Warona Jay: Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously

Yahoo

24-02-2025

Born in Botswana and raised in England, Warona Jay studied law at the University of Kent and King's College London before switching to a creative writing PhD at Brunel. As a teen, she was shortlisted for the Sony Young Movellist of the Year Award judged by Malorie Blackman. More recently, in 2020 she was longlisted for Penguin Random House's WriteNow program.
In this interview, Warona discusses how a lack of passion with her law degree led her to focus on her creative pursuits with her debut novel, The Grand Scheme of Things, the research into the theater world that helped the novel's themes, and more.
Name: Warona Jay Literary agent: Janklow & Nesbit U.K. Book title: The Grand Scheme of Things Publisher: Washington Square Press Release date: February 25, 2025 Genre/category: General; literary Elevator pitch: Two unlikely friends hatch an extraordinary scheme to expose the theater world in this wildly entertaining and sharply observed debut novel exploring perception, redemption, and how success shapes us all.
Bookshop | Amazon[WD uses affiliate links.]
I began formulating the idea for The Grand Scheme of Things in 2019, a couple of months after graduating with a law degree and a month into moving to London to start my law postgrad at King's College. In my early 20s, I was still figuring out how I wanted the rest of my life to unfurl, and I was grappling with the realization that law wasn't my true calling (I lacked enthusiasm beyond academia). However, I've always been passionate about writing, and up to that point had written five novels since I was a teenager. Around that time, I came across a BBC News article about unconscious bias in the U.K.'s hiring practices. A study by Oxford's Centre for Social Investigation (2016-2017) found that 24 percent of 'white' applicants received employer responses in a fake applicant name experiment, in comparison to only 15 percent of 'ethnic minority' applicants. This sparked the flame for starting Grand Scheme, where I wanted to explore how unconscious bias shapes representation in the U.K.'s creative industries more specifically—especially once I had decided to go down that route. I knew my chances as a lawyer were slim, but I wondered if my chances as an author were any different.
Although the pandemic turned everything on its head, it also gave me the chance to dig my heels into writing more. Once I completed my masters, I started a PhD in Creative Writing in Brunel in October 2020, pitching this novel idea to my prospective supervisor. She was on board with it, so she took me on, and we went from there. Initially, I plotted a story where a struggling unpublished black female writer attempts to campaign for representational equity within the publishing industry, but I began to think more about other areas that are impacted by a lack of diversity, and this brought me to theatre. I had a two-pronged approach to this pivot: For one, I was a total outsider to the theatre world. My notions were that it was a very white and upper-middle-class arena, even more so than the world of publishing. Secondly, as I was formulating the plot for the novel, I felt that theatre could work better for forming higher stakes for the characters, due to its more dynamic nature and the need for investment in fruition.
I started looking into the representational statistics of award-winning plays. As of 2024, 83 percent of the winning productions of the international Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Plays have been written by white men from primarily middle-class backgrounds in the United Kingdom or the U.S., with only one winning pay being penned by a black female playwright in the 48 years since its conception. In the U.K., the Critics' Circle Theatre Award's Best New Play has an identical percentage of 83 percent, with no black representation whatsoever. The Evening Standard Theatre Awards is the most egregious, with 91 percent of white male representation in its nearly 70-year run. A significant number of these playwrights have repeated wins, adding to the insular nature of theatre. Grand Scheme had gone by a different title throughout the first draft, but I couldn't help but wonder to myself, will aiming to shed light on unconscious bias ever really move the needle? The title is not just an allusion to the protagonists' ambitious scheme to get back at the theatre world, but the potential futility at attempts to combat systemic racism.
As mentioned, I came up with the premise in late September 2019 but started writing the novel a year later as part of my PhD. I finished the first draft in February 2023, so it took approximately two and a half years—however, I was also juggling a full-time office job for half of that time (in legal research, ironically), so that slowed things down quite a bit. The idea never really changed at all, to be honest. As far as the original premise went, it stayed exactly the same. However, I was quite lucky to have my supervisor overseeing the first draft and giving me feedback that caused the story to change in more subtle ways. For example, my characterization of Hugo, one of the protagonists, evolved to better accommodate to the primary themes of the story. This change in characterization informed the direction of the plot, taking the story somewhere I hadn't initially planned, which kept things quite fun and interesting.
The one thing that surprised me was that my book was picked up by Simon & Schuster in the U.S. pretty much immediately into submission, but it took a few more months for a U.K. publishing house to bite. My book is set in London and very culturally British, so I had assumed that it would be the other way around. I guess it just shows that the themes spoken about in Grand Scheme aren't exclusive to the U.K., and are fairly universal, which is always something you can hope for as a writer. This was one of the first novels I'd written that I purposefully decided to fashion from some of my own experiences and within a distinctly British backdrop, and I guess I assumed that I'd be painting myself into a corner, but ironically it just opened wider doors for me! So, I guess I learned that authenticity is always key.
There weren't any noticeable surprises, because I'd been writing novels for a long time before this. And again, having a creative writing supervisor put me in a much better position than had I been just writing it amateur like all my prior work. I guess because I was picked up by a U.S. publishing house and did all of my structural and line editing with American editors, there was a bit of a 'culture shock' in that regard. Although my book is still authentically British, I had to really consider how to communicate it well to an American audience. I came to realize how linguistically different the U.K. and the U.S. really is, and I had to learn to strike a balance without accommodating too much to an American audience and losing the essence of the world that the book is set in.
I find this question intriguing because expecting a reader to take something specific from a book feels a bit like reverse engineering—it assumes I wrote it with that goal in mind, which I didn't. While the novel has a didactic element, its exploration of themes is far from one-dimensional. What became most important to me wasn't just critiquing the lack of diversity in creative fields, but examining what it means to be a friend—who we choose to trust and why. At its core, The Grand Scheme of Things is about challenging systemic racism, but perhaps even more so, it's about the complexities of relationships—the bonds we forge and the ones we risk losing in pursuit of a 'grand' ambition.
I think it can be difficult to write freely without bogging ourselves down with our own expectations. I might be too afraid to start something because I'm already doubting it conceptually. I might give up on something because the motivational spark has vanished. I like the phrase 'fuck around and find out'—it's usually used as a threat, like play stupid games, win stupid prizes. But I also see it positively. Don't decide how things will work out—find out. Fucking around, to me, is going, 'What the hell, sure.' Or, 'You know what? Hell yeah.' (two very Gen Z references, I'll admit.) Don't take yourself too seriously. Just fuck around and see what happens. I've had so many times in my life where I've worried about not being where it is I want to be yet, but there's a sense of freedom in that. Even if I got what I wanted, like in this instance, finally becoming published, I might still not be satisfied. There's always something to find fault with. So, just fuck around, and then find out.