Presenter: Hello, everybody, and welcome to our weekly programme The Writers' Workshop. Today in our studio we have Leona Brown, a prize-winning short fiction writer. Hello, Leona!
Leona Brown: Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me here today.
Presenter: Will you please tell us a bit about your literary achievements?
Leona Brown: Of course. So far, I've written a novel and some collections of interlocking stories. My novel is basically a story about finding hope. I'm currently working on two other novels and a collection of essays.
Presenter: Some literary critics think your novel A Good Person is a love story. What would you say to that?
Leona Brown: Well, a lot of the action in the story happens off the page. The scenes seem to focus instead on the interactions and moments that happen in the wake of that off-page drama. I know some readers were particularly struck at how the story avoided certain storylines. For example, the drama that's built on the main heroes' relationship is an important part of the story, but it remains secondary to what's going on with another main character, Sylvia. Another writer might have made it a much bigger part of the story: what will all of them do? This question is present, but it's kept to a lower register. So, there is a developing romance that gets folded into all of the other stuff going on in the story. As a result, one could call this a love story, but that wouldn't feel quite right, I don't think.
Presenter: When you were working on this story, what was your sense of what kind of story it was?
Leona Brown: I never did think of this as a love story. My process in developing a story or an essay is almost always exploratory for the first few drafts, and that was the case with this one even more than usual. It began with memories of a time and a place that I wanted to explore for meanings. I had quite a lot of it drafted before I figured out that its true subject was the drama going on inside Sylvia, a drama she's only partly aware of. Once I'd decided what the story was about, I rewrote it several — in fact, many — times, hoping to make all the parts of it work together to make that drama felt.
Presenter: So, Sylvia is your main character in this novel, isn't she?
Leona Brown: Yes, I'd say this is a story about Sylvia. The drama I was most interested in delving into was happening inside her. She's trying on different versions of herself and hasn't yet come to realize that life is serious business. She's reaching for some idea of cool, and, naively, she half thinks she's already achieved it. But she's yet to take a deep look at anything in life. I love her and I forgive her faults, because she's young, and a slow learner.
Presenter: What can you tell us about your working process?
Leona Brown: In my opinion, stories are constructed through language, not memory. I write at the level of the sentence. I sit there, looking at the doors and windows a sentence has opened for the sentence that can follow, and so on. I do not write with a plan. I do not know where a story is going ahead of time. There is no prewriting. It all happens in the moment of looking at the words.
Presenter: How do you understand the plot is going to be interesting for readers?
Leona Brown: I do not believe circumstances are intrinsically interesting or uninteresting. Narrators create interest by their passionate investment in the story they are telling. The less the narrator asks for something from the reader something like feel my feelings, share my understandings and so on, the more room readers have to feel their own emotions.
Presenter: Thank you, Leona. It has been very interesting talking to you.
Leona Brown: Thank you
