Alina Khawaja, author of 'Maya's Laws of Love' - How to avoid tangents which block your ideas, dealing with rejections, and trying to get better
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2024
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
After writing around 7 books and getting many rejections or near-misses, Alina Khawaja finally has a published novel. It's called 'Maya's Laws of Love', and tells the story of Maya on her way to Pakistan for an arranged marriage she hopes will end with love. Only, after a disastrous journey, she begins to wonder if Mr. Right might actually be someone else she meets along the way.
Alina is well read and decorated, with a degree in English, History and Creative Writing, and a Masters in Literatures of Modernity, and all the time whilst studying, she's been writing. She's been carrying on in the face of rejections, reading to get better, and cracking out stories. You can hear how she dealt with rejections and near-misses, and why she thinks this novel finally got her published. Also, at a time when self-publishing has never been easier or more successful, we talk about why Alina was desperate to follow the traditional route.
You can hear about her outlining process and whether that's likely to change, also why she tries to avoid tangents, and how she's trying to make her work stand out in busy bookshelves.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along to writers' routine where we take a look through an author's working day. |
| 0:13.0 | This week we're chatting to Alina Kowager about her new novel, Myers' Laws of Love. |
| 0:18.9 | You can hear about her long journey to publication, why she never |
| 0:23.1 | gave up and just carried on writing, also why heading on tangents leads her to a block, |
| 0:30.7 | and you can hear how she keeps trying to get better. I would read a lot more, especially within |
| 0:34.9 | the genre that I was writing, just to see how other |
| 0:37.8 | people have done it and just get a sense of what makes good writing and that kind of thing. |
| 0:43.2 | But also, I was taking university classes at the time. |
| 0:46.5 | I majored in English, and I have one of my minors is in creative writing. |
| 0:51.3 | So a lot of the classes that I was taking kind of within that major and within |
| 0:55.7 | the minor also really helped to improve my skills because I learned like, oh, this is what you |
| 1:00.0 | should do in prose. This is what popular genre conventions are working within like romance or |
| 1:06.3 | within horror, within fantasy. So, and I think it's just practice. Like, I think that I needed to write those |
| 1:16.0 | books to up my skills naturally so that by the time I had gotten to that fifth book, it actually |
| 1:22.1 | was something real and ready. There is more with Alina Kowager in this week's Writers' Routine. |
| 1:36.1 | Yes, welcome along to the show. |
| 1:37.5 | This is Writers' Routine. |
| 1:38.5 | My name is Dan Simpson. |
| 1:39.9 | Thank you so much for being there. |
| 1:42.9 | We take a look inside an author's working day. |
| 1:49.0 | Every week, more or less, I bring you all manners of different writers, some of the most successful, storied, authors who are publishing their 100th book in the 10th year, and people |
| 1:57.0 | who are just getting started, who are navigating that tricky path to publication, |
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