My interview on the Creative Writer’s Toolbelt Podcast! 🙃 Yay. Andrew Chamberlain, author of Junk Voyage and many other books runs The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt Podcast. Last week he interviewed me about Painting Kuwait Violet!

Andy pretty much sounds like a Radio 4 host. He’s got a great radio voice and has over a 130 episodes on writing and mentoring writers. So when we talked me being on the podcast, he asked how could I help his audience. As a multicultural author I didn’t have anything extraordinary to say! 😕 Fast-forward to the podcast and we have a 54 minute long episode!

My Interview

So here’s the podcast!!!

Itunes users can tune in here!

What we talked about?

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background, where you were born, where you grew up, and the places you lived in during your life?

2. What were the formative cultural influences on you?

3. How has traveling, and living in different cultures and countries influenced you, and how has it influenced your writing?

4. You’ve written a book based in Kuwait, a middle eastern country which you’ve lived in. Can you tell us a bit about the book? How much of the setting of the book is based on things you directly experienced or observed, and how much is based on the additional research you’ve had to do?

5. You describe middle eastern/Asian fiction as an unpopular genre, what do you mean by this? What advice would you give to writers who believe that the genre they are writing in might not be popular?

6. What encouragement would you give to a writer who is struggling with a theme or genre that they think won’t be well received?

7. This book seems to be both a story and a social commentary, a protest at conditions in the country in which it’s set. How do you think commentary about a situation should be combined with story so that the reader engages with both of these aspects?

8. How do you manage the development of your characters over the course of the book?

9. What about maintaining the tension and excitement in the novel? How do you do this?

10. By profession you are a doctor, do you think this would ever be a source of material for a book for you?

11. Did you struggle to write your book? What challenges did you face with it?

12. Can you tell us about some of your other writing, your novellas, like “Seoul mates” for example, what are these about?

13. You are also a freelance medical writer, how did you start doing this? How does a writer promote themselves as a writer in an area where they have expertise?

14. What are the main differences for you in terms of style and approach between writing fiction and non-fiction?

15. How have you developed a portfolio of writing genres? Has this been a deliberate strategy or are you simply responding to the desire within you to write different stories, genre, fiction, and non-fiction?

What do you think?

I’d love to hear what you think about this my interview on this episode. We talked plenty about Painting Kuwait Violet (which was on the Amazon best sellers list!) I’m super excited. Since radio is my favorite format of entertainment, I absolutely loved doing this podcast! 😊

I’m so happy to have worked with Andy and grateful to him for giving me a chance to talk about this book through my interview. He’s such a great host.

Let me know if you enjoyed this episode and do check out Andy’s other episodes. In the meantime, subscribe to my newsletter, for more pictures and my posts! Tweet me @PamelaQFerns or leave a message on my Facebook Page!