Interview with J.B. Reynolds

Tell us about your latest novel or project:

I’m currently working on the second draft of my first novel. It’s a contemporary women’s fiction novel, set in Central Otago, about a recently separated mother of one who pursues a handsome young snowboarding instructor against the wishes of her friends, family and ex-husband. It has romantic elements but I hesitate to call it a romance because it doesn’t have a happy ever after ending. I’m planning on it being the first book in a series of three and we might get a happy ever after by the end of the third book - I haven’t decided yet.

What got you started writing?

I’ve dabbled for a long time. Really, it grew from my love of reading, and reading about writers and seeing them in movies and thinking that the life of a writer looked pretty appealing (or at least a successful writer - the idea of being a broke and starving writer had less appeal). It’s only in the last couple of years, after a long period of not writing very much, that I’ve become dedicated and serious about it. Now I try hard to write for an hour or so every day - it’s that consistent effort that makes all the difference. I’ve written far more in the last twelve months than I did in the previous twenty years.

What challenges did you face when you first started writing?

I first started writing with the thought of getting published when I was an Arts student at Otago University in the early nineties. It wasn’t much of a challenge - the beauty of being a University student, especially a lazy one, more interested in the world outside campus than within it, was that I had time, so much more than I ever have now. If I felt like writing but had a lecture to attend, no big deal. Just skip the lecture and copy someone’s notes later. Or not. I got lucky - the first story I ever submitted for publication got published in The Critic, the Otago University student newspaper. That was the moment when I first thought to myself - I can do this.

Where do you get your ideas? Is there anything about New Zealand that has inspired you to write?

My ideas mostly come from my own life - people I’ve met and things that I’ve done that have left their mark on me. That’s not to say that those ideas don’t develop into something that is outside my own realm of experiences. The landscape inspires me, and people I’ve met have certainly inspired the characters I’ve created. I’m sure similar characters could come from any country, but as kiwis we have our own flavour - dry, generous, not too precious, a little salty perhaps - it’s one that really appeals to me.

Why do you think readers are fascinated by books written about New Zealand?

I think the landscape plays a big part, the Middle Earth/100% Pure branding that’s been presented to the world. People have this romantic notion that New Zealand is this wonderful, wild country full of friendly, plucky people that punch above their weight in the wider world. Whether or not it’s accurate, I can see the appeal, and as authors, I guess we should be thankful. And the landscape is important. It is a beautiful country, even if we’re nowhere near as clean and green as we like to pretend. I feel a deep connection to the landscape, which is why I live in the country. And while where I live is all cows and green paddocks, hardly wild, every time I step out the door on a misty morning and see the sun melting through the haze and quails dashing through the back yard, I’m glad I live here.

What advice would you give for other writers in New Zealand?

There’ll never be the perfect time to write. I spent twenty years dreaming about being a writer, but didn’t make any progress because I was waiting for something to happen that would miraculously give me the time to write, and of course it never did. Finally, I realised the only way around this was to make the time. But how do you do that when you’re busy, when you’ve got a young family, when your life is full of all these other commitments? The way I did it was by getting out of bed at five o’clock in the morning, which soon changed to four-thirty in the morning, and writing before I went to work, while the rest of the family were sleeping. I didn’t particularly want to get out of bed at that time, but I just thought Hey, you can sleep when you’re dead. Now, two years later, it’s become a habit, and I really enjoy that time, alone with my thoughts and my coffee and my laptop each day. In the end, for me, the difference between writing and not writing was a simple time-tabling issue. If you don’t make the time, and don’t make it consistently, writing will only ever be a hobby.

Do you get to network or meet up with other New Zealand authors?

Occasionally. I’m a member of the Northland Branch of the NZSA and I go to the odd meeting. I find online networking to be more useful. I’m a member of the New Zealand Indie Authors Facebook group, plus a couple of other groups for Northland and New Zealand writers and I find people in those groups are great at answering questions and offering support and advice. Mike Botur is a Northland writer who is doing some great stuff in the online space to assist Northland writers in particular, which is awesome, as Northland is so spread out and geographically isolated, it’s often hard to meet up with other writers in person.

It seems like everything has Easter Eggs (surprise reference to your other work) do you have any Easter Eggs in your books?

I don’t know if they qualify as Easter Eggs exactly, but I’ve written a series of short stories which I’ve published as ebooks. The idea is that they will work as prequels to the novel I’m writing, introducing different characters from the novel. If you read the short stories now, you’d struggle to see the connection between them and their characters, but that connection becomes clear in the novel. I have a couple of other ideas for further prequel stories for some of the characters, and maybe other ideas will come in the future. I think it’s something I could keep coming back to from time to time.

How long does it take you to write a book? Do you have any secrets to productivity?

I’ve been working on my current novel for a year. It’s 90,000 words and it took nine months to write the first draft, and I’m about eighty percent through the second draft. After it’s complete, all the story events and elements will be in place and subsequent drafts will be for fine tuning the language and characterisation rather than shaping the story. It’s taken longer than I wanted, but at the end of the day, I’m happy with my progress. It’s my first novel, so there’s been a lot to learn. My biggest takeaway was the need to write everyday. I tracked my daily word count on a spreadsheet from the outset, and after six months I had about 40,000 words. I was kind of despairing that it was taking so long so I sat down and analysed my spreadsheet and realised I’d spent much less time actually writing than I thought I had. Way less. Most days I’d been doing writing related stuff, but I’d only spent about a third of those days actually drafting my novel. So I made that my focus and knocked out the next 50,000 words in three months. So if there’s a secret, it’s that - be consistent, write every day. I’m not the fastest writer and with work and family commitments, I don’t have a lot of time available to write, but at an hour a day, every day, 20,000 words a month is eminently achievable. Some authors write far more than that, but I think 20,000 words a month for a part-time author is pretty reasonable.

How important do you think marketing is for authors today?

It’s massively important - perhaps more than ever, and whether you’re traditionally published or indie published you need to do it. Indie publishing is wonderful, but with the sheer volume of books being published, it is hard to stand out from the crowd. That being said, it’s very clear to me that there are readers out there, and the ability to be able to connect with those readers on a personal level, through social media or mailing lists or whatever, is fantastic. It just takes time and effort to find those readers, and to nurture your relationship with them. When I got serious about indie publishing in 2016, I spent more time on the marketing and admin side than I did on the writing, which was okay considering I was setting up my author platform, but now that my platform is mostly setup and operating okay, I’ve really tried to change that around this year, to the point where I’ve probably neglected the marketing. But I figure I really need to have a novel under my belt to market anyway, so that’s where my focus currently is. It can be such an enormous time-suck - you have to be really careful and do your research about what strategies are likely to be most effective, which in itself takes time. If I could just write and not have to worry about marketing, that would be nice (although I do find it interesting), but how many writers get that luxury these days? Only the superstars I’d say, and even they have to turn up for the promotional stuff, even if they don’t have to organise it.

Many authors have a word or a phrase they automatically use too often. Do you have one?

The F word, in real life anyway. In what I’m currently writing, I have too many characters sighing. They sigh when they’re angry, they sigh when they’re sad, they sigh when they’re frustrated, they sigh when they’re confused. Writing emotional cues for characters is hard. I’ve just purchased The Emotion Thesaurus, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, to help with this. It gives a whole array of mental and physical indicators for a wide range of emotions. I’ve used it sparingly so far, but in the next draft or two I want to look at the emotional arc of each scene and see if the thesaurus can help in bringing more variety and impact to my emotional descriptions.

Thank you so much for sharing some of your story with us. Good luck with your next project.