Kehinde Fadipe
In Conversation
This week we spoke to Kehinde Fadipe about her sizzling debut novel, In Such Tremendous Heat, and how her acting career influenced her writing.
Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.
NA: I’d love to start by taking it back to the very beginning. Can you walk us through your journey to writing? Where did it all start?
KF: Well my journey started with writing plays for my family, and forcing my poor little brother and my twin to perform them. I started writing very, very young. And I know every mother exaggerates about how young their children were when they started doing something, but I know I was pretty young. So the real journey for me hasn’t been about writing, but more about trying to figure out what form of writing I really wanted to work on. I've written pretty much everything. When I was at drama school, I wrote a lot of plays, and it didn't really work for me. I tried short stories and I love short stories, it’s an incredible art form in itself, but my stories could never be fully contained within that form. I also wrote screenplays as well, but there came a point, which also kind of coincided with moving to Singapore, where I knew I wasn’t going to be acting for a while and I knew I really wanted to write. I wanted to focus on one form, and really master, or at least start to master it, and I kind of asked myself what my greatest regret would be if I died tomorrow. The answer had nothing to do with my acting because I knew I’d probably get back to it at some point. But I knew I’d regret not publishing a book. My six-year-old self would be so upset if I died and I never actually published something. So that's my journey summarised.
NA: I think you kind of answered my next question, because if an actor decided to pivot into writing, you would automatically think they’d write a screenplay, you wouldn't automatically think novel - so I’d love to know why you chose this form and how acting has impacted your writing.
KF: That's an excellent question because I don't think I'm an actor who writes, I think I'm a writer who fell in love with acting. I've always been a writer. Even going back to when I was at school, I wrote the school play a couple of times and I wasn't originally in the plays, I only stepped in if some of the other girls were annoying the heck out of me, or sometimes they dropped out because I was too controlling! But when I went on to study English at university, there was no plan to become an actor, but I fell in love with acting during my time there. After university, when I auditioned for drama schools, I didn't get in too many schools at all. I happened to get into RADA, which is amazing, but it was a massive detour, which my parents weren't very happy about. And then throughout drama school, I was constantly asked whether I was an actor or a writer, as if I could only choose one path. So in some ways I was only writing plays at the time because I thought that was what was expected of actors, but eventually I managed to find my way back to my first love, which was writing fiction.
But to answer the question about how being an actor influences my writing, I would say that the biggest impact is the character’s internal world. As an actor, you have to do so much work on your character's backstory. There are many different approaches to acting, but one way or another, you're trying to get into the character’s psyche, and that’s essentially what I do when I write. Hopefully, a good editor chops a lot of that out, but readers should still feel like the characters are fully formed and have a full life. So I would say that I do a lot of exercises on their backstory and their history - that would probably be the biggest influence acting has had on my writing.
NA: That's such a great answer. And now focusing specifically on your debut novel, it follows the lives of three Nigerian women living in Singapore. How did this specific story come to you?
KF: Okay, well, when I'd been living in Singapore for about a year, I'd been working on my first book, which was very dark, and after having my son I didn't want to go back into that world. It had a lot of heavy themes, so I honestly just made the decision that I wanted to write something light. I decided to focus on what I was seeing around me, and the different types of Black women that I was meeting in Singapore. So I started a blog and I would write serial episodes every week. I would get lots of people reading it and sharing it and I noticed that people were really enjoying it. I also noticed that I really enjoyed writing it. It was very frothy and it didn't really have a lot the meat that it later developed, but the characters were exactly the same from the beginning, they were very clear to me, and nothing about them has changed. It was more that I learned how to write through this book.
So writing this book took seven years, on and off, and in that time I was focused on the process of learning how to write. I joined a writers group, I was reading books about writing, I made a really concerted effort to read different genres for the first time. With this particular story, the characters came to me first, and both the minor characters and the major ones were based on people that I was meeting. So it was probably three or four years of writing the blog before I really had to ask myself what I was doing and what my plans were for the story. I had to ask myself if I really wanted to get published, because that’s a whole other job of figuring out how publishing works, so that was the second part of the journey. But the first part really was just asking myself what kind of book I wanted to read and finding a way to write it.
