Bette Adriaanse on writing, the course and getting published
In the second year of the Master in Creative Writing, I started writing what would become my first novel, Rus Like Everyone Else. There was no plan, I only had a few characters that had slowly emerged from my experience living in Amsterdam and London. Those characters had been wandering around inside my head for a while and their stories seemed to be connected somehow. There was a lonely secretary waiting for her life to start, an elderly man with agoraphobia, a granny with a soap-opera addiction, a young immigrant trying to make it, and Rus, a young man who had to start taking part in society after living the first twenty five years of his life under the radar.
I was living on a small farm in Devon when I began writing the novel, where I helped with the horses in the morning and tuned into the city-life of my characters in the afternoon. At first I was worried that being in the countryside I would only get ideas for stories about fields and horses, but the distance to my everyday life gave me the space to fantasize and create a fictional city.
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