I’m very ambitious and I want the best for my books. But that doesn’t shape my writing at all. I want to stay true to the story I want to tell. So I have to push sort of all of ambition out of my head, and just get on with writing the story that I want to write. I have to be inside the work and also looking at it from the outside as much as you can when you’re creating it yourself. So I’m a very ruthless critic of my own work as I’m developing it. I
rewrite pretty much every paragraph as I’m writing the book. You know, my background was as a poet. And I still pay a poet’s attention to language, as a novelist.
Many of my characters are completely beyond my experience, but that’s what we do as writers, we write beyond our experience… I feel entitled to write any story I want, in whatever way I want, and if there are consequences to that, I will deal with them. I am not going to be scared off. But obviously if you’re writing a Muslim Saudi Arabian woman, there are things you need to research, and if you get things wrong maybe to do with the religion, then I think that’s valid. But I think with the interior life of the character, you can play with it and have fun with it, and do what you like, and I think we need to do that.
Writing tips from our bestselling authors [Penguin Books UK, 15 October 2020]
Use the link below to visit the website of British novelist BERNADINE EVARISTO:
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