why it's our responsibility to write about our experiences
[28:00] Diana shares her creative process, and how white American authors writing about ordinary life inspired her to do the same for her book, Ordinary People
[31:12] How Diana come up with her book characters, including writing down lists and brainstorming
[34:40] Why planning everything is important for Diana, and why she prefers that her writing is led by a character and what the character is experiencing
[37:44] Our responsibility as readers and writers in documenting the world around us
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QUOTES:
“I think journalism, journaling rather, it's quite important for just recording things. I think it's, it's our responsibility as writers actually, to comment on the world and to reflect the world around us, whether that's historically or today because we are mouthpieces of society.”
“And I feel that there is so much in the world that is real and alive, and that is happening both in my life and around me, in the lives I see around me that is, you know, rich in story and in drama. I'm really not a world builder. I'm a world observer.
I investigate the world and try and analyze it, and encapsulate human life. So that's where the writing comes from, but in order to achieve a distance, I have to kind of place myself in a position that is somehow apart from the characters and the world that I'm writing about. So I have to find a way to do that in order to tell the story."
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RESOURCES
Diana's Books:
Book awards mentioned:
Books mentioned:
Authors mentioned:
Others:
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CREDITS
Production by Victoria Spooner. Artwork by Emma Winterschladen
[Intro] Matt: Hello, and welcome to season one of the London Writers' Salon podcast. I'm Matt.
Parul: And I'm Parul. And each week, we sit down with a writer that we admire to talk about the craft of writing and the art of building a successful and sustainable writing career.
Matt: These interviews are recorded live with our global writing community. If you would like to join us for the next recording or write with us at our daily Writers' Hour writing sessions, head to londonwriterssalon.com for more information.
In this episode, we interviewed the wonderful Diana Evans. Diana is the award-winning, best-selling author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a. Diana's work is often based on her life experiences and across her books, she captures daily conversations, relationships, and the dynamics within society.
She's an incredibly talented writer, nominated for The Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book Award. And she also won the Orange Award for new writers in the UK.
Parul: Diana is a literary writer and she really takes her craft seriously, that comes across in the interview. And she was very kind to tell us and talk us through the journey she went through to discover her voice and how that journey actually started with journaling.
She shares her daily routine today, and she really talks about the importance of having a work ethic in her writing. She goes into talking about flow and how she uses simple practices like reading poetry to get into [the] flow. She talks about planning her writing and how she overcomes a writer's block. What really struck me was how Diana spoke to us about the role of the writer.
She's passionate about the fact that our craft matters and how by writing about our experiences and writing about our lives, we're helping to document society today.
Matt: And in this interview, she talks about how that process of documenting our everyday lives is also a process of documenting our emotions. And she says it's as much for us as it is for the world.
She says, and this is a quote, “As feelings or impressions come to us, we have to record them in some way. The work will emerge and form in its own time.” This was such a wonderful conversation. Diana is so calming, inspiring, and it was just a delight to be with her and to interview her. And this episode was a collaboration with the Women's Prize for Fiction, who every year host their Discoveries Award for new writers, which is an award that's open to women aged 18 and above or residing in the UK or Ireland and who write in English.
If you'd like to learn more about the Discoveries Prize, you can go to discoveries.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk, and maybe even enter your own work into it. All right, without further ado, we hope you enjoy this beautiful conversation with the wonderful and wise Diana Evans
Parul: To kick [this] off, I wanted to talk a little bit about music because I believe you wrote Ordinary People to John Legend’s soundtrack. Do you always listen to music as you write, and what's the relationship for you between music and writing?
Diana: I don't listen to music while I'm writing actually apart from very quiet jazz music or occasionally classical music, something that's instrumental. I can never write to music that has words in it because the words are too distracting. Generally, I have to write in complete and absolute silence and isolation. I usually use earplugs when I'm writing, because I want to just block out all sound. But music itself has an influence on my writing in terms of inspiring me and energizing me when I'm in the midst of a project, when I happen to be listening to [it], it usually finds its way into the work. If not, then at least [it] sends me back to my desk. And that was the case with John Legend. I mean, it was an experiment, actually. The John Legend presence in Ordinary People, Get Lifted, his first album that I really love. And I used to be a music journalist and I've always been interested in articulating sounds and music and movement as well because I used to be a dancer. So I wanted to see if I could do essentially, what is an album review in the fourth chapter of Ordinary People, but combine it with a geographical journey on a bus through London and a history of a romantic relationship. So it was an experiment to see if I could get all those three things into a piece of writing and it worked and then the music became a larger and larger presence in the story. And it was a way of moving through the psychology of the characters, especially Michael.
