I am thrilled to be inviting Renita D’Silva to my blog. I very much enjoyed her novel A Mother’s Secret (https://goo.gl/i2ZVaQ) and I hope you will you enjoy this interview with her.

Renita D’Silva loves stories, both reading and creating them. Her short stories have been published in ‘The View from Here’, ‘Bartleby Snopes’, ‘this zine’, ‘Platinum Page’, ‘Paragraph Planet’ among others and have been nominated for the ‘Pushcart’ prize and the ‘Best of the Net’ anthology. She is the author of ‘Monsoon Memories’, ‘The Forgotten Daughter’, ‘The Stolen Girl’, ‘A Sister’s Promise’ and ‘A Mother’s Secret’.

What are you currently working on?
I am currently writing my next book, a historical fiction novel set in India and the UK.

What has inspired your most recent novel/writing?
An image of a temple, once a centre of worship, now forgotten, lying undisturbed through the years, vegetation encroaching upon it, appeared in my mind spawning a thousand questions. What was its story? Who had worshipped there? How did its existence slip from collective memory?  My current novel attempts to answer these questions, give that hidden temple a voice.

How much do you think fiction intertwines with real life?
I think all fiction is a reflection of real life to some extent. I think as authors we take what intrigues us and weave it into a story. I think we – or at least I – tell stories to make sense of life, this terrible and wonderful world we live in.

Your five writing tips
Characterisation: Five tips:

1. Create characters who are human, with flaws as well as redeeming qualities.
2. They should be dealing with some conflict.
3. They need to grow in the course of the novel, learn something about themselves and come out changed in some way.
4. The reader needs to be able to relate to the character.
5. You need to know the character inside out – her likes and dislikes, what makes her who she is.

How would you describe your writing process?
I am a ‘pantser’, i.e, I don’t plan in great detail. I know roughly where I am going and I just delve in, start writing and see where the story takes me.

What helps you to write/what gets in the way?
I work my way through several mugs of tea while writing J I am very lucky in that I can write anywhere and once I am in the story, nothing really gets in the way.

What kind of research do you do & how do you go about it?
I scour the web, read books about the subject I am researching, and talk to the relevant people, peppering them with questions until they don’t want to talk to me anymore.

If you are traditionally published, could you say something of your journey and your experience?
The journey to publication was a huge learning curve. I committed every possible mistake there is. Once I had penned The End on my first draft, I bought a copy of ‘The Writers and Artists Handbook’ and sent the first three chapters off to the first few agents listed there. I did not check to see if the agents were representing books by authors in my genre and I did not make my book the best it could be.

I was lucky in that I got requests for a full manuscript from a couple of agents. They read my draft and were kind enough to come back with suggestions for improvement. I took their feedback on board and I also saved up for a professional edit. This time when I sent the revised book off, the responses were positive, but I was rejected nonetheless. I was told that publishers were reluctant to take on new authors because of the recession. Then I saw the ad for Bookouture in Mslexia and sent my manuscript off to them. And they said yes!

So do you have some thoughts on being a woman & writing about India? Or, perhaps, on writing about (& having experience of) two countries/cultures and how the two interweave?
I set my stories in the India I grew up in, a land of disparities, of breath-taking beauty and toxic pollution, of din and ruckus contrasting with the agonised silence of women who are not heard, of people who are as kind as they are bigoted, of spicy food and spicier gossip, of paan-chewing matrons and arranged marriages, of girls who yearn to grow into the women they want to be but are restrained by a culture that levies boundaries on them.

In my stories, I attempt to contrast the cultures and attitudes in India and the UK and explore the mindset of an immigrant, the question of displacement, the notion of belonging and the idea of home.

How can readers find you and learn more about your writing?

I can be contacted via facebook, twitter, gmail, or my website. Details here:

FB: https://www.facebook.com/RenitaDSilvaBooks Twitter: @RenitaDSilva Website: http://renitadsilva.com/ Email: Renitadsilvabooks@gmail.com