All things writing, authoring, and creativity (Interview with Dani J Norwell)
Today I have the privilege of sharing an interview with Dani J Norwell, who is an author and recent friend. I met Dani on Instagram, where I first knew her as one of the co-creators of the Sincerely, Spain blog. A few months later, I realised that she is also a fiction writer - having published her first collection of short stories, Fairly Familiar, in 2020. I read through these diverse stories - which I thoroughly enjoyed - and then found out that she was already preparing her second collection of short stories, Snapshots of Spain, (which has now also been published).
I was interested in interviewing Dani to find out about her transition from language teaching to full time writing, her experience as a budding writer, and how she manages to balance her various writing projects. Dani does not disappoint! This interview is packed with details, advice, and inspiration. Enjoy!
A little background…
You're from the US, but you live in Spain - what brought you to Spain?
Yes, I’m from the Chicagoland area, but I’ve called Granada, Spain home for the better part of the last decade. It was a bunch of little decisions that all added up, I guess. I started studying Spanish in the seventh grade and just figured I ought to keep it up, which led me to making Hispanic Studies one of my university majors, which led to me needing to do a study abroad semester in a Spanish-speaking country. I always laugh because I considered many other Spanish-speaking countries but ultimately opted for Spain because I figured it would be the “one and only time” I got to see Europe. I had never been all that drawn to international travel, so I never anticipated returning abroad…that was back in 2011 and, go figure, my life has mostly been abroad since.
Becoming a full-time writer
How long have you been writing?
This is always a tricky question—on one hand, I’ve been writing since I was a kid, I always kept journals, wrote little stories, and even wrote a newspaper for my family. At the same time, I wouldn’t say that I’ve taken my writing seriously until recently. Claudia and I started the Sincerely, Spain blog in 2017 so I’ve been blogging for the past five years and writing fiction full-time since January 2020.
What made you decide to move from teaching English to writing full-time?
When I decided to move to Spain, I did the most common thing native English-speakers do—I became an English teacher. I worked in this capacity for about seven years and really enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of someone’s language-learning journey. However, I knew writing had always been my passion and, as much as I love blogging, there’s something different for me about creative writing. In reality, it was nothing more than talking with my husband about my life-long dream of writing a book and realizing that there was no foreseeable time in the future that would be “better timing” than the present. Because of his work, we knew that we could afford for me not to have a steady income and so three months after that conversation I had quit my job and embarked on my full-time writing career.
What were some of the challenges in transitioning careers?
I may have made it harder on myself because I didn’t tell anyone about my career shift—not my parents or my best friends—truly the only people who knew were my students because I had to explain to them why I wouldn’t be able to teach them anymore. I chose to do this because I wanted to give myself time to adjust and find my own rhythm without anyone’s inquiries or expectations. As well-intentioned as I knew they would be, I wasn’t ready to answer questions about what I planned to write, when I planned to publish, or what I would do if it “wasn’t successful.” I think this was the right choice for me, at the time, but I wouldn’t necessarily suggest it to others. I obviously still had my husband to talk to about it, but it can feel a bit lonely and isolated. I also wasn’t on social media as an author at all for the first five months and I’d recommend finding a writing community to connect with sooner than that.
Additionally, it took me time to figure out my new routine and decide if I wanted to stick to a regular schedule or “follow my flow” – in the end, I’ve started switching this up depending on what stage of a project I’m in. It’s wonderful to suddenly have your entire day free and up to your discretion but, at least for my personality type, it’s sometimes hard to feel like you don’t have a clear direction. I find that having a steady morning routine and, ideally, an “evening routine” to wrap up your work day can be helpful too (otherwise it can feel like you never “leave work”).
What were some things that were surprisingly easy/straightforward?
I think it worked out really well for me to transition to full-time writing right at the beginning of the year when it already felt like a natural new beginning. My intentions for the year were already getting written out in my Year Compass and so I was able to “batch” my new routines. For example, a morning routine was actually something I had never consistently done before full-time writing but because it happened at the same time, it was really easy to get into the swing of it and now it is a non-negotiable for me.