NA: That reminds me of the beautiful Toni Morrison quote 'If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.' I also love that you spoke about splitting up the creative writing side of things, from the practical ‘getting published’ side of things, because you’re right - they’re different parts of the same journey. But going back to In Such Tremendous Heat, when you think about Nigerians in diaspora you think about the UK or the US – I never thought I’d be reading a book about Nigerians in Singapore. Were you partly drawn to the idea of reframing dominant narratives about where and how we exist in the world?
KF: I don't know that there was a strong political element to my decision to tell this story, but what I will say is the practical ‘getting published’ side of me was very aware that I had not read anything of this nature before, so I knew that there would be some interest. When I started writing to literary agents, I got a really lovely email from an agent and - because I’d done so much research - I knew just getting a response from an agent was amazing. I got rejected, but with a nice email that said she loved the premise, but it wasn't what she expected, which told me that the writing didn’t deliver and wasn’t up to scratch. So then I had to go back and really figure out what I was trying to do with this book.
I grew up reading a lot of literary fiction and following all these prizes like the Booker Prize, and that’s what I wanted for myself, so it was very painful to realise and accept that I’m not a literary fiction writer. It was very painful and it stopped me completing things and sending my stories out. But one of my best friends read an early draft of this book - when she said she liked it, I was relieved and shared my plans to write another draft to ‘literary’ it up. She didn’t understand what I meant and I kept explaining that, now that the story was written, I needed to make it good. I needed to ‘Adichie’ it, and then she asked me, what if it is what it is? What if the book just tells you what it is? She totally blew my mind and it really freed me because from that moment I decided that every book I write from now on is just going to be what it is. It doesn’t need to be literary, and whether I can sell it is a different thing, but my books are going to exist as they’re meant to exist.
NA: I absolutely love that. When you stopped focusing on winning literary prizes, did you replace that dream with another goal?
KF: I did, actually. As I was writing, I had this vision of a Black woman in an armchair, curled up with my book. That was all I wanted. I wanted to create a book that you could curl up with and just escape into, but a book where you could also recognise the characters. Winning awards is great, but just writing a book that someone could escape into was the ultimate goal.
NA: That’s a beautiful goal, and I definitely see women curling up to this book so mission accomplished. Moving on, I’d love to know your writing process – you started writing on your blog, but when you decided that you wanted to work on a book, how did you go about completing it?
KF: To be honest, it's a lot of writing on the weekends, I don't beat myself up about not writing every day, I’m kind of over that now. It really depends on what draft I'm on. The first draft is really fun. I'm working on my second book now, and I'm always clearer in the morning. So I can either wake up really early, or I’ll write after my kids have gone to school. If I’m working in the morning, I can play a bit of music to get into the mood depending on what's happening with the book. But it depends on the draft because if I really have to concentrate with the editing, I need to flow so I like long pockets of time.
When was younger, I remember reading that Hemingway had this amazing writing desk and he would have all these little rituals that felt slightly pretentious to me. For me, there's a lot of typing things up in my notes app for the first draft or I send emails to myself – random ideas, thoughts, reflections. I just try to capture it all and I take it from there. There are no strict rules and that’s what makes it a fun process. When you sit down to bring all the different pieces together, it really feels like you're making progress.
NA: Nice! And finally, if you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring author, what would it be?
KF: I would say: sometimes you have to work backwards. So, if we're talking about being published, sometimes you have to clearly visualise what you want for the book and then work backwards. And there's no shame in being really clear about that to yourself. So, for me, that looked like going on YouTube to learn all the publishing lingo and understanding how agents work. That really helped demystify things for me. I'm all the way out here in Singapore, so I didn't have the luxury of meeting people for coffee in London and figuring out what's happening with different agencies. I've also never had a short story published in a literary magazine, so I don't think writers need to feel like they need to have this amazing CV. None of my short stories were ever accepted in magazines, but I knew I wanted to be published. I did my research and I figured out exactly which agent I wanted because I thought she would be a good fit. In the end, I had a choice between agents and I still went with her, and it's worked out well. So I think it's okay to be very clear about what you want and find a way to work backwards.
Kehinde Fadipe is a RADA-trained actress with stage and screen credits including Misfits (E4), Of Mary (Lesata Productions) and Ruined (Almeida Theatre). She began her writing career in the Royal Court Theatre's Young Writer's Programme while studying English at UCL and she has written and produced a short film, Spirit Children, starring Pippa Bennett Warner and Jenny Jules, which was screened in two international short film festivals. In Such Tremendous Heat is her first novel.
You can read an excerpt of In Such Tremendous Heat here.
