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Thursday 4 March 2021

The Write Advice 147: BERNADINE EVARISTO

 
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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