How To Date - How to Write a Book | 2. IDEA (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

In this episode of How to Write a Book, Elizabeth Day’s new podclass series, hosts Sara Collins, Sharmaine Lovegrove and Nelle Andrew continue their discussion of IDEA. Just where do ideas for books come from? How do you know if they’re any good, or even if they’re right for you to pursue? Our expert podclass provides answers to all of this - and even a lesson in how to know when your idea might be ready to send to an agent. And at the end, you’ll hear Elizabeth provide her own reflections on how the lessons discussed relate to her own writing journey. We hope you enjoy our part 1 & part 2 on IDEA and stay tuned for next week’s chat on…VOICE. Books discussed in these episodes include: •  The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins •  The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett •  Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden •  Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth •  The Color Purple by Alice Walker •  Scissors, Paper, Stone by Elizabeth Day •  Paradise City by Elizabeth Day •  Magpie by Elizabeth Day We also talk about Christopher Booker, Kit de Waal, The Seven Basic Plots and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Executive produced by Elizabeth Day for Daylight Productions and Carly Maile for Sony Music Entertainment. Produced by Imogen Serwotka. Please do get in touch with us, your writing community, with thoughts, feedback and more at: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Defender. With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a waiting depth of 900 millimetres, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Day, author and podcaster, an executive producer of how to write a book. You might know me from my other podcast, How to Fail, or from reading one of my books, but this podcast isn't actually about me. It's about you. How to Write a Book is a podcast masterclass, a podclass, in fact, and over the next 12 weeks, we'll take you from developing characters

to experimenting with your voice and getting your finished manuscript ready for publication. We want you to think of us as your on-hand writing community, giving you the push you need to get started on that novel, memoir or piece of nonfiction you've always dreamed of writing. And even if you've no intention of writing anything, this is also a podcast that allows you to draw the curtain back on the world of books. Every week, you'll get an exclusive insight into how and why our most celebrated writers wrote the books they did and what it really means to create unforgettable stories. Because we all have a story in us.

But how do we get it out there? To guide you through the process, I've brought together three amazing women. You'll hear from best-selling novelist, screenwriter and 2024 Booker Prize judge, Sarah Collins, former agent of the year at the British Book Awards, Nell Andrew. And you'll hear from Charmaine Lovegrove, co-founder and MD of Dialogue. An Inclusive Division at Major Publisher, Hashet. Our three hosts are absolute powerhouses. These are the voices you need to hear if you want to know anything and everything about books.

They're also really good friends with each other and with me. So the idea is, yes, we might be teaching you a new skill set, but you'll also get a seat at our friendship table. We hope very much you'll stay for the conversation and the laughs along the way. In part one of this two-part episode on Idea, we chatted about where ideas come from and how we know whether they're worth pursuing. But can an idea ever be wholly original? Here's now answering that very question.

The truth is no one can own an idea. You can only own the expression. And I say this as an example because I think a lot of writers do go, well is my idea too similar to this or like how similar is too similar and i think christopher bicker actually wrote this book that there are only seven stories in the world i think the seven stories he said was like overcoming a monster rags to riches the quest a voyage and return a rebirth a comedy and a tragedy seven stories that's it and there's the tale of like um i think it was michael christin someone sued him for the uh about gibrasic park they're like i had this

idea about Jurassic Park and I was writing it and the judge threw it out and it was literally the same idea but the judge was like you have to prove it or the only person who ever had that idea in the entire world any point and that no one else could ever have had this idea except for you. It is a tough one because obviously when you're talking about the confessions of Ranny Langton there is the slave element to that book. It is not just about it but there's a lot of kind of inspiration there and I guess my question is like when did you decide that it was different enough to be worth pursuing when it's about a subject that has been done very often. How did you make that decision where you're like, okay, there is something different enough

