Bianca Marais

So talking about the book itself, it's really, really tough to write a

multi-POV characters when the characters, for example, are similar?

Because here you've got all women, sort of similar ages.

So speak a bit about how you differentiated them in the reader's mind, because that's something that a lot of emerging authors struggle with.

Yeah, very, very much so.

And as a panther, I'm like applauding, yay, because that's how I wrote my book.

I don't know who died, who killed them, why they were killed, and it works out.

It's not very efficient, but it does work out.

In terms of...

We sometimes think of the unreliable narrator being first-term narrative, like a first-person point of view.

But each of these women has got secrets.

And so as you're writing them in the close third person, you have got to be aware of those secrets.

And you can drop curiosity seeds for the reader so that the reader's theorizing what they are.

But you've really got to be in control of the calibration of what gets released first.

When was that something that you found in the rewrites?

Or was it something that even as a pantser, you were able to figure out in first draft?

Yeah, I used to hate edits, used to despise them.

Like my first draft, that's what I loved.

And now I've trained myself.

Well, I think it's the opposite way.