How Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta Sit Down & Write
'The View Was Exhausting' is the slow-burn romance you'll want to enjoy at the beach this summer.
Faking a love story is a whole lot easier than being in love . . .The world can see that international A-list actress Whitman (“Win”) Tagore and jet-setting playboy Leo Milanowski are made for each other. Their kisses start Twitter trends and their fights break the internet. From red carpet appearances to Met Gala mishaps, their on-again, off-again romance has titillated the public and the press for almost a decade. But it’s all a lie.
As a woman of color, Win knows the Hollywood deck is stacked against her, so she’s perfected the art of controlling her public persona. Whenever she nears scandal, she calls in Leo, with his endearingly reckless attitude, for a staged date. Each public display of affection shifts the headlines back in Win’s favor, and Leo uses the good press to draw attention away from his dysfunctional family.
Pretending to be in a passionate romance is one thing, but Win knows that a real relationship would lead to nothing but trouble. So instead they settle for friendship, with a side of sky-rocketing chemistry. Except this time, on the French Riviera, something is off. A shocking secret in Leo’s past sets Win’s personal and professional lives on a catastrophic collision course. Behind the scenes of their yacht-trips and PDA, the world’s favorite couple is at each other’s throats. Now they must finally confront the many truths and lies of their relationship, and Win is forced to consider what is more important: a rising career, or a risky shot at real love?
The View Was Exhausting is a funny, wickedly observant modern love story set against the backdrop of exotic locales and the realities of being a woman of color in a world run by men.
The View Was Exhausting is perfect for fans of You Had Me at Hola by Alexis Daria and Fix Her Up by Tessa Bailey.
We spoke with Mikaella and Onjuli about their writing process together, how music plays a huge role in their writing, and their favorite romance tropes.
Q: Where do you like to write the most?
Pretty much exclusively from our apartment in Berlin - it’s a messy little one bedroom on a quiet cobbled street and we’ve furnished it with writing in mind. Plenty of tables, comfy couches and armchairs, plants in every room and a spoiled young cat trotting back and forth between us to offer comfort.
Q: When do you like to write the most?
Whenever there are good lines coming through in our heads. Writing feels like summoning a demon sometimes, where you’re not quite sure how the ritual is working but you gotta just press on and try to keep up with it when it arrives. There’s no real perfect time - an idea can grip you out of nowhere, and sometimes it’s inconvenient, like when a scene starts forming itself in your head halfway through a workout and you have to pull up the Notes app when you’re still on the treadmill. But there’s never a time when we would say “not now, demon!”
Q: When it comes to drafting, do you prefer writing on a computer or freehand?
We write a lot of notes freehand, especially if we’re planning together, because we often do planning sessions in bars or at restaurants and it’s more intuitive than typing on a phone. But all of the actual prose is done on our laptops. This is especially important to us as co-writers because computers make it much easier to edit each other’s work and spy on each other’s progress. Sometimes if we have writer’s block we switch to freehand in a desperate play to get ideas flowing; sometimes it works and sometimes it’s just another procrastination technique.
Q: Are you more of a plotter or pantser?
We used to be pantsers but in the past few years we’ve learned to do a small amount of plotting just to make sure the scenes we’re separately working on don’t contradict each other. We generally divide a novel into three acts and we need to know where the current act is going to end up before we start. So we might only have an idea of a third of the plot when we begin, but that’s enough to ride on, and we try to have at least a vague idea of how the book’s going to end.
Q: Stephen King has a great line in ‘On Writing’ that says “the scariest moment is always right before you start. After that, things can only get better.” That scary pre-start moment often inspires procrastination in writers. Suddenly, you have to clean your entire house, do the laundry and play Candy Crush for an hour before you can actually start writing. Is there anything you need to do before you can actually sit down and work?
Sorry to disagree with daddy Stephen but the scariest moment is actually when you’re halfway through the day and reading back over what you just wrote like, I spent four hours on this? Should I burn it before anyone else can see it? Starting is relatively simple. The only thing we really need to do before starting to write is to have an opening idea in our heads; first line, first image, first snippet of dialogue. Without that all the cleaning and coffee-brewing is for naught.
Q: Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what music? Is your choice of music inspired by the project you’re working on?
Yes, overwhelmingly so! Playlists are hugely important to our writing process and we make tons of them for each character, for each act of the book, sometimes just for one scene. A good playlist can function like an impromptu soundtrack that we use to keep the story going in our head even when we’re not writing - to dream about at the gym or while washing dishes. While writing, Mikaella will often put an extremely dramatic playlist on full volume to help her power through to the end of a chapter. Onjuli is obsessive about playlists and makes a new one at least once a week, but when she’s writing she listens to vaporwave. It’s essentially white noise with a beat. She is required to listen on headphones because vaporwave on repeat makes Mikaella twitchy after the first ten minutes.
We compiled the best of our writing playlists into an official soundtrack to The View Was Exhausting which you can listen to here! It covers both POVs and is in chronological order, just to prove how obsessive we are.
Q: Some writers believe you have to write every single day. Is that true of your process? How often do you write/how long for each session?
No, we would love it if we could write every day but we both have day jobs and fairly weak self-discipline. In the past year or two we’ve gotten better at blocking times for writing and actually doing it when we said we would, but if we need a day off we try not to beat ourselves up about it. We vary widely on how long we write - some days you can write ten thousand words without even blinking, and on others it takes eight hours to write one line. But maybe the ten thousand words are trash and the one line is the best part of the whole novel. It all feeds into the story.
Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d give an aspiring author?
