Interview with Bianca Marais

To the thousands of faithful fans of her podcast, “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing,” which recently notched over 850,000 downloads, Bianca Marais might come across as a superstar. Between her teaching awards, her interviews with literary luminaries such as Ann Patchett, Ken Follett and Lily King, and her three novels published with “Big Five” publishing houses, her writing career path appears to have been paved in gold. But when she closes each episode by telling listeners in her chipper, South African accent, “Remember, it just takes one yes,” that encouragement derives from lived experience.

Marais’ writing career almost didn’t happen. Unable to find an agent to represent either of her first two books, she undertook a creative writing certificate program at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, where she wrote a third novel. That one secured her an agent but garnered fifty rejections from publishers. Determined to succeed, Marais rewrote the novel, cutting 60,000 words in the process. Back on submission, the book received another forty-nine rejections before, at last, the one “yes” that she needed. She published two literary novels set in her native South Africa. Then, unable to find a publisher for her next book, a psychological thriller, but committed to a shift toward more commercial fiction, she amicably parted ways with her agent in 2019.

A lot can happen in three years. During COVID, Marais noticed people reaching out to her with similar writing questions. She decided to start a podcast in order to answer their questions in a way that others could benefit. She also signed with a new agent (CeCe Lyra, who became a co-host of the podcast), published a novella on Audible, and is set to release her third novel, The Witches of Moonshyne Manor, in August.  

Marais recently spoke with me about writing in different genres, the lessons she’s learned through her years of rejections, and her most valuable tips for emerging writers.

Jill Witty: Your latest book, The Witches of Moonshyne Manor, a contemporary fantasy, represents a departure of sorts from your previous two novels, works of literary fiction. Can you tell me about the decision to change genres?

Bianca Marais: My first two books had moments of levity, certainly, but they were considered much more serious. Readers would tell me, “I didn't want to read this book because I thought it was going to be so heavy. But once I started, I loved it.” After that, I decided to write a book where people say, “Oh, this is going to be fun, and I want to read it now.” I was trying to be strategic in my writing. But even though the novel is about witches, you could take the magic out of it and the story would still centre on sisterhood.

JW: The witches are in their eighties. Was it a conscious decision to centre a demographic that gets less representation in literature and popular media?

BM: One hundred percent. This book is about what it means to be a woman in the world, the misogyny we face, and what it means to age as a woman. Women pass their forties and we become invisible. People think women no longer have value when we get older, whereas men can be president in their seventies. I see so many friends who turn forty or fifty and they freak out. But I'm like, "Every year is such a gift! Why are we sitting here acting like we’re at someone's funeral when they turn fifty instead of celebrating it?" And so I wanted to show these women aging disgracefully. As women we should view aging as being liberating, rather than this thing we should avoid at all costs.

JW: In terms of audience for this book, are you worried that your previous readers might not follow your pivot into contemporary fantasy?

BM: Some of my previous readers who have read TWOMM said, "Look, all the things that we loved about your previous work—the feminist angle, the sisterhood, coming into your own, being damaged, and overcoming adversity—those themes are here, too.’" That said, it’s sex-positive. Just because you're getting older doesn't mean you stop being sexual, and Jezebel certainly isn’t giving up sex. Maybe some readers of literary fiction will be shocked by my representation of her.

Really, our job as writers is to be read, and there's only so much we have control over. We can write the best we can, but we can't control who's going to pick it up or who's not going to like it. You only have to read your Goodreads reviews to realize how subjective this stuff is. One person will say, "this is the thing I love the most" and the very next person will say "I hated that one thing."

JW: These witches are a diverse group, including one trans woman and one black woman. After your previous novels, you’d said that you didn’t want to write from the perspective of a black character again. Has your opinion shifted? How do you approach writing characters whose lived experiences differ from your own?

