Emily Dunlay: 'I’ve always been interested in the 1960’s, and particularly in political scandals'
BY Emily Powter-Robinson
4th Jul 2024
Emily Dunlay studied on our three-month online Writing Your Novel course in 2019. Her debut novel, Teddy is out today with 4th Estate (an imprint of HarperCollins).
We spoke about the Rome setting of the novel, creating suspense in your writing and the best advice she received from her tutor Suzannah Dunn.
You studied on our three-month online Writing Your Novel course in 2019. How did studying with us impact your approach to writing?
One thing I really appreciated about the three-month novel course was that it encouraged me to think more systematically about writing. Having consistent deadlines for submissions and reading and critiquing other students’ work on a weekly basis helped me to build both writing and editing into working habits. I also found the course’s segment on what comes next—finding an agent, pitching your work—to be incredibly helpful, as that can often be very daunting for new authors. The lessons I learned about the publication process and the discipline I developed over those three months have been immensely helpful to my writing.
Many of our students find lifelong writing friends on our courses. How did the collaborative nature of the course impact your writing?
My course ended just as the pandemic began, so I felt very fortunate to have that group of writers to check in with on our group chat in the early days of lockdown. There were students in the course from all over the world, as it was entirely virtual, and it certainly made social isolation feel a little less lonely to have a platform where we could continue to chat and discuss our projects. I found the feedback from my classmates to be so valuable throughout the course, and reading their work and offering feedback of my own improved my ability to edit my own work.
Your debut novel Teddy is out now with 4th Estate (an imprint of HarperCollins). Set in the glamour and excess of 1960’s Rome, the novel follows Teddy’s attempts to retrieve incriminating photographs which threaten to ruin her life with her new husband. Can you tell us a bit more about the book and the inspiration behind it?
The first scene I wrote for Teddy, long before I expanded the idea into a novel, was a scene of a woman getting ready for a party, trying to make sure her hair and makeup and clothing were all perfect, anxiously trying to fit into a particular role. I kept returning to that woman, trying to write a story for her. I’ve always been interested in the 1960’s, and particularly in political scandals from that time, many of which centred around women, and I realized eventually that 1960’s Rome was a perfect setting: the celebrity culture of the time and the nascent paparazzi, plus the threat of Cold War surveillance, would force Teddy to confront her fear of being truly seen. It was such a volatile time, with the Cold War always in the background, political scandals from Watergate to the Profumo Affair, and political and social unrest in Italy, so all of that coalesced into a larger plot.
What does your writing process look like? Did you spend any time researching the novel in Rome?
The very earliest drafts of the book were written when travel was still a bit complicated due to Covid, so I had to rely on memories and research to recreate Rome. I’d been to Rome several times before that, including a few trips where I spent most of my time just walking around the city alone, so those memories were really helpful to draw on. As for the writing process, as I’ve mentioned, the first scene I wrote of the book was Teddy getting ready for a party (the 4th of July party in the book). Once I realized this was an idea I wanted to work with and had the setting in mind, I worked out a broad outline and character sketches, then wrote my first draft in order, beginning to end. In later edits I went back through and spent way more time on certain scenes, moved things around, and so on, but it was important to me to just write some version of what I wanted to happen, start to finish—otherwise I felt there were certain scenes I might never get to! I also originally wrote the book in the third person, and the final version is entirely in Teddy’s voice, so the drafts changed quite a bit from the beginning of the process to the end. I was finally able to get back to Rome last summer, and it was really fun to go and check on all of the streets and various locations mentioned in Teddy, just to make sure everything was where I thought it was—luckily, I didn’t have to change much!
The story becomes progressively more tense and claustrophobic as Teddy descends into the underbelly of the city. Do you have any tips for writers looking to create suspense in their own story?
My biggest tip for this is related to my previous answer—I originally wrote Teddy in the third person, and I really felt that it just wasn’t working that way. It was also initially a much larger story involving more characters, more timelines, and so on, but I realized that all I really wanted was to tell Teddy’s story, so I rewrote it from her perspective, and suddenly it all seemed to come together. The fact that you only know what she knows from moment to moment helps to build suspense in the chapters set in the past, and the frame narrative of a later Teddy reflecting, in a limited way, on what has already happened helps to guide the reader along. I think the way you distribute information to your readers is the single most effective way to create tension, and sometimes a change in perspective can help to achieve that. I will also say that it helped that I didn’t know all of the final plot twists myself, when I started writing. This is another benefit of starting at the beginning and writing to the end for your first draft: you may uncover additional surprises along the way!
What’s the best piece of advice you received from your tutor Suzannah Dunn on our three-month course?
Suzannah was such an incredible tutor, and the one-on-one tutorials were so helpful. Her emphasis on tracking the emotional journey of a character through a scene helped me to hone a skill that is crucial to writing convincing characters. I’ve actually just pulled up some old notes from her and found a scene I submitted for feedback: in her comments, Suzannah walks through the motivations and feelings of each character as they interact, laying out where it helps the reader to understand something new about the character, sets up a future conflict, and so on. She was really so great!
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I have a couple of ideas I’m currently working on for my next book. One is set in the present day and one in the 1920’s, but I think despite the different settings, they are both fairly similar to Teddy thematically. Hopefully they’ll be out in the world sometime soon!
Teddy is out now!
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