Author Birthday – 31 October – Daisy Johnson

Happy Birthday, Daisy Johnson, born on 31 October 1990.

Daisy Johnson Quotes

1. I think a lot of the landscapes I love writing about are made of what you can’t see.
2. Every writer I know was a reader first in an obsessive sort of way. Writing for me came naturally from the hunger of that. How do they do that? Can I do that? How do they make the reader feel that way? There was a sense of jealous wonder which spurred me on.
3. For me those early moments of writing without direction—of word vomiting—are always fun. I love the excitement of a barely formed idea, the blank document not yet filled. It’s later that I find difficult.
4. Reading also helps me. Whenever I’m stuck I pick up a book and, if it’s good, after a couple of sentences I’ll be back in the zone again.
5. Crime dramas are littered with murdered, vanished women. We don’t let our women characters say anything. They are trapped in repetition.
6. I try not to have rules or superstitions when it comes to writing. It can become to easy to limit the moments when writing can occur and, in doing so, end up not writing at all.
7. I like writing at my desk but, equally, I enjoy noisy coffee shops or pubs, working on the train or at a busy train station.
8. My process is one of quick early drafts and then constant, endless rewriting. I plot and plan and read other books similar to the one I’m working on and then I write and then I delete and delete and delete and begin again.
9. The whole process of writing is one of putting things down and walking away. Within each book there are maybe three or four other, almost entirely different, books it could have been.
10. Some weeks I am blissfully routine-based. These tend to be when I am writing rather than planning or editing. On these weeks I try and write 4,000 words a day. I am a fast but messy writer and much of this will be slaughtered later.

Source for quotes 1-5: American Short Fiction and 6-8: Somerville and 9-10: Famous Writing Routines

Daisy Johnson is an award-winning British novelist and short story writer. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English and Creative Writing from Lancaster University before earning a master’s degree in Creative Writing at Somerville College, Oxford, where she also worked at Blackwell’s bookshop. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under. Her 2020 novel Sisters was adapted into the 2024 feature film September Says. Her debut play, Viola’s Room, was produced in 2024. Her new novel is Long Wave. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford, England, by the river. Her favourite writers include Stephen King, Evie Wyld, Helen Oyeyemi, and John Burnside.

Source for photograph: Penguin Random House

by Amanda Patterson
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