Writing Your First Novel After 40: What Nobody Tells You
Plenty of novelists publish their first book after 40, and often write better ones for having lived first. What nobody tells you about starting late, and why your life is the material.
How to Write a Sense of Place Into Fiction
A strong sense of place in fiction comes from almost anything except description. How characters living in a place make it real, drawn from writing the KwaZulu-Natal coast.
The House That Kept Secrets: Writing The House on Dunehaven Lane
On writing a story about a coastal South African house, the apartheid era architecture of secrecy, and the courage that leaves no trace until someone finds it decades later.
The South African Coastal Town as a Setting
The KwaZulu-Natal coastline is not dramatic in the way most famous coastlines are. It is exactly the right kind of coast for a novel about secrets.
How Mireya Found Me
Mireya arrived in a sentence I wrote almost by accident. On finding the central character of The Lantern in the Valley and what she needed to say.
On Writing Women Who Are Not Waiting to Be Rescued
The first version of Naomi was polite and careful and entirely reasonable. She was also someone you would not want to spend three hundred pages with. I rewrote her from scratch.
