Q&A with Lisa Jewell

We, here at WomenWritersWomen[s]Books, are in love with Lisa Jewell.

How can you not fall for a woman whose story of success starts with getting laid off from her secretarial job, followed by drinking and eating her sorrows away with friends, includes an actual wager, and ends like a fairytale? [Insert from Lisa – “So – there you have it. Dreams can come true. And it’s all thanks to a drunken conversation with a pushy friend at four in the morning in Gozo! Life is a funny thing.” )

How can you not fall for a woman who seems to hold pay-it-forward as a personal tenet? The web is full of her advice and wisdom – both print interviews and personal videos. This, from the one of the most popular authors writing in the UK today.

Lisa Jewell’s first book, the result of that wine-soaked wager, Ralph’s Party, became the  UK’s bestselling debut in 1999. In 2008, she was awarded the Melissa Nathan Award For Comedy Romance for her novel 31 Dream Street. She has written numerous other bestselling novels in the commercial and upmarket women’s fiction genre including: Before I Met You, The House I Grew Up In, and, most recently, THE GIRLS (Released as THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN in the US in June 2016).

We are so pleased to welcome Lisa to WomenWritersWomen[‘s]Books.

Let’s start from the beginning, your beginning.

Where did you grow up? How does it compare to where you are raising your own family?

I grew up in north London, in a small cottage in a semi-rural area at the very furthest end of the tube line, zone 6, virtually not in London at all. I dreamed of living in zone 1. I now live in zone 2. I love it; it’s urban and well connected, I can hear sirens at night and I’m in the centre of town in twenty minutes. My children are being brought up in the heart of the city and I’m so jealous of them! I’m aiming for a penthouse in zone 1 once the children have left home.

What were you like as a kid? A teen?

As a kid I was quiet, sweet-natured, excruciatingly shy, a bookworm and very imaginative. As a tween I was horribly self conscious, self-loathing and borderline depressed. But that phase didn’t last long and as a teen I was very gregarious, obsessed with indie music and old overcoats and backcombing. I had boyfriends who were much older than me but they didn’t take advantage, and I was a pretty good girl, no drugs, no sex, just lots of rock and roll. My biggest flaw as a teen was having no particular desire to succeed at anything.

Secret talent? 

Untangling tangled things. Oh, and I can draw quite well.

Best meal you prepare?

A Thai banquet; I think my friends would agree. Usually about three or four dishes. And all so spicy that everyone goes a bit mad and texts me about their toilet experiences the next day.

What is your preference between reading on paper or digitally and why?

I am one hundred percent in the paper camp. My house is virtually fifty percent books. I adore them. All the work that goes into making them look good and feel good, making them pick-up-able and desirable, it’s not for nothing, and you lose all that joy with an e book reader. I love turning pages, and more than that, I love closing a book when it’s finished and putting it on my shelf and saying goodbye to it, properly.

What book are you reading right now? Which books are at the top of your TBR pile?

I’m reading Maggie O’Farrell’s latest, called This Must Be The Place. I’m a huge fan of hers but didn’t adore her last book, Instructions On A Heatwave, but this – my God, this – it is completely in another league to anything she’s written before. It reads like a great American novel. It’s a big book, but I am racing through it, completely swept away by the characters and her prose. Next on the pile is A History Of Loneliness by John Boyne, bought on the back of a reading group going nuts about it on Facebook. Then I intend to tackle A Little Life, as soon as I can conquer my terror of the sheer size of it.

What author(s) are we not reading that we should be?

Tamar Cohen. Everything she’s written is amazing, from crime to domestic noir. I would start with her first, The Mistress’s Revenge, and work your way up from there.

You publish about a book every eighteen months. What is your schedule when you are writing?

I actually publish a book every year! My schedule is very flexible and forgiving. Because I write in cafés and coffee shops, I can always find the time to write even if I have other plans for the day, eg; a school performance or a meeting with my publishers. I spend my early mornings being a mum and then at 10am, when all is quiet, I take my laptop out to a local coffee shop and I stay there until I have written 1000 words. I don’t care what kind of words they are, as long as they are on the page by the time I leave.

