Jenna Clake, author of 'Disturbance' - Poet and novelist discusses writing spaces, keeping it tight, and how poetry helps novels
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2023
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we're chatting to Jenna Clake. Her new novel is 'Disturbance', it tells the story of a young woman who, with the help of her strange, witchy neighbour, seems to bring her boyfriends presence back to haunt her. It's eery, creepy, razor sharp and beautifully written.
Jenna began writing with poetry. Her first collection 'Fortune Cookie' won many awards, and she teaches creative writing. We discuss how writing poetry influenced her storytelling, and how much it affects the way she writes novels. You can hear why this story needed to be a book, rather than a poem, but why she still kept it at a tight 200 pages.
Jenna discusses her different writing spaces, how she began unpacking characters, and her very strong font opinions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome along to a brand new episode of writers' routine. |
| 0:11.8 | This week we're chatting to Jenna Clayke. Her brand new book is Disturbance. |
| 0:16.5 | And it's out right now. She's packed a lot into a tight 200 pages. You can hear about her two |
| 0:22.5 | writing spaces and how that changes things. Also, how voice messaging herself plays a big part in |
| 0:29.1 | her workday and why she began with poetry. I had very narrow ideas of what poetry could be |
| 0:36.7 | and didn't really know anything about it. |
| 0:40.1 | And then suddenly this whole world opened up. And it felt really exciting. And I think |
| 0:45.1 | what appealed to me is that I could tell a whole story in very few words, or I could capture |
| 0:52.5 | a snippet of a story in a few words. And I think that really |
| 0:56.6 | trained me how to be a writer, like all the things I know about writing I know from being a poet. |
| 1:02.2 | And there is more with Jenna Clayke in this week's writer's routine. Yes, welcome along to the show. This is writer's routine where we take a look inside an author's working day. |
| 1:18.1 | My name's Dan Simpson. We see how they get things done. We see how they take an idea, how they plan their space, their day, their entire life and everything else that comes with that to give them the best |
| 1:28.8 | chance of getting the words onto the page. And this week we are supported by Plotter. This is your |
| 1:34.9 | last chance to make the most of the brilliant Plotter deal that we've got the discount that |
| 1:40.9 | they've given us while they are supporting the show. They can power your |
| 1:44.6 | writing. Plotter is a writing tool that does what the title says. It plots. It helps you plan |
| 1:49.6 | your books the way that you think, letting you outline faster, organize smarter, and it turbocharges |
| 1:55.6 | your productivity. If you've got a short window to write, if you like things done in a |
| 2:00.1 | particular way, this will help you out. |
| 2:02.1 | It will curate the background for you. When you open it up, you get a digital cork board. You can easily swap between the timeline, the outline, your notes, the details on your characters and places. You can even tag all of it to make it really easy for you to skim through and find what you need. It's colour coded, as it might be in a |
| 2:18.5 | notebook, but you don't need to worry about the notebook because this is all there with you on your |
| 2:23.5 | screen. If you're a very visual writer who likes to see everything that is going on whenever you |
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