Anna Trench is an illustrator, cartoonist, writer and teacher based in London. Florrie is her first book. It won the Book of the Year Award at the East Anglian Book Awards 2025 and was previously shortlisted for the First Graphic Novel Award and the LDComics Award.

Peggy

Thank you for coming on to the podcast.

 

Anna

Thank you for asking me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

 

Peggy

I think you were on Radio Norfolk, were you? Did I see this as well?

 

Anna

I was earlier this week. It was really nice.

I had a really nice conversation and really fun to be chatting to Radio Norfolk about bits of Norfolk, or about other bits of Florrie.

They’ve got this great scheme called Page Turners, so they’re also sort of weaving into a general celebration of reading. Then obviously you had World Book Day yesterday, so it feels like a lot going on with everyone trying to get people to read the most, and we’ve got this national drive as well this year, haven’t we?

So yeah, very celebratory of books, it’s feeling.

 

Peggy

Good. We love that. We’re biased, but we do love that here at the National Centre for Writing.

That’s an interesting point to me, Anna, and not the question I’d planned to ask, but how does it feel now to be talking about the book? You must spend so long conceiving of the book, in your case, drawing it, creating it.

And now you’re in the world talking about it, and I wonder how those two things are for you.

 

Anna

Yeah, I actually, when Florrie came out and in the lead up to it coming out, there was quite, it felt to me that there was quite a lot of publicity, with doing interviews and doing events.

And because we’d timed it with the Euros, it really needed, it had such a short period of Flory being commissioned, finished and then being published, like a few months, so really short compared to most books and graphic novels usually take a lot longer.

So I kind of just went straight into almost finishing it to then doing publicity and talking about it, and this is really nice right now because it’s been a while actually, I feel, since I have talked about Florrie.

There’s been bits here and there, but it’s so lovely to be talking about it again and reflecting on it, and yeah it’s been really nice, thank you.

 

Peggy

Yeah, does the distance, I mean, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here in a sense because we’ve not actually talked about what the book’s about and everything, but does a sense of distance or timing give you a different perspective on the book, do you think?

 

Anna

Yeah, it must do, it must do. And it’s interesting what sort of sticks in your head, and when I flick through it, kind of what I’m newly more interested in.

But yeah, it’s also, if I can say it, a kind of fondness. I am very fond of it, so it’s nice to spend some time with it again.

 

Peggy

Nice. Good, good. I think we should explain to our listeners just what exactly we are talking about. I’m holding a copy, not that the listeners can see it. This beautiful book, as you are, I think.

Yes. Absolutely stunning. So I wonder if you could sort of take us under the covers of it, really, and just set the scene. To begin with, what are we dealing with in Florrie?

 

Anna

So Florrie begins with someone discovering that their great aunt, Florrie, was secretly a footballer in the early 20th century.

In the attic, after her great aunt has passed, there are these boxes with her football boots and shirts and scarves and letters and match reports and photographs, and it reveals this incredible story of Florrie that no one really knew about.

Then very quickly we go back in time to 1919. Florrie is 19 years old, and we follow her story of how she is in Norfolk and she works with her antiquarian book-dealing father in a house that’s quite sad and quite cold. Her brother died recently in the war and her mother’s dead.

She goes for these runs, secretly goes on these runs, and she sees these women playing football. She’s intrigued and she’s drawn to them, but she doesn’t think it’s for her. And of course, she gets drawn in further and she joins them.

She’s very good at running and she teaches them to run faster, and they teach her so many things, not least how it feels to belong, to be part of a team and the exhilaration of playing. She scores her first goal and there’s nothing like it, and she’s totally wrapped up in this world of football.

They go on a little trip to Dieppe. She meets another female footballer. I’m going to stop giving too much away.

But then, as many people will know and some people will not know, in 1921 the FA banned women from playing on FA-affiliated pitches, which essentially meant women were banned from playing football.

A large part of the novel, really the second half, is dealing with the devastating consequences of that on Florrie and also gesturing to wider implications of that.

