Photo Credit: Callum MacBeth-Seath
Natasha Ngan grew up dividing her time between Malaysia and Britain. After studying cultural geography at university, she worked for a time at a social media agency. Her first book, The Elites, was published in 2013, followed by her second, The Memory Keepers, in 2014.
Girls of Paper and Fire, was released last year to extreme acclaim and its sequel, Girls of Storm and Shadow, is out on November 5. Natasha currently lives in Paris where she writes and posts gorgeous pictures on her Instagram.
We had the pleasure of chatting to Natasha about the sequel, mythology, her writing process, and more!
Hi Natasha! Tell us a little about yourself!
Hi! I’m a 29-year old Chinese-Malaysian British writer and yoga-teacher living in Paris who loves books, tea and video games!
What can readers expect from Girls of Storm and Shadow, the sequel to Girls of Paper and Fire?
GOPAF was a very intimate, contained kind of novel, both in the world and the story, and in GOSAS everything opens up. We’ll see a lot more of the Kingdom of Ikhara and meet new characters, both human and demon. There are epic battles and dark magic and an equal amount of love and betrayal!
The book’s caste system and its categorisation based on the animal hybrid form is a really interesting and clever way to physically depict the normally intangible power of a hierarchical social system. How did that come into being?
Honestly, I think it comes from a lifetime of loving anime and manga! The demons are just so fun for me to imagine. I was also influenced by Chinese and Malaysian mythology – we have a lot of animalist-type demons and ghosts.
Your descriptions of the world – especially the palace – are so sumptuous, and perfectly balanced so that I never felt as though I was drowning in description, but I had a perfect mental image of the backdrop to the story; how do you arrive at that balance point of description versus getting on with the story?
Thank you so much! I think this is a balance that really comes through careful editing. Of course there’s a bit of foundation laid in the drafting process: when I’m writing a scene, I really try to set myself in the middle of and ask myself what my characters are seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing etc, and then just try and feed in different elements into the descriptions. But it’s something that is improved on during edits. I’m more of an overwriter when it comes to drafting – I tend to go on little tangents of description or add in more details than are necessary. Then in edits I’ll where I’ve done this and ask myself whether it’s the right place for that exposition, or if it can be woven in more naturally elsewhere, or whether two descriptive sentences can be combined into one stronger one, for example.
What were your favourite parts to write in Girls of Paper and Fire, and Girls of Storm and Shadow?
All the sweet, soft moments between Wren and Lei! I love these girls so much, and it’s such a pleasure to be able to give them tender moments amidst all the horror of what’s happening around them. There are quite a few bathtub scenes between the two of them, ahaha.
Obviously you draw upon the mythology and religious beliefs of South East Asian cultures – what role do you believe these mythologies play in modern societies?
Mythologies and cultural beliefs are powerful, especially the ones you grow up with: they can frame the way you look at a world, shape your imagination, even your opinions on different things. I wasn’t brought up religious, but both Malaysian and Chinese cultures are full of superstitions, and so many of these superstitions live inside me. For example, I don’t believe in magic as such, but I do believe in black magic in the sense of it being a manipulation of a person’s energy, and I’m extremely wary of crossing anyone for this reason. And this in turn affects how I act towards people. So I think they are very important and influential.
What do you think is so powerful about the fantasy/sci-fi genres, and especially those for young and new adults?
Just like so many fantastical ones, our world is a dark, dangerous place, and I think it’s just so empowering to read about characters – especially in YA, young girls – that stand up and fight against all that try to oppress them. It’s incredible hopeful and necessary right now.
Can you describe your writing process?
I am very much a pantser – I usually only have a few pages or so of outline (if that) before I begin a book. But I spend a lot of time worldbuilding before I start drafting, so I think that even though I haven’t written down many specifics of plot, the details are already there in my head because I’ve got a strong sense of my world and characters. While I like how this means my own stories can surprise me, I wish I could plot properly! It would be so much more comforting to know that my stories have a strong sense of direction. But at the same time, I just have to trust myself and believe that my subconscious knows more than I do, since it always seems to work out in the end!
Drafting takes me a few months, usually between 3-6 depending on my deadline. I’m pretty erratic when drafting – I will write at any time of day, in any conditions. But mostly I write at home, for a couple of hours at a time. Some days this will be enough to get out a thousand words or more, and other days I can sit with my laptop all day and only eke out a couple of hundred.
When it comes to revisions, my editor and I usually do a round or two for bigger structural changes (character arcs, pacing, changing specifics about worldbuiding etc). After that it’s an edit or two for line changes (the beauty and readability of the writing, dialogue etc), and then there’s the copyedit (grammar, consistency etc). I really wish we had more time to edit! Trilogy deadlines are brutal, and so we have to just get in deep and heavy pretty quickly, and there’s not quite as long to tinker and think as I would like. At the same time, you have to let go of a book at some point! I’m always my biggest critic, and so at some point I just have to accept no novel will ever be perfect and I can only just do my best with my given timeframe and skillset.
So you were born in the UK and lived there and in Malaysia throughout your childhood, and you now live in Paris – where’s your favourite place in the world?
I am a beach girl at heart, so honestly, take me to a beach – bonus points if it’s sunny and warm and empty – and I’ll love it. I have the sweetest memories of a holiday a friend and I took to Kefalonia in Greece and all the beautiful beaches and waters we spent time at there <3
Lastly, what are you currently reading?
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo! It’s brilliant, unsurprisingly. And I recently finished a graphic novel, Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam, which is a queer love story set in space and is so, so lovely!
