‘If something really gets to me, I want to figure out how and why. What is it the writer does that takes me to a particular place, or time? How do they expose a character and make them compelling? And what makes a voice special?’
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‘The student distrusts their own abilities to evoke a fictional world and so they add in more and more detail. But they also distrust their reader.’
Cherise Saywell speaks with Doug Johnstone about the correspondence course that showed her she had something to say, the striking sense of place in her writing, her love of clean, understated prose and the benefits of continuing to write short stories alongside her novels.
‘I was playing. I take play very seriously. I was wrapping prose around poems, then freeing the poems.’