Ask the Author: Jane Davis
Answered Questions (13)
Jane Davis
My publishing journey began before the advent of self-publishing, when the Done Thing for a writer was to secure the services of a literary agent. Which I did. But that agent was unable to place my first novel. (There was an offer and a contract but before I could sign the contract the publisher who had offered the terms was bought up by another publisher, so that was the end of that). There, my journey diverted. Unbeknown to my agent, I entered my second novel in a competition, the aim of which was to find the next Joanne Harris. And I won! Half Truths and White Lies was the result.
Unfortunately (as you may have guessed), I didn’t turn out to be the next Joanne Harris. Transworld published my book under their women’s fiction imprint. I didn’t challenge their decision because I was very green and had no idea of the implications of this. When I submitted my follow-up novel to them, they turned it down because it wasn’t women’s fiction.
There followed several years of trying to find homes for my next three novels. During this time people began to speak about self-publishing in hushed tones. I paid good money for the advice that no self-respecting author would even consider it. But by 2012, I was on the verge of giving up, but before I jacked it all in, I decided that I should see for myself. I booked a ticket for a self-publishing conference. The rest is history.
Unfortunately (as you may have guessed), I didn’t turn out to be the next Joanne Harris. Transworld published my book under their women’s fiction imprint. I didn’t challenge their decision because I was very green and had no idea of the implications of this. When I submitted my follow-up novel to them, they turned it down because it wasn’t women’s fiction.
There followed several years of trying to find homes for my next three novels. During this time people began to speak about self-publishing in hushed tones. I paid good money for the advice that no self-respecting author would even consider it. But by 2012, I was on the verge of giving up, but before I jacked it all in, I decided that I should see for myself. I booked a ticket for a self-publishing conference. The rest is history.
Jane Davis
That’s like asking me to choose a favourite child! If forced, I’d have to say Lucy Forrester, my main character from My Counterfeit Self. She’s a cross between Edith Sitwell and Vivienne Westwood. I enjoyed watching her grow from childhood polio victim, from poet to political activist and, in later life, into a reluctant style icon. I was very proud when readers said that they’d Googled her and were surprised to learn that she wasn’t a real person.
Jane Davis
I have only ever written at my dining room table, which is definitely not an ideal environment - I don’t live alone and it is the highway to the kitchen and the bathroom! However, Stephen King describes in his book “On Writing” about how he used to write at a small desk under the eaves, and it wasn’t until he had his first office that he first suffered from writers’ block. So if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In terms of schedule, I used to say that I aimed to produce a book a year every year, but the need to pay the bills and helping to care for my father while he suffered from dementia have meant that my schedule has slipped. For my last couple of books there have been two years between release dates. Of course, not all of that time is writing...
Jane Davis
My process is slow and organic. I start with a single idea and follow it through to its natural conclusion. Most of my books have changed substantially during the writing. The pivotal moment of a novel may not actually reveal itself until several edits in, or until an editor comments, ‘I see the point that you were trying to make.’ I might realise that whatever I thought I was writing about, this is the one sentence the whole plot hangs on. Sometimes it’s a subtle change of mind-set, but equally it can be a Eureka moment.
Jane Davis
I try to get things that stops my flow out of the way. Once you’ve published that first book, there is never just the writing. The publicity machine tends to take over. The requests to review books and provide endorsements. A website to maintain. I know some authors who ring-fence their time very successfully, but I can be side-tracked by the fact that 350 emails in my in-box every day and, whilst many of them will be junk, the thought that there might be ten that deserve my immediate attention means that I can’t leave them alone. So it takes discipline. But if I'm really blocked, I go for a walk. That seems to wake the old grey-matter up!
I try to get things that stops my flow out of the way. Once you’ve published that first book, there is never just the writing. The publicity machine tends to take over. The requests to review books and provide endorsements. A website to maintain. I know some authors who ring-fence their time very successfully, but I can be side-tracked by the fact that 350 emails in my in-box every day and, whilst many of them will be junk, the thought that there might be ten that deserve my immediate attention means that I can’t leave them alone. So it takes discipline. But if I'm really blocked, I go for a walk. That seems to wake the old grey-matter up!