It usually takes about two and a half hours but can sometimes take less, sometimes more. Then I get home, have lunch and spend a couple of hours doing emails, social media and things like this Q&A. Then at 3:20, I turn back into a mum and head off to collect my youngest from school. I don’t work after that, and I don’t work at weekends or in school holidays. In fact, my children could easily go their whole lives without actually realising what I do for a living!

What characteristics do you need to know about your protagonist before you feel her story is ready to be written?

Each character is different. Some I feel I know intimately before I start writing their story and then it’s just a matter of showing them to the reader. Others start as an outline, which I fill in as I go, getting to know the character as the reader gets to know them. I love it when I find myself thinking things like; no, that won’t work, X character wouldn’t do that/say that/think that. I also love little discoveries like the first time you describe a character naked and you realise that they have a freckled back. Or a small tattoo. You didn’t know it was there yourself until you described it. But I don’t have a checklist. It’s much more nebulous than that.

Regarding your process – To what degree do you plan your books before you write them? You know your character and your ending in advance. What else?

I am not a planner, not even slightly. I tend to spend a while ‘testing’ ideas inside my head. I let them grow branches and roots and sprouts in there and if they stop growing I move onto another idea. As soon as an idea has grown enough roots and sprouts and branches that it has become too big to keep in my head any longer, I start writing. I start with chapter one and I keep going. I don’t go back. Every morning I read the 1000 words I wrote the previous day, and then I crack my knuckles (metaphorically; I don’t know how to crack my knuckles) and write another 1000 words.

In theory, one hundred days later I should have a full length novel and it does tend to work out like that most of the time. Sometimes though it all goes horribly wrong. I have abandoned books 30, 40, 50 thousand words in and started again or written something else instead. But to me, that’s not a failure, it’s just part of the process. I’d rather give up on something than keep banging away at a draft that I can’t get to work.

How are you able to write only one draft? Do you revise as you go?

I don’t tend to revise as I go. If I’m sending the book to someone during the process – typically my editor at the halfway point – then I’ll read it through from the beginning and make any changes that jump out at me. But nothing major. And I’ll tweak the previous day’s output if I feel it needs it. But otherwise I just go, go, go. I’ll always hit rocks in the road, of course, and spend a few days wondering how the hell I’m going to move things on or work out the wrinkles. But I always find a way and because I write so fast and regularly I make sure I don’t spend too long over-thinking things.

Writers are told that their main characters need to be flawed and that most commercial readers appreciate them also being somewhat likeable. On the surface, this is at odds and makes some writers nervous: ‘My protagonist is selfish. I’m afraid the readers won’t want to keep reading through to her evolving into a better person.” What thoughts do you have on this? What protagonist flaws have you had success with?

One example I can think of is a character in my latest, as yet unpublished book. She’s very hard, very cold, shows very little human compassion. But in the final scene we see her turning to wipe away a tear and then kissing the hand of the baby on her lap. I wanted the reader to have their preconceptions about her confounded at the very last turn of the page, to be reminded that everyone has some goodness in them however hard their shell. But I’m not sure it’s a one-size-fits-all issue. All my characters have flaws and some readers love them for their flaws and other readers dislike a book because they couldn’t move beyond the flaws. So, there’s no one winning formula here.

All I know is that everyone I know and love in this world is good and bad in varying measures, and I couldn’t write a character who didn’t embody all those shades of light and dark. I’m not interested in writing one dimensional goodies and baddies. I have a personal preference for writing ‘bad’ characters because I really enjoy the challenge of throwing some light on them and letting the reader see right inside to the soft, scared interior world that leads to bad behavior.

How do your stories come to you – Character? Theme? Question? An environmental trigger, like the house that inspired The House We Grew Up In?

I tend to come up with a theme first. With The House We Grew Up In I wanted to explore hoarding, with the Making of Us I wanted to write about sperm donation and with my latest, the Girls In The Garden, I wanted to write about a communal garden and the what-if aspect of allowing your children more freedom than is normal. Themes come to me sometimes like little shiny gifts from the universe and other times I have to scrape them out of the darkest corners of my consciousness with a blunt knife. It varies.

At the start of your career, there was a hole in the market for books and television that explored the lives of twenty-somethings. Enter Bridget Jones, “Friends,” and Ralph’s Party. What holes in the market do you see now? 

