How do you keep readers glued to a page?
That is not easy questions to answer, but it was a challenge that novelists Sue Nyathi, Tom Eaton, and Puseletso Tsotetsi took up and shared their insights on during a “One More Chapter” panel at the Open Book Festival earlier this month.
Led by Cape Town Silent Book Club organiser Shawn Buck, the authors helped educate the audience on what their writing process looks like, and how they keep readers glued to the page.
Nyathi is a writer by passion and an investment analyst by profession, and has been even more well-known due to the recent success of her 2012 novel “The Polygamist”. Sue has written two other novels; “The GoldDiggers” (2018) and “A Family Affair” (2020). She also edited "Man-Hood: Confessions from the Heart".
Tsotetsi is an honours-qualified filmmaker, Mandela Washington Fellowship alumna, digital marketing strategist, and the author of two romance novels. Her debut novel, “Good Things Keep Happening to Me”, was adapted from her viral TikTok series Thato Wa Ngwanyana, which reached over 3 million viewers.
Eaton is a writer, living in Cape Town. Over the past 20 years he has been a columnist for the Mail & Guardian, Noseweek, Sunday Times Day and Business Day. He has published five novels, but most recently, he has published two cosy-crime novels, “An Act of Murder”, and “A Second Shot”.
When asked by Buck if their careers, or whether their experiences with television informed and inspired their writing, the authors had a range of answers.
“I would say for me, it hasn't really inspired my writing, but rather I’ve come to appreciate the differences in the two mediums. Whilst there are similarities, there are differences. For one thing, when I write a book, I can create new worlds. I'm not governed by budget. I don't have limitations,” Nyathi said.
“I can actually make my mind go wherever it needs to go. I can have a 1,000 characters. The world of writing is not as punitive as the world of film, filmmaking and television. I think my exposure to film and screenwriting actually helped me to understand the differences better, so that, by the time when ‘The Polygamist’ happened, I understood that it wouldn't be like the book. Not everything would make it into the series.
“If I hadn't been exposed to the world of TV, I might have reacted differently to adaptations,” she said.
Tsotetsi said that she learned how to develop characters, story arcs and screenwriting in film school.
“I was able to then draw those skills, and experience also editing… I knew that there are the hooks, there is this and that, the arcs. So it really served me well and helped me be the writer that I am today. By the time I wrote the novel for the first time I had all of that knowing because of being a filmmaker.
Eaton said that when he came through TV, his experiences were not really “apropos to my writing”.
“If you've ever written scripts, you'll know that they butcher them. You write two pages of glorious conversation that comes out as ‘hey, how are you? - bye’, and somebody walks off. So I think that I did gain that experience of just getting on with it.”
When asked how they managed to identify an audience, Nyathi said she didn’t think of the audience of ‘The Polygamist’ when writing it, but was rather focused on the women characters actually representing women in the world.
“That should be recognisable by many other women… I would say, like, Jonasi is a character in the book. Although, the story centres around him. It is not told by him.
“We never hear his point-of-view (POV) throughout the entire novel. You hear the POV of these women, whose lives revolve around this one chaotic man. Yet, like he only has one chapter in the whole book. It's after he is dead, then he speaks in the epilogue.
“But, you know, he has become like the character. You know, as a result of the series, and his (Sdumo Mtshali’s) portrayal of that role.
“I just wanted to have characters that readers would either identify with or see themselves in… I think, you know, that's really what makes the book very popular is the relatability.
Because representation matters and people want to see themselves in the stories,” she said.
She added later that it was very intentional for her to just start the chapters without explaining which woman was narrating.
“I remember my editor saying to me afterwards, ‘should we title each chapter with the character?’ and I was very emphatic and I said, ‘No, I want the readers to know, just by reading and to know instinctively who's narrating the story’.
“And I was like, for the lazy readers, they're going to have to work a bit,” Nyathi quipped. “But I think at no point have I ever come across a reader who said they never knew which wife was narrating at which point, and I think that speaks to the strength of the characterisation. So that was really intentional, you know, and I wanted to keep it that way.”
For Eaton, he had a different approach: “As I left this kind of corporate-office environment early on and have been a sort of stay at home writer, which means I'm a kind of hermit-hobbit. I don't know people, I don't meet people, I don't know what happens in the world.
“... So essentially I just had to write to somebody like me. (My protagonist) Arnold, luckily, is an actor. Those of us who know and love actors will know that they're as neurotic and thin-skinned as writers. So I could just project a lot of that onto him.”
The audience in attendance was stunned to hear how for Nyathi the story of ‘The Polygamist’ poured out of her.
“It just took shape. I mean, I know it sounds wild, right? But I'm not trained as a writer. And when I wrote that book, I had no screenwriting knowledge, or anything about beats in books.
My background is investment and finance, but I think I drew a lot from the books that I read in high school for leisure, not for school, for leisure,” Nyathi said.
“And Sidney Sheldon was one of those writers. And I think I learned from him because he wrote very pacy novels. I always enjoyed that because you literally turn the pages. I think when I also started writing, I wanted to write those kinds of novels that have pace and just keep going and you get very invested emotionally.
“So I really can't tell you, there's no technique to it. I just do it. I can even explain it. But that's how I do it. I think there's a method to the madness. I just don't know what the method is.”
Tsotetsi said that when she writes it is a mixture of planning and a stream of consciousness.
“Actually, I was at a wedding one day and I kind of had the idea. So, I decided to tell the story and it was meant to just be one video. But at the end of that video, people asked, ‘and then what?’ And so I had to give them more. By then I could see it, it was probably over half a million views. And so I thought, how do I continue to capture them and grow my audience?
“Because for me also, the numbers mean that the other side of my money making world grows. So I had to just keep going, and for it to then go into a book, it was a bit easier because by the time I started writing a book, I had 30 episodes. So each episode of the TikTok series then served as an episode in the book,” Tsotetsi said.
“Of course, my voice as a storyteller on TikTok is different because there I'm just, tjatjarag (pronounced cha-cha-ragh), that's what we would say in my language. I just keep going and I switch languages between Sotho and Zulu. I had to figure out how I keep the streamline of hooking, the reader, still throughout the chapters.
“Part of it was difficult because it was my first time writing something like this, but part of it was easy because of the stream of consciousness that came through me telling the story.
The characters do come to you, they live in you when a character is crying, I also cried while I was writing. I was basically in Didi’s world… So it's really a combination of both,” Tsotetsi said.
When Buck asked, why the authors think that their types of books are so important for readers or the book industry, Nyathi managed to sum up the point poignantly.
“I would say, I think reading needs to be accessible. A lot of people who don't read will often say, I read your book and I finished it in a day and that's never happened. And they want to read more, you know? And I think that's what books should do. They should encourage you to read.
“I think there's a book for everyone, just as literary fiction is there for, you know, what they typically call the serious/snobbish reader, and page-turners, like you say, are typically looked down on as flimsy, and fluff.
“I was quite surprised when I saw some academics discussing it (The Polygamist). Now it is not fluff. Because suddenly people understand there's many themes, there's so much depth in it, but because of the way it was written, it wasn't taken seriously. But for me, that's really not the point.
“I just think that, you know, as much as we can educate people through reading, it should also be entertaining. People should read for fun. That's what I used to do.
“I used to. I had a very hectic day job. And so when I read, it was for escapism. I wanted to be able to disappear. Even when I was growing up, books were an escape for me,” Nyathi said.
“You know, I could be transported to Italy just by sitting in the living room, and that's what reading should be. They should be fun and they should give you a respite. I think that should be the goal.”
theolin.tembo@nationalmg.co.za