BM: With my last two books, I became very aware of how in South Africa, many black authors were not getting their work published, whereas white authors were, and I didn't want to be a part of that problem. After that, I decided not to write from the perspective of ‘a black woman in South Africa experiencing racism.’ I'm a firm believer in being an ally, though, whether it's to the Black community or the LGBTQ community. Every book I write is going to have some sense of tackling homophobia and tackling racism, but in this book, I approached it more in terms of allyship than lived experience.

If I only write my own perspective, then everything I’d write would be about a middle-aged, middle-class, white woman. How does anybody learn from that? How does that make the world more diverse, inclusive, et cetera?

JW: You have five or six POVs (points of view) in this novel. On the podcast, you have cautioned that using dual POV means each POV character receives roughly 40,000 words to tell her tale, half the real estate of a single POV novel. With that in mind, walk me through your decision to use so many POVs in TWOMM.

BM: I wanted the sisterhood to become a character unto itself. For that to happen, I needed to have all the witches’ voices together. There are scenes with an omniscient, third-person narrator, and then in other scenes, I've zoomed in and offered one third-person close perspective. On the podcast, we always say, we're giving you these rules but rules are meant to be broken. Most of the advice we give is for emerging writers, people writing their first and second novels. I would never have been able to write this book five or ten years ago; I wouldn't have been technically proficient enough. Still, I made lots of mistakes, but thanks to the input from my writing group, beta readers and agent, I was able to fix them. Writing is rewriting.

JW: What kinds of mistakes did you make?

BM: The biggest challenge when you're writing multi-POV is knowing whose perspective to use for each scene. I always write the scene from the perspective of the person who's got the most to lose or the most to gain. But sometimes I wanted to show one character observing the other characters. I'd set it up from the perspective of the person with the least at stake, making some social commentary on everybody else, and that would be a mistake. I would write a scene in Ivy’s perspective, and [my writing group or agent] would say it would be more compelling if it was in Queenie’s or Ursula’s perspective, and they were right.

JW: The timeline in the novel is structured in an unusual way. The first half of the book unfolds in the present day, and then come chapters that took place thirty-three years ago. How did you arrive at that timeline?

BM: I'm always saying on the podcast, backstory has got to be revealed in a way that moves the current story forward. The modern story is a race against time, and it’s full of tension. To maintain that tension, I tried to write for as long as I could, giving as little about the past as possible. And then we got to the point where the reader had to know what had happened in the past in order to make sense of the current story.

JW: You found your first agent and publisher with the third book you wrote, Hum If You Don’t Know the Words. What do you think made the difference for that book?

BM: When I wrote the first two (unpublished) books, I'd never studied writing. I was just like, “I've always loved writing, and I love reading, so I'm going to write these books.” I hadn't studied storytelling. I hadn't studied structure. While writing Hum, I was studying writing, and I was much more serious about the craft.

Then, the first two books were madcap capers, with characters you didn’t really care about. For Hum, I gave myself permission to write a book that explored some themes from my upbringing, like my privilege, how my opportunities came at the expense of Black people in South Africa who had that opportunity taken away from them due to apartheid. I decided to hold a mirror up to myself, no matter how uncomfortable it would make me.

And then of course, an enormous amount to of luck comes into it. The book was imperfect when I queried it, but the woman who became my agent had just spoken to a South African friend. She saw the book was about South Africa, and she really liked the title, and she read it as soon as it came in, instead of letting it go to the slush pile. And she was prepared to put in the work the book needed. I’m incredibly indebted to her.

JW: Next I want to ask you a series of questions your fans sent in. First, can you give writers a few quick tips to elevate their manuscripts, to help them emerge from the “slush pile”?

BM: Agents often decide whether they're going to represent something if the writing is there at the line level. So look at your work. Read your work aloud; look for redundancies. Mix up your sentence structures. Are you using ‘and’ too much, or too many adjectives or weak verbs? How long are your sentences? Are you tending toward purple prose while trying to sound literary? If you can write on a line level, as a writing teacher, I can help you with your story. I can help you with your structure, tension and pacing. But if you’re not a good writer at the line level, there’s not much value I can add.

