For those unfamiliar, I am a writer from South Africa. Born here and raised here.
Over the course of 5 posts, potentially more, I’ll share about me behind the pages. I will discuss what influenced me as a writer. I will also share how being South African influenced my writing.
How did being South African influence my writing?
I’m a cautious writer.
It’s fun for me to play with words. It could mean one thing. Or it could mean another thing. You decide.
Our newspaper articles were full of ambiguous messages. The words said one thing but I always read something different. For most of my life, it seemed to me that I spoke a different English or Afrikaans or Sesotho. It felt as if I got from the same words that all the members of my newspaper-reading family, a completely different message.
In the romances I wrote so far, there are many passages that readers ask me to clarify. My Beta Readers highlight something they find confusing, then I know to clarify this. Only to find that my Beta Readers are becoming attuned to my voice but new readers expect clearer or more obvious descriptions.
This is a deliciously new problem for me, how can I write in my cautious voice without giving too little info?
I prefer letting my reader make up their own minds.
What’s the use of a mind if you can’t change it? I love it when my readers get to color in the details for themselves. I see my writing as a sketch with black lines and my readers interpretation of the words the color that they add.
Ena Murray was one of the authors whose every book and omnibus I devoured in our small town library. She wrote stock standard books with the same formula but every book was delicious in its own right.
In an interview she was asked about her closed-door habit when it came to explicit scenes in both her romance and suspense books. Her answer was clear. Readers are bright and creative. Leaving them with a dot dot dot approach allows them to make up their own minds but also brings them back for more.
I loved the respect and love she had for her readers and there and then I went from writing the violence or sex or suspense explicitly to a dot dot dot approach.
All my stories are set in a version of South Africa.
Morgana Best, the cozie mystery author from Australia eluded in an interview with the fabulous Spa Girls ladies that publishers advice to non-US authors have always been to write in a US voice, set the stories in the US and use US characters.
A teacher from school and my dad echoed a version of the same advice when I made the mistake of telling them about my love for writing. Do it as a hobby. In South Africa, you will not make a living from your writing. And the international market is not welcoming to foreign writers.
I took their message to heart and desperately tried to change my voice, move my setting and create the characters that sells. Talk about a creative killer.
Then there’s the infamous advice of writing what you know. I know South Africa. Despite efforts and dreams and pleading with the powers in control to make another country home, South Africa is home and this is what I know.
Surprisingly, my stories resonate with foreigners as well! It’s amazing if you don’t keep people in boxes, how they surprise you.
**I promised myself to keep blog posts to no more than 500 words so I’ll end this post here.
Thanks for reading. Look out for the next post in this series where I’ll go into a little bit more detail about my writing
Cheers!
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