Matt: When did the title Ordinary People emerge? In the writing or after or at the beginning?
Diana: That was right at the end, actually. The original title was—well it had many titles. It was called Friends and Family at one point, which is really whack, obviously.
And then it was called Bell Green for a very long time, which is an area in South London. But it wasn't until right at the end when we were actually going towards publication with my publisher. And it was a conversation with my agent and my editors, and we were throwing ideas back and forth. And I came to the conclusion that it needed to have a musical title, because there were so many musical references and so many songs in the novel, and we'd decided by that point to have a playlist anyway. So it was a matter of finding a song or an element of a song that would speak the whole novel. And that song Ordinary People, even though it's not my favourite song on the album, it just spoke so much of what I was trying to do in the novel in terms of presenting Black British lives as ordinary, and normalizing communities that have been sort of marginalized in the arts.
So it was just the perfect title. It's always a really good feeling when you finally arrive at the right title and my editor and agent, usually, they have something to do with it.
Matt: Great. Well, I'll echo your love for John Legend. That album's excellent. Yeah. I remember where I was and when it came out, so it's a wonderful playlist or wonderful soundtrack to that.
Parul: It’s also interesting to finish the book and then I just put that song on and listened to it, and absorbed it. And it made a lot of sense or just fitted together, slotted together so well. I love that relationship that you built.
Diana: Right.
Matt: So, Diana, we'd like to go back to the origin story of you as a writer. So we read that you either had started journaling, or at least were journaling at the age of 16. And then your journey took you into poetry and short story and journalism. And then with your first novel, 26a, that was the birth of you as a novelist.
In one interview, you described this journey as discovering the type of writer you are, which is a really beautiful way to put it. And I guess what I'm curious about is that process of discovery when you're in the middle of those years, trying different mediums, trying different things, did it feel as romantic as the way you described it? The discovery of who you are as a writer or was it messier than that?
Diana: Yeah, it was very, very messy. It wasn't straightforward at all. My experience of writing is generally a discovery of what you don't want to write about. And in that process, learning what you do want to write about and how you want to write it. It's like writing the first draft of the novel, you do it in the wrong way, and that tells you what you want to do and how to do it in the right way, and how not to do it. And my process of becoming a writer was very similar to that. It was kind of expressing thoughts and feelings that were inside me and trying to find the right capsules to put them in. The most obvious place to begin with was a journal.
I think I was probably about 14 when I started writing in a journal and it was really just recording thoughts, kind of impressions that you have of the world as you're growing up, things that really impact on you. And then the entries gradually turned into poems and I realized that I really enjoyed playing with language and just using language as a kind of—as a toy and experimenting with it and see all the different things it could do.
And I would get this really excited electric kind of feeling within when I was playing with language in this way, but it wasn't like I never—I ever really set out to be a writer. It wasn't like that at all. It was a very kind of organic and instinctive process. I went off to university and carried on writing, journaling, doing poetry.
And when it came to getting a job, I had to kind of decide whether I wanted to, because I had fallen into this dance troop, so I was dancing as well. And when it came to what do I do now after graduating, it was like, do I write or dance? You know, how do I earn a living by doing something that I liked doing.
And when I really thought about it, I realized that I think I had a lot more to do in writing. There was just more kind of fire or purpose within me for writing. So I decided to just get a job as a journalist. And that's how it continued, really. The journalism I found was too instructive. I wanted to write in a much freer way.
The poetry had become too small. I wanted to write in a more expansive way. And so it wasn't until I actually started working on a novel that I realized that I'd found the right kind of capsule for the story that I wanted to tell. And even now I feel that the novel is the right space for me, but it's quite a scary process.
