We caught up with Dani Heywood-Lonsdale, author of The Portrait Artist and graduate of Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel and Finish Your Draft courses, to talk about her path to publication, the inspiration behind her atmospheric debut and how she finds time to write alongside teaching and family life.

You previously studied on our Writing a Novel and Finish Your Draft courses. How valuable were these courses to the writing of your novel?

These courses were incredibly helpful for their workshop format and covering the essentials of writing prose, but they were especially brilliant for accountability. Having clear deadlines every month was essential for finishing my first draft.

Did you make writing friends during your Faber Academy course? How important has peer feedback been to your process?

I did make some lovely friends, but we didn’t manage to keep in touch after the first year post-course (whilst on both courses, I happened to move out of London to the Cotswolds and then eventually to Florence, so life was quite busy!). With this said, peer feedback has always been invaluable to my process. I feel incredibly lucky to have a handful of close friends who are brilliant and steadfast first-readers; I think sharing early drafts is one of the most vulnerable parts of writing, so having a group of readers who approaches these drafts with thoughtfulness, honesty and kindness is so important. Feedback always makes the manuscript better.

The Portrait Artist has been described as a ‘lush and imaginative novel full of gossip, art and intrigue.’ Could you tell us a little bit more about the novel? What gave you the inspiration for it?

The Portrait Artist begins when a portrait appears on the doorstep of the National Gallery in 1890; it’s confirmed that it has been painted by Timothy Ponden-Hall, a famous explorer-painter who everyone has believed to be dead for the past fifty years. It’s also intriguing because when he was at the height of his fame, rumours around his paintings ran rampant: the Victorian public believed he was immortalising the souls of his sitters. The novel is essentially about finding the hidden painter and uncovering the truth about his paintings.

The story was heavily inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (I was fascinated by the idea of preserving the beauty and youth of one’s physical body whilst a painting deteriorates behind the scenes with every transgression), and by wanting to shine a light on underrepresented voices in the margins of society. It’s a book about how rumour, art and storytelling play a role in achieving immortality, and it’s also about family, mixed race identity and the quiet lives that have been forgotten in history.

Can you share your journey to getting published?

I was incredibly lucky in my publishing journey. After an extract from my novel was published in a Faber Anthology and sent out to a range of agents in London, I was contacted by a couple of agents in the same week, asking to read the full manuscript. The brilliant Olivia Maidment at the Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency read the full draft in the span of twenty-four hours and invited me to visit the agency in London. I signed with her later that week, early September, and we spent the next three months polishing the manuscript. We went on submission in January and a couple publishers were interested, but Emma Herdman at Bloomsbury completely blew me away with her understanding of the novel and had such inspiring and razor-sharp ideas for the story, so it was a no-brainer to sign with her. I genuinely couldn’t dream up a better agent or editor, and I know my journey to getting published has been so exciting and positive because of Liv, Emma and the teams around them.

Who are your biggest literary influences? Did any of these influence The Portrait Artist?

I’ve taught Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for several years, so these classics have undoubtedly influenced and inspired me.

Modern authors who I really look up to are Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Madeline Miller and Donna Tartt; I am in awe of their storytelling, particularly in Demon Copperhead, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Song of Achilles and The Secret History. I’m also a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro for his talent and ability to write across different genres.

What are your top tips for writing historical fiction?

This is quite obvious, but I would say write about a time period you love and are genuinely interested in, because accuracy is so important and the research can feel endless sometimes. With this said, I would also say: don’t get bogged down with facts and historical research TOO much, because it’s so easy to go down hundreds of rabbit holes and you put off actually writing the story! It’s okay to press on writing even if the research isn’t 100% done; you can always (and should) go back and tighten in the editing process.

Could you tell us about your writing routine, and how you balance writing with other aspects of your life?

Life is beautifully busy at the moment, as in addition to writing, I also teach English GCSE and A Level part-time at a school in Oxfordshire – a profession that I love, and I have two young children. It just means that I need to be very efficient and disciplined with my time. I devote Tuesdays and half of Thursdays to writing during the week, and on the weekends, I sneak off to write in cafes on Saturday and Sunday mornings whilst my husband takes the children to sports practice. That way, we’re all around for lunch and can enjoy the rest of the day together.

The most challenging part of striking this balance is undoubtedly when there are pressure points at school – for example, reports, mock exams and the dauntingly endless marking that comes with teaching an essay-based subject. I have to be so disciplined in keeping that precious space for writing when it would be much easier to surrender that time to school. But if I don’t take the writing seriously, no one will; it’s liberating to make the choice to pursue this creative part of my life over and over again.

How much of the book was planned out versus discovered as you wrote?

I knew the ending first; there was a (fictitious) painter’s story I wanted to expose and I knew how I wanted to reveal it at the end. From there, I worked backwards with key ‘beats’ so that I had a sturdy skeleton of the story. Then I wrote, almost always chronologically, and fleshed out everything in between. Loads of details and the textures of the characters were discovered as I wrote, but the beats and the ending kept me anchored all the way through.

What are you reading right now?

I’ve just started reading Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders as several of my friends have said it’s utterly unique and wonderful.

What’s next for your writing?

I’m nearly half-way through a draft of Book 2, another historical fiction which will be published with Bloomsbury. I can’t say too much about it now, but the backdrop of the book is a story that has been close to my heart since I was very young, so I’ve been trying to savour this experience of getting to pursue this project. My Faber tutor Richard Skinner said that it’s a novelist’s duty ‘to bring your whole self to the page’, and because this story has been slowly forming for so long, it’s hard not to bring my whole self, which is exhausting and a bit terrifying but also joyful, honest and deeply meaningful to me.

Writing a Novel is designed to support aspiring fiction writers to develop their craft over six months, with courses in London (at Faber’s HQ in Hatton Garden), Newcastle and online.

A six-month programme of seminars, sessions will cover all the essentials of novel writing – including character, story, structure, plotting, voice, dialogue, conflict and more.

Find out more about the next iterations of Writing a Novel.