To celebrate the release of her new book, The Drowned Village, we asked author Norma Curtis to open up for readers in an exclusive piece for Female First. Here's what she had to reveal...
1. I love writing about love in all its forms, not just between lovers but the everyday unifying kind that brings us out of ourselves and raises a lump-in-the-throat gratitude towards partners, friends, pets, strangers. It’s a great feeling. Writing about love is a joy!
2. Having said that, I did once try my hand at crime writing – everyone has a dark side. We’ve got an innate sense of justice and righting wrongs is an appealing subject, so after I had my first three books published, I switched genre. Book number four was the crime novel. I called it Every Breath you Take and the body count rose to eight. It was a small group of women committing extreme vigilante violence against wrongdoers, and death by corkscrew was one example. My editor not only turned it down, she resigned and moved to Norfolk. Maybe it was just coincidence but sometimes I do wonder if it was also partly me.
3. One of my writing highlights was having drinks with the Queen. Not one-to-one – I was one of at least two hundred writers including JK Rowling, Joanna Trollope and Jilly Cooper. But I was in Buckingham Palace drinking her Majesty’s G&Ts and eating her nuts, and that was good enough for me.
4. I’m currently obsessed with drowned villages. They can be found all over the world, the stuff of legends, and whether they’ve been flooded to create reservoirs or submerged under the sea, they have a savage mystique of their own. Sometimes on a low tide they put in an appearance. When you come across one, if you linger on the glittering shore on a quiet day looking out over the water, cross my heart, you can hear the bells toll.
5. Writing is a solitary occupation but being published is a collaborative experience. The best editors enter the world of the story and they know it as well or better than the writer does. Creativity is part inspiration and part craft and sometimes you have to be brave enough to throw ideas, pages, chapters away. (Also whole typescripts – see number 2!) It’s good to keep faith in the writing. I have an amazing editor and when I finished the final version of The Drowned Village I felt a wonderful moment of joy and satisfaction, because that was it, she’d got me to write the story it was meant to be.
You can buy Norma Curtis’ latest book, The Drowned Village here: https://geni.us/B09MJJH4ZRsocial
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