I never really know what I'm doing while I'm doing it. So it's full of—it’s usually full of anguish and fear, but as long as I'm actually getting this electric feeling of playing with language and just following my instinct and then I just know, I know it's okay. I just—faith. You need faith. A lot of it.
Parul: Yeah, that's really interesting. Thank you for sharing that. So when you do go down that road where you feel a little bit lost, or when you're exploring a new idea, do you have any practices that you turn to like journaling? Do you still go back to journaling if you're feeling a little bit blocked? Or is there anything else that you might do?
Diana: I read poetry and that helps me kind of loosen up. I don't really journal very much anymore because I write so much that at the end of the day, writing is the last thing I wanted to do or think about. Unless something really awful happens or unless—lately actually I've been feeling the need to record elements of lockdown and pandemic life and what's happening now in the world, and just as a kind of historical record, if anything, but when I feel lost I tend to just carry on, actually. I just force my way through the writing. I make myself write.
I think when I first started writing, what I found really difficult was this idea of writing well and writing perfectly. I really put a lot of pressure on myself. And I didn't understand that novels don't come out perfectly and writing, it doesn't just fall out of your brain in this wonderfully literary way.
And it's a lot to do with the nuts and bolts of actually getting words on paper and then thinking about them and leaving them for a while and revising, revising, and editing. But back then, I didn't know that, so it took me a long time to just write. But now I just kind of—I will just throw anything on the page because I know now that as long as something's there, then I'm moving forward and if [I’m] not producing anything good, at least I'm working out what I don't want to write and how I don't want to write it. And that's useful.
Parul: That's great. That's really helpful. We write with many writers who are still quite early in their journey, and we often hear those frustrations. That's really helpful to hear that from you. The idea of just pushing through and persevering, even when you don't want to.
Diana: Yeah. I mean, it's a job. That's another thing I learned. That you have to treat it as a job. You have to turn up and, you know, commit.
Matt: In that vein of treating it as a job, do you have any writing rules that you follow? We were listening to Neil Gaiman talk about one writing rule he has is that he'll go down to the gazebo and he's allowed to do absolutely nothing or write. That's his two things. And we're just curious, do you have any rules or habits or things that you try to stick to treat it more like a job?
Diana: Yeah, breakfast is really important. I have to eat well before I write. [I] can’t write on an empty stomach, and I don't really—because I live with people. I have [a] family. I don't really like to communicate with anybody before I write.
I'm kind of either silent or monotonal in the morning. I hardly say a word. And then the other thing is I try—I have a word count target of around a thousand words a day, and the minimum is around 600. So when I'm working on a project, I try and stay within those parameters. On a really bad day, it would be as low as 300 or something.
But on those days, I try not to beat myself and stick by that and just kind of accept it, and that tomorrow will be better. I think I'm less hard on myself than I used to be. I understand that, you know, you need to be kind, you need to have a schedule and a routine and a sense of work ethic and commitment, but you also have to just let yourself be a human being. And sometimes, you know, you don't meet your targets and it's fine. It's not the end of the world, you know.
Matt: And is this five days a week, seven days a week? Do you truly treat it like a nine to five type job?
Diana: Basically, yes. I read poetry usually before I write for about, I don’t know, 15 minutes, just to get me to thinking about language and the rhythm of language and the pace. That's why music's important as well after writing because it helps me just loosen those rhythms and that I do pace around in my head, ready for the next day. So I think as long as I work every day in that kind of nine to five fashion and there's a sense of moving forward…then I'm happy for the weekend.
I don't really like to write at weekends if I can help it. I mean, occasionally I will. The urge takes me, but I try and keep it within office hours, which is strange because I've had—when I did work in a traditional nine to five job, I felt like once I left that I would leave that whole structure behind as well, but I haven't. That temporal structure has stayed with me.
Parul: I'm curious because you've obviously been writing in different forms for quite a while. At what point did you define yourself as a writer?
Diana: When I could call myself a writer? I don't know actually. Maybe after finishing the second book.