Her friendships and love affair also continue, but there are pressures on them, and there’s lots that Florrie experiences that is liberating. There’s also lots that is constraining.

We end, I think it’s okay for me to say, with a jump forward to the incredible Lionesses’ success, which I hope shows how far we’ve come.

And yeah, I hope that hasn’t given too much away, but given a bit of flavour. I’ve probably missed out some bits.

 

Peggy

I think that gives us the key, the shape, the arc, if you like. I’m trying to think where best to go, because there’s such a lot in there.

But I suppose I want to come back to the box in the attic and press that a little bit. Was there a real box in the attic, or was that simply a useful starting engine? How did the desire to write this begin, I suppose?

 

Anna

I think there’s a box in everyone’s attic. I don’t even have an attic, but everyone’s got something that reveals something about someone who’s gone, and they can’t ask those questions. They only knew there were questions to ask when it’s too late.

I suppose I was thinking about all these stories that we don’t know, and all these stories that it would have been incredible to know if only we’d been able to ask, or the stories that we don’t realise are worth telling as well.

So I do not have a great aunt. I certainly do not have a great aunt who was a footballer. But I looked at these pictures of all these women and girls playing at the time, hundreds and hundreds of them, and I thought, well, that is someone’s mother or aunt or daughter or great-great cousin. And where did that legacy go? Because it seems to me so much of it was shut down and silenced.

So that’s kind of what got me thinking about it.

 

Peggy

Yeah. Yeah. Lovely. Everybody is someone’s someone.

Yeah, we haven’t really talked about football much yet, Anna, but I think both of us played football, I believe. I know you did, and I did.

But it’s a deeply painful story, how this all came about, and yet not a story I think many people know enough about, that there was this enormous ban. I wonder if you could first of all just say a little bit about that, about the scale of it, and also then why you wanted to reclaim that, I suppose.

 

Anna

So it was absolutely massive. I think some people do know that in World War I there were the munitions factories and a lot of women were working in them, and they were having independence and doing physical work for the first time. A lot of football teams were formed.

Together, these football teams often would play each other and create mini leagues, and that really, really snowballed into, by 1920, there being 150 women’s teams across the country.

There was a famous match between Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helens on Boxing Day 1920 that had 59,000 people in the stands, with 15,000 more trying to get in. It was huge. There were a lot of men watching these games as well. It was really, really massive and popular all over.

And I should say also that these games and these leagues mainly took place in the north of England, so Dick, Kerr Ladies, who I’ve mentioned, were based in Preston and they were absolutely massive. There were some teams in the south, and I found a couple of munitions factories in England, like Kingston and somewhere else nearby. So I think technically that could have happened.

A lot of Florrie is based on absolute fact, and a lot of it is me thinking, “Well, why not? Why didn’t that happen?” We’ve got so little documentation of this really, so what happened to all those people’s experiences? Some of those players maybe didn’t write them down, couldn’t write them down.

So I did use some licence there, but I don’t think I did much that I couldn’t think might have happened.

So in 1921 the FA banned it, and there are theories about why that happened. There were some false claims spread that some of the money at the gates of these matches was being misused. I think that was an excuse.

I think the reason the ban came in was jealousy, that the women’s game was becoming more popular than the men’s game. I think it’s also about men’s control over women’s bodies and fear surrounding that.

There were medical professionals who said that playing football would severely damage women’s bodies and mean they were unable to have children because their wombs would be damaged. Kicking it was too forceful an act for a female frame.

These are things we’ve heard since and before and will continue to be said. I think those are the reasons: jealousy over the popularity of the game, fear that it was becoming uncontrollable, and wanting to regain control over what women can do, especially with their bodies, especially post the liberation of World War I. But I’m not a historian.

 

Peggy

I mean, even hearing all that again, it just makes me so angry. And this is not an angry book. And I wonder then, was that a negotiation for you between this stuff that’s so enraging and unjust, but then such a light, beautiful, well-told story? So I just wonder how you negotiate between those things.

