Anna Stothard

The Pink Hotel is about a androgynous, violent, nameless seventeen-year-old London girl who flies to LA to attend the wake of her estranged mother. She steals a suitcase of letters, clothes and photographs from her mother’s bedroom at the top of a huge pink hotel on Venice Beach, and spends her summer travelling around LA returning love letters and photographs to the men who knew her mother.

The Pink Hotel was inspired by living in Los Angeles for two years. When I first arrived in the city at the end of a road trip around California and Nevada, I stayed in this giant art-deco pink hotel on Venice Beach. Outside my window were children on rollerblades and cartoonish men and doll-shaped women and an old man playing the piano on the sidewalk. Like the protagonist of The Pink Hotel, I meant to stay for a week but ended up living in an apartment on the cusp of Thai Town and Little Armenia in East Hollywood, for much longer than expected.

I either write at home, in London, on the same beat-up desk where I wrote fairy stories and did math homework as a kid, or I write in coffee shops: I like the basement of Café Nero on Frith Street, or the Costa Coffee near my house. I have perfect concentration if surrounded by strangers, even noisy ones, but I fall to pieces if someone I know is nearby. So I can’t do The London Library or the British Library, but I can do local libraries. I drink a lot of coffee and chew pencils to bits.

I do plan, but I’m not good at following orders (even my own). My instinct is to sneak off and have a cigarette behind the bike shed, or whatever the writing equivalent is: basically I have trouble making my characters do what they’re told during a first draft.

This is when I force the characters into submission. I like editing. It doesn’t have the raw adrenaline of a scrawling out a first draft, but I like seeing my words tighten and my plot get under control.

Many. Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Truman Capote, Graham Green, Ted Hughes…

I’m about to finish Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb, which is fantastic. “I love you because you’re part of me. I loved Eva because she wasn’t. That’s to say, loving you gives me confidence and strength, but when I loved her, it humiliated and annihilated me…”

I’m not good with heat; I’d get very grumpy if stranded on a desert island. Can I have a large air-conditioned tree house? With a top floor library looking out on the ocean. And a freezer full of ice cubes.

The White Rabbit would be fun. Not a great conversationalist, and he’d probably be late, but he knows all the good rabbit holes.

I have a longstanding crush on David, the love interest in The Pink Hotel. He’s a secretive giant, and part of the LA paparazzi. He has issues, and he falls in love with the one person he shouldn’t.

The best is when you’re on a roll and nothing outside your head matters. The worst is when you fall too far inside your head and struggle to resurface while the “real” people in your life tap their feet and frown at you from a murky distance.

I’m finishing my next one, out March 2013.

1. I often imagine I’m dying. It stops me from Googling pointless things.
2. When you’ve finished a first draft, put it away for a month before showing any one.
3. Read your book out loud, or at least some of it. How things sound, the rhythms, make a difference.
4. You can’t please everyone and shouldn’t aim to. Write for yourself, but ideally with humility (don’t be boring!).
5. Keep a notebook and record overheard conversations, descriptions, ideas etc as they come to you. Don’t write them down “later” because “later” they won’t be the same ideas.

For more information on Anna, visit her website.

The Pink Hotel is available via Amazon.

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by

Laura

I'm Laura. I started Novel Kicks back in 2009 as I wanted a place to discuss books and writing - two loves of my life. As someone who has anxiety, these two things give me, and I am sure countless others, a much needed escape.
There is a monthly book club, writing exercises, prompts, reviews, author interviews, competitions and guest posts. I cover many genres and I hope there is something for everyone.
I grew up by the sea in Dorset and currently live in Poole with my husband, Chris and three cats. I love writing and have a BA (Hons) in Creative Writing from Falmouth University. I am writing my first book. If only I could stop pressing delete. Chris has threatened to stop it from working. Haha.
I have always loved creative writing since I was in first school and would very much like to meet my teacher, Miss Sayers, to say thank you for all the encouragement she gave me then.
When not writing, I love reading, cats, Disney, singing (I can't sing but this doesn't stop me,) and falling into a good TV show or film. If I could step into any fictional world, it would be amongst the characters in ABC's Once Upon a Time.
I love reading many genres and discovering new authors.