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 .."

A matter of trust

Receiving feedback is a vital but uncomfortable part of the writing process. It can also be mighty confusing. Someone asks why you've hardly described the hero's looks, while someone else enjoys being left to imagine him. One person raves about your gift for description, while another turns their nose up at your purple prose. Someone adores the hilarious way your ditzy heroine keeps tripping over cake trolleys – but someone else cringes at her vacuousness, making you panic and scribble in a paragraph about her love of Renaissance literature.

When it's informal feedback – from friends, an online forum or a face-to-face writers' group – there might also be issues with the individual commenter's perspective. Is it a family member who just knows everything you do will be brilliant? Is it a kind person who wants to help but worries about hurting your feelings? Is it someone employing Machiavellian tactics to climb the chart on a competitive writing website? Is it an arrogant or insecure writer who feeds their ego by belittling others? Then there are those who have interesting views on your work but can't express them – they might say 'It was great!' or 'This bit doesn't read very well,' but that's the extent of their analysis.

What you want are sensible, polite, honest and thoughtful responders who can explain the reasons behind their views. But even they can end up being unhelpful. They know you want detailed comments and that you won't fall for being told you're the next Milton, so they will find something – anything – to show they are taking the task seriously. They might point out a 'mistake' – but if the same thing were in a published book, they'd see it as a clever literary device. People trust a published author to have a good reason for doing something, but they don't necessarily trust you in the same way.

For all these reasons, I'm wary about rushing in to make changes on the strength of one person's opinion. After a few days, once the sting of criticism or the joy of praise has worn off, maybe it will turn out that the person was right. Maybe a few people have made the same comment, or maybe I knew deep down that part of the story didn't work but I just kind of hoped no one would notice. Maybe they have raised an issue that never would have occurred to me otherwise, and that makes sense of everything. But it's also possible they have their own agenda or that they've completely got the wrong end of the stick.

It's great to have trusted readers who can enlighten you about how to improve your work – but if you've carefully considered feedback in cold blood and concluded that you don't agree, I think it's equally important to trust yourself.

Diary of 2010 Festival Of Writing

Friday 9th April

Today I drove for five hours to reach York University by one thirty, the designated time for registration at the 2010 Festival of Writing run by the Writer's Workshop. As I write these words, it’s late at night. I’ve already met some really interesting new people at a Literary Speed Networking session; caught up with some writer buddies; attended a workshop with Harry Bingham and the lovely Helen Corner; watched a live Authonomy session that rivalled the best of the X Factor, and drank one too many glasses of cheap Chardonnay. Actually looking at the single mattress (pvc lined?!) in my student room, the alcohol may indeed aid my night’s sleep. That is if I can ignore the geese clacking (do geese ‘clack’?? Is there even a verb to clack??) I’m rambling. But it’s allegedly mating season and they make loud lovers those geese...


Saturday 10th April



The festival was formally opened with a key note address by the wonderfully charismatic best- selling novelist and chair of the Romantic Novelists Association, Katie Fforde. I love Katie’s books and she had each and every member of the disparate audience laughing out loud with her. People then parted to attend the many workshops offered, or pitch their novels during one to one agent/publisher sessions. Each attendee had two sessions - ten minutes with an agent or publisher during which they had a chance to pitch and discuss their work. Though this opportunity was a big draw to the conference (and my one today went very well) I do feel that they are not and should not be the main attraction of the festival. The opportunity to network, to immerse oneself in a sea of like minded people is in itself completely uplifting and inspirational – something I desperately needed before York.


After a really good buffet lunch, the afternoon offered a further key note address in the form of ‘Confessions from...’ featuring literary agent Simon Trewin and publisher Barry Cunningham - both of whom provided humorous insights into their busy lives. They were also surprisingly generous and approachable afterwards. Don't tell anyone but I am a little bit in love with ST who is a tiny bit gorgeous.

Throughout the whole day the workshops available were varied and plentiful. I attended one on ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ given by Jeremy Sheldon and ‘Creating Character by Julie Cohen (Do pop over to Julie’s website where she has a nine part section on her blog about character arc which is brilliant) Did I learn anything? Absolutely...The craft of writing is my chosen apprenticeship and I was reminded throughout this entire weekend that I’m constantly learning.

