By Lena Zeller
I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicola Dinan, a Creative Writing tutor at Royal Holloway, whose novel Bellies moved me deeply.
Q: Would you introduce yourself to our readers?
A: I’m a full-time novelist – my debut, Bellies, came out in 2023, and my sophomore novel, Disappoint Me, is out in January 2025. I’m currently a visiting tutor for the MA Creative Writing. Although I spend much of my working day thinking about books this is my first foray into an academic environment for writing, which might surprise people! I studied Natural Sciences at university and then trained as a lawyer before writing Bellies.
Q: What has it been like to translate your experience as a writer into teaching? Did you learn anything about yourself as a writer in the process?
A: It’s been really rewarding. Each week, my seminars cover one aspect of a novel. The purpose of the module is to offer students a framework through which to critically assess their own and others’ writing, and so I definitely benefit from this, too! As part of the seminars, I naturally talk about my own experiences as a writer, drawing on my body of work, which encourages me to reflect on my own experiences in a more interesting light.
Q: What is your writing process like? Do you have any advice for young writers?
A: I live a really unstructured existence, which is partly why I love being a writer. I write when I feel like it, which luckily is most days. I’m always really cautious when people ask me about my process, because I worry they’re hoping to find instructions about how they should write. All I can say is that you need to find what works best for you. I think consistency trumps quality: it’s far more beneficial to sit down and write on a regular basis than it is to sit down and write only when you are sure you’ll write something amazing. As they say, all writing is rewriting, anyway.
Q: Would you tell our readers about Bellies?
A: Bellies seemingly starts as a boy-meets-boy on campus. Tom, a recently-out, white middle-class leftist, is drawn to Ming, an ebullient playwright from Malaysia. However, when the two move to London after graduation, Ming reveals that she intends to transition, leaving Tom and Ming to reckon with what this means for their relationship. While it’s a very queer novel, it’s also about the somewhat universal chaos of being in your early twenties, transitioning to adulthood and finding your feet in the world. It means a lot that some of my students have read and enjoyed it!
Q: Craft is depicted in Bellies through Ming’s playwriting. What was it like to write about writing?
A: Writers writing about writers is a bit of a cliche, isn’t it? I can’t help myself, though. It’s interesting to me! In Bellies, Ming writes a play about her and Tom’s relationship, which raises ethical questions around the craft: what do we owe to others when writing, particularly when drawing from personal experience? I like that my novels can function as a sandbox for difficult questions around the wider implications of what we as writers do, and other moral conundrums. At the start of my second novel, Disappoint Me, the protagonist, Max, has published a poorly-reviewed book of poetry – it deals more directly with why we might write and the impact of professional disappointment on our creativity. My novels have helped me tremendously with navigating tricky experiences in my own life, and how I approach my writing.
Q: I really loved the way you depicted love, intimacy and vulnerability. How did you decide on the metaphor of showing your belly as a through line for this story?
A: Thank you. The “showing your belly” metaphor, which the novel is ultimately named after, deals with two of the novel’s major themes. Firstly, our complex relationship to our own bodies and how that can define how we relate to others, seen clearly through Ming’s transition and the interpersonal ripples of this. Secondly, that vulnerability demands showing another our softest parts at the risk of, to borrow Tom’s phrasing, being disemboweled. What I hope the novel conveys is that understanding our bodies and how to be vulnerable isn’t a lesson learned once. We see Ming’s feelings towards her body change, not necessarily lessening in complexity, and adapting to new realities up to the very end of the novel. We also see Tom having to learn how to be vulnerable once again after suffering what he understands to be a deep betrayal.
Q: Would you talk a bit about depicting OCD and how it influenced Ming becoming aware of her transness in the novel?
A: I wrote about OCD as I hadn’t read many depictions of it in literature which I’ve found accurate or meaningful to me. I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me since Bellies was published to tell me that they felt really understood by its portrayal, or that they’ve shared it with family members to help them understand the kinds of things which go through an OCD sufferer’s mind. I’m glad that it has resonated with some of my audience.
As for how it influences Ming, that’s a bit more complicated. I wasn’t trying to draw distinctive links between OCD and being trans more generally, but Ming spends much of the novel questioning her own reality constantly worried she’s about to have a heart attack, believing she has diseases which she doesn’t. This kind of far-reaching doubt means she loses trust in her feelings about her own body, and as a result doubts her transness – at least initially.
Q: The internal monologue in Bellies is raw, relatable and witty. How did you make your characters’ minds feel so distinct?
A: In one of my seminars, I described writing characters as a bit like dating them. You only have an initial sense of who someone is when you first meet them, and I experience something similar with my characters. In the process of working through iterations of a novel I understand my characters more deeply. It takes the pressure off knowing exactly how a character is supposed to be at the start of a novel. When we compare our first drafts to other people’s finished works it’s easy to feel a little inadequate, as if our characters are lacking fullness, but it doesn’t stress me out anymore – depth comes with time.
Q: What made you decide to portray grief in the novel?
A: Grief is a part of life, or at least my understanding of it, so it felt natural for Bellies to explore grief and its different manifestations. At the start of the novel, we learn that Ming’s mother died six years before. Tom and Ming also experience grief in the wake of Ming’s transition – for the life they thought they would have, for bodies they’d once loved. The novel examines grief as both a destructive and unifying force – not with a particular agenda, aside from the desire to paint a picture of how life often is.
Q: What can readers look forward to in your upcoming novel Disappoint Me?
A: I’m really proud of Bellies, but Disappoint Me is a better, tighter novel, closer to the voice I’ve always wanted as an author. It deals with problems that both I, and women around me, think about on a regular basis. Our relationships to heteronormativity, the conflict between what we want for ourselves and the expectations put on us by others, the loss of identity that may come with choosing a secure future, and how and when we may decide to accept change in others. I love it and the characters so much.
Photo Credit: Stuart Simpson