Jane Davis
I didn't begin to write until my mid-thirties. Then it was a response to the lack of creativity in my day-job, and yet the day-job has helped. Both imagination and logic are required for fiction. As for why,
fiction provides the unique opportunity to explore one or two points of view. It is never going to provide the whole answer, but it does force both writer and reader to walk in another person’s shoes. And, in many ways, it’s the exploration and not the answer that is important. The idea that there is a single truth is flawed. I have a sister who’s less than a year older than me our memories of the same events differ substantially. There are many different versions of the truth and many layers of memory.
fiction provides the unique opportunity to explore one or two points of view. It is never going to provide the whole answer, but it does force both writer and reader to walk in another person’s shoes. And, in many ways, it’s the exploration and not the answer that is important. The idea that there is a single truth is flawed. I have a sister who’s less than a year older than me our memories of the same events differ substantially. There are many different versions of the truth and many layers of memory.
Jane Davis
It sounds so much more glamorous than ‘I’m an insurance broker’. (The reality, I can assure you, is that it is not.)
Jane Davis
I'm actually writing that book! For the last 20 years I have lived in a house that used to be a ticket office for a pleasure garden. We know that the man who built the property was called R E Cooke. Ordnance survey maps show that the pleasure garden didn't fail in one fell swoop but was sold off plot be plot. The question of what led a man to open a pleasure garden at a point when most of the great gardens had failed, and what made him fight so hard to try and save it, has intrigued me for the past two decades. Now I'm writing it.
Jane Davis
Although it may only be an emotion, it’s inevitable that something of me ends up in each of my books. If I need to write a tired and emotional scene, I might set the alarm for the middle of the night.
While I was writing “Half-truths and White Lies”, my middle school was pulled down to make way for a housing estate. Since it was within walking distance of my job, I made a pilgrimage every lunchtime to see the wrecking balls do their work, documenting the progress with photographs. In the evenings, writing as Peter Church, I described the dismay he felt at discovering that a block of flats had been built on the place where he used to play marbles and that more blocks had been built on pitch where he played football. He asks himself the question, is it possible to mourn the loss of a building as you would a person? “Or is it simply that St Winifred’s was the shell that I stored so many of my memories in? How is it that my old school was torn apart and I didn’t feel a physical wrench?”
In “A Funeral for an Owl”, Jim discovers that his pupil Shamayal is living in the council flat that he had lived in as a boy. I knew that flat because I lived there too and so some of the small anecdotes are things that happened to me.
I wrote “An Unknown Woman” in a year when my income had dropped to a level that I hadn’t earned since the late eighties, and so I chose to explore our relationship with material possessions. I also wanted to write about a character who is like me, but is not me. A woman in her late forties who has chosen not to have children and is living with a long-term partner, but is unmarried. Although she’s happy in her relationship, there is a nagging sense of alienation that she doesn’t like to acknowledge, sometimes from her friends whose time and energy is taken up with young children, sometimes from the life she imagined for herself when she played Mummies and Daddies, and was bridesmaid at an aunt’s wedding. In many ways, her life lacks milestones. Measures of success and achievements. And so she has ploughed everything into her relationship, her work - which she loves - and her home. And then her home and everything in it are taken away from her. In the first scene, Anita is standing outside her home watching as it burns to the ground. The house is recognisably mine. If you set out to write something that is authentic and true, you have to make it personal.
While I was writing “Half-truths and White Lies”, my middle school was pulled down to make way for a housing estate. Since it was within walking distance of my job, I made a pilgrimage every lunchtime to see the wrecking balls do their work, documenting the progress with photographs. In the evenings, writing as Peter Church, I described the dismay he felt at discovering that a block of flats had been built on the place where he used to play marbles and that more blocks had been built on pitch where he played football. He asks himself the question, is it possible to mourn the loss of a building as you would a person? “Or is it simply that St Winifred’s was the shell that I stored so many of my memories in? How is it that my old school was torn apart and I didn’t feel a physical wrench?”
