The Journey to my Debut Novel, The Pretenders
I began The Pretenders at a point in my life where I was sure I couldn’t write a novel – after all aren’t such works the product of young and brilliant minds? What’s more, in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first two books I felt there was an expectation that women like me were supposed to write important things – or at least I felt there was pressure. We, as writers from Black Africa, were supposed to be advocates of our heritage and write about war, poverty and colonialism. Since I don’t enjoy writing in that genre, I was stuck. I’d began and abandoned countless stories that I had no feeling for but I felt that’s what I was supposed to write.
It was only when book platforms such as Amazon became easily accessible that I finally read a few books and thought – J*sus this’s terrible!
When I Say Terrible . . .
When I say terrible, I mean, yes some were badly edited, poorly formatted or plotted. No one would like to say that about someone else’s work but that’s what I found online.
This discovery freed me to write. Before these platforms most books available to me had been through traditional publishers. They would have been vetted, edited and proofread. Whether you liked the final product or not was more a matter of taste rather than the books simply being badly written.
These books gave self-publishers and small publishers somewhere where a person like me could buy books by people who decided that they would publish regardless. I could read books as they came from an author’s own mind and effort.
That’s when I realised “I can do that,” and I set out to write a terrible novel. That was my benchmark. I had to clobber together 70,000 words and that was all I asked of myself. It didn’t have to be literary, and its themes would be those I could identify with and, most importantly, the end product would only have to be good enough to self publish on Amazon books.
The Truth, Edited
And I did it. I wrote a rather substandard manuscript named The Truth, Edited.
Then I thought, I’ve done all this work, let me see how far this takes me. So I started querying agents and publishers.
What made a difference was that I knew that with self-publishing, I had the freedom to write what I wanted. Even when I decided to find an agent or publisher, there was a bottom rung upon which I was standing, all that work was never going to be for nothing. Luckily Sam Brace from Peter Frasers and Dunlop found it and since then it’s been in the hands of professionals.
To those online who preach formulas and so-called hacks, even those promoting AI, I’d like say the real work, the hours put in, the rewrites and the self doubt is what being a writer is all about. The final product can take any form and be published on your own, with a small press or with the coveted big deals.
Of course I can say that. One of the pleasures of having published The Pretenders is having proof that I worked on it to its real end and that some people, somewhere, enjoyed it.
So what’s The Pretenders about?
The Pretenders is essentially an escapist novel. A house in a London suburb may seem like a strange place to locate a fantasy but I was living in Singapore at the time – and Singapore is as far from London as you can get (not literally of course). I wanted to write something that while familiar to me was far enough away to have to fully exercise my imagination.
Yet nothing that occurs in the book is inconceivable outside an ordinary upper middle-income neighbourhood in London. There are no vampires or drug dealers. Their circumstances are rather mundane, and none of my characters set out to be anything other than an ordinary partner, brother, father or lover – except perhaps John.
But of course, a story only starts when something changes. The Pretenders describes that one day in the lives of six people when six lifetimes collide. It is about when all their histories and insecurities, their fears and their unfulfilled desires clash. It’s about an inevitable day. Certain events that occurred have made it impossible that m for them to have simply carried on, so that Saturday it all comes to a head.
Jasper and Edmund
The story is of the relationship between two brothers Jasper and Edmund. My early draft was about Jasper and from his perspective, but it evolved into Edmund as the central story because he was the only person who could have changed the trajectory that the characters were on; right up to that Saturday morning he could have changed everything. Ovidia was a more marginal figure in my early draft, then I changed her clothes (she should win a worst dressed award) and she came to life.
The plot came together quite early. The story was clear in my head – the difficulty was conveying what I could see in my mind into words. Setting it in a single day helped stop it from sprawling out too far. When I saw the house online (returning to the mention of escapism) I found a core to the story, its outer boundaries were pencilled in. Once I had the setting, the story came together and my first draft was ready in a few months.
Leila Slimani’s The Nanny influenced my decision to write a book focused on crime. She describes her book as a whydunnit, rather than a whodunnit. Instead of solving crimes, I’m exploring the lives of offenders, their motivation and the consequences on themselves and their families.
If I am to summarise the book, I’d say the title does it incredibly well. When Sam Brace at Agora Books suggested The Pretenders, the first thing I thought was there must be a million books with that title. Surprisingly they were very few and most had to do with the band.
(c) Agatha Zaza
About The Pretenders:
Jasper’s brother Edmund has never been exciting. Always reliable, he’s been there for his little brother even in the worst of times. It’s only natural that the day after their engagement, Jasper and bride-to-be Holly decide to surprise Edmund with a celebratory visit.
John, Jasper’s best friend comes along. Of course he would, fun loving and devoted to his friend, he wouldn’t think of missing such an occasion. Anne, John’s wife joins them – because she is John’s wife and Jasper is a huge part of her life.
Edmund and Ovidia aren’t expecting visitors, but they can’t exactly say no when Jasper, Holly, Anne and John walk into their London mansion one Saturday morning in spring.
Ovidia is not supposed to be there.
Perhaps Edmund is not as reliable as Jasper believed. Maybe John doesn’t know everything about his best friend.
Today might be the day they all have to face the consequences of the lies they’ve told themselves.
Order your copy of The Pretenders online here.
And read more Meet the Author articles on Writing.ie here.
