Drew Davies

The romantic novelist tells Margaret James about getting inside the minds of the characters in his heartwarming – and heartbreaking novels

Drew Davies doesn’t come from a family of writers, and says he believes he’s the first in his own family to write fiction. ‘But my dad’s Irish and loves telling a funny story, and my English mum is an educator and trainer, so if you boil all that up, my writing makes some kind of genetic sense,’ he says. Drew’s latest novel is With or Without You and he feels this new book is a reaction against his previous ones. ‘The Shape of Us is a bustling, multi-narrative romantic comedy, and Dear Lily is a very emotional tale of two sisters, so I wanted to explore something more introspective in my third novel,’ he explains. ‘One day, I needed something from the mall in Stratford Westfield in East London. It was early, and my fiancé and I were the only ones there, just like Mr and Mrs Dixit in the first few pages of With or Without You. Over breakfast in the empty food hall, I scoped out the bones of the book. I wanted to explore a quiet marriage, and how people on the outside (and also the central protagonist, middle-aged Mrs Dixit herself) might come to judge that.

‘I think my many years of listening to Woman’s

Hour on BBC Radio 4 have definitely helped me to get inside the female brain. My second novel Dear

Lily also has a female protagonist – Joy, in her midthirties – and one reader was surprised to find I’d been able to capture what it was like to go for a smear test. Mrs Dixit in With or Without You doesn’t really like her sister, and often she’s only playing at being nice to people, which I suspect women often feel more socially conditioned to do. I enjoyed sitting in the mind space of Mrs Dixit and noticing what came up. I observed her reacting to events and people, and I tried to maintain the truth in those interactions.

‘I live in east London, in a diverse neighbourhood, so I really wanted With or Without You to reflect my local community. I trained as an actor, and before I became a novelist I wrote plays, so I usually get into my characters through dialogue. Mrs Rampersad, who is Mrs Dixit’s Trinidadian/British neighbour, has a very distinctive voice. She came to Essex from Trinidad when she was a child, so being Trinidadian –Trine – is a key part of her identity.

‘As an interracial couple, the Dixits have to deal with casual racism, because in the real world this would be the case. Mrs Dixit has learned to bite her lip.

‘When I portray gender, sexuality and race in my books, I like to create an authentic richness. But I’m also aware that I’m writing from the perspective (and privilege) of a white cis man, so I fully support the move towards OwnVoices in publishing. As a gay man, I don’t mind at all if non-queer writers create queer characters, in fact I encourage it. But I hope they’re mindful of the stereotypes – the gay best friend, the dangerous pervert, the bitchy queen – especially if the killer in the book is revealed to be the bitchy best friend of the protagonist.

‘I think that’s the danger of well-intentioned writing when it comes to diversity – stumbling into cliché and inauthenticity, which at the very least feels patronising to the group you’re portraying, and asserts harmful stigmas at worst.

‘When I start writing a novel, it’s a case of no plans or outlines for me. I usually have a very basic shape in mind, and possibly the ending too, but then each day of writing is a form of improvisation. Fellow novelist Sophie Ranald told me this is called the Headlight Method. You have some idea where you’re going, but you can only see as far as the car headlights. That’s my process to a tee.

‘While I was writing With or Without You I had lots of surprises, not all greeted with enthusiasm by me, at least initially. After her husband’s car accident which results in him being in a coma, for example, the police visit Mrs Dixit. I was writing the scene quite happily, and then one of the officers says, your husband’s taxi customer was sitting beside him, not in the back seat. Do you know why?

‘Neither Mrs Dixit nor I had the foggiest, but I went with it, and that one line sent the story off in a different direction, introducing an element of thriller or crime. I’d never set out to write a thriller, but now I’m very happy that element is there.

Do it right now – make sure you’ve saved your manuscript in multiple safe locations. I find it helpful to save my WIP to my local hard drive, and also to upload it to my cloud-based email at the end of each day, with a description of what I’ve done, so I can keep a version history in case I want to go back and change something from an earlier draft. There’s a caveat here – if your cloud storage is free, be aware that there is usually no customer support if something goes wrong with your account or your document.

You can usually tell if something isn’t working. But we writers sometimes hope this feeling will just go away. Or that we’ll read the part in question again and it will magically seem all right. It never does, so the sooner you fix it, the better. Your gut knows.

When I write comedy, I usually pitch more jokes than are needed to my editor, knowing she’ll pull me back on one or two. But it’s easier to be overly funny upfront than be told, hey, we need a joke here, and have to reverse-engineer one. This doesn’t just apply to writing comedy. I think that if you try to keep dialling things up, for example in terms of horror or romance, a good agent or editor will have a better chance of shaping your work into a great final product.