about this idea that I can pursue it that's not going to make it reductive? You know what? I think that goes right back to where ideas come from because I didn't consciously want to write a story about an enslaved person. I wouldn't say I wouldn't read one or write one. Obviously I did write one, but they have to be doing something different these stories. I feel like a lot of them have just fallen into the trap. So consciously I didn't set out to write a story about an enslaved person. And I still insist that's not what I did. But the whole idea of slavery has been this kind of thing that bogged me ever since I was old enough to understand that that's what happened to my ancestors. I mean, it's barking mad to me that there are children in the world who still have to find out, you know,

you sort of enter the world in a state of innocence. And at some point you have to find out that this horrible thing, you know, the genocides and the Holocaust that have happened throughout history, that your ancestors were part of that. I find it truly stupefying. And so I think it was something I had to wrestle with. Someone said to me, after they read the book, and a good old friend of mine said, I can see that this was the thing you had to get out first, not even by choice, but you had to get it out first. And so sometimes the good idea, or at least the theme or the premise, is buried in your subconscious. us. But for me, and it is really important to emphasize this, no book is about slavery and that book was not about slavery. An idea leads to another idea that leads to another and that actually

what a book is is a cacophony of multitudes of ideas. That comes from an idea with confidence plus talent, plus ambition. Plus work. Yeah, plus work. Okay. So we've got an idea plus confidence plus talent plus ambition but and here's the nub of it all when do we know an idea is ready back to charmaine it's a bit that i find the most fascinating about writers is how you're able to know that when you're done with an idea and that you've fulfilled it what happens when you do the work to turn that idea into reality because you could just be doing anything and you just start thinking about a specific topic and then it leads you down a rabbit hole and the question for us really is like how far down that rabbit hole do you go until you realise that you're done

does anyone feel that way but you must do right I mean I still don't feel done with any piece of work I've ever finished it's just usually I'm forced to hand it over I think part of it is because the idea somehow becomes part of you, or it is already part of you, I should say. It's this idea that maybe Nell was getting at that good ideas somehow link external influences with your own subconscious, and that's where the magic comes. And so if it is your own subconscious, it's kind of always with you. Who wants to let go of their own psyche in a way? Maybe I'm being too grandiose about it, but there are parts of, well, certainly parts of my psyche and everything that I write. So in a way they're always with me. And also they're always incomplete because, you know,

yourself is incomplete. I do think in writing a novel, you really have to excavate things about yourself and from yourself, but also confront yourself in ways that can be actually quite difficult. It's not an easy process at all. I agree with that. But also, there's this sort of inherent perfectionism as well. And I think this is an important thing to say here because this almost stopped me writing. And I know there will be people listening who will feel. feel the same about a piece of work that they're engaged in because it seems shitty. And every time you come to it, this was I talking about, what I was talking about failure, like it's built in. You're coming to that cliched, shitty first draft, and your perfectionist mind

just won't let you sit with it. And that's why you feel like you're going to give up. And you just have to understand that that's part of the process. Like, if that's the single thing we can do here, that's very useful to people who are trying to write a novel for the first time, that you have to live with that process of sort of excavating mining and perfecting until that shitty first draft turns into something else. I did in fact give up halfway through. I swore I was done with it. And one of the things that got me back to the table is that I googled, I can't remember the exact terminology, but something like, quote, suffering of other writers or writers complaining about writing novels. And I remember reading these stories from the greats like Virginia Woolf, etc.,

et cetera, and how they had struggled. And I realized that what I needed was company. I needed some voice in the dark of my struggling subconscious to say, you're not the only one who has struggled at doing this. They did it. You can do it too. And I suppose that's what I'm saying, right? It's like one of the questions around this is what gives you the confidence to see it through, you know, and of having that idea. And that's what I mean. So it's not so finite as in this is the end. But knowing, I believe that this is now. good enough to send to an agent. There's something that happens, right?

