SCREENWRITER ON E.TV’S MATATIELE, CHATS ABOUT HER SOPHOMORE BOOK

What made you fall in love with writing? I’ve always loved reading and I started writing around age nine. My favourite pastime was cutting out pictures from magazines and writing stories around them — I remember having a field day with Princess Diana’s wedding [chuckles]. As I grew older, I discarded the pictures and started writing descriptive stories on A5 exercise books and circulated them among schoolmates.

What conditions do you prefer when writing? I need total silence, where it’s literally just me and my characters. I don’t want to be disturbed because I lose thread easily. However, when my son entered my world, he broke all that silence [chuckles]! What inspired The Gold Diggers’ storyline? Ironically, it was inspired by the xenophobic conflict in South Africa or what some call ‘Afrophobia’. Much as there was sympathy from some quarters, there were also vociferous shouts of, ‘What are they doing here? They should return to their countries!’ How long did it take to finish the book? I completed The Gold Diggers in 2016 — it took me a year to get a publisher. I haven’t written anything new since. Between working full-time as an investment analyst and being a single parent, there’s just no time to write. What’s the one thing you’d like readers to take away from the book? To be empathetic. We’re too quick to judge. Try to be kind.