What inspires you to write?
It’s funny you should ask that because I’m working on my fifth novel right now, and some of the notes [from Yellow Wife] came back to me, like, “you need to go a little bit deeper”. I want to feel these characters a little more they seem just kind of one-, two-dimensional. So, when I was reading the notes I started to think I’m not drawing enough on things that [the characters] experienced, such as trauma and pain. So, as I’m writing [I] kind of almost like an onion pull back their emotional layers … [of] what they’ve been through and what they’ve seen.
What’s your writing process? Do you have to set the mood with candles, glass of wine, or play music?
Absolutely. I play music. Every every book has a soundtrack.
So, what was the soundtrack for Yellow Wife?
[For] Yellow Wife, it was Chopin, because he plays classical piano and Phoebe played classical in the book. It was definitely the soundtrack for a lot of my scenes. And then there were scenes in church and you hear Negro spirituals.
