Talking To Diane Chamberlain

Monday 14th December 2009 - 11:00:00

An author for over twenty years, Diane Chamberlain has become a major player in the US fiction scene.

Now, publisher Mira books have finally decided to bring her over the pond to the UK.

With her second UK published novel The Bay At Midnight out soon, Female First spoke to her about her life before and after she took up a life in prose.

So before you were an author you had a career in psychiatry, can you tell us a little bit about that?

I was a clinical social worker and a psychotherapist in a private practice. I worked in hospitals; I was a medical social worker in the emergency room and the maternity unit. Then I had a private practise as a psychotherapist working with mostly teenagers. And for a while I was doing both, I was writing and working as a kind of social worker at the same time.

What made you go back to writing after this?

Well, I always loved writing and I always loved reading. I had an idea in my mind for a story, probably from the time I was a teenager about a group of people living together in a big house on the shore.

One day I had a doctor’s appointment and he was keeping me waiting for hours, he was very late, and I had a pad and a pen with me and I just started writing down that story and I got hooked. First I thought of it as a hobby and then I really started aiming towards publication because I was so into it.

It took me about four years to write that book, just doing it during the evenings and on my breaks at work. Then it took me about a year to find and agent and another year to find a publisher but then I was well on my way.

Has this background helped you as an author?

I think it’s helped me tremendously because it’s given me insight into people and what makes them tick, as well as how they deal with adversity.

Especially working in an emergency room where I would see people become so strong in the face of trouble, that really influenced my writing because I like my characters to go through a lot, but them to ultimately triumph.

Was it hard trying to get published as a first time author?

You know, it seemed really hard at the time but I think it was easier then than it is to get published now. It seems that there are so many people writing right now and there are fewer publishers so I think just got tighter and more difficult now.

It’s been twenty years since I wrote my first novel and I think I came in at a good time. Although it took me a while to get published, in retrospect it seems like it was pretty easy compared with what writers go through today.

Do you have any tips for anyone trying to become an author?

My first tip is to make sure that you can write well. I see a lot of manuscripts from friends and acquaintances who will ask me to read what they’re written and a lot of the time the ideas are brilliant but the execution is so poor that I know that it’s never going to get published.

I think that if someone isn’t completely sure they’re writing very, very well that they need to take a few really basic writing courses and learn how to string words together in a really beautiful way.