Emma Bamford, author of 'Deep Water' - Writer and memoirist discusses scene breakdowns, moving to full time writing, and switching from real life to fiction
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
Emma Bamford is a journalist and memoirist whose debut novel, 'Deep Water' is out right now. About a decade ago, Emma quit her job and escaped to Borneo with a complete stranger. She told this story in her memoirs, 'Casting Off' and 'Untie the Lines'. We talk about writing memoir: why other people want to read about your life, and how you keep records of adventures to write them later on.
'Deep Water' tells the story of Jake and Virginie, who after a traumatising experience at sea, find sanctuary in a remote island... until the island starts to reveal more secrets than they know. We talk about the exact moment she had the idea for the story, how she reverse-engineered her scene breakdown, and how much the story changed whilst she was writing it.
You can hear why she's moving house with a new office in mind, how challenging she found moving from writing memoirs to fiction, and what she does when the words aren't coming out.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along to writer's routine where we take a look inside an author's working day. |
| 0:14.1 | This week we're chatting to Emma Bamford, who is a journalist, a memoirist, and she's just |
| 0:20.2 | published her debut novel called Deep Water. |
| 0:23.4 | We talk about why she's moved house with a new writing space in mind. |
| 0:29.2 | Also, how she found the change to full-time writing from writing around her job. |
| 0:35.3 | She's now doing it all the time and how that has affected her motivation. |
| 0:39.8 | And you can hear how her plot developed significantly along the way. And the characters |
| 0:44.4 | changed actually. One of the protagonists changed, like his name changed, his job changed, |
| 0:50.2 | even what he looked like changed as I got kind of a better understanding that it was a thriller I was writing. |
| 0:56.2 | Because to begin with, I didn't know that. |
| 0:57.8 | I just knew that I had this two people and I wanted them to go to this island by sailing boat |
| 1:03.1 | and then encounter difficulties when they were there. |
| 1:06.4 | There is more with Emma Bamford in this week's writer's routine. |
| 1:18.6 | Music more with Emma Bamford in this week's writer's routine. Yes, welcome along to the show. |
| 1:20.4 | This is Rice's Routine, where we take a sneak peek inside an author's working day, |
| 1:24.5 | finding out where, when, and how they work, how they take that idea, that morsel, |
| 1:30.2 | that nubbin of an idea, and work on it, plot it out, develop it into a book that you can now |
| 1:37.5 | buy on the shelves. My name is Dan Simpson. Thank you so much for listening and finding the show. |
| 1:42.4 | This week we're talking to Emma Bamford, |
| 1:44.7 | who is a journalist and memoirist. She left her old life behind 10 or 15 years ago and went to |
| 1:51.9 | Borneo with a complete stranger, an experience that she wrote about in casting off and then |
| 1:57.7 | followed it up with untie the lines. We talk about writing memoir. I've always |
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