Andrea Shaw’s debut book, Unsolicited, started with an itch.
The 50-something TV editor said editing other’s stories gave her an “itch” to write her own.
“It’s a wonderful job, I love it very much and it gives me good ideas for stories but it’s always someone else’s story that you are editing so you get an itch to start making up stories on your own.”
The Vredehoek resident said writing has always been “a bit of a hobby” from her school days but she decided to venture into publishing about a decade ago when she completed a fiction writing course. Her homework for the course was to finish the first three chapters of a potential novel and Shaw sent her homework off to publishing houses but received nothing but rejection letters.
This prompted her to switch to crime fiction, which is a more popular genre than the literary fiction of her rejected homework.
“I loved Agatha Christie as a child, those whodunnits where there is a very clear structure with clues and reading those helped me to learn how to write,” she said.
Shaw had a lightbulb moment for the plot at an Open Book Festival, while listening to a publisher compare manuscript reading to Tinder dating.
“They just swipe through,” Shaw said, which was when she got the idea to hook a publisher’s attention by setting the story in a publishing house.
The plan worked because Unsolicited was picked by Jacana, which is parodied somewhat in the book as the fictional Hadeda Press.
Plotter, pantser or plantser
Shaw approached writing in the the same way she did publishing – strategically.
“It was very plotted. I had a whiteboard, I had a book with things that I wrote down and then I had characters whose names I had crossed out because they weren’t right for that and so it was very, very plot driven,” Shaw said when the TygerBurger asked her if she was a plotter, pantser or plantser. “I plotted the book so I built characters around what was necessary.”
Her characters, Shaw said, are not based on any real people, except for the car guard but she got the inspiration for her lead character, Fatima, from a series of documentaries she edited for UCT about forced removals.
“The women I came across there, who were teenagers in the 80s, were just these incredibly inspiring activists, very grounded in their community, so she’s kind of an amalgamation of characters I came across there.”
Fatima’s activist past is hinted at in the book, as well as traumas related to that activism. These arcs are never resolved in the book though and Shaw says that this was deliberate.
“The rest of the story is mapped out and I will be going back and looking at her teenage years and the 80s,” Shaw said she has a planned sequel and screenplay but that both of them need more research.
“I want to sit down and talk to people and share those stories more,” she said.
This will have to wait though until Shaw is back in the country. She is currently visiting relatives in America and while she is there, she is trying out “pantsing”.
“Because I’ve only written one book I don’t really know what kind of writer I am and I need to explore the other ways of writing. I’m working on a new book where I am completely pantsing it,” which she describes as chipping away at a mountain with a spoon. “But I love plotting. Plotting appeals to me. I will have to try to control myself.”