 

Anna

Thank you. I think I spent a lot of time looking at newspaper archives in the National Archives and found these articles. If you can present something to someone that is so clearly unfair and so factually straightforward, that’s probably going to have more of an impact than shouting and screaming and stamping your feet. I guess there are two ways to do it, but for me I just sort of presented it and let the reader see.

There’s a page, well there are a couple of pages, with the newspaper stories where I literally verbatim put down the words that were in there. And they are shocking reading them today.

But I also have a page that’s just Florrie-ish. When she realises that she can’t play football anymore, and she realises that her lover in France isn’t coming over to play this match with them anymore, and that this whole world that she discovered is going to fall apart, she just runs to the sea and cries.

And I guess that shows quite a lot of emotion without having to say a thing. There are no words on that page.

 

Peggy

Yeah, yeah, let’s talk a bit about that actually, just the storytelling and how it’s different in a graphic novel, and what you choose to leave in, and how do you make those decisions? Like how that piece is going to be framed, do you know what I mean?

 

Anna

Yeah. I think everyone does it really differently. For me, I would sometimes know exactly how the page would work. Sometimes I’d know that there was an image I really wanted and then work out the text around it that I’d pre-written.

But what I also found so interesting is that once you get on the page, you can cut some of that text or change it and it takes a life of its own. I wrote some of it before, most of it, but not in a fully formed way at all, and I didn’t write it all before I started drawing. I kind of started drawing it at the same time as I was writing it.

Then I would go ahead and do a lot of the writing, but sometimes I’d be like, no, I don’t know where that’s going, I’m just going to go back and do this page that I really want to do. So I kind of did it chronologically.

I don’t think I did it in a very efficient way, or even in the way other graphic novelists I’ve spoken to have done theirs. A lot of them do the writing first. And I’m not even sure if I’ll do this the same way next time.

But for this book, seeing those images and the text side by side in my head was really important. I’d sometimes also just describe what images I wanted in words, but they wouldn’t become the words of the book at all. It was just, ‘Here I’m going to have this flower that Florrie’s going to send to Vivian.’

And then because I also handwrote everything without making a font or using Photoshop very well, everything was handwritten and hand-drawn. And if I needed to change it, I did have to redo some pages. I’ve learned a lot.

 

Peggy

Okay, because I did want to ask you about that. I just, is it an analogue process for you? I imagine it’s just different for different artists, but for you is it absolutely big bits of paper everywhere?

 

Anna

No, very neat. All in one book. I mean, several books, all of exactly the same size, with the same pen, with the same size page.

Very small changes on Photoshop, taking out a misspelling, moving something around, because the pages are pretty simple. They’re all white; there’s rarely a whole background on one page.

But yeah, I think in some ways it probably is quite old-fashioned, the way I did it. And it’s all pen and ink on paper and then sort of scanned, and not many changes made at all.

 

Peggy

And is that, how do you evolve into that style? Is that just what feels correct for you? You mentioned comparing notes with other graphic novelists, but is that just the style that came to you?

 

Anna

Yeah, I guess it’s just the clearest and simplest for me. I’m sure there’s so much I want to learn and so many things I want to experiment with, but also, if you kept on trying to learn forever and experiment forever, you’d never get anything down.

So I kind of felt like I’ve just got to do this the way that feels most natural to me right now. And that’s what I did.

 

Peggy

Yeah, well, lucky us, I say. I mean, that’s fine, it worked.

Of all of that then, I just wonder how you sort of decide what Florrie’s journey is going to be, more of a plot point really. Did that come from the very beginning? Was that something that surprised even you? Or how do you know where she’s going to end up?

 

Anna

So I knew I needed this character, obviously, to tell this story, and she was going to be really integral. And I think that paused me for a while, partly because there was a moment when I thought I needed to set it in the north of England, as I was saying previously about there being so many teams there.

It was Norfolk, actually, that unlocked a bit of this for me, because I realised it needs to be somewhere that I have an emotional connection to. The fact that my grandmother lived there gave me a link to someone from previous generations, and to the idea I was talking about before—someone’s history you’re not really close to at all, but you are, and yet there’s so much you don’t know.

