Guest Spot: Interview with best-selling author Lisa Jewell

Welcome back to Strictly Writing, Lisa, and thanks for guesting for us again.  Your new book, “The Making Of Us” is due for release next week, 12^th May 2011.  Can you tell us a bit about it?

"The Making of Us is about three strangers, all in their twenties, all living very different lives, who slowly come together when they discover that they share an anonymous donor father."

It’s a fascinating concept, what first ‘sparked’ your imagination with this storyline?

"As ever, with my books, it is not the book I set out to write! I started off wanting to write a comedy a little like Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. I wanted to put a dry, childless woman in middle youth together with an unlikely younger person and see what would happen. I thought of a long-lost younger sister and then I read about the Sibling Registry that had just been set up for donor children to track each other down and thought that would make it less clichéd and quite current. So I started writing the book with just these two characters in mind, but felt it wasn't funny and it wasn't light-hearted and I needed to make it more substantial. So I brought in the other characters and tried to give it the feel of an ITV drama series instead."

Which character did you feel the closest to in ‘The Making Of Us’ and do you find you miss certain characters more than others after you’ve finished writing a book?

"Usually when I write one of my multiple character books there is one I like writing the best and look forward to getting back to. That wasn't the case with this book. I loved them all equally and enjoyed writing from all their perspectives. I think I probably felt the closest to Dean as he had it the toughest and was the most vulnerable. I never miss my characters after I've finished with them. I'm always ready to move on to the next bunch."

You've mentioned that you enjoyed the David Nicholls’ book ‘One Day’ which is currently being made into a film.  Which one of your books would you like to see made into a movie first and who would you want to play the leads?

"As I type, a group of people are trying to make 31 Dream Street into a movie. They have the finances in place which is half the battle, and they want to start filming by the end of the year, so hopefully, you never know. I thought of David Thewlis for Toby, but he's a bit old now. Or maybe James McAvoy, but he's too cute. Steven Marchant? Can he act? As for Ruby, maybe the gorgeous Karen Gillan?"

Have you already come up with an idea for your next book or do you like to give yourself a celebratory break before moving onto the next project?

"I do always engineer in a break, usually a few weeks (which is why I like to complete a book in early summer!) but then there’s usually a few weeks of rewrites and edits, so it tends to be a couple of months before I start the next one. I delivered the Making of Us in June last year and started this new one in September. I want to finish it by the end of July, but we’ll see. It’s a love story set in Soho in the mid-90s, very different from the last few books. I hope everyone likes it."

Being a writer is a solitary business; how important do you think being part of an online social network is for an author?

"Unbelievably important. From the very early days of the internet I have been part of an on-line chat room of fellow authors. Since then, of course, we have seen the arrival of Facebook and now Twitter, neither of which I am addicted to, but which do form an important part of my working day. I would feel very lonely without them let's put it that way."

Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy best-selling schedule and talking to Strictly Writing, Lisa,  Good luck with the book!

"Thank you so much for having me! Fingers crossed!"

Lisa Jewell was born and raised in north London, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Her first novel, Ralph's Party, was the bestselling debut of 1999. She is also the author of Thirtynothing, One-Hit Wonder, Vince & Joy, A Friend of the Family, 31 Dream Street, The Truth About Melody Browne and most recently, After the Party, all of which have been Sunday Times bestsellers. To find out more visit her website at www.lisa-jewell.co.uk or http://www.facebook.com/LisaJewellofficial

Guest Post: Lisa Jewell - on Sequels and Unsympathetic Main Characters

We're thrilled that Lisa has found time in her busy schedule to Guest Post on StrictlyWriting. Her new book, 'After the Party', the much-anticipated sequel to 'Ralph's Party' (Lisa's best-selling debut novel of 1999) is published tomorrow and you can read an extract from it  here.

And here's what she said about writing it...

"Many moons ago, I was looking at the prospect of renewing my publishing contract and feeling rather nervous. My previous two books had sold well, but not in proportion to my advances for them and I felt that my publishers were slightly deflated about things and slightly at a loss as to how to progress my career. I kept giving them books to publish that were good and nice but not very easy to pigeonhole (odd-looking reclusive poets in ramshackle houses for example.) So, for the very first time in my writing career I thought not about what I wanted to write next but what I thought my publishers would like me to write.

And it came to me: A Ralph’s Party sequel! I'd always said I would never, ever write a sequel. Once I've spent a year to eighteen months in the company of a group of entirely imaginary people I'm pretty much done with them and ready to meet some new people. But I felt I needed to up my game and writing a sequel to the book that had started my career all those years ago (and remains, to this day, the biggest-selling of all my books) was going to make a lot of people very very happy.

So I began to plan it in my head. And as I thought about it I realised immediately that it would be a perfect opportunity for me to write a book about a modern relationship, about one of those equal pairings formed in curry houses and beer gardens and to examine what happens to those trendy, carefree lovers after children arrive on the scene. I knew then that it would not be a contrived set-up that would include all the old players from the original as of course in real life they would not still know each other. Instead I focused on Ralph and Jem, ten years and two children down the line. I wanted their problems to reflect my own problems so set it just after the arrival of their second child, which was one of the toughest times for me and my husband in the fifteen years we've been together.

And then of course I had to write the thing. It was the most challenging book I’ve ever written. I'd thought it might be technically difficult to write about people I hadn't thought about in ten years, to make sure my references to the original book were subtle and natural and to make it readable for someone who hadn't read Ralph's Party. But actually, the technical aspect wasn’t hard at all. The hardest thing was balancing the need to portray total and utter reality, the moment by moment, second by second deterioration of a relationship with keeping everything moving along with a proper storyline. That was a tough balance to strike. If I'd let the story take over the book would have lost its authenticity, but without the story it would just have been a turgid journey through the minutiae of somebody else’s marriage.

When my editor read it she said the main problem was that she’d found Jem, the female character, unsympathetic. I found that really hard to come to terms with as so much of Jem’s persona and inner workings were based on my own and in fact I'd tempered a lot of it already to make it more palatable. I was worried that I was watering down the stark reality of long-term love to the point that the book would lose its potency, but I did it anyway. I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote for three long, hideous months. By the time I'd finally laid it to rest I was dizzy with it, had no idea what I'd written, what it was about or if anyone would even like it. But now, two days before publication I can see that it was all worth it. The book is striking a chord with people and I can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

Would I write another sequel? Well, you never know, maybe in another ten years, if I REALLY REALLY had to .."