The Girl Below (40 page)

Authors: Bianca Zander

BOOK: The Girl Below

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By far the biggest tool you learn from screenwriting is how to build drama and tension in a scene. But it can also backfire when scenes become too dramatic at the expense of subtlety or meaning. Your readers have wet their pants with fear when you were trying to make them feel heartbroken—that kind of thing.

Would
The Girl Below
make a good movie and would Bianca Zander be the only person who could write the script?

It would make an excellent movie (of course I would say that), but I would like absolutely nothing to do with writing the script. Ideally, I would hand it over to some amazingly talented filmmaker and they would go for gold. To make something work as a movie, you need to take liberties with the story, and I would be happy to give someone the license to do that. The trickiest thing to pull off would be the timespan. The novel covers a period of about twenty years, whereas film, as a medium, lends itself better to stories that take place over a single weekend or a year at the most. The time travel aspect might also present challenges . . .

Over the course of writing this book you’ve been childless, then pregnant, then a mother. How did those three writing experiences differ from one another?

The childless writer has endless amounts of time to sit around dreaming and writing, but that time has no shape so you often waste it; procrastination becomes a problem. Pregnancy sharpened my focus. The birth became my second-draft deadline because I was terrified I might never write again. I sent the manuscript off to various editors the night before my son was born. They all rejected it. I did write again; I had to. Writing as a mother teaches you that it’s possible to write two thousand words in four hours because you might not get another four hours free for a week. What you really miss is reading and thinking time, and I do worry that my work, from now on, will suffer from inadequate consideration.

Read on

Ten books that inspired me while I wrote
The Girl Below

The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Wonder Boys
by Michael Chabon
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Ice Storm
by Rick Moody
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami

About the Author

British-born BIANCA ZANDER has lived in Auckland, New Zealand, for the past two decades. An established journalist, she has written for numerous publications, including
The Listener
, the
Sunday Star-Times
, and the
Dominion Post
. She has produced radio shows and written for film and television, including writing the dramatic short film
The Handover
, which screened in competition at the Chicago Film Festival. Bianca holds an M.A. in creative writing from Victoria University, Wellington.
The Girl Below
is her first novel.

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Credits

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover photography © Paul Knight/Trevillion Images

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE GIRL BELOW. Copyright © 2012 by Bianca Zander. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zander, Bianca.

The girl below : a novel / by Bianca Zander.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-210816-6

1. Young women—England—London—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9639.4.Z36G57 2012

823'.92—dc23

2012012394

Epub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780062108173

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