JW: We’ve heard you describe yourself as a ‘pantser’ on the podcast. If you haven’t mapped out the plot in advance, how do you ensure that each chapter advances the story?

BM: Every scene needs to do two jobs: move the story forward and reveal character [dimensions] that haven't been revealed before. So when I begin a scene, I list my goals for that scene. How does the character change in that scene? What is the emotional shift? What plot points do I need to address and how will it move the story forward? So long as I’m doing that at the chapter level, the rest will come together.

JW: What do you do when you're overwhelmed with self-doubt about a new project?

BM: To be a writer is to live with self-doubt. You just need to make it your best friend. Give yourself permission to say, ‘despite the self-doubt, I am still going to write this.’

JW: When I hear about writers that don’t stick with it, I think, on the one hand, not everyone can handle so much rejection, but on the other hand, I wonder if they still love writing, the way you have to if you’re going to survive in this industry.

BM: When we’re sitting by ourselves, talking with our imaginary friends, we are in a state of bliss. We love it. What is soul destroying is trying to sell this thing that we loved writing. That’s why I tell writers all the time, “Take a break. Stop querying. Stop pitching. Go back to the writing, reestablish the love, and return to the querying later.”

JW: Can you describe your writing routine for us?

BM: I don’t have a writing routine, and right now, the podcast takes up four full days of my week, leaving me very little time to write. Whenever I feel like a pressure valve, like I'm going to explode, even if it's nine o'clock at night or four o'clock in the morning, I sit down and write. I will write a chapter, send it to my writing group and agent, ask them to critique it, and when it comes back, I revise based on their feedback. And then I keep moving forward. I like to constantly be polishing and revising as I'm working. The only other consistency is that I need a collaborative process. One of the things I love about CeCe is she’ll say, “I would like some pages.” I’ll send her five chapters. A week later I get notes back, and I revise based on that.

JW: I think of your brand as ‘the emerging writer’s best friend,’ due to your work on the podcast. But you’re also a novelist and a writing teacher. How does the podcast fit into your career goals? Do you think there will be a time when you’ll have outgrown it?

BM: I love that role; I take it very seriously. I love helping people tap into something that maybe they didn't know was there. Maybe they didn't have the confidence, or they needed one person to give them permission, to tell them they have talent and to keep going. Nothing is more rewarding to me than when I get an email from a podcast listener or former student who's like, “I finished this and I've now landed my agent.” I celebrate on their behalf as if it were my achievement. I will keep doing the podcast as long as we have an audience and as long as we’re helping people.

JW: And how about your writing goals?

BM: My only goal is to keep writing. In publishing, you're only as good as your last book. If your last book didn't do well, you're not as likely to get another book deal in the future. So I want each book to do well enough, essentially, that I can write the next book. If I can keep writing, doing the thing I love for the rest of my life, I will be overjoyed.

Bianca Marais is the author of the beloved Hum If You Don't Know the Words and If You Want to Make God Laugh, as well as the Audible Original, The Prynne Viper. She taught at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies where she was awarded an Excellence in Teaching Award for Creative Writing in 2021. She runs the Eunice Ngogodo Own Voices Initiative to empower young Black women in Africa to write and publish their own stories, and fundraises to assist grandmothers in Soweto with caring for children who have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS. Bianca is the co-host of the popular podcast, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which is aimed at helping emerging writers become published. 

Jill Witty is a writer and former startup executive from Virginia (USA). She won the Writer Advice Flash Fiction contest and was nominated for Best Microfiction and Best Small Fiction awards. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, CRAFT, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Atlas & Alice, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. She is seeking representation for her book-club novel about revenge-seeking sisters. When not writing, she can often be found reading with her children, training for a marathon, or baking brownies. Find her online: Instagram @jillwittywriter, Twitter @jwitty, or her website, jillwitty.com.