Dani with her first book, Fairly Familiar.
What's your favourite thing about being a full time writer versus teaching?
I can definitely follow my whims more now that I’m writing. If my husband and I decide we want to take a trip mid-week, all we have to do is rearrange our own plans/expectations, which is not something I could do back when I had lessons booked and commitments to others. There’s also something to be said about being able to just take a day off when you’re not feeling super creative or inspired. I honestly don’t take advantage of that as often as I could, but it’s nice to know that it’s an option.
How do you stay motivated?
As odd as it may sound, social media helps a lot! The writing community is one of the most supportive niches you’ll find on Instagram and so following others, interacting with their content, participating in their challenges, etc is always a source of motivation and fresh ideas for me.
Writing process, routines, getting things done
What is your general writing process?
It’s hard to define! So far, I would say that I’m a plantser: I have a general idea of a character and/or story arc and I just set out to write it. I discover who the people and the story are as I go, but I generally get stuck 50-75% in. That’s the point at which I tend to step back and plan out the plot more strategically. Sometimes, I’ll end up changing the order in which the scenes happen or rewriting the point-of-view completely, but I try to remember that it’s all a part of the process and that none of it is wasted time. I enjoy feeling like I get to know my characters organically by watching them work through different experiences in their life, even if those scenes don’t make it into the final product.
Do you work on multiple projects at once?
Yes and no. Writing a short story collection is the perfect way to keep things interesting while working on the same project because I can switch stories if I feel like the one I intended to work on is not right for my current mood. I like the idea of sticking to one project, but I honestly can’t tell you how that will go for me once I try my hand at novel-writing.
How do you manage all the different aspects of an 'author life'? Writing, editing, publishing, marketing...
Uff, it’s a lot, and I don’t know if I always manage it to the best of my ability. Still, I try to keep the actual writing and creative side front and center as often as I can. When I’m still in the writing stage of a project, I try to always make writing my first task of the day.
At the same time, I do usually set aside a day or two at the beginning of each month to plan out social media / marketing, as well as take time to work on things like my author newsletter. I think it can be helpful to have these different tasks to change gears from time to time, but I also try to remember to never let them overshadow my writing.
If we’re being honest, the editing, publishing, and marketing tends to become all-consuming for me in the final three to four months before a book releases and I don’t feel like a creative at all during that time. I’m looking to shift that on future projects.
How do you manage your personal writing with your blog writing for Sincerely, Spain?
Balance is so important, but also so difficult! Claudia and I have been blogging for five years now, so we treat it like a job and plan everything out in advance. The result is that the blog-writing is more systematic and the fiction writing can therefore be a bit more fluid. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s the plan. I think what often ends up taking a lot more time than you anticipate is all the non-writing aspects: social media planning and writing, photo prep, and formatting the blog posts so it can help to always try to do that at least one day before necessary.
Are there any Spanish 'quirks'/cultural aspects that are useful for you as a writer in Spain?
Since I work from home, there aren’t many aspects of Spanish culture that directly affect my writing. However, one thing that definitely works well for me is the Spanish eating schedule. In Spain, it’s normal to eat lunch around 3 pm and dinner around 9:30 pm and this really helps me to feel like I can get a “full morning” of work in, even though my morning routine is quite long and I might not actually sit down at my desk until 11 am. Since mornings are usually the most productive time for me, it helps that my “morning” gets extended until 2 pm.
What does a typical work day look like for you?
Like I said, the typical timetable is definitely later in Spain than it would be for me back in the US. As such, once I wake up, do my yoga, maybe a meditation, read with breakfast, and get ready for the day, it’s usually around 11 am. I then try to focus on my writing (or whatever stage I’m on for my main project) until 2 pm, then make a big lunch which I sit down to with my husband. By 3:30/4pm I’ll return to my desk, and it just depends what I have to focus on for the afternoon—I may return to the same writing task but often I will have blog, social media, or administrative / self-publishing tasks to take care of instead. On an ideal day, I wrap up around 8 pm to have an hour of me-time to go for a walk or do something else relaxing before making dinner and winding down for the night.