Learning though IS exhausting and I confess that by late afternoon the pvc mattress with sticking out springs and bonking geese beckoned. I needed a kip before the evening festivities began. And all I have to say about the gala dinner where everyone made an effort to dress up is that alas they still served the Chardonnay.I still drank it and I would still be there if I and a few others hadn’t been asked ever so politely to leave the building! Fellow evictees, I will not name and shame, but you know who you are.

Sunday 11th April

Feeling queasy – no idea why. I could only manage a slice of toast and two paracetamol before joining Julie Cohen’s workshop ‘More than Shoes and Shopping’ She had the most wonderful visual slides to accompany the title. Red shoes galore to match my eyes. Brilliant workshop- I love Julie’s friendly delivery and again she too is so generous with her time and advice. I had another 'one to one' which was really useful but unfortunately, in order to accommodate the long drive home, I had to duck out early from the festival just before lunch.

The drive back was long which gave me lots of time to reflect. I really enjoyed the weekend. It was busy and full on, quite exhausting but extremely useful on lots of fronts. It did have a price tag attached to it but to be honest, we were really well fed, the setting was lovely and the quality of workshops and industry people available to us was, in my opinion, more than worth it. Only complaint is the Chardonnay. I’m a sauvignon girl myself. Note to Writers Workshop – supply of sauvignon needed for next year. It’s simply a kinder grape...




PS: Thanks to Liz Fenwick for the piccies! And to Emma Darwin for her boundless energy and positivity. I want whatever batteries she's on.

Reading like a reader

I took up writing again exactly six years ago. There had been a spate in my twenties when I wrote like a man possessed and brief relapses in my early thirties when I pushed out a poem or forced myself to clock in for the dawn shift advocated by the likes of Dorothea Brande. I still have megabytes of folders called “early morning writing” to which I will probably never return.

It was six years ago that I finally fulfilled my life ambition by racing through the first draft of a novel. I know the date because it coincides precisely with meeting Jessica Baker, and we will have been together for exactly six years this Sunday. Pause. Somehow meeting that person rekindled my propensity to write – when I found her I found my pen.

The rest is a story of hard graft and learning. I signed up for every writing course and studied every manual. And in all that labour, I lost my faculty to read. For the last few years reading has been a matter of analysis rather than immersion. When I was a boy, I hid under the blankets with Robert Arthur’s, The Three Investigators detective stories. I had so little interest in what the author was doing that I believed they were actually written by Alfred Hitchcock, who appears in the stories. I swallowed Enid Blyton too, with not a critical thought in my head, just wonderment and, to be honest, envy for the ginger beer fuelled lives of those carefree country children. How I longed to go to a public school. In my teens I slid into Gavin Lyall, by now longing to be a secret agent. Even when I graduated to Beckett and Joyce and set out, in my twenties, on a frantic and fanciful attempt to surmount the entire black wall of Penguin Classics, I was still reading with an innocent eye.

The love of books evaporated when I became a serious writer. As soon as I started learning our craft I couldn’t stop looking backstage. How could I keep my eye on the heroine descending gracefully into her lover’s outstretched arms without peering round to see the stagehands manipulating a pulley mechanism in the wings? One of my favourite writing books is Reading Like a Writer by the fittingly named Francine Prose. She deliberately leads you to a prospect from which you can enhance your writing and destroy your enjoyment of stories. It has taken many books before I can let myself go again, and even now the scalpel is never far from my hand, to dissect the author’s technique. This reminds me of the character in Heller’s Good as Gold, who knew everything about art except what he liked.

Last week I took myself off to a book club for the first time. Down at The Drayton Court I bumped into people who read but don’t write – at least I’m guessing – we had no time for a full exchange of CVs. What I encountered was the strange and dimly recalled appreciation of a novel as though it were true. Real readers, unlike the freaks around here, engage with fictional characters as people and debate their behaviour as if they were actually guilty of murder or betrayal. They don’t notice changes of tense, let alone consider why. Slips of POV are invisible to real readers whereas they jerk my head away from the page as violently as the deliberate breakings of frame in Good as Gold, “the thought arose that he was spending an awful lot of time in this book eating and talking”.

When everyone at The Drayton was discussing whether the author thought her character was to blame for what happens in the book, or was on the MC’s side, I couldn’t understand the question. What the author wanted was to create enough ambiguity to keep people reading, and to stoke a rousing debate in the pub afterwards. The result was, without doubt, a character worth talking about.