Parul: All right. That's okay. Second book. Not your first book. So you still don't feel—
Diana: Yeah, because the first book was—even though it was the hardest thing I'd ever done at that point—I also felt like maybe it was just a fluke and just because I wrote the novel, it didn't mean I was a novelist or that I knew even how to write novels and then this second book was also really hard. In fact, harder than the first time.
But by that point, when I actually finished that, I thought, okay, maybe, maybe now I can call myself a writer. I mean I still don't really think of myself as a writer in a sense. I'm just somebody who writes, you know, that's what I do. It's kind of a part of my existence.
Parul: That makes sense.
Diana: And writing is living, you know, so I'm, I'm just living my life. And as I said before, writing was never—I never dreamed of being a writer. It all kind of happened organically, almost by accident. So I feel like I'm still becoming and I’m still discovering, you know. I almost don't want to make the assumption that I'm a writer because that label now it's just, it's loaded by so much that is in public and of the world. And writing to me is a very—it's a very secret and private gift. I've always thought of it as something that is completely and utterly mine, and it cannot be touched by the world and in calling myself a writer in the context of the world, it feels, I don't know, almost like a threat to that perception of it that I hold dear.
Parul: Yeah. That makes sense. And you've written about some very personal experiences as well. I'm curious about that because you've touched upon very difficult subjects like the bereavement of a twin in 26a and then in Ordinary People on identity and parenting, you know, how to be a parent, how to sustain a marriage when you have young children. And I wonder if you have any thoughts on how do we separate real life from our stories?
Diana: Yeah, I mean, it does have to be a separation. It's a difficult thing to achieve. I mean, on the one hand, my writing has always come from a personal place. A lot of my writing comes from a personal place. Something that I've either experienced or felt personally or observed around me.
And that has had some kind of extreme impact on me in terms of feelings and sensations. A direct experience was the thing that made me write in the first place, is the thing that sent me to the journal in the first place, but at the same time, I do feel—I do love stories, I love drama and the whole idea of storytelling. And I feel that there is so much in the world that is real and alive, and that is happening both in my life and around me, in the lives I see around me that is, you know, rich in story and in drama. I'm very loath to create things from nothing… to invent. I'm really not a world builder. I'm a world observer.
I investigate the world and try and analyze it, and encapsulate human life. So that's where the writing comes from, but in order to achieve a distance, I have to kind of place myself in a position that is somehow apart from the characters and the world that I'm writing about. So I have to find a way to do that in order to tell the story.
So with 26a, because I was writing about the relationship between twins, I went through two drafts of that book. And the first draft was written from an adult's perspective of Bessi, the twin who had lost her twin as an adult and writing from that perspective in that moment. And it really wasn't working.
So I took it away to UEA to do the MA in creative writing, and I only started working when I completely overhauled the structure of the novel and turned the characters into children and started to write from the child's point of view. So I was still writing this—it’s actually the same story in exactly the same world, but because I had achieved distance in the eye of the character, and that made the story kind of come to life.
Anytime I use material that is close to my life, I have to find a way to achieve distance, so whatever way is the right way to do it in the context of that story.
Matt: I'm curious with 26a. So you went to get your MA, what was the thing that helped shift to realize, “Actually, oh, it needs to be told from this perspective, not this one.” Was it the peers on the course? Was it the feedback? Was there anything else that you learned?
Diana: Actually, it was completely the peers on the course. I can put it down to one moment. In one workshop, I was reading from the novel in progress in the first workshop. I had volunteered to read first cause I was so shy and so nervous about reading my work that I just volunteered first just to get over and done with, and then I could relax. So I read a piece from the novel where, uh, Georgia and Bessi, the twins, are children. And there's this scene where they're kind of stealing sweets from this shop in Neasden in London. And it's a slightly comic scene and really goes into the heads of the two girls. So I read that and afterwards, and my classmates asked, “So what happens to these girls in the story?”
And I said, “Oh, one of them dies.” And the reaction, the woman was like, “Oh my God”, there was this gasp in the room. And it was just that gasp that changed the whole novel because I realized that I wanted the reader to have that same reaction at the death of one of these twins. I wanted the reader to feel it kind of in motion rather than to feel it in retrospection.