So although a lot, like everything, was imagined, I think locating it there helped things begin to work for me, and thinking about the sea, and Florrie going to the sea. She just became a character.

A lot of it was to do with setting, but also probably to do with my experiences. She’s not based on me, obviously, but there are elements of her experience that mirror mine or my friends’. I play football. I’m six months pregnant, so I haven’t played football for a while and I won’t for a while, but football has been a really important part of my life. I met my partner playing football. We have a lot of friends who are in a similar position. It’s a very queer-friendly space, women’s football.

I remember when I did an art foundation at Falmouth and I joined a team there, and it changed my life. We used to play these matches on cliff tops above the sea, and we lost almost every single game, but it was so enjoyable.

I guess I was also tapping into them being 19 and thinking about that experience as well. And she just kind of evolved from that.

Then there comes a point when they’re just their own character. I remember that moment so vividly when I didn’t even have to wonder what Lily, Alice, Vivian, and Florrie would do, because it felt like they would just tell me. That was so exciting.

And then very soon I was very upset because I knew I’d never be with them again because I was coming to the end. But that was incredible—when the characters become something you don’t have to ask about, you just know what they’re going to do.

 

Peggy

Yeah, yeah, yeah, how amazing. Hilary Mantel, I think, said that in order to get into her character’s mind, she did this exercise with The Giant O’Brien, where she invited the giant to sit on a chair, and the giant had to sort of press on the chair to make sure it wouldn’t break when he sat down.

And after that, she was like, I knew the giant then, you know, I knew exactly how he would be. He was a fully-fledged concept then.

 

Anna

Yeah, and there were moments with Florrie when I think she’s quite quiet. She doesn’t say things, and it was thinking about when is she going to speak, when is she going to say things. That was really helpful for working her out.

I guess I haven’t really expressed that or thought about that much, but just sort of going back to it—when does she speak to the people in the group? When does she write a letter? When does she say something to her father and her brother? She’s very close to her brother, but so much is unsaid.

And I guess also in a graphic novel, you can show character like you would in a novel through description, but through a look, through posture, that kind of thing.

 

Peggy

Yeah, wonderful. Sticking with football for a little minute, what got you into football?

 

Anna

I come from a family where no one is into football. I think the simplicity of just kicking a ball, running around, but also I was what is still sort of called a tomboy, so I wanted to be doing that kind of thing and being outside.

Manchester United have recently won the treble, so that was really exciting. I was, sadly in retrospect, a Manchester United fan, and I had all their kit. Every day of the week in primary school I was wearing a different kit. I saved all my money, and I got family friends, 15-year-olds’ sons, old past hand-me-downs. And I absolutely loved it. I really, really loved playing.

I also grew up not far from Arsenal. Arsenal Women were formed in like ’89, and there was a new kind of interest, but also respect for women’s football that was very gradual, very subtle, but definitely happening in the 90s with Arsenal Women. You can see how far they’ve come, how much that investment, financial investment, but also that seriousness, taking it seriously, pushing their games, publicity, matches.

So even though I used to joke that maybe I’d join Arsenal girls, and my mum also used to say that, because I don’t think she understood they were actually really, really good. But knowing that they weren’t professional at all, still, they were becoming semi-professional, that was really exciting.

Like a lot of women who played as girls in primary school and secondary school, I didn’t get the chance to play. It was just netball really, or hockey. Then in sixth form I started to play again.

When I did my art foundation in Falmouth, like I said, I joined that team and absolutely loved it. Then I went to Cambridge, read English at Cambridge, and football was a really great part of my time there as well. I was in my college team and the university seconds team, and it was such a wonderful release from everything. It also meant I was playing with people I never would have hung out with otherwise, really different groups.

