Our sincere thanks to Danarii for taking part in our interview series, and sharing valuable insights into her writing process.
How do you believe a writer improves?
Practice your writing as much and as often as possible. You should also listen to and be able to accept both positive and negative feedback. This is not about ego. It’s about clambering up to the summit of that learning curve, the one from which you can see how much further you have to go.
And don’t be afraid to experiment, to try something different, to embrace the unusual. The same applies to your reading: keep it as varied as possible, try different genres and styles. Every new idea is grist to the writer’s mill and who knows what your imagination will make of it?
Always read your work out loud. It’s the only real way to ensure the text flows smoothly and don’t do this straight after writing it. Let the work sit for a few days to allow for at least a little detachment.
What are the most important steps an amateur writer can take?
Join a writing group if you’re not already a member of one. Writing can be a lonely process and it’s easy to lose sight of whether you are improving or not. Sharing your work with fellow writers and listening to theirs can often point out a weakness or highlight a strength. And when all those rejections land on your doormat (or in your inbox), your group is there to commiserate on a shared experience, encourage you to carry on trying and, when things go right, to crack open the champagne!
What is the best piece of advice you have received or would offer?
I don’t remember when I first came across the phrase, “kill your darlings” but of all the writing tips I have picked up along the way I think it is the most important. It is also the most difficult for me to implement.
Often you wake up in the middle of the night with the most incredible phrase rolling round in your head. You write it down. It looks even better on paper. In the morning it becomes the heart of a new story. It flutters against the plain English around it, a hummingbird with bright plumage, but its song is discordant. It may have been the beginning but, no matter how much it pains you to do so, you must let it fly away long before the end.
Which successes are you most proud of?
This has to be the publication of my first book, a collection of short stories entitled Will You Walk into My Parlour, which was published by Crystal Clear Books in October this year (2024). During the early stages of the editing process, my publisher suggested that one of the stories in the collection (actually a novella) stood out from the others and she subsequently commissioned me to turn it first into a novel (The Reluctant Reaper), which is due for publication in April 2025, and then expand this into a trilogy.
Will you tell us a little about your writing process.
I am a complete obsessive when it comes to writing. Once I have a clear idea of where a story is going I simply cannot leave it alone! I have been known to get up at 5.00 am and write almost continuously until well into the afternoon (then drop with exhaustion!). It is not unusual for me to write a complete short story in a day when I have the inspiration (then begins the hard work of revision: re-read, re-write, re-edit).
I am both a planner and a pantster. First comes the outline (beginning and end) then, as the words flow, the story inevitably changes and often my characters surprise me with the things they get up to.
If you were to begin writing today for the first time, would you do anything differently?
I had already written several novels with no success before a tutor on a writing course suggested to me that I go down the short story competition route. Since then, in the last two and a half years I have achieved longlist or better in almost seventy competitions across the globe from Canada to New Zealand. More than twenty of those stories have been published in anthologies related to those competitions and many of them are included in Parlour. Indeed, the offer of publication of the collection was made as a direct result of winning one of those competitions. Short story competitions may be seen as walking before you can run but they provide an ideal testing ground for developing your style.
Denarii Peters was born in the north-west of England but now lives in Lincolnshire. A former teacher, she now spends her days writing stories and drinking a lot of coffee. In the last two and a half years she has achieved longlist or better in almost seventy competitions and over twenty of her pieces have been published in various anthologies. A collection of her work, Will You Walk into My Parlour, was published by Crystal Clear Books in early October 2024 and her debut novel, The Reluctant Reaper, is to be published in April 2025.
Website: https://denariipeters.substack.com/
Publisher: https://crystalclearbooks.co.uk/product/will-you-walk-into-my-parlour/