The book we discussed is an epistolatory novel. To me, after about two letters from the protagonist to her estranged husband, with no whisper of a response from him, and no explanation why the letters were chock-full of facts he would already know, it was glaringly obvious that he was dead, or at least unavailable in some way that would be revealed later. The only other explanation was that it was a crap book and I wasn’t ready to entertain that. I don’t even consider it a spoiler to mention this here. What shocked me was that virtually none of the real readers clocked that. It showed me how literary devices don’t have to be as subtle as I first thought. Not because readers are stupid, they aren’t, but because they come to the work from a different perspective. They have different needs when they sit down to read.

Now back to the reading, not just to reawaken that first love, but to understand what an audience might appreciate – I’m going to learn to read like a reader.

Nice To Fit In?

When I emigrated to Australia with my partner and two young children, I had in mind that we would give it two years before taking stock. Back then, the idea of two years away from home didn’t seem like a big deal simply because it felt bonkers, unreal. I went along with it as if I were a character in a novel about a family emigrating.
That character was the mother of two half-Aussies, who joked about making them take elocution lessons rather than develop an accent; she was a born-and-bred Londoner who could never understand why people moaned about the place so much; she liked rain and was slightly too curmudgeonly for her age. She was a Brit; she was an author; a British author.
It was such a new experience, being an alien; both thrilling and terrifying. On my blog I talked about being mocked for wearing Ugg boots outside, for not knowing what a rashie is, or for being an anti-social Victoria Meldrew compared to my Ramsey Street neighbours. All good fun. What I neglected to share were the darker times; the times I’ve stood in the park, tears streaming down behind my sunglasses as I observed other mums so at ease with each other and feared I would never find a real friend; or the weeks around Christmas when I was so depressed to be away from home I could barely get out of bed and function properly (the famous Brit stiff-upper-lip has come in handy on many occasions).
I have felt enormous tension between my desire to stay me and my need to fit in - I wanted to feel included, but only on my terms. Over time, my children have taught me better than anyone that you can be flexible without losing your identity. I can say capsicum for pepper now without thinking about it, or deliver a “no worries” casually; I can bbq, talk about Australian politics or house prices, or advise you on ant extermination (wow, don’t I sound fascinating?). The Australian literary scene is far more familiar to me now: I’ve moved beyond Kate Grenville and Peter Carey into less well-travelled authors, and it’s been my favourite aspect of this educational period.
We’re weeks away from that two year anniversary, and it feels as bonkers as ever - except that I accept this is my life; it isn’t fiction. But now there’s a new challenge: my novel, Girl, Aloud, published in the UK last November, is coming to Australia in early April. Just when I’ve found my own groove in Melbourne, now my book needs to do the same.
There have been doubts from others (Australians don’t know Simon Cowell, that whole aspect will be lost on them) and from within (I’m no Simmone Howell / Jaclyn Moriarty / Melina Marchetta - they’ll hate me!). The excitement about holding a launch and finally seeing my book on a shelf instead of on a friend’s camera phone has at times been overshadowed by the thought of Girl, Aloud being sent back to the UK with its tail (tale?) between its legs.
What makes a book travel well? Did those authors who have enjoyed worldwide success think about a worldwide audience as they were writing, or did they just get lucky? Which countries share the same humour? What makes Australian literature Australian? I could generalise, I could philosophise, I could bury my head in the sand on St Kilda beach and wait for my book to come and go. In truth, there is nothing I can do about it. My book is what it is. It will, as I have done, try to elbow a little space for itself over here. Perhaps there will be, as there have been for me, times when my book fits in, and other times when it sticks out. As I have found, that can be a good thing.

Emily Gale is the author Girl Aloud, published by Chickenhouse.

We are delighted to announce . . .

At Strictly Writing we love everything about writing, apart from all the bits we hate - writer’s block, writer’s bum, rejections, etc, etc - but really, we love it all.

Now we want to celebrate writing with a competition, to provide a place to showcase some stories and to offer a prize to the overall winner.

We’re excited to tell you we’ve created The Strictly Writing Award, sponsored by Strictly Writing with a cash prize of £300 for the winning story. Unlike many competitions, this one is free to enter.