Your short stories are so diverse! How do you come up with ideas? Do you do a lot of research? How do you know when an idea is going to turn into a full story?
Thank you so much! It really depends. For this collection, I had a long list of particular scenarios/storylines I wanted to cover. It was easy to come up with a lot of different storylines since I’ve met so many different kinds of people while living abroad in Spain and had so many different kinds of experiences myself too. The funny thing is that, of the ten stories that made it into Snapshots of Spain, only five followed my original ideas. It seems that it’s the storylines you didn’t plan on but that you can’t stop thinking about that always have what it takes to become a full story.
I do a decent amount of research when the characters are different from me because I still want to make them seem as authentic as possible. This was definitely the case when writing from a six-year-old boy’s perspective, for example. I also ended up using Google Earth a lot since I wrote this collection during the pandemic and wasn’t able to revisit the Spanish cities I may have otherwise visited for developmental reasons. Even so, I leaned on places I felt I knew well and could still do justice to from memory so you may be surprised that some of the most popular Spanish destinations, like Madrid and Barcelona, don’t feature in this collection.
Dani with her second book, Snapshots of Spain.
What attracted you to the short story form?
This is a fantastic question and I have actually written an entire blog post on it. The moral of the story, though, is that short stories are a great way to discover your writing style and develop as an author. I actually never read or really liked short stories before I started writing them, but I have grown to appreciate them so much over the last year and a half I’ve focused on writing them.
Advice + Resources
What is the best piece of writing advice you've ever heard?
“Make it messy.” This advice is so simple and yet it really struck me because when I read it (on someone’s Instagram account, if I recall correctly) it immediately made me realize that I was putting too much pressure on myself to “get it right” and “make it good” from the start. First drafts—and second and third drafts, for that matter—are meant to be messy! If you’re trying to get it perfect from the start, you’ll find yourself crippled by that expectation.
What are some of your favourite writing resources?
Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, was one of the first “craft books” I read, and I believe it was a great way to get started! There was a lot in it that was just about his own life, so it didn’t feel like as much of a “textbook” as some other books on the craft of writing do. Still, it provided some golden nuggets of writing advice and inspiration. I’ve also really enjoyed Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King. It is far more practical and completely transformed the way I edit and revise my writing. I recommend it to every writer I meet. On the self-publishing side, I’ve relied heavily on Reedsy and Kindlepreneur. I wrote this post about useful writing resources right after writing my first book, but I think it’s time to update it with new ones I’ve come across in the last year.
What’s next?
Now that you've published two collections of short stories, what's next? Will you stick to the short story form, or do you plan to do something else?
I definitely plan to branch out into full-length novels. It’s funny, because I never envisioned myself writing short stories, but it was just so much easier for me to finish short stories than a full novel and I felt that I needed that boost of confidence at the beginning of my writing career. In fact, I will be taking my first go at novel-writing through NaNoWriMo in November. I don’t actually think I’ll be able to write a full novel in a month, but I think the camaraderie of NaNoWriMo will help me stay motivated to get a great start. If anyone else will be doing the same, please reach out and let me know. The more the merrier!
Final words
I hope you have enjoyed this interview with Dani as much as I have. I think Dani’s story offers a lot of inspiration out there for those embarking on their own writing journeys.
Remember to stay up-to-date with Dani at her website (where she also blogs about the writing process) and on Instagram.
Today’s post was an interview with Dani J Norwell
An American author living in the south of Spain, Dani J. Norwell writes fiction that is real, raw, and relatable. From themes of connection, disappointment, and family bonds in her debut, Fairly Familiar, to topics such as exploration, self-discovery, and life abroad in her second collection of stories, Snapshots of Spain, there’s something for everyone in a DJN book.
When Dani is not reading or writing, you can find her blogging, traveling, sipping Spanish wine, or seeking out dogs to pet on her walks around town.
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