INTERVIEW WITH Jane Fletcher

October Newsletter 2005

By Connie Ward, BSB Publicist/Author Liaison

What made you decide to become a fiction writer?

I've always told myself stories and wanted to write them out, but I never used to get anywhere when trying to put them down on paper. I'd spend an hour trying to get the first sentence right. By then the paper would be wearing thin from me rubbing out the pencil marks. I'd have to force myself to go on to the next sentence. After three hours I'd have a hideous paragraph of turgid prose, which would end up in the rubbish bin, and I'd settle for telling my partner, Lizzy, all about it instead.

The writing happened when I had a computer and Lizzy refused to listen to yet another account of a plot. She told me to type it on the word processor, and then she'd read it. My first paragraph was still horrendous, but knowing that I could go back and edit it got me moving on. By the time I'd finished the entire first draft of the novel, I was starting to get a feel for how to put sentences together to say what I wanted. By the time I'd edited the story six times, my writing had got to more or less where it is now.

So, for me, it wasn't so much deciding to become a writer, as Lizzy pushing me into learning the craft of word-smithing, and the only way to learn that is to do it.

What type of stories do you write and why?

I write romance because I'm a softy at heart, and fantasy because that is what inspires my imagination.

I like the freedom fantasy gives me to play games of 'what if', and also to look at things from new angles. In my writing, I'm interested in not just telling a story, but also exploring issues of gender and sexuality. Science fiction and fantasy let me do this in ways that are impossible in any other form of literature. As in my Celaeno series, creating an exclusively female world, then populating it with the sort of real-life women I have met, and seeing what sort of world this gives me. Unlike the women only worlds that many other writers have created, mine isn't a utopia - maybe I've been meeting the wrong sort of real-life woman.

What does/do your family/friends think about your writing?

 I think the overwhelming initial reaction was surprise, except for Lizzy who was mainly smug for pushing me into it in the first place.

Where do you get your ideas?

All sorts of images drift through my head while I'm nominally thinking about something else. Sometimes the images stick, and I start to weave plots around them. Sometimes the plot comes together and sometimes it doesn't. Overall, the initial image to completed plot ratio is not very high, but I get lots of images, so I still end up with more plots than I have time to write.

How do you write? Do you plan everything out or just write?

I plan. I don't even touch the keyboard until I have the plot fixed in my head. My seven step plan for writing novels goes something like:

1) Plan the story out completely - this can take years, and I usually have three or four half plots bouncing around in my head, waiting for inspiration.

2) Write a one page chapter breakdown. I give a couple of lines per chapter. These are little more than shorthand memory prods. It wouldn't mean much to anyone else, but it allows me to get the action evenly spread. If I can't summarize it in two or three lines there's too much happening, and if I can't fill two lines there's not enough.

3) Expand the summaries to one - two pages per chapter. Which gets me almost to paragraph level. Before this step I might only know that a conversation has to take place. This stage is where I work out where it happens, and might even include a few crucial lines of dialog.

4) Write the chapters out in full and get someone else to read it - this always used to be Lizzy. She was my first and toughest critic.

5) Put story in a drawer for at least six months and don't look at it, so I can come back to it with fresh eyes. While I'm writing, I'm too close to the words to be objective about the overall work.

6) Reread the story, making notes. This is for major changes, where I realize that something is explained so badly that it doesn't make sense, or I was rushing and need to put some paragraphs of description in, or I was waffling and I need to cut bits out ruthlessly. Then incorporate all the modifications into a reasonably final draft.

7) A final edit prior to submitting it to a publisher, working more at a sentence level, picking up as many typos as I can and making sure that the language flows as smoothly as possible.

How much of yourself and the people you know are in your writing?

Everyone in the books is to some extent based on people I know, with additional insight from my in-depth knowledge of me. I want my characters to be like real people, so I have to use my experience of what human beings are like.

In terms of directly basing a character on a specific individual, the nearest I've come is with some characters who are composites of various people. As with the murder victim, in Rangers at Roadsend, who was about 50% based the class bully from my school, filled out with assorted traits from other people. But I can confess to extra pleasure when writing the book, knowing that she was going to end up with a knife in her back.

Which lesbian authors inspired you most?

I'd have to say that the writers who've inspired me the most in my writing are not lesbian. They're the authors who've written books that I have loved reading, but finished thinking how much more fun the book would have been if there had been a few dykes in it. Like Tolkein and 'The Lord of The Rings' - a big book, a wonderful read, but not a single lesbian. Part of my inspiration to write the Lyremouth books is correcting this oversight.

For lesbian authors, I guess I'd pick Katherine Forrest, for the first lesbian books I read where the character being lesbian was not, in itself, the main plot point. In her Kate Delafield novels, Kate's lesbianism is integral to the stories, but it isn't what the plots are about.

Do you have any suggestions for new writers?

Write lots and lots, it’s the only way you'll get to develop your own voice.

Edit your work critically and accept that you are going to have to rewrite whole chapters. No writer is so good that they can't turn out some duff pages.

Study the skills of writing - read books and articles and attend courses. Before you boldly launch out and break the rules of writing, you should know what the rules are and why they're there.

Learn to accept constructive criticism. It's not the reader's responsibility to understand what you are trying to do in your story, it's your responsibility as a writer to explain.

When you’re not writing, what do you do for fun?

Read, play games, meet friends in pubs, and torment the cat.