If I could see a hole in the market believe me I’d be filling it! I hate to say it but second guessing the book market is a hiding to nothing. It cannot be done. Publishing is nebulous and unpredictable  – who, for example, might have put their finger to their chin five years ago and said ‘Hmm, you know, what the book reading public are really after right now must be some low level bondage and S&M.’ No one could have predicted that.

Also, publishing is a slow process. You may have spotted a “gap”, it would then take a year to write the book, another few months to secure a publisher and then another year to put the books onto bookshelves, by which time the moment will most likely have passed. So the advice I always give an aspiring writer is to look not at the market, but within themselves. That’s the only place you should be looking for things to write about.

Speaking of Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, that book has become the poster child for what some call ‘chick lit.’ Many people say that ‘chick lit is dead.’ Many say it isn’t. Many more say it was but it changed and now it’s back. (Many of us ask why we’re still calling it ‘chick lit’ and ask why ‘popular fiction’ or ‘commercial fiction’ or ‘women’s fiction’ won’t suffice?) One observation another author mentioned in her interview was that female protagonists have become more agents of their own change/discovery (as opposed to love-saves-girl). What do you see happening in commercial fiction today?

I feel like the Bridget Jones era was all about female readers wanting to see their lives and their insecurities reflected back at them in an endearing and relatable way; they wanted to know they weren’t the only ones who chose crap boyfriends, drank too much and worried incessantly about their weight. They wanted to see themselves as cute and desirable in spite of all their flaws, and they wanted there to be a happy ending.

Nowadays it seems that women want to see their worst nightmares reflected back at them. All the what-if scenarios. What-if my child didn’t come home from school? What-if my husband was actually mad and trying to poison me? What-if that man I flirted with at work today turned out to be a psycho stalker and set out to ruin my perfect life? What-if I took my eye off my child for one minute to attend to some needs of my own and someone stole them away from me? It’s a form of escapism; if the bad shit is happening to someone else then it’s not happening to you. It makes the reader feel safer in their own world.

You once said that your goal was to write a commercial book of a literary standard. In this interviewer’s opinion, you have done just that several times over. What have been the most impactful lessons since your first published book on your storytelling and writing?

I have had to learn and then unlearn the same lesson. Many moons ago when I was only three books into my career, I was telling my editor about my work in progress and I got to a certain point and then said; ‘and I don’t know what happens after that.’ She said, ‘that’s OK, nothing needs to happen.’ I used that as a mantra for many books subsequently but the books I’m writing now are very different to those early ‘relationship’ novels and nowadays, well, something really does need to happen, it needs to happen, ideally, at the end of every chapter and I need to know what it is.

I think writing The Third Wife was the biggest lesson in this. The theme I wanted to explore was the impact on children of having a many-times-married parent. But I jumped into it without really knowing what was going to happen, hoping it would come to me as I wrote. It didn’t and I had to kind of pin the story on it halfway through and in my opinion it wasn’t the right story and I didn’t tell it properly and I feel a little like I wasted an opportunity to write about something I was genuinely interested in.

Who do you write for? Do you have someone in mind that you intend to satisfy when you are writing?

I very much write for myself. I write books that I would like to read, which is why my books have changed direction so much over the years. When I was writing my ‘relationship’ novels, back in the old days, I used to keep a little imaginary man on my shoulder as I wrote to keep me from veering too far over into girly girl territory – I always wanted those books to have a little edge – but nowadays I have no imaginary people on my shoulder. It’s just me and myself.

What worked for you in your early days to expand your audience?

I had a run of amazing good fortune during the publication of my debut novel. It was selected to be reviewed on a very staid and high-brow panel review show on the BBC. As far as I was aware they had never reviewed something as lightweight and commercial as my book before and I assumed they’d just picked it to have a bit of fun with, a bit of ‘what-the-hell’s-going-on-with-all-these-young-girls-about-town-getting-six-figure-book-deals? type of thing. But actually all four members of the panel loved the book which was so unexpected and atypical that all the broadsheets sat up and paid attention and suddenly I was splashed all over the papers and was the writer of the moment.