So if I had told the story from the end of the story, I would completely have lost that sense of reader discovering this death and feeling this sense of sort of dismay and being there with the character. So that's when I realized I had to tell—just go back to the beginning of the story, really, and just tell it chronologically in a very simple way.
I tend to over-complicate things a lot. I always think of the most complicated way to do something, but actually, this is another thing I've learned about writing. It’s if you just find a simple way to do it, that might seem even dull or mundane or tedious in the moment, if you just try it out, you might find that that's the easiest way to kind of tell the story and explore what you want to explore and say everything you want to say. You can never trust all of your reservations and hangups about something.
Matt: Have you used readers in your subsequent novels, The Wonder and Ordinary People? Did you use readers in a similar way to help as a litmus test or a compass with the work?
Diana: Yeah, I've always had people reading my work. It was a less stark situation with my other novels. With The Wonder I just had my partner reading it, who tends to read everything and a very good friend in the states, Jennifer Kabat, who's an essayist too, was on the UEA course with me and she tends to read everything, and also my agent. I mean, I think with the last novel—with Ordinary People, I hung on to it probably too long. [I] didn't show it to anybody apart from my agent. And yeah, I showed a bit to my partner and my friend, Jennifer. It's been really useful, having readers actually.
And early on, even before I was writing 26a, I was going to courses in fiction writing. I remember doing one at Goldsmiths, just a short evening course in fiction writing and another one at City Lit. And through those courses, I would meet writers and sometimes we'd hook up in pairs and I had a couple of writing partners at some point, and we would exchange work and even just get together and be writers together. Just exist together. I think that's what was so helpful when I finally went off to UEA to do the MA was I was suddenly—it was so encouraging, affirming as well because I was suddenly part of this community of writers, and I'd never had that before.
It was a real revelation to me. It was suddenly this kind of affirmation of what I was doing. This weird thing of locking myself away all day and writing. Well, what was I writing? What does it mean? Why does the world need it? You know, all that kind of inner—mental kind of questioning of writing. It just evaporated once I was part of this community. And that's been so incredibly helpful to me.
Parul: Yeah. That makes sense. It's such a lonely activity to do, and it can often feel particularly if you're like in a—during lockdown or during this time when you're in a house, maybe with people who don't quite understand what you're doing. That was quite helpful.
I'm curious about your philosophy to writing about difficult subjects. 2020 has been a very difficult year so far. There've been a lot of heightened emotions and when we put a question out to some of the writers in the group about what they'd like to hear from you, we had a few comments about how do I write about basically difficult subjects? Whether it's rage against the system or the patriarchy, whether it's about racism, what's your take on approaching very difficult subjects that are still almost like I want to say wounds to us?
Diana: Yeah. I think journalism, journaling rather, it's quite important for just recording things. I think it's, it's our responsibility as writers actually, to comment on the world and to reflect the world around us, whether that's historically or today because we are mouthpieces of society. One of the writers that I really admire is Tolstoy for the way that he recorded Russian society.
And that now we have these novels that show ordinary everyday lives in his time. So I always aspire to that kind of approach to writing that we are kind of—we are doing important work and we might not always know what it is, the form that this work is going to take, but I think as feelings or impressions come to us, we have to record them in some way.
And then the work will emerge and form in its own time. And every situation is different. When I was writing about the loss of a twin, for example, I had to wait for a while before I could even really address that because there is a sense of having to put emotions on hold, really, in order to achieve the distance that I was talking about. You know, even now and in the context of the world we live in at the moment, a lot of the rage and heartbreak that I feel, I know is finding its way into the work. It's percolating into the work.
And it will be in the work in future instalments because I feel that it's my responsibility as a storyteller to show how people are living, especially characters who've been marginalized that we don't really see often and to show the political environment around us, to show the reality of how it feels living in this moment, in this political moment.
Matt: Maybe if we bring it back to Ordinary People, so the book begins with a political moment, a high Obama getting elected, and then the parties that ensue. [I’m] curious about the origin point for Ordinary People. What was the starting point for you? Where was that first seed of the idea to write that book?