Because all writers do what you just did of like, it's never finished. I don't know, I don't know. But you still manage to send it to an agent. And so there has to be a level of confidence in understanding that because otherwise it would just sit in the draw. For me, I think it's really useful at that stage to get that idea judged by someone else. And for me, that's someone else is Nell. So I'll say to her, what do you think?

core. In fact, actually, when you have an agent, sometimes they can be incredibly good sources of ideas as well. But you've got to filter, you've got to filter your own ideas and decide, has this really grabbed me? Does it have the ingredients of a story in it? Because I think that's what we've really been saying in this episode is ideas can come from anywhere, but actually, what is it that inspires that reader and what is it that inspires that writer to keep going? So I'm interested in, not just what keeps you going, but also what makes you stop. It also is the gift to the public imagination, right? That's what we're ultimately trying to do is take an idea from somebody,

guide that idea into the physical form of a book, whether it be an e-book, a physical book or an audio book. And then for that to be available at different retailers, and then for people to read those books, and then for society to be more interesting and more dynamic and more cultured because of it. I feel like this pod class is that, but in this wonderful kind of collegiate form, it's something that can keep you company because I know how lonely it is and how you feel like no one cares if you're writing this book,

but you still have a compulsion to write it and equally to give up on writing it. With MX Platinum, access to exclusive Annex Precise, Trial tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca.org.

You can get protein at home or a protein latte at Tim's. No powders, no blenders, no shakers. Starting at 17 grams per medium latte, Tim's new protein lattes, protein without all the work, at participating restaurants in Canada. hopefully we've inspired you all to pursue your most compelling ideas but if we haven't here are a couple of listener exercises to help you get your creative juices flowing take it away now so one of the exercises i'm going to impart to listeners here as we wrap up is go and ingest stuff

go to art galleries, go for a walk, get outside, go read a book. You have to ingest. Go and look at the things that really either bothers you or challenges you. Alice Walker, I think, said that we either worship or we fear things that we don't understand. And it's like, well, what do you worship? What are you afraid of? Like, Sarah, that's where Finding Lantern came from. It came from this dupified notion, like, how is this a possibility? I think a really good task for our readers is to, I say readers, but I mean writers, I'm so used to talking to everyone. The task for everybody that would like to be on this journey with us

is to really think about what has made them follow the narrative thread on the book and also maybe think about when they've read a blurb and the book has lived up to that blurb and think about when a book hasn't lived up to that blurb And at what point did you realize that you're reading the story, that you want to be reading or not reading the story? So what keeps you in a book? And have you been putting books down? And when do you feel absolutely bereft when the books have finished? And what was it about it?

That was so good. I've learned so much from you too. I like to imagine a kind of growing audience of people who feel like maybe a door is opening to that and that we're making a tiny little difference. So if we are, and if you have been listening, then I guess we just want to say thank you. And good luck and keep going. And it can all be worth it in the end, even though I'm going to continue banging on about how shit it is while you're doing it. On a note of positivity, what I will say is this, to crib from other authors, you are who you've been waiting for. That's what I would say. Yes.

Oh, my God, that's so beautiful. This is why I love you. Look, you're such an empowering. I'm a liberal personality, babes. It's my Libra energy. I just love to leave beautiful things behind. So it's got nothing to do with you personally. She said me one of these little Bon Moes earlier today by WhatsApp about my new novel. And I replied saying, Nell, why are you so good at your job? Oh my God, that's a psychological deep dive that we don't have time for in this podcast. But since we've talked about our idea, I guess the next thing we're going to be talking about on our next episode is how to turn that into voice. We're going to move from conception to execution. I know that you've heard our amazing voices, but like these ladies have got some absolutely fantastic things to talk about with regards to this subject. I am really excited to get into it. I think it's going to be great. I was just about to talk about my orgasm metaphor, but you're saying it's a voice, babe. You'll still keep voice.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the first episode of How to Write a Book. It's Elizabeth Day here, and I feel that I have. learned so much simply from listening to these three extraordinary women talking about their craft. And I speak as someone