Since then I’ve been in several London teams, and my current one, where I’ve been nearly 10 years, is Gold Diggers, which is really lovely, really big, very queer-friendly, and it’s all about being available to play. It’s not about how ‘good’ you are, anyone can sign up. And that’s been really lovely. There are lots of opportunities to play 11-a-side, 5-a-side, or just go to training.

 

Peggy

Fabulous. Yeah, the sheer joy of football really comes across in the book, which is one reason why I loved it.

And you mentioned already the moment where she scores her first goal. It’s just like sheer, you know.

Who was the player that you loved most in terms of that Man U side? Was it Eric Cantona?

 

Anna

I think you chose a better player in Cantona because I think he’s very interesting. I’ve still got my Beckham shirt and my room was filled with Beckham. He was the golden boy, he was so great, but Beckham, you could have done so much. You could have done so much to make the world a better place.

And I think about the Men’s World Cup in Qatar and just think, oof, so disappointing.

 

Peggy

Yeah. I mean, it’s thinking of us as girls and the game not being accessible, or not having the same visibility. I mean, what do you hope the book will do in that space?

You said it launched alongside the Lionesses and the campaign. I mean, how would you, what do you hope it would do in the world now with football and women, a story like this?

 

Anna

I’d be, I’d be honoured if it did anything. But I think I am surprised still by how many people don’t know that women’s football was really big and that there was a ban. And it is wonderful then for people to read it and to discover that.

I also think there’s a discovery of this sort of still secret, hidden history of women’s football, and the more widely known that is, the better. That’s brilliant.

I also guess it’s a story about a girl who wants to play football and gets to play football and has a brilliant time doing that. And the whole country, the whole world has seen that on their screens. A lot of those players are quite young, and you can see how much they love playing and what they give to it.

So in some ways, maybe it’s about saying, isn’t it brilliant this is happening now, but let’s not forget it happened 100 years ago too. Then it was shut down, and it’s being shut down in other parts of the world.

I mentioned Qatar, but I’m also thinking about Afghanistan and women not being allowed to play sport there. Many places in the world where those freedoms are not given. And I guess it’s also about women’s rights in general, really, because it’s a book about sport, it’s a book about football, but it’s hopefully a book about a lot more as well.

 

Peggy

Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if I could return briefly to Norfolk and what Norfolk means to you, and of course this book, and congratulations, has recently just won Book of the Year at the East Anglian Book Awards.

Yeah, what’s your relationship with Norfolk? You mentioned your grandmother.

 

Anna

Yeah, so my grandma lived there, and when I was a child and a teenager I would visit Norfolk, and it has always meant a lot to me. The landscape, particularly North Norfolk, and a nice place by the sea called Cley and Blakeney Point, and just the space.

I think also coming from London and not having that space, being able to run, to swim in the freezing sea, to just feel the salt air, I’ve always found it very freeing and very calming. I love it, I just love looking out to the sea there.

You can look so far in Norfolk, and see so much, but there’s also a coldness to it. That flatness is quite stark, and I think some people find that quite eerie. I love it, but it’s almost that you can’t hide sometimes. There are no hills to hide behind, no pretty little bucolic hills. There are a few, but mainly it’s that unrelenting flatness, which I find incredible.

It was thinking about that. And I suppose also because it’s a place I used to go to but don’t go to anymore in the same way, it allowed me to be quite nostalgic and sentimental and emotional, because I was tapping into my teenage and childhood feelings.

I think that worked well with this book because that feeling is something Florrie has. She might not express it, but she does have it. She returns to Norfolk and she does love it, but it’s a complicated feeling because it’s also tied up with a sense of responsibility as well as love.

 

Peggy

Yes, and losses and difficulty and all of those things. And obviously the book, she’s rooted in Norfolk, so it’s present in that sense. But I wonder, are there other aspects of Norfolkness that sneak into the work, or into this work, or into your attitude as an artist? You know what I mean?

 

Anna

The aspects of nature are really important. So Florrie finds a hagstone on the beach and she sends that to Vivian. Hagstones are the stones with the holes in, and they have these magical powers, supposedly.

