We’re back with another interview (we’re sure you guys love to get a peek into the minds of LGBT creators just as much as we do)! Today our guest is Kathleen Jowitt, whose second novel is coming out later this year.
Kathleen told us about the messiness of her writing process and how showing people a draft early isn’t always a good idea, about the power of finding a writer idol and much, much more.
Of course, you can follow Kathleen on twitter!
Let’s start at the beginning. How did you first get into writing?
I always enjoyed writing, from primary school onwards. I remember reading the blurb of the Garden Gang books, whose author was nine years old, and being determined to outdo her. I didn’t manage that! But I did keep on writing through my teens, and really knuckled down to my first novel the year after I left university. It took me eight years to get that one to the point where I was happy to let it out in public…
What are your favourite genres to read and write?
I’m a pretty eclectic reader, and have favourite books from most genres. Sci-fi, fantasy, Golden Age detective fiction, Ruritanian adventures, spy thrillers… I value competent prose, thorough but not obtrusive research, thoughtful worldbuilding, and complex characters – and those are things I’ve found in many different genres. As for what I write, I tend to just call it ‘contemporary’.
And are there any genres or tropes you wouldn’t write?
Never say never! I’m a bit intimidated by the idea of historical fiction and hard sci-fi, in both cases because of the amount of research required, but I’ve ventured into historicals at least for shorter fiction. I think I’d also struggle writing in a subgenre which required strict compliance with a particular structure: one of the things I most enjoy about writing is the opportunity to play around with expectations and undermining convention.
How do you get inspiration for your books?
Usually it’s something that intrigues me or angers me, some kind of real life contradiction or complexity. My latest book began with a comment my partner made when we were watching the cycling: that a professional endurance athlete would be more likely than most of the general population to understand the concept of ‘spoons’. Most recently, I’ve been rendered furious by the House of Bishops’ ‘Pastoral Statement’ (a massively hurtful response to the fact that opposite-sex civil partnerships are now available in the UK, which managed to be simultaneously and hugely offensive to Christians in same-sex relationships and to non-married couples in different-sex relationships, and, as usual, ignore bisexuality altogether) and I think it’s going to make my current work in progress a whole lot stronger.
Do you have a writing playlist? And if you do, does it focus more on the lyrics or melodies, vibe of the songs?
I don’t – I just hit ‘Shuffle’ on iTunes, and skip anything that intrudes on my concentration (which is usually spoken word stuff). Quite often I tune the music out entirely, and am quite surprised when I look back at ‘Recently Played’!
What’s your writing process? At what point do you let other people read your drafts and who are they?
Erratic! I write whichever scene I feel like in the moment, and then go back and fill in the gaps, over and over again until I have a whole novel. With my last book, I got other people to read it rather earlier than perhaps I should have done, and had to keep sending substantial revisions over to them. This time I’ve just got my friend Sam looking at the first third of the novel, while I frantically fill in gaps so that I can send the next chunk over, but it’ll be a while before I let anyone else look at it. Sam and I have both seen each other’s terrible early drafts, and expect comments to be robust – but also to be ignored, if appropriate!
Summarise your most recent/next book in up to 5 words and a meme.
Two young women, various institutions.
Which three authors would you say influenced your writing the most?
This is a difficult one: I keep thinking of authors, and then going, ‘But wait! No! I want to do something really different from what they did!’ Then of course there’s the fact that all of us are picking our words and our stories out of a hoard that’s been built up over centuries by other people, and we’re always in dialogue with some other writer.
So I’ll say Dorothy L. Sayers, for that sense that every word I write belonged to someone else first, and also the way that she does really interesting things within her genre without ever disowning it. Susan Howatch, who really gets inside the head of a character and shows them, knows them, the way they don’t want to be known. They’re unreliable narrators, but not the annoying sort. Noel Streatfeild is definitely on the list: her unconventional family set-ups, her interest in women and the way they relate to each other, and her preoccupation with careers and callings and talents, are all reflected in what I write.
I think that perhaps I write against things, or write things that I can’t find elsewhere. I want to dig deeper, or show a different point of view. My first book began as ‘Dear Bob, but if in fact the main character was a lesbian’; its sequel is turning out to be ‘Lindchester, but where the queer women get some plot and we’re not sure that marriage is necessarily all it’s cracked up to be’. The one between them started out something like ‘Jill Mansell, but nobody’s going to end up rich and famous’. And so on…
And for something that is also very important to us & what we put a lot of emphasis on when blogging. What does ownvoices LGBT representation mean to you?
It means that someone is writing what they know. (That’s a cliché for a reason!) It means that the writing is informed by real experience, even if that never shows on the surface of the text. It means that there’s a particular kind of truth in the story. Of course it doesn’t give an author a free pass not to do any other research. And again, there’s only so much of a book that it can cover. (For example, I know what it’s like to be a queer Christian – but I can only imagine what it’s like to be a queer Christian in a non-affirming family.)
Rec us some great LGBT books you’ve read recently! One can never have enough recommendations!
2019 was a really good year for LGBT books! A couple that I really enjoyed were: Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny (time-travelling bisexual heroine!) by Ankaret Wells; and Floodtide (historical fantasy, with a working class narrator) by Heather Rose Jones. Looking back a bit further in terms of publication date, I’ve recently finished Trumpet by Jackie Kay, which is an absolutely devastatingly beautiful book about a trans jazz trumpeter who’s outed after his death.
What’s one piece of advice you would like to give your younger self?
Keep on going! The more you write, the better you get at it. And don’t worry too much about what anybody else thinks.
If you could have dinner with one member of the LGBT community, dead or alive, who would it be?
Any one of the Benson family, though I fear it would be more for the ‘horrified fascination’ and ‘Victorian repression’ side of things. And you never know, there might be a book in it…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kathleen Jowitt was born in Winchester, UK, and grew up deep in the Welsh Marches and, subsequently, on the Isle of Wight. After completing her undergraduate degree in English Literature at the University of Exeter she moved to Guildford and found herself working for a major trade union. She now lives in Cambridgeshire, works in London, and writes on the train.
She is the author of two novels; her first, Speak Its Name, was the first self-published book ever to be shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. Its sequel, The Real World, will appear in September 2020.
You can find her at www.kathleenjowitt.com and @KathleenJowitt
Follow on Goodreads | Buy Speak Its Name | Add The Real World