Write short stories! Short stories are such good practice for novels; they train you to experiment with structure, they force you to write a gripping opening and see it through to the end, they allow you to have the satisfaction of actually finishing something. And they can be a great way to get your name out there, to connect with other people in the industry, and who knows, maybe to catch the attention of an agent.
Q: Where do you normally find story inspiration?
Anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes we’ll watch a movie and be like “I’d love to play with this dynamic that character A and character B have”; sometimes we’ll go to a new bar and be like “what do you think our main couple would make of this place?” Once Onj was idly spying on the neighbours across the street and Mik ended up writing a whole story about it.
Q: The View Was Exhausting was written by the two of you together. How did you tackle the writing process and create a distinct voice within the story?
We’ve been writing together for so long that we’ve developed quite similar authorial voices, and we edit each other’s work so extensively that both of our voices are present in every line of the book. We wrote this book for fun and initially we were guided only by what we wanted to write; we just wrote whatever scene we were thinking about and didn’t worry too much about continuity or structure. Once we had a fairly shambolic first draft we started re-organizing chapters and getting stricter with our plot outline, but the decision of who writes what was still guided by whatever each of us felt most inclined to write on a certain day.
Q: The View Was Exhausting explores being a woman of color in the male dominated world of Hollywood. What made you two want to explore this through the lens of the fake dating romance trope?
The fake dating came first as a trope that we love, and Whitman Tagore as a character arose quite naturally as the heroine we wanted to write about. We didn’t entirely set out to write about racism, but most characters of color will come against racism in one form or another, because that is just the truth of the experience. It would have been strange and counterintuitive to ignore the elements of racism and sexism in Win’s world. Toward the end of the first draft we realized the crucial interplay between the fake dating trope and Win’s position as a woman of color - the idea that dating a pretty white boy would make her more palatable to white audiences and give her something of an entryway into the world of white privilege. And fake dating is all about appearances, so it plays well into Win’s deeper struggle to control how she is perceived.
Q: There's a great cast of characters in The View Was Exhausting. Aside from Whitman and Leo, who was your favorite to write? Did you each gravitate or relate to a character more than the others?
One of the fun things about writing a romcom is that every side character basically exists to say something about the main couple, whether by comparison, by reflection or by interaction. Pritha, Win’s mother, was so significant both as an element of Win’s past and a source of pressure in her present, and as a figure who encouraged Leo to grow up and consider that the world might be a more complicated place than he first thought. That felt like a really moving and important relationship to delve into, and we also had a lot of fun developing Pritha and Leo’s friendship.
Our other favorite character to write was Geoffrey “Gum” Milanowski, Leo’s hapless older brother. He’s quite a retro old money loser who talks like he’s from a Donna Tartt novel and thinks of himself as a Fitzgerald hero, and we just find him endlessly entertaining. We created someone who unintentionally brought Leo down a peg; Leo tries to be so cool and modern and understated and it was fun to force him to deal with his uncool, old-fashioned and over the top brother. Gum is basically Leo’s receipts - a good reminder for Leo of where he really comes from.
Q: When the dialogue between love interests is so fun and more importantly believable, it’s often because a lot of work went into developing those characters. How did you approach craft Win and Leo as individuals that would work so well together on the page?
This is something that comes from drafting and re-drafting the book over and over again and slowly building up the layers that make a character real. You can write a complete first draft with fairly thin characterization, just putting your plot through the motions and deciding the basics of each character’s arc. And then you go back through every step of the plot and be like, why though? Why did they say that, why did they act like that? You have to imagine a reader like a little kid who responds to every answer with another but why? And with a romance you’re not just explaining why each character is the way they are, but why they love each other and/or where the tension between them comes from. What about a person’s upbringing would prepare them to deal with a control freak partner? What about a person’s values or goals would make them turn their back on somebody they loved? Second and third drafts are meant to answer these questions, and that was where Win and Leo’s relationship developed into something strong and believable, once we already knew them well enough to help a reader get to know them, too.
Q: With a slow burn romance, how do you make sure a slow burn isn’t too slow? How do you make sure you’re keeping readers on the hook without them losing interest or the relationship losing steam?
With slow burn it’s important to make the reader feel like a lot of things are happening even when the couple’s relationship isn’t explicitly changing - delaying that moment of realization that they’re in love with each other and instead taking very small steps in that direction. There are so many ways to do this, whether by genuinely moving the plot along so the couple get closer together, putting them in situations that amp up the tension between them, a moment of intimacy or disagreement that makes you aware of new dimensions to their dynamic, or a revelation about something that already happened long ago… The couple doesn't necessarily need to make fast progress in their relationship, but the reader needs to find out something new about them from every interaction. Slow burn can’t be repetitive; you can’t keep telling a reader what they already know. It’s like dropping a trail of breadcrumbs. There have to be different kinds of bread, different shapes of crumb, because otherwise the reader is like I already ate that.
Q: What's your favorite trope in romance? What was your most recent favorite book written with this trope?
We’re suckers for enemies to lovers because it’s a trope with unresolved sexual tension built in from the get go. A recent book that nailed this has to be Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game. It delivers on everything that the title promises - it’s about two colleagues and rivals who despise each other, but it’s so playful and good-humored at the same time. And it has a deeply sexy first kiss. Or, if you have a taste for sci-fi, you can’t go wrong with Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon The Ninth, which is probably the most moving and most hilarious example of the trope to date. (Be warned, the third and final book in the series isn’t out yet. But come join us in clawing the walls waiting for its release.)
Grab your copy of The View Was Exhausting at bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound.
Sit Down and Write is brought to you by Emily Lee and Cassie Stossel. For more author interviews like this one straight to your inbox, subscribe below!