Diana: Gosh, hmm. It was a very higgledy-piggledy kind of creative process, Ordinary People. I just knew the kind of book that I wanted to write. For a long time that's all I knew. I knew that I wanted to write something that was set in contemporary London and that featured people of black and multi-racial heritage.
And I wanted to kind of normalize their ordinary lives. And that's all I had for a long time, but then two things happened in the same year: the election of Obama, the death of Michael Jackson. And those two things were so enormous. Michael Jackson, culturally, Barack Obama, politically, and culturally, in fact. And I was recording those moments in the journal that I realized that I wanted to encapsulate that one particular year where those two major things happened, that were kind of these universal events.
So that gave me a universal context in which to posit this set of people that I wanted to concentrate on. And then I was reading a lot. I was reading lots of John Updike who kind of writes about Middle America, everyday life in Middle America from a particular perspective, a problematic perspective that has to be said, but I found that very guiding to me. And then there was also James Salter, Richard Yates. So basically these kinds of American men, these white American men who in the kind of sixties and the fifties were writing about ordinary life in this way, that was very kind of male-centric. And it used various kinds of tropes of femininity that I really kind of responded to in a kind of quite a furious way. So that gave me the idea that I wanted to write a similar thing, but in a way that was much more open and that showed both female and male perspectives and didn't present women in this problematic way, but showed an entirety of [the] female experience.
And then there was also Claire Messud’s novel, The Emperor's Children, which is about four characters in the lead up to 9/11 in New York. So it was a combination of things. And then gradually the characters—I did kind of character work where I would just write things and conversations, little bits of dialogue, just to expand, really. Gradually, it turned into a kind of storyline, but it was a very messy and chaotic affair, and it just went on forever. I thought it was never gonna end.
Parul: I mean, your characters are very believable. And so the four characters that we come across, Ordinary People, Melissa, Damian, Michael and Stephanie.
Diana: Yeah.
Parul: Did you have them in your head first as characters or did they emerge through the specific scenes you were writing?
Diana: I was doing lots of character work in terms of, you know, kind of writing down lists, really. I do a lot of brainstorming when I'm writing, so I just purely write lists of things about a character, anything interesting that occurs to me about the character. Physical detail, psychological, historical details. You know, it might be the way they walk or things like that. But I was also working from within, so some of the characters came from real people that—real people were the beginning of those characters. But then say the character work, that the character becomes a fully formed creature that works in a fictional form, and then the characters that felt most alive were Michael, [he] felt especially alive, Damian as well, and then Stephanie. Sometimes [the] characters kind of just come from thin air, really, in connection with an existing character. So it was a combination of things. And sometimes I merge people in real life into one person as well.
And then these other characters will come in, who feel just as real to me as the initial character. So it's kind of like making this big soup of people, you know.
Parul: Yeah.
Matt: I'm curious if anyone, uh, that you know, has read your work and sees themselves in the book, has that ever happened or does that ever create any conflict or rough conversations for you?
Diana: No, not really. I mean, I'm always very, if I'm working from life, I always think about it a lot in terms of being respectful and being kind and any discussions I need to have, I have those discussions. if that, uh—any big problems, then I move away from it. But that's never really happened because the reality is only the beginning. I change things a lot. I'm very wary that my work be taken as a blueprint of real life because there is a lot that is different but very kind of crucial elements of 26a, which I think is probably considered my most autobiographical novel. But there are very crucial elements in that novel that are very different from reality.
And in a sense, reality is much—it's much worse in some sense. It's actually—or the opposite, you know, the fiction is an extremity of reality.
Parul: Right.
Diana: They really all very different realms to me. And my sister is an artist and she—I had a dream about her once and she—in the dream, she said to me that writing should reflect life, but it should be different from life.
And I woke up thinking of those words, those words roaming around in my head and they've never left my head. It really is like that. It's wanting to show and reflect life, but it has to be different. It's not the same thing. If you take real life and put it in a novel, it doesn't work.
Parul: I like that. I really liked that reflection.
Matt: What a gift from the dream world too.