There were these bluebells, which I remember being in a bluebell wood once when I was very little. Or snowdrops, or the birds that you can find around there. I think all of those were important as well.

 

Peggy

I want to zoom out a little bit from Florrie and just talk about your artistic register more generally. And I just wonder if you could say which artists inspired you, or brought you along this path, I guess.

 

Anna

So the graphic novelists who’ve had a big impact on me are probably Alison Bechdel, who wrote Fun Home. That was her graphic memoir that came out first, and that is like a world-changing book. It is absolutely incredible. I recommend everyone to read Fun Home.

It’s about her growing up in a family with a half-time funeral parlour, and then it’s a sort of coming-of-age and queer awakening. It’s incredible. The ways that she used words and images I found really liberating, because she doesn’t hold back with the language she uses. It’s often beautiful, it’s often complex. She has a vast vocabulary and she wants to use it all. There are metaphors and analogies, and there’s a real almost self-conscious literariness in it that I hadn’t really come across before.

So Fun Home was a big influence on me. I love all of Posy Simmonds’ work. I love the way she uses words in pictures. The way she draws is just exquisite, the way she can get expressions, so witty. And again, she had what felt to me like quite a pioneering literariness of using words and images together in a way that maybe in France had been done before with the bande dessinée, but in England hadn’t really been done in comics in that way. So she kind of brought graphic novels to the public more, I think.

Then Raymond Briggs wrote a graphic novel called Ethel and Ernest, which is also an absolutely lovely book. It’s a memoir about his parents in the earlier part of the 20th century, and I also love the way he uses words and images together.

More recently, I guess, Lizzy Stewart wrote and drew a graphic novel called Alison, which also had a lot of words in it as well as really beautiful images, so well-drawn, so well written. Thinking about her use of text, I’d already started Florrie by the time I read Alison, but it gave me that boost to think, okay, someone else is doing this as well, it doesn’t all have to be in speech bubbles.

So I do use speech bubbles, but I also use a narrator. Some cartoonists, even graphic novelists, might see that as not the true graphic novel or comic style, but there came a point when I just thought I’m going to do whatever I want, actually, and this feels right to me. So I also have letters in it, postcards, newspapers, lots of different forms of writing.

I think the notion of having a narrator, which the previous graphic novelists I’ve mentioned all used, gave me confidence to do what I wanted to do, which was to have a narrator as well.

 

Peggy

It seems like a pleasingly stretchy form or genre, or however you’d describe it. You can break the rules within that quite easily, would you say?

 

Anna

Yeah, and there’s a big thing that I did, which I felt was one of the most liberating things I did, I think that gave me such confidence to keep going.

I don’t use any panels, so I don’t have any boxes around my images. And when people think about comics and cartoons and graphic novels, they might think about a page that’s laid out in a grid, with boxes and all the images and speech bubbles contained within that.

I don’t have any of that. And it meant, practically, that I could move the images around retrospectively, like I said earlier, on Photoshop if I needed to, but it also gave me breathing space, I felt, and I could create that sense of movement that I wanted, also for football and for her running and swimming.

And you can still, compositionally and with a wash, create a sense of claustrophobia or enclosure if you need to. But I didn’t want to be restrained, I didn’t want to be restricted by having those boxes.

So yes, I think there is loads of room for the graphic novel form to be changed and shaped however you like. And for me, not having any panels was something that once I realised I could do that and was happy to do that, I felt really good going forward.

 

Peggy

What are you working on now then? What’s coming next? Is there a project forming, or are you taking a bit of time post-Florrie?

 

Anna

I have a few ideas for a few different things. I definitely want to do another graphic novel that’s aimed at adults, or adults and young adults.

I have two ideas that I want to explore. But I also quite want to do a picture book for younger readers. I’ve got a toddler and I’ve got another one on the way, and I’m obviously reading a lot of them at the moment, but I have always wanted to do one myself. I draw and I write, and that does seem, I think, a style that suits that.

So I’ve got a couple of ideas for that that I’m working on as well. But yes, I have a few things that I want to work on, I just want a bit more time to do it.

