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.
