This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Lynn Shepherd's latest book, A Treacherous Likeness, is out now and we will be reviewing it here soon, but in the meantime here are a few questions Lynn recently answered for us.
Can
you tell us a little about your average writing day?
I write for my day job as well, so if I’ve no meetings in London my typical day looks pretty much the same whether I’m being creative or corporate. I do a workout first thing and then I’m at my desk by 9 at the latest. I have a brief lunch then typically work through till about 5. I can’t write in the evenings – I never have been able to, even when I was at university with essay deadlines. And when I do try it, the results are usually so poor I only end up re-doing it all in the morning!
When you are writing, do you use any celebrities or people you know as inspiration?
I do sometimes find it easier to ‘fix’ a character in my mind if I can give then a well-known face. The most obvious example is my young Victorian detective, Charles Maddox, the hero of Tom-All-Alone’s and A Treacherous Likeness. I’ve always visualised him, right from the start, as Tom Hiddleston. And let’s face it, it’s no great hardship to have him in your mind’s eye for hours at a time!
What is your favourite Women’s Fiction book of all time and why?
I’ve never been convinced about the label ‘women’s fiction’. I like to think good fiction should work for both genders, whatever the subject matter. So on that basis I’m going to give a slightly lateral answer and go for a book written by a woman, and that’s AS Byatt’s Still Life, the second in her series featuring Frederica and Stephanie Potter. Byatt is an unashamedly intellectual writer, which I’ve always admired, and Still Life is a wonderful evocation of the two sisters as their lives take different directions, one to Cambridge and the other to motherhood. I’ve never had a baby, but Byatt gives a powerful and moving account of childbirth, and the way she evokes the child’s first experience of colour is one of the most memorable things I’ve read.
What is your writing process? Do you plan first or dive in? How many drafts do you do?
I’m a great planner, and I always work from very detailed synopses, which don’t tend to change much as I write, though I have had one or two characters surprise me, like my version of Henry Crawford in Murder at Mansfield Park, who turned out to have a much darker past than I had ever imagined. I don’t think you can just dive in if you’re writing any kind of mystery story, and just hope the plot will look after itself. You need to work out exactly what gets revealed and when, and if there’s any sort of crime involved, then who was responsible and why, and who else might be introduced as alternative suspects. In other words you have to write it ‘forwards’ from the start, and then ‘backwards’ from the denouement, and hope against hope that the two ends will meet in the middle!
What was your journey to being a published author?
I used to work in the City and then in PR, and it was only when I went freelance in 2000 that I got enough time to start thinking about writing for myself. It was two and a half unpublished novels later before I got the idea for Murder at Mansfield Park, but by then we were in the middle of the financial crisis and getting the first publishing deal was tougher than it probably would have been a couple of years earlier. But since then I’ve been very lucky, and my books have been published in North America, Australia, Spain, and the Netherlands, as well as the UK.
What do you think is the biggest myth about being a novelist?
That anyone who’s published must automatically be making huge piles of cash! I’m always staggered by how often people ask you how much money you’re making – they’d be deeply offended if I asked them their salary, but they seem to think it’s perfectly OK to ask a novelist about their sales. Needless to say it’s lovely if your books sell well, but anyone dreaming of being the next JK Rowling or Dan Brown needs a serious reality check. Don’t do it for the money, do it because you love it.
What advice can you give to our readers who want to write a novel of their own?
Perseverance! You need to be prepared to work at it, perhaps for a long time, and have a very thick skin. This is a tough business, and unless you’re very lucky indeed there’ll be a lot of rejections along the way. It’s really important to get a good agent if you can, especially these days, when publishers don’t have the teams of people reading unsolicited manuscripts they might once have had. Your agent really is the most important writing-related relationship you’ll ever have. I’ve been incredibly lucky in having one who doesn’t only have great commercial nous but also excellent literary judgment as well
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m currently working on another Charles Maddox novel – this will be the third with young Charles as the main protagonist. It has another literary ‘link’ but beyond that my lips are sealed, at least for now!
Thanks, Lynn!