In “A Funeral for an Owl”, Jim discovers that his pupil Shamayal is living in the council flat that he had lived in as a boy. I knew that flat because I lived there too and so some of the small anecdotes are things that happened to me.
I wrote “An Unknown Woman” in a year when my income had dropped to a level that I hadn’t earned since the late eighties, and so I chose to explore our relationship with material possessions. I also wanted to write about a character who is like me, but is not me. A woman in her late forties who has chosen not to have children and is living with a long-term partner, but is unmarried. Although she’s happy in her relationship, there is a nagging sense of alienation that she doesn’t like to acknowledge, sometimes from her friends whose time and energy is taken up with young children, sometimes from the life she imagined for herself when she played Mummies and Daddies, and was bridesmaid at an aunt’s wedding. In many ways, her life lacks milestones. Measures of success and achievements. And so she has ploughed everything into her relationship, her work - which she loves - and her home. And then her home and everything in it are taken away from her. In the first scene, Anita is standing outside her home watching as it burns to the ground. The house is recognisably mine. If you set out to write something that is authentic and true, you have to make it personal.
Jane Davis
I write about big subjects and give my characters almost impossible moral dilemmas. I don’t allow them a shred of privacy. I know what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, the lies they tell, their secret fears. But I only meet them at a particular point on their journeys, usually in a highly volatile or unstable situation, and then I throw them to the lions. How people behave under pressure reveals so much about them.
Jane Davis
I am so sorry, Mary, I have only just discovered your question among general discussion points from Goodreads! I think it's true that the home for literary fiction is with the small independent presses these days. In the UK we have Bluemoose Books http://bluemoosebooks.com/who do a sterling job of supporting new talent. I have recently teamed up with nine other indie authors to produce two boxed sets with five novels in each. I have included the link so that you can take a look. Clare Flynn whose novel The Chalky Sea is included on boxed set one is an author of historical fiction. She won The Selfies Award in its second year. Shortlists of awards aimed at indie authors are another great way to track down some of the best. The US has its own Selfies Award http://selfiesbookawards.com/ which has a far higher profile than our UK version. I think the difficulty is not a lack of self-published books, but the fact that because so many indie authors set up publishing imprints, it is becoming more difficult to identify whether of not a book is self-published. https://www.vineleavespress.com/pando...
Jane Davis
Hi Elissa, I wish I saw messages automatically! I have only just found this one. I check in on book reviews reviews regularly so there is no need to eamil. I hope you enjoy it the book.
Jane Davis
In December 2013 I announced publicly that I was going to cut right back on paid work and spend a year trying to live on my earnings as an author. I was already earning very much less than I did at the height of my career as the deputy managing director of a firm of insurance brokers. Already, I had had no new clothes for over four years, but in December I got rid of my car and cut out all of the little luxuries - the takeaway coffees, for example. Everything that was not essential had to go. At the same time, mine was arguably low-level risk. My house is paid for and I have no dependents relying on me. If push comes to shove, I doubt my partner would let me starve. But as my world shrank even further I began to think about how much of our identities are bound up in the things that we surround ourselves with, much of them completely unnecessary, but the things that have become our armour. To my right as I sit here is my bookshelf. The selection of books on display in my dining room is not random. Each book tells part of my history and says something about me. 'If we are what we own, then who are we when we own nothing?' And so, in the first scene of my new novel, An Unknown Woman, I burn down my house and everything in it. Anyone who knows me will recognise that it is my house; those are my things. People who have read the early drafts asked me how could I do that? (Certainly, I’ve become quite paranoid about switching anything electrical off before I leave the house). Although the character is not me, I think that in order to make the emotion as raw and authentic as possible, you have to make it personal.
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