Writing Your Own Process: Dhonielle Clayton
Alumni share their experiences and insight on polishing the craft and finding their own voice.
How has your writing changed throughout the years? What has surprised you
the most?
My writing routine hasn’t changed much over the years. I still use a mix of paper, pencil, and pen, and a plethora of notebooks. I handwrite quite a bit, and I often use typewriters or devices that don’t connect to the internet because I get easily distracted.
The biggest surprise is that I can write much faster now. For a long time, I considered myself a very slow writer, especially compared to my peers in the MFA program. But I realize that slowness came from still learning the art and craft of writing. With experience, I’ve become more confident. I can see stories in my head more clearly and articulate them faster.
I’ve also learned to play with form—nonlinear storytelling, mixed media, etc.—and all the techniques I admire when reading others’ work. I’ve been able to incorporate those into my own writing. Ultimately, practice hasn’t made me perfect, but it has made me better. The more I write, the stronger and faster my writing muscle becomes.
What do you enjoy about writing the most or the least?
I actually hate writing first drafts. Generating new material feels like running a marathon. I just want to get to the end, and every step feels painful. Each chapter feels like a mountain I don’t want to climb.
What I love most is revising. Once I have material on the page, I know I can make it better. Revision is about shaping words, cutting them, moving them, deleting them, and adding new ones until the story takes the right form. That part is deeply satisfying to me.
Who have you been reading lately? How have they influenced or inspired you?
I’ve been reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I love the premise: time expats traveling from the past to the present, a secret government agency running the program, and the caretakers responsible for them. It’s also a love story.
What stands out most is the brevity. I tend to overwrite, but this writer crafts very clean, tight sentences. Reading this book has challenged me to see how much I can accomplish with fewer words. It’s inspiring me to try to tell my own stories more efficiently.
How did completing an MFA help you find your style or purpose in writing?
The MFA didn’t necessarily help me find my style or purpose, but it did help me solidify what I wanted to do. It gave me the space to explore how I wanted my stories to sound, look, and what topics I wanted to write about.
The program also helped me generate a lot of material and identify my audience—who my readers are and who they aren’t. Equally important, I learned who could help me along my writing journey and who couldn’t.
I’ve always believed every book has its reader, a perspective that comes from my librarian background. While in the MFA program, I realized how important it is to find people who see your vision. Holding onto that support is key to finishing whatever piece you’re working on.
What advice would you give to current students crafting their first novels or
collections?
I wish I had done this during my MFA: choose three books that give you that electric feeling—the ones that make you want to write every time you read them.
Study those books like a writer. Ask yourself:
– What is it about the characters?
– The plot?
– The character flaws and their journey?
– The sentence structure?
Break it down like a scientist analyzing a potion. Write out what makes the book powerful and figure out that writer’s unique story alchemy. Then, see what you can borrow, emulate, or adapt for your own work.
I believe this exercise would have helped me not only start stories but also finish them, instead of ending up with countless first chapters.
Dhonielle Clayton is a publishing industry tastemaker with over fifteen years’ experience wearing several hats: prolific author, story proliferator, and literacy non-profit head. She is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen titles, including The Conjureverse series, The Belles series, Shattered Midnight, co-author and creator of Blackout & Whiteout, The Rumor Game, and of the Tiny Pretty Things duology, a Netflix original series. In addition to writing her own novels, she owns and operates two IP story kitchens, Cake Creative and Electric Postcard Entertainment, to develop story ideas for emerging writers to break into the publishing industry. She’s ideated, developed, and sold close to one hundred original novels to big five publishers spanning all genres within children’s and young adult to women’s fiction, adult horror and SFF, contemporary romance, romantasy, mysteries, thrillers, and historical fiction. Some of the titles include the Tristan Strong series, Promise Boys, the Love in Translation series, Fortune’s Kiss, Love Radio, The Lilies, The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter, I’ll Make A Spectacle of You, The Spindle of Fate, the Futureland series, and many more. She recently launched a steadily growing IP short fiction platform called Chain Letter delivering fresh, thrilling, and profoundly unsettling tales. Each story is masterfully crafted by bold and boundary-pushing voices in horror, thriller, dark fantasy, and speculative fiction. She runs the writing podcast Deadline City with Zoraida Córdova where she deep dives her messy process and thoughts about the writing life. She is Board Chair of the non-profit We Need Diverse Books, a non-profit dedicated to diversifying the shelves for readers, and sits on the leadership board for Authors Against Book Bans. She built Reese Witherspoon’s successful LitUp program for emerging women and non-binary writers looking to break into the publishing industry. She is a former secondary school teacher and librarian, and graduate-level writing professor.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.