 

Peggy

Yeah, fair, fair. I mean, I think that must be surely the highest art, to create a book that captures the attention of a toddler and can be reread every single night for months on end and still hold them. I mean, that must be so hard. No?

 

Anna

I don’t know, I think there are some amazing books that capture his attention. I think there are some that I would be happy never to read again.

 

Peggy

Lovely. Well, listen, we’re nearly there. I want to just ask you then, you know, people listening in are writers, they’re readers. I wonder what your writing and drawing life looks like. Where does it take place? What would you be doing right now if I wasn’t distracting you with this podcast conversation?

 

Anna

I’d like to be writing down some ideas, I’d like to be drawing in my sketchbook, I could be doing both those things.

The boring practical answer is that I’m also a teacher four days a week, and I’ve got several exam classes this year and a lot of marking to do. So sometimes that encroaches on my day that I have to do my drawing and writing. And that’s just how it is.

But also, there are times when you can still do a bit of both, and you can be thinking about them both. So I have one day a week for my drawing and writing. There have been times when I’ve been very strict that nothing else can come into this day, but at the moment I’ve got to be a bit flexible because I want my students to do their best.

 

Peggy

Sure, sure. Well, lucky them also. I suppose that sort of discipline can be really helpful, productivity speaking, when you’ve got one day to do that. That can have its own benefits, I guess.

 

Anna

Yeah, I also, it’s just sort of funny how it all works out. Florrie was maybe a third done before I gave birth to my son.

Then a third, or a bit less than a third, maybe when I was on maternity leave. And then the other section when I was back at work. But I would also make it clear that my partner took him for a day during my maternity leave so that I could work on it. And I already had it commissioned, so I knew I had my deadline, which was fantastic.

But we can have all the time in the world, but if we have other things going on and encroaching on our headspace, it makes it a lot more difficult.

So I actually found that whole period I’ve just described really helpful for creating Florrie, because I could think about it a lot. I had a lot of time to think. There were times of complete and utter sleep deprivation, but I still wanted to think about something different.

It’s like, going for a walk is so lovely for thinking, or just having that space. It isn’t always about time, is it? It’s about headspace, I guess.

 

Peggy

Definitely.

 

Anna

So, yeah, Florrie was quite interesting in that actually a lot of the thinking, and some of the making of it, and the forming of it and the developing of it, happened in this time when I was looking after my son but not yet back at work.

I didn’t necessarily have time to sit down and draw and write, but I did have thinking time to form things.

 

Peggy

It’s as fundamental a part of the process, to be fair, as just being at the desk, isn’t it? The thinking time.

 

Anna

Totally. Yeah. And I guess if you’re drawing and writing, you do feel like you, I think drawing more than writing, writing you can do in other places, fortunately. But drawing, you sort of do need to be in a certain location, which I am finding a little bit tricky. But I’ll get there.

 

Peggy

You’ll get there. Final, final question. Just mindful again of those writers out there who might need a word of wisdom from someone who’s now published their first book, an award-winning book. Do you have any top tips, be it for graphic novelists or not graphic novelists? What do you wish you’d known at the start of this that you know now?

 

Anna

I think to keep going, just to keep writing and drawing the thing that you want to read and the thing that you want to write. If you’re not into it, there’s no point really. You’ve got to be really into it. If you’re not into that section, move on to another bit and then come back to it.

Just keep going with what you’re into. Write about and research things that you’re interested in. I got really into the 1920s lesbian scene in Paris with Gertrude Stein and that literary scene. It only appears fleetingly, barely even fleetingly, in Florrie, but I really enjoyed researching that.

All of that background really helped me form some of it. So go down those paths that you’re interested in. But essentially, just keep doing it.

It doesn’t have to be really long or complex. Lots of it won’t even come into it in the end, lots of the ideas. But if you don’t keep doing it, it will never get done. And if there are bits you’re not into, skip it, go somewhere else, come back to it.

 

Peggy

Brilliant. Thank you.