Interview with Carolyn Taylor-Watts

Author Carolyn Taylor-Watts talks about becoming a writer, her writing process, and her new book, "Phantom Siblings". Available on Amazon.

Watch: https://youtu.be/7vGE-ulhLQ8

Unedited transcript.

Jim Allan: With me today is Carolyn Taylor-Watts, and she's an author, and to be totally transparent, she's also my mother-in-law. We have to be honest, here. And she's an author with a lot of books, so welcome by the way, welcome.

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Thank you.

Jim Allan: She has a new book out called Phantom Siblings. I like to talk to people who've made, you know, changes in their life, and sometimes it's a big decision that changes the course of their professional life. Now, you've done a lot of other things. You haven't just been a writer, of course, but did you always, did you always, did you always want to be a writer? Did you always think about being a writer?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Yes, from the time I was about eight years old, and I just knew I was going to be a writer one day. So when I was about eight, nine, ten, I hijacked my mother's dressmaking paper, big riot rolls of it, and I cut it into strips, and I wrote stories back in front. She wasn't impressed because I was using up her precious dressmaking paper, but I wrote stories actually throughout my teens, and then I got serious with my life, and I became a registered nurse.

Jim Allan: When did it, so you became a registered nurse, but did you keep a diary? Were you writing? Were you, would you, did you try to at least flex those muscles?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: I did. I kept a diary off and on all my life. I kept a diary, but I, I think I'd like to read that diary. I don't think I still have it anyway. I always knew that I would write, and so I wrote for professional magazines as a registered nurse. I remember one, The Sandwich Generation, which was way back, and I knew that one day I was going to write books, but I kept living my life. I was, I worked, I worked full time, and got married, and had children, as you know.

Jim Allan: And you get busy.

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: I was busy, and I played a lot of tennis, and life was, how to put it, life was there, and so I lived it, but I knew that one day I was going to write.

Jim Allan: Did you know what you wanted to write, or what kind of thing you wanted to write?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: I was going to write fiction. I was going to make up everything. So what I, what happened, but I should let you ask the questions, but I was going to write fiction, and my head was full of stories all the time. In fact, I seemed to live in my mind more than I lived in real life sometimes, but I ended up writing nonfiction, which was accidental. But I also wanted to tell other people's stories, and in my mind I was telling other people's stories, but it was my interpretation of their stories.

Jim Allan: Here's a few of your books. The first book that you did, as far as I know, is Heroic Rescues at Sea, and as you say, it was nonfiction. And then here's the latest Phantom Siblings, and there's a few others as well. But with Heroic Rescues at Sea, which I, because I was around by that point, what I always thought was really clever was that you kind of had a built-in audience. From a business point of view, you had a built-in audience. You went out and did first-person original research, East Coast, West Coast, I believe, and then by the time the book came out, these people were waiting for the book. And so they bought the book, sometimes in large numbers to give to friends or to put in a local library, because it was about the Coast Guard in Canada? So tell me a little bit about that process, because that was a lot of work, if I recall?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Well, some people think that it's easier to write nonfiction because you've got the stories there, and you just have to write them. But there were a lot of difficulties because I gave each person the story, when I'd written about them and their story, I gave it to them before I had it published, before I presented it. And they said, oh, that doesn't make me look very good. I don't think I want you to put that. They argued, they said, can you change this? And it was actually a lot of work. But I...

Jim Allan: They're editing you.

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: They're editing me, yeah. So you...

Jim Allan: Not everyone would, right? You sent them the stories to make sure they were happy with it…?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Yeah. But you don't have to do... I don't. I didn't have to, no. But I wanted them to be happy. I wanted them to buy the book. I wanted them to be... I wanted to give them recognition, because to me, Coast Guard workers, search and rescue technicians, Navy SEALs, I didn't know about them, but that doesn't mean anything. But I don't think people realize what they do. And to me, what they do is unsung and heroic. And so I wanted to tell the people what they did. And they seem to have no need to tell the world what they do. It's just what they do. But they really liked that I did that. And the Coast Guard, the Canadian Coast Guard, really liked that I wrote that book, because nothing had ever been written about the Coast Guard. This was their first book, official book.

Jim Allan: And so they bought a lot of copies.

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: They probably bought hundreds and hundreds. And they put a copy or copies in every lifeboat station throughout Canada. And they offered one to every visiting dignitary from all over the world.

Jim Allan: Do you have an actual writing process? I mean, I always hear some people just get out of bed and try to write whatever comes into their head, like every day, just write, write. Like, whether they want to or not, they write. Do you have a particular process?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: No, for those, for that book, that first one, and the others. Well, the first one, I didn't even know the questions to ask. I hardly knew what a Navy SEAL was. And they were very sympathetic and they helped me. They told me what questions to ask. And so it was a huge learning process. But I didm't have any, I didn't get up in the morning and say I'm going to write all morning or all afternoon. I just wrote ad hoc.

Jim Allan: Right. What's the big difference between writing fiction and nonfiction? It's sort of the, the obvious question really. So did a different process or you didn't need to go out physically and interview people. But I guess you could do original research even for fiction, right?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Absolutely. You could. You could. Some people, there are two modes of writing. Some people have a plan. This is what's going to happen, when, to whom, and their characters are fully formed before they write anything, even to a mole on the cheek, to personality habits. They know exactly what the story, and they just have to flesh it out. And that's an easy way to write or this easier. I tried that and I had no imagination at all. I couldn't, nothing came to mind. I just had to write words. I had a vague idea. I had an impulse to say, oh, this sounds like this might be a really interesting story. So I'd have to write words. And from those words, more words came, more ideas came. And it's a very difficult, even sloppy way to write. But it's the only way I can write.

