Author Interview: Nicola Yeager

Nicola Yeager is steadily becoming one of my favourite authors. Her novellas are punchy and real with great characters. She is gradually redefining ChickLit. Her characters are not obsessed with make up or finding the right man, her characters are strong minded and intelligent and thankfully so different from other ChickLit characters. She gracefully accepted to answer a few questions for me. She’s inspired me to keep writing. Hopefully she inspires more writers to keep writing. Thank you Nicola for the wonderful words. 

Author Profile

Nicola Yeager is a writer and book reviewer. After several years working as a journalist for a variety of publications, she started writing novellas. Her first in the chick lit genre, The Spa Day (originally titled Christmas Without Holly), was a critical success and an Amazon best seller. She followed this up with Picture Imperfect, which continued the gritty, witty, first person style of her debut.

Although born in Lincoln, she has lived in London for almost ten years and lives with her husband and two small children. Her hobbies include swimming and slimming!

Interview

What inspired you to write Picture Imperfect and the Spa Day?

 Even though none of my work is autobiographical in any way, I know of lots of people, male and female, who seem to have been trapped in relationships with unsuitable people for years and years. I've always been interested in why this happens; why people are prepared to put up with all kinds of crap just for the sake of conformity, security or money. Holly, the character in The Spa Day, had a fiancée who worked in Hong Kong. I did actually meet a girl who was in this position and it had been going on for ages. I remember thinking: 'Are you insane?'

Are the names of the characters in your novels important?

When I was asked to write novellas in the chick lit genre, I read quite a few books to give me a flavour. I have to say I found a lot of them very hard to read; some used really weird phrases that you'd never hear a person say in real life and a lot of the characters seemed unreal, as if the authors had vaguely heard of 'people like that' and were just making it up the best they could.

I noticed that most of the forenames used for women were pretty much all 'little girl' names, like Sophie, Issy, Becky, Lucy and so on. I followed suit with this for The Spa Day and Picture Imperfect (though not so much in that one), but I've got fed up with it now and have moved away from those sort of names in the one I'm writing at the moment. Holly Nightingale in The Spa Day, was unintentionally clever! I wanted to use the name Holly as the story had a Christmas theme, but the fact that her surname was Nightingale and she was a nurse was coincidence. I was looking around for a surname and I thought of Mary Nightingale the news reader. Sometimes I just Google 'interesting names' or something and see what jumps out!

What about the titles of your novels? How important is it to choose the right title?

This is complicated. The Spa Day was originally called Christmas Without Holly, which I was quite pleased with. It had a couple of meanings, though the main one was the fate that would befall Holly's rat of a bf, i.e he'd be spending Christmas without her. The publisher rebooted it so it wouldn't only get seasonal sales and now it's called The Spa Day, which doesn't really make sense as Holly is there for more than one day! Picture Imperfect was the publisher's idea. We had a working title for this novella, but it had to be changed at the last moment, so Picture Imperfect it became! I've got a working title for my third one, but the story has changed since I thought it up, so I don't know what it'll be called yet. I'm sure something will pop into my head - or the publisher's!

Are there any occupational hazards to being a novelist?

You have to get used to continual rejection. Unfortunately, you just have to take it on the chin. Some people get very upset by it; they feel they've put their heart and soul into what they've written and take a rejection as something personal. It isn't. It's just bad luck. Or you're just not good enough yet. You have to send a publisher the right thing at the right time. I would say, though, that many of the people who read the submissions in a publishers are often just out of university. No one senior in a publishing company wants to spend all day reading manuscripts, so the job is invariably given to someone who's just started. They may not have the judgment to decide whether your work is good or bad and may not be very well read. Remember, any decision they make may decide whether they've still got their job in publishing next month. Just keep sending stuff out. If a publisher says they don't take unsolicited manuscripts, send them it anyway!

What are your current projects?

I'm currently working on my third chick lit novella, and I'm currently about two thirds of the way through the first draft. I think this 'first draft, second draft' idea came from the days when an author would type the whole thing out again, adjusting and making changes to the original. Nowadays, with a word processor, you can just go through the whole thing and make alterations. That's what I do, anyway. You sometimes have to go back and stick things in earlier bits to make later bits make sense. I can't imagine what a pain this would have been when you could only use a typewriter!

Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?

 As far as chick lit goes, I just felt, after reading some when I was on holiday, that you could make the problems the main characters had a little bit more realistic. Most of the ones I've read concern women who are really good at making cakes and stuff like that. It kind of reminds me of articles in papers like The Sunday Times, which say things like 'being a stay at home mum is cool again' or 'how to cook your way into a man's heart'. No matter how feisty and in-control these women seem to be, they're all waiting for Mr Right so they can bake cakes and biscuits for him. I think this pre-feminist attitude can be traced back to the authors. They strike me as rather inexperienced, anodyne women, to be honest, and it comes out in their writing, even if they try to hide it. If the characters in these books were truly submissive, i.e practiced bondage and consensual spanking while they were making cakes according their grandmother's old recipes, they'd be a lot more interesting!

Who is your favourite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?

 I don't know that I have a favourite author, to be honest. Sometimes, I'll read a few books by the same person, but they usually let you down, sooner or later. I'll tell you what I've been reading in the last few weeks. 'A Parisian Affair & Other Stories' by Guy de Maupassant, 'Venus In Furs' by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and 'Little Birds' by Anais Nin. Two of those are collections of short stories. That may give you an idea of my taste. I like sexual and sensual stories that are well written. I probably read more non fiction than fiction.
 

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

 Keep at it. Sacrifice everything for it. If you really feel you have something to say, there is nothing more important than what you're doing, not even your family.

Thank Nicola for the wonderful interview.