We will showcase one story per month for ten months on Strictly Writing, and each of those stories will be entered on the shortlist for The Strictly Writing Award.

When all the ten shortlisted stories are on display on Strictly Writing, the winner will be chosen, with your help. In keeping with the spirit of our namesake, Strictly Come Dancing, the winning story will be decided by a combination of 50% votes from the SW readership and 50% by the SW team. We’ll post instructions on how to vote, nearer the time.

The story to be showcased each month on Strictly Writing will be selected by the SW team. We commit to read at least 30 stories each month from those sent to us. Any we don't manage to read will be placed in a queue, to be read and considered for later months. In the last month we will read another 100, so stories sent in towards the end of the competition can be included too.

How to send your story

Simply email your story to strictlywriting@btinternet.com

Anyone can enter, wherever you are in the world, so long as you are over 18 years of age, and the story is in English, with one entry per person.

The story should be included in the body of your email, as we can’t handle attachments. Please include the name of the story and your name in the subject line of the email.

The stories must be no longer than 2000 words, but can be on any subject.

The stories should be unpublished, including publication on any internet sites. You will retain full copyright of your story, but by sending it to The Strictly Writing Award, you give us permission to post it on Strictly Writing.

The shortlisted stories will be showcased here on the last Friday of each month, starting on Friday 30 April. To see the stories please come back here.

What we are looking for

We’re looking for stories that have a strong effect on us, stories that make us laugh or make us cry. We’re not pretending to be experts or professional judges, but we know what we like and we’d like to celebrate that.

So, dust off your quill, unblock your inkwell and send us your story. We're ready to start reading it now.

Guest blog by Kathryn Robinson of Cornerstones

I’ve been trying to think of a good metaphor for the strange journey I’ve had as an editor starting to write; for the process of moving from teacher to pupil; from feeling like I know all about my subject to knowing I know nothing.

Unsurprisingly, I binned my first, oh, 20 or 25 ideas.

Then I hit on it. Imagine a midwife who’s spent her life delivering babies, who understands babies and mothers almost better than she understands herself, who plays her part in the birth, but is only ever behind the scenes.

She gets pregnant. Everyone she knows trills, ‘Oh, you’ll be alright! This must be a walk in the park for you, lucky thing.’ She nods and smiles, digging her nails into her palms. She knows she ought to be the best mum in the world, but inside she’s so terrified of getting it wrong that she’s suddenly paralysed about the simplest of decisions. Home birth or hospital? Disposable nappies or organic palm-fibre pants? Pink or Blue? She gets to the point where people asking her about the baby makes her heart lurch.

Because everything’s different when it’s your baby.

I have always had huge admiration for anyone who finishes a novel. Editing requires a similar level of focus, and it can also be a very creative process, but even with those projects you feel most editorially involved in, there’s always an element of detachment because ultimately it’s not your creation. But a calm, capable editor doesn’t necessarily translate to a confident writer.

Personally, my writing process goes something like the following:

Have an idea. Fall in love with it. Rush to get something down before it disappears. Start writing in a pink haze of passion. Finish a chapter. Re-read.

Spot all the things that aren’t perfect (which I think of as ‘mistakes’ even though rationally I know that at this stage they’re a perfectly natural part of the creative process). Edit.

Write a bit more. Re-read. Spot all the other cock-ups. Edit. Re-read.

Feel sort of satisfied.

But by this time I’ve lost momentum. The initial excitement of the idea has receded, giving me time to GET SCARED. What if it’s not good enough? What if I’ll never be able to finish it? And of course, the mere act of thinking all these things is enough to make them come true. I file the idea under ‘to be continued’, and I hide under my bed for six months hoping that no-one will ask me about it.

You can be the best, most fastidious writer in the world, but it means nothing if you can’t finish the blooming thing. And at this early stage in the writing process, I need to learn to set perfectionism, self-doubt and fear aside. One author I know has a sign on her computer saying ‘Write Crap’. Maybe I need one of these.

Anyway, the more I think about my metaphor, the more I realise it is true. Ideas are like babies, in so many ways. They’re messy, beautiful, flawed and fragile, and they need time and understanding – not just criticism – to flourish.

Kathryn Robinson is Managing Editor of the Cornerstones Literary Consultancy