My first book sold 250k copies in its first year of release (a big deal in the UK), but sadly I didn’t take all those first readers with me (they clearly didn’t agree with the members of the review show panel!) and none of my subsequent books sold nearly as well. All the publicity in the world can’t sell a book to someone who doesn’t like your books!

What advice would you like to give to aspiring writers?

I would give some very practical advice with regard to the actual getting-the-book-written rather than the-writing-of-the-book. DO NOT write on the same computer or in the same place where you do your email and surfing. Use another laptop, borrow one if you must. DO NOT install email on it. Then take it out of the house with you away from your wifi and write somewhere where you can’t access the internet.

Writing on the same computer you surf and email on is like writing in the middle of your favourite shop, with all your mates having a laugh around the corner and people dropping interesting notes into your lap every few minutes. You cannot write a book with the internet at your fingertips. You just can’t.

And finally…

Muffin or Crumpet?                      

Crumpet. With marmite.

Game of Thrones or Downton Abbey?                  

Am possibly the only person in the world who hasn’t seen Downton, so it will have to be Game of Thrones.

Neighborhood Garden or Public Park?

Definitely neighbourhood garden. Mainly for ease of access to my house.

Jeans or Skirts?

Jeans. Not blue jeans, but skinny jeans, in dark colours.

Beer or Wine?

Love both, but wine is kinder to my waistline.

Thank you, Lisa, so much dropping in. Welcome to the WWWB family!  We will be supporting and rooting for you forever more.  ☺

THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN –

Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people’s houses. You’ve known your neighbors for years and you trust them. Implicitly. You think your children are safe. But are they really? 

On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her thirteen-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden. What really happened to her? And who is responsible?

Dark secrets, a devastating mystery, and the games both children and adults play all swirl together in this gripping novel, packed with utterly believable characters and page-turning suspense.

Praise –

“Lisa Jewell’s characters are so real that I finish every book half-expecting to bump into one of them. Modern, complex, intuitive, she just goes from strength to strength.”
— Jojo Moyes, author of After You

“Full of suspense yet emotionally grounded…Fans of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Carla Buckley will adore this peek inside a gated community that truly takes care of its own, no matter the consequences.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“Rich characterization and intricate plot development are combined with mid-chapter cliffhangers that cut from one character’s point of view to the next, resulting in a riveting pace. Vivid descriptions of the bucolic park contrast with the evil lurking around the themes of teenage sexuality, perversion, peer pressure, and the desire for a complete family. Jewell adeptly creates a pervasive atmosphere of unease in this well-spun narrative.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Jewell crafts another page-turner that keeps the suspense flowing…[and] sharply evades the truth while bouncing the story among multiple characters’ perspectives. Recommended for lovers of mysteries built on the complexities of family and the dismantling of the idea that being part of a community keeps us safe.”
— Library Journal

“An intoxicating, spellbinding read that will make readers entranced with Lisa Jewell’s wicked and gorgeous prose…raw, intense, gritty, dark and suspenseful. If you are looking for a looking for a psychological thriller that will unfold secrets and truths in a shocking manner, this book is for you.”
— Manhattan Book Review

THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN is available –

Amazon                         Barnes & Noble           Books-a-Million

                    IndieBound                             Apple iBookstore         

                                        Blio             Kobo

Other ways to bond with Lisa Jewell –

Website                 Facebook              Twitter

Interviewed by –

MM Finck is a writer, essayist, and book reviewer. She oversees WWWB’s Interviews and Agents’ Corner segments. Her women’s fiction and is represented by Katie Shea Boutillier of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and the contest chair for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association 2016 Rising Star writing contest for unpublished authors. Her work has appeared in national and regional publications, including skirt! magazine.

When she isn’t editing her novel, #LOVEIN140, you can find her belting out Broadway tunes (off key and with the wrong words), cheering herself hoarse over a soccer match (USWNT! – 2015 WORLD CUP CHAMPIONS!!!!), learning to play piano (truly pitifully), building or fixing household things, and trying to squeeze more than twenty-four hours out of every day. She is active on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Litsy (@MMF). Say hi.  http://www.mmfinck.com

Tags: featured, fiction, Interviews

Category: Interviews