Jim Allan: Now, one of your earlier books, and I'll just get a shot of that, was is it Helena or Helena?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Helena. Helena and Odyssey. It was my hairdresser, a local hairdresser. And she is a Turkish Greek or descended from. And I think she told a lot of people her story. She wanted somebody to write it. And everybody promised and nobody ever did. So I thought, I don't think many people know much about the war between the Greeks and the Turks after the First World War. And I didn't. And I didn't know the history of the Greeks in Turkey or the Turks in Greece. So I thought I could write, I could write the story. But then I thought, this is not enough. I don't want to just chronicle. This is what happened here, there and there. I wanted something more, something more to drive it. So I created two generations before this one. And I had a Greek-Turkish family who believed that they had descended from a wealthy, influential Greek family and were advisors to the Sultan in Constantinople, Istanbul. So they believed that they had been very powerful, very wealthy, and they'd lost it all. And it was the duty and the obligation of somebody in every generation to reclaim that former wealth, glory, status. And it was imposed generation after generation, all the way to my hair dresser in Toronto.

Jim Allan: So, your current book, Phantom Siblings…? We'll just show it a bit here, a bit of a reflection there. So what can you tell me about Phantom Siblings? How long did it take you to write?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Not a long time. It was just for fun, because I overheard a remark at a New Year's Eve party. And this man, probably in his seventies and unremarkable, who seemed to have a, who had one of those ordinary lights that they may be epic to themselves, but they're unremarkable to other people. I heard him say that he wanted to go back in time and fix something that he'd done, or to apologize, to atone for, that's my word, to, to, to apologize and explain what he'd done to a girl when he'd been around 18, 20. And I went away thinking, I wonder what he did. And I thought about any, all of the things that a young man would do to a young woman way back, that six decades or five decades later, he would suddenly want to, to apologize for and make better. And of all the things I thought about, and I thought it would be just an interesting little short story. So it came to me because they had no children. Eventually it came to me that he had told her he couldn't have children. I thought about maybe he got her pregnant. No, that's too commonplace. Maybe, and I thought of all the things that a person could do. And then I decided that it was because he understood or absorbed for himself that he couldn't have children and they were going to get married and they were going to have all these kids. Whoops, he couldn't have kids. And he thought that if he told her he couldn't, she would pretend, because she loved him, that she didn't want any either, but she'd come to regret it. And then she'd come to hate him. Maybe she'd leave him, whatever. So he told her that he hated her, that he'd never loved her. He just wanted to see if he could get her to make her go away so that she could find a guy who could marry her and give her kids. And that was the impulse to write that. And so I had no idea what was going to be in it, how it would unfold. And it's a messy process and I have to keep writing. And then another idea comes in, another idea.

Jim Allan: So you didn't necessarily know how it would end. You were writing it.

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: So, some people do, like they pick the finish line first and then they, you know, whatever you call it, reverse engineer the whole story to land at this place. So you didn't know necessarily, it was a living, breathing thing. It was a living, breathing thing, except I knew one thing. I knew he was going to find that girl. And I knew that she wasn't going to change. She was going to be that flirty teenager that she always believed she was right into her old age. And she wasn't capable of change or seeing herself. And he was going to find her.

Jim Allan: So, I read it… as you as you know now. Certainly, once you get into it, like any book, but it's a real page turner for a while. And you're wondering there is a mystery like what's, what's, what's going on with this fellow. And there's a bit of a mystery. And then I don't know if you'd call it suspense, but there's definite building action. And I remember I'm thinking this better pay off because it's all this suspense or whatever you want to call it. And then there's like, there are big explosions at near the end of the, of the book that, that are pretty dramatic, I'd have to say. So, so I mean, it's all written in first person. I mean, that, that would be, it was an interesting choice that you made. So you're writing, it's a male protagonist written a first person narrative. So was that did it ever occur to you that it might be a creative risk? It's been done elsewhere, I suppose.

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Well, you don't dare write about anybody else, another culture, because that's cultural appropriation. So I thought for a while that I might be accused of sexual appropriation, but it's been done from, well, men have written about women from an age old. Michael Redhill, his first novel, I think it was called Consolation, he wrote in the first person as a woman, and he was asked about that. I forget what he said, but I happened upon a, an interview of Kuzuro Ishiguro, the Japanese author, his famous book is Remains of the Day. And he just came out with a new one called Clara and the Sun. And he was asked, why did he write in the first person as a young woman, an AI woman at that? And he said, I never write about people like myself, never, because to write about somebody really different helps you focus very differently. It gives you a different point of view. You can ask questions, questions in the mouth of that character that you couldn't in the mouth of a character of a person like himself. So it was because the guy that I heard make this remark at the New Year's Eve party, it was because he was a man, I just put it in, in his, in his mouth, I suppose.

Jim Allan: Just to wrap up really, it's Phantom Siblings. So you're, you're happy with the book?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Hard question. Any author, once the book is published, wants to go back and change it. And most authors are unhappy with the endings of their book. Or any artist. Yeah, I would change a few things. But the work is never finished. You can change it for the rest of your life and you're still not happy with it. So you never finish and you'd never published, right? So you have to get there.

Jim Allan: Sometimes deadlines are good for people. You're always working on something, right? So what are you, what's next?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: I created a book. It's finished. And I wrote it in the second person, like, it's to you. It's a letter. It's a long letter to my husband, Gordon, my beloved husband, who died two years ago. And I wrote to him almost every night for a year and a half. So it's called Looking for Gordon. At this point, it's called Looking for Gordon.

Jim Allan: Yes. When's that going to come out, do you think?

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Hopefully September, October.

Jim Allan:Well, it's been nice talking to you. Thanks for coming. The book is called Phantom Siblings and Carolyn Taylor-Watts is the author, amazon.com Thank you.

Carolyn Taylor-Watts: Thank you.