Diana: Yeah, it was really clearly spoken in the dream. It was odd.
Parul: I'm curious to see how you move from characters to plotting. So if you have these characters in this sort of soup, as you will, do you then sketch out the outline for your novel or do you just write it and it emerges?
Diana: I'm a planner. I'm a planner because I'm a Virgo and I need—everything has to be organized. And I have to know I'm doing, where I'm going. Otherwise, I can't move forward. But at the same time, it's really difficult because with a novel it's like wading out into [the] darkness, you have no sense of where you’re going. And there's no way of knowing actually until you're at least halfway through. So what I do is I write lists.
I write a plan, a very rough plan in list form just down one, single A4 sheet of paper. It has to fit on one A4 sheet of paper. I can't do that thing where people have like lots of bits of paper on the walls or on like [...] on the floor. It has to just be on one piece of paper, and it shows the chronological sequence of the chapters and the events in the novel.
But that changes usually as I'm writing it. So I'll keep revising, revising the list as I go through.
Parul: Alright, that makes sense because as you're writing, you'll shift your perspective.
Diana: Yeah. But generally, I'm not a big plotter. I'm not very good. It's not my strength, plotting. I don't like it when I'm reading a novel and I feel like someone's just going through the motions of a plot with me. I very much want to be with the characters and experience what they’re experiencing and be inside their heads. I find that much more satisfying. So that's the way I tend to write. It's all led by a character and what the character is experiencing and thinking and feeling that leads to the next reaction or the next plot point.
Parul: I recently read your Harper’s Bazaar article and it really struck a chord with me. And you say “Our Gatekeepers have been selfish for a long time” and you’re talking about the publishing industry. “They’ve habitually made a dangerous and myopic assumption, that we would not be interested in seeing the other picture, and we too have been lazy.” That's what struck me.
“We too have been lazy. Why did we not imagine that in any of the pictures of the invisible, we would not see ourselves and recognize our own human feelings?”
I think it's a really important message, and I wondered if you could just talk a little bit around this, about how we can collectively be active in a fractured world?
Diana: Well, yeah, I mean, I was thinking of gatekeepers in terms of publishers, but also cultural gatekeepers as a whole. So TV and film, music as well. I mean, I was thinking about the way culture is presented in terms of mainstream and marginal and how the breadth of human experience tends to be transmitted through a very white lens traditionally.
And that's still remarkably happening now. And which I find just so absurd that the majority of our stories, whether that's TV, film, books, that we’re still thinking in this very old-fashioned way. We're still picturing the world and in this very old fashioned way. And I think it's our responsibility as readers and as writers to open these other stories and experience the world through other perspectives, and also to take up the baton of anti-racism. It's our responsibility to try and change the world. I mean, it sounds idealistic, altruistic, but—and it is, but I've always felt in my writing and just in life in general that that’s what I want to do—to try and make the world better.
It's funny, but I genuinely do so, I put my writing in service of that, and I think we have to do that as readers and consumers of culture as well.
Parul: I love that. Thank you for that
Matt: There'd be a giant amen, hallelujah from the crowd. I can just imagine everyone right now, so that's wonderful. And it might be a good place to wrap this, is to, as writers heed our work, which is birthing the best story that we can birth and then focus on the rest after that. Diana, thank you so much. This has been such a joy. I loved it. Hopefully, this was useful for you and for everyone listening. This will be one that I'll revisit and relisten to and rewatch to really continue to chew on your wisdom, Diana.
Any asks you have of us before we wrap? Anything you'd like us to do other than carry on with our writing and continue to amplify the voices that need more amplification? Anything else that you would leave us with?
Diana: Just keep the faith and remember that writing is, uh, it's a responsibility, social responsibility. It's our tool.
Parul: Thank you, Diana, I really enjoyed it.
[Outro] Parul: Thank you for tuning into the London Writers' Salon podcast. If you'd like to join these weekly interviews live for the chance to ask our guest writers your burning questions. Well, you can become a member at londonwriterssalon.com forward slash pound membership. You'll get access to our library of salon interviews and workshops, our private online community, where you'll find world-class resources on the craft of writing and find creative friends.
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