Writers with Dienece-Francine Beaton
Updated: 5 days ago
Welcome Dear Readers!
No week is ever the same here at Writers with Dienece. I love the variety of authors I've been able to meet through Our House on Jakaranda Laan, and today, we meet an author who writes in more languages than just English!
Speaking of which, last week I promised to teach you how to pronounce the Laan part in Jakaranda Laan. So, here we go.
Laan sounds a little like lawn to most English-speakers, but it's actually la-Hn. And now you know. :) Have you tried to pronounce it yet?
Dienece: Hi, Francine! I'm so excited to have you join us today. I haven't been able to chat with you much this year, and I feel like I'm meeting you right along with my readers.
Why don't we start off with where you live? I know it's somewhere in South Africa, but SA is a pretty big place!
Francine: I often feel as if I’m tap-dancing between places, because I spend quite a bit of time in Cape Town and Scotland, but Pretoria, South Africa, is still the place I call home. It’s where I was born, where I went to school, and where I eventually got married, after taking a few detours along the way.
And, appropriately for The Survivor’s Journey, Pretoria is also known as the Jacaranda City.
Dienece: It does seem very fitting that someone who lives in "Jacaranda City" joined Our House on Jakaranda Laan! [Dienece grins]
And you have me well and truly intrigued. Scotland seems a world away from Pretoria and Cape Town. What takes you there?
Francine: My husband is Scottish, and we lived there for a few years. The joke in our house is that he's more South African than I am now — he loves it here and has no intention of going back. We tried again in 2021, and he'd barely been there a month before he started making plans to come home the moment the borders opened.
Dienece: Aw, that's so sweet! How lovely that he has made your home, his home.
Now, as I said before, Dear Readers, I'm meeting Francine right along with you. So, what kind of books do you right, Francine?
Francine: I write contemporary romance, particularly sports romance, in both English and Afrikaans.
Dienece: Cool! What makes you decide which language you're going to write a book in? And which language was your first book published in?
Francine: My first book came out in English. I started there because everyone told me it was the bigger market, and they weren't wrong — but these days I only publish one or two English books a year.
How I decide varies. If it's a series, I'll often write it in English first, because I have a lovely editor who helps me make sense of all the grammar and spelling differences.
More often than not, though, the characters decide for me. They tell me what language they want to speak, and there's no arguing with them. I had one character I fought with for nine years. Nine years of trying to write his book in English and getting nowhere. Eventually I gave up, started again in Afrikaans — and now he won't stop talking.
[Dienece chuckles] Yes, our characters have a way of deciding what's right for them. It's their story after all.
Now, I'm wondering something. I find it hard to keep my English between Australian and American right, and it's not just the spelling. We have different grammar and punctuation rules as well. I can't imagine trying to write in two completely different languages. Is that difficult for you?
Francine: Less than you'd think, and for an odd reason: I'm not translating. When a book is in Afrikaans, I'm thinking in Afrikaans, and the rhythm and the jokes and the way people needle each other are all different from the start. It's when I try to carry something across from one to the other that it fights me.
The spelling side is easier for me than it sounds. South African English is essentially British English with a handful of local adaptations — nothing like the gap between British and American. So I'm not switching between two Englishes the way you are between Australian and American. That sounds genuinely harder to me, because the differences are small enough to hide.
Dienece: Yes, exactly, I often don't notice that I've slipped between the two.
But what you said before makes sense. I can see how it would be harder to translate rather than just write in one language. Thanks for sharing that!
So, how did you become a writer?
Francine: I never intended to become an author, never mind a romance author. It happened on a flight home from New York in 2016.
I’d downloaded a few rugby romances onto my Kindle for the long flight back to South Africa. By the time I tried to read the third one, I remember thinking, I can do better than this.
So I did what any perfectly sensible person who had never written a novel would do. I started plotting one.
By the time the plane landed in Johannesburg, I had plotted five books. That Monday, I unpacked my muse alongside my dirty laundry and started writing.
There was just one problem. I had absolutely no idea how to write a book.
That didn’t stop me. I wrote anyway. And then I wrote another one. And another. I learned as I went along, eventually found people who could teach me what I didn’t know, and somehow that rather arrogant thought on an aeroplane turned into a completely new chapter of my life.
Ten years later, I’m still writing romance. And I still occasionally read something and think, I can do better than this. The difference is that now I know how much work “better” takes.
Dienece: I love how you worded that. Writing a good book is hard work, and I love how you shared that right alongside your own journey to writing. What an inspiring tale about how you got started and stuck with it!
Speaking of books, why do you tell us about your latest release? Which, Dear Readers, is written in English if you're wondering.
Ethan Langford knows how to survive. On a rugby field, that has always been enough. But after a devastating few months leave his life in pieces, even the game that has defined him can no longer drown out everything he is trying not to feel.
Back home in Cedarfontein, nothing has changed and everything has. His grandfather’s old rugby club is struggling, the people who have known Ethan since he was a boy refuse to let him disappear, and at the other end of the garden is a gate he has crossed thousands of times.
On the other side is Annika.
She has been waiting for her husband to find his way back to her. But Annika has survived her own grief, and loving Ethan doesn’t mean she can keep standing still while he shuts her out.
The old gate between them is easy enough to open. Everything else will take a little longer.
The Survivor’s Journey is a story of grief, faith, marriage, and finding the courage not merely to survive, but to choose to live again.
Francine: The Survivor's Journey is a story about the difference between surviving and choosing to live.
Dienece: I think that's a very important distinction to make. Surviving is a world away from actually living. A worthwhile message to share.
It would also be a tough subject to write about. What scene was the hardest for you to write?
Francine: The hardest scene to write was Ethan admitting he had never allowed himself to grieve his daughter.
He spends most of the book believing he’s grieving Francois, the promise he made, the friend who died in his arms. It’s only much later, out loud, to Annika, that the grief he hasn’t acknowledged finally comes up: he’d had nine months of Angelica in his head already. He knew how it was going to go. He was going to teach her to pass off her left hand. He was going to be hopeless about boys. And they hadn’t even settled whose name she’d carry, his granny’s, or her ma’s, or his mother’s, because they had all the time in the world to decide.
I had to write that scene more than once. Grief that gets spoken is hard enough. Grief a man has hidden from himself, that only comes out sideways, took me the longest to find.
Dienece: As a mother of two boys, I know what you're talking about. That would have been hard to write.
Have you experienced the loss of a child yourself? Did that help you know how to write it?
Francine: Not myself, no — though I have close family and friends who have, and I wrote those chapters carrying them in mind.
What I do know is the other side of it: the fear of losing someone close to me with congenital heart conditions, and one of them is the condition that kills Francois in this book. We've had a good many frightening episodes over the years. Fewer now — but you don't ever quite stop listening for it.
That person is the one who gave me the idea for the story. And their cardiologist helped me get it right, which mattered enormously to me. If a reader recognises what happens on that field, I wanted them to recognise it properly, and not feel it had been used carelessly.
Dienece: Oh wow, that would have been so hard. I've had some scary times and a few hospital visits with both of my children. I know what you mean about having your ears tuned for that 'sound', although thankfully theirs isn't heart related. But it's so hard to relax when you're always listening for what might happen.
And I'm so glad that you had the chance to talk with the specialist about this. I can really see the benefit in spreading the word, so others can be aware and know what's going on. Thanks for sharing that and for being so diligent to try and get the details right.
You said earlier you live in Pretoria, the city of the Jacaranda trees. Do you have some pictures to share with us and maybe a Jacaranda story or two?
Francine: In Pretoria, where jacarandas line whole suburbs and turn them purple in October, right on top of exam season, students swear that if a jacaranda blossom falls on your head, you’ll pass. Generations of University of Pretoria students have walked under those trees in October hoping to be hit by a flower.
I used that bit of folklore in The Survivor’s Journey.
Near the end of the book, a petal catches in Annika’s hair, and Ethan remembers that Francois swore by the superstition every exam season. He never opened a textbook, never failed once, and put it all down to the flowers.
So Ethan lets himself believe it too, just for the length of the street, that they’ll come through this. That they’ll pass.
Dienece: Oh, I love that! And I can't wait to read that part of the book! Thank you for sharing that tradition with us. How special.
Just before we leave you today, is there a book that has stayed with you?
Francine: The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle.
Dienece: Excuse me while I go look that book up. [Dienece disappears for a moment].
Oh wow, that would be a book that lingers with you. I did some research about abusive relationships for a book, and those were hard reads. Worthwhile though.
How did you come across this one?
Francine: I discovered Roddy Doyle in a rather unlikely place: on an oil tanker. But what stayed with me about The Woman Who Walked into Doors was the moment I realised I recognised real life in fiction.
Not myself. But someone close to me. Someone who, over time, had made herself smaller.
Until then, I think I’d always separated the two. Fiction was fiction and real life was real life. That book made me realise that a novel could show me something I already knew, but had never really seen or understood before.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons The Survivor’s Journey is so personal to me. There are pieces of real life in it too. Not one person’s story, and not my story, but things that have happened to people I know and love, things I’ve witnessed, and emotions I’ve recognised.
I think that’s what I want from fiction now, both as a reader and a writer. I want to recognise something true in something that isn’t real.
Dienece: That's my favourite kind of fiction too. Something I identify with, or something that helps me understand people better. I find it easier to deal with tough subjects if the book is fiction, and yet it is no less real to me for being fictional. I once threw a book across the room because I was mad at the author. That was long before eBooks.
But going back to our topic, books like this are really important. I know that I misunderstood people in abusive relationships for years without having any idea how wrong I was until I took a few shallow steps in their shoes through various books, both non-fiction and fictional. Thanks for sharing this novel with us.
Just before we say goodbye, where is the best place for readers to find you?
Francine: The best place to find me is on my website https://www.francinebeaton.com or on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/FrancineBeatonAuthor.
Dienece: Thanks for joining us today, Francine. I've enjoyed getting to meet you, and I'm looking forward to reading your book. Although I suspect I'll need a few boxes of tissues nearby.
Not that that ever put me off a book! [Dienece grins] Sometimes, I like the book better because it made me cry. It's sign that you really reached me, and your characters have come alive. And to be honest, your characters already feel real to me just from this chat!
Thanks for sharing so much with us today. I feel like I know you so much better after our chat, and I'm excited to read your book!
Readers, this doesn't have to be in the end. If you have any questions for Francine (like what was she doing on that oil tanker anyway? I missed the boat on that one and forgot to ask her, but I'm so very curious now!!!) pop your questions in the comments!
And don't forget to check out Francine's book, The Survivor's Journey. FYI, it is written in English, just in case you were wondering. :) I'll be back next week with another author interview from Jakaranda Laan. Hope to see you then!
The Jacaranda Tree images belong to Francine Beaton and are used with permission.
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