Christine Evans: 'Trust that your writing will lead you somewhere'
BY Katie Smart
19th Sep 2023
Christine Evans was a student on our Writing Your Novel – Three Months course in 2016. She has written award-winning plays that have been produced in the US, Australia, Canada and the UK. Her debut novel Nadia is out now from University of Iowa Press (US) and is available worldwide as an audiobook, produced by Penguin Random House. The novel explores the perspective of two survivors of the 1990s Balkan War who have escaped to London.
We discussed her time studying with us in London, the inspiration behind her debut and the different writing challenges she faces as both a playwright and novelist.
You studied on our three-month Writing Your Novel course in 2016. How did your time on the course impact your approach to writing?
It gave me vital structure, a great group of writers, focused feedback, and also, because of the agency connection, a sense of how the sausage gets made. The guest speakers were brilliant: I still remember, in a moment of despair about plot, asking David Mitchell how to get unstuck when you’re in the muddy middle and don’t know what happens next. He said, it’s not about plot, it’s because you don’t know your characters well enough yet. When you do—you’ll see what they do next, and follow them.
I also saw that the people who finished their books were the ones who stuck at it and didn’t give up. Persistence leads to success.
It was important to physically be in London for the three months of the course—though I was born here, my family left for New Zealand, then Australia, when I was seven. Since the book’s set in 1990s London, I needed to research locations and the history undergirding the story. It also gave me the essential opportunity to meet people who’d come to London as refugees, after living through the war that my fictional protagonist escaped from. I’m so grateful for their trust and generosity.
It's ironic that, although it’s such a London book, its first print outing is in the US. However, the audiobook, produced by Penguin Random House, will be released worldwide on the same day (out 19 Sept 2023).
Many of our students find their writing community on our courses – are you still in touch with any of your course mates?
I am! It’s now (gulp) seven years, and I live in the US, so I can’t meet up for London drinks or coffee… but we have a Facebook group and cheer each other on. It’s very inspiring to see their books hit the shelves.
You have a US book deal with the University of Iowa Press for your novel Nadia, which is the book you worked on with us. Can you tell us a bit more about the novel and the inspiration behind it?
Set in late-1990’s London and Sarajevo, it’s told from the contrasting points of view of two young people who’ve fled the Balkan wars to London, only to find that the war has followed them there. Nadia just wants to fit into her boring office job—until one day, a man she suspects is a sniper from the war she fled turns up at the next desk. From there, the story spirals into the past from their conflicting perspectives. It has ghosts, a queer love story, wartime secrets, and explores the complex aftermath of a history marked by political violence.
Nadia herself appeared as a minor character in a completely different work—a play You Are Dead. You Are Here., that I was working in New York, that had virtual-reality ghosts in it. She was a temp secretary from the enigmatic Temp Angels (‘Short Term Solutions When You Need Them Most!’ agency. She didn’t entirely belong in the play, but this secretive, ghostly office temp got me wondering. Why was she hiding out in an office? Did she need ‘short-term solutions’ of her own? I started noodling around, and a very clear voice—her voice, emerged, and led me into this story.
The background only came later—it leaked in as I wrote, from my own memories and connections with former Yugoslavia. I first visited the region as a traveling musician studying Macedonian and Romany folk music, when Macedonia was still part of Yugoslavia; then later, after the wars, as a long-term friend and colleague of Dah Theatre, a Belgrade-based company who opposed war from within Serbia.
Maybe everyone has their defining war: for me, it was this one. After all, I knew people in it. And it was one of the first media-era conflicts to play out in real-time on TV. We are more inured to this war-porn now. Having said that, Nadia is much more about its two main characters, and what they carry in the aftermath of the wars, than the specifics of the conflict they fled.
You are also an award-winning playwright. What are some of the differences and challenges you face when it comes to scripting writing and fiction writing?
Playwriting is an unforgiving medium, in the sense that you have to grab and keep your audience’s attention. Fiction does too, but it’s not on such a tight clock. In the theatre, your poor audience can’t put the play down and wander off for a snack. So, tension, compression, pace, intensity – those elements are crucial. Playwriting also forces you to reveal character through action (which of course includes speech). And you have to really visualize a scene, because a play unfolds in time and space. Plays aren’t finished on the page: actors, designers, director and audience all breathe life into them. So, learning not to overwrite, to leave some air and mystery for others’ art, is key. And letting yourself be funny sometimes, even with serious subjects. Pompous, earnest theatre is dull.
When I started writing fiction, I was surprised to learn how much all these skills translated: that fiction writers also think in ‘scenes’. What I love about writing fiction is the expanded possibility of interiority it gives, and the ability to stretch out in language. But compared to writing a play, it’s just so many more words! You are the director, scenic and lighting designer and the ventriloquist of the whole thing.
When did you know you want to be a writer?
From when I could read – as long as I can remember. I lived inside of stories, and books. They were my escape and my salvation.
Can you talk us through your writing routine?
It tends to come in bursts, around the rhythms of my job. I go to writing residencies when I can, and the deep focus of time away is a boon. That said, I do write in a journal with a pot of tea every morning, and that keeps me alive in my writing, even in jotted notes, no matter what else is happening. I’m happiest (or perhaps just less anxious) when I write, even a little, every day. It avoids the awfulness of picking up a cold trail, and allows the project to come to life and start talking to me. It reminds me that ideas come from writing, not the other way around.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Right now, it’s Makina, the protagonist of Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of The World. From my younger life: I was in love with Estraven, the ambisexual character in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
If you could only pass on one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would you say?
This one comes from the playwright Erik Ehn: ‘Follow your writing. Don’t make your writing follow you’. For me, this means: listen and trace those whispers, images, intuitions that come, even if they go to strange and confusing places—don’t sit down and demand that your writing give you something neat that flatters the ego, or fulfils your sense of what you ‘should’ be writing. Trust that your writing will lead you somewhere. And (if I can cheat and add one more thing): Just. Keep. Going.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I’ve had a wonderful time writing as an opera librettist – a new medium for me. Three Marys, for which I wrote the libretto (composer Andrée Greenwell), just premiered at the Sydney Opera House this May (2023). Music is a force-multiplier of emotion: that means the libretto has to be spare, a scaffold, for the music to inhabit and shine through. And you have to think about how singable the words are—how they sound, as much as what they mean. It’s a hugely absorbing puzzle, and so joyful when you get it right. I want to work more in that field.
In terms of fiction: I’m in that awful muddy middle of the next book: about two thirds of the way through a first draft. River & Maude is very different from Nadia: its’ a speculative novel set in a drowned world, where melded AI-bio creatures, such as augmented crow-drones, co-exist with humans, hybrid creepies and a world saturated with plastic. It’s an attempt to imagine a world beyond the Anthropocene, and to find hope, however strange and changed, in that place.
Listen to the Nadia audiobook now
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