The last month or so has been a whirlwind of returning guests, and don't I just love it - especially when they are ones I've known all my writing life. Today I'm delighted to welcome back my very special guest, Samantha Tonge, for her fourth appearance on Wendy's Writing Now. Samantha has been on quite a journey recently and has openly talked about her struggle when wine O'clock become something bigger. Since then, she's made huge changes in her life and one of these is a new direction in her writing.
I'll let Sam tell you about it.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about a writer’s voice and exactly what it is. The first book I wrote - not my debut Doubting Abbey, published in 2013, but my very first attempt at writing back in 2005 – was not comedic. My second and all the ones to follow were. In real life I’m the sort of person to crack one-liners and laugh with people I know (and don’t, to my children’s embarrassment) and I think I decided that romantic comedy was more me because of this. Plus at the time I got feedback from an editorial agency saying that they felt I was very near the point of finding my writing voice and I took that to mean I was doing the right thing, writing as I spoke.
It certainly felt natural and I went on, eventually, to have nine romantic comedies published, the last this May, One Summer in Rome.
I say the last because in recent years I’ve faced some mental health challenges and there came a point, in 2017, when I had to tell my agent I couldn’t write comedy anymore. It just wasn’t in me to crack one-liners. Less of that was happening in real life and I suppose it’s obvious that would affect my work as a writer. In 2016 I’d found myself with a wine o’clock problem that had got out of control and it was whilst recovering from that I changed direction and wrote my first women’s fiction novel Forgive Me Not. It has just been published by the wonderful Canelo.
On the back of that I thought that very first book I
wrote must have been the real authorly me
and I’d just gone back to that.
But then the reviews started to come in for Forgive Me
Not. Here are some examples...
“You will still find the same warmth and love just like in her other
stories.”
“This book has a harder edge to it but the
characters and plot were equally as compelling.”
“Samantha’s writing style has the knack of
drawing me in making it her books extremely difficult to put it down.”
“Heartwarming & heartbreaking in equal measure – love
@SamTongeWriter's new direction.”
Whilst reviewers acknowledge that Forgive Me Not
heralds a very new direction for my writing, they can clearly see common
ground. And the same words keep coming up as in reviews for my romcoms – warm,
emotional, heartfelt… so all of this leads me to question exactly what voice
is.
And I’ve concluded that, for me, it’s not the tone – i.e.
whether the book is comedic or serious – no, it’s about warmth. All of my novels
have featured characters and communities pulling together, for example, and
Forgive Me Not is no different – the economy of the little village of Healdbury
is under threat from a new out-of-town hypermarket and so locals pull together
to save their businesses. There’s also a warm-hearted thread about charity and
acceptance connected to the grittier subject of homelessness.
I suspect whatever genre I wrote that voice of mine
would be there. If I wrote about zombies alongside the gruesome deaths I’d
probably have one who was vegetarian, like the shark in Nemo, who was trying to
save the humans.
So I think readers help you identify exactly what your
voice is – what it is, about your writing, that inspires them to buy your next
book. It may not be the tone or the style or feel. Or it might be. But,
whatever it is, it’s unique to you.
You can find out more about Samantha by following the links below:
Samantha Tonge lives in
Manchester UK. She studied German and French at university and has travelled
widely.
When not writing she passes her days cycling, baking and drinking coffee. Samantha has sold many dozens of short stories to women’s magazines.
Her bestselling 2013 debut novel, Doubting Abbey, was shortlisted for the Festival of Romantic Fiction best Ebook award. In 2015 her summer novel, Game of Scones, hit #5 in the UK Kindle chart and won the Love Stories Awards Best Romantic Ebook category. Her new novel, Forgive Me Not, heralds a new direction with publisher Canelo, and is a story about acceptance, forgiveness and trying to put things right.
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