Author Interview: Elizabeth Wein

What is your favourite thing about writing books?
I confess I really enjoy reading my own stories when I’ve finished. The writing process itself is not my favourite part – if it’s going well, I’m so absorbed in it that everything around me grinds to a halt. Dishes pile up in the sink and laundry piles up on the floor, and there’s never any fresh food! And if the writing isn’t going well, then I feel depressed and crabby and unproductive. My favourite part of the process is when I have a completed story that I’m happy with, and I can re-read it and enjoy it.

My favourite thing about being an author – not quite the same as my favourite thing about writing books – is being able to meet and communicate with readers. That is hugely rewarding and it’s always fascinating to hear someone else’s interpretation of something I’ve made up. I feel like being a writer is a secret exercise in the give and take of creativity.

Who is your favourite character in your book and why?
Apart from Louisa, the heroine and obvious answer, I think my other favourite character in The Enigma Game is Jane Warner, the mysterious German woman Louisa is hired to take care of in the early days of World War II. Jane, at 82, still enjoys skinny-dipping and lying about her age. I loved creating her backstory – as a teenager she was a telegraph operator, which predated the telephone, and that meant she had to learn Morse code and could be an independent wage earner even in the 1880s – and it turns out that this was something a lot of “modern” young women did, even so long ago! I love finding out amazing obscure facts like this.

(Here’s a bit more about early women telegraphists: http://www.scrambledmessages.ac.uk/blog/women-telegraphists/)

What is your favourite drink to consume while writing?
Coffee, coffee, coffee! And I like to pay tribute to coffee by having my favourite characters enjoy it as well. Like me, Louisa in The Enigma Game is a coffee snob, and prefers Jamaican coffee.

Do you have any bad habits while you’re writing?
When I get writer’s block I eat a lot of candy. I keep a stash of jelly beans on my desk. I am terrible.

Or did you mean bad writing habits? I do tend to leave blanks (indicated by square brackets [] ) when I don’t have a name for a character or I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Sometimes I’ll temporarily name a character “German dude” or let my characters slip into inappropriate slang, or comment on their poor decisions, in the text. Then I have to go and remove it later.

Another bad habit is leaving manuscripts around where my children can mess with them. One classic example was when I was working on The Pearl Thief and one of my kids slipped in the line, ‘Other dinosaurs see my shadow and run away.’ My baffled editor spotted it and queried politely, ‘I don’t understand. Is this a typo?’

How did you research your book?
I research all my books with a little bit of everything! For this one, it was a cocktail of the Internet (useful for period videos and recorded interviews), books (both non-fiction and fiction – period fiction is a great way to pick up lifestyle details), museum trips (to see aeroplanes and other relevant material culture), and life experience. Some of my own flight experience went into the manuscript, as did some of my own memories of being a stranger in a strange land, and of moving to a cold country after a Jamaican childhood (I lived in Jamaica for three years when I was small).

Are you a plotter or a pantser?
Sometimes by necessity a bit of both, but pantsing comes naturally to me. My preferred way of coming up with a story is to let the characters run with it. But if they don’t pick up the ball quickly enough and I’m on a deadline, I have to put my plotting hat on.

If you could live in any fictional world, which would you choose and why?
I really love the world of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books. It can be frightening – it’s a world full of magic and talking dragons – but it is a beautiful and green world where everything revolves around balance and equilibrium. I loved these books when I was a teenager and I used to have a hand-painted (by me) map of Earthsea hanging on my bedroom wall. It’s a very long way from the World War II books that I write now, but I love the landscape of Earthsea and the diversity of its people, and I think I would be happy living there. I’m not sure how I would earn my keep – probably the same way I do in this world, as a storyteller!

If you could befriend any fictional character, who would you choose and why?
Oh, Sara Crewe, from A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, ALWAYS. She is loyal, courageous, creative, smart, funny, and a fighter. There is a lot of Sara Crewe in all my own characters.

I’ve strayed into plenty of random waters in this interview – thank you for a fun and interesting voyage! I hope you enjoy the flights of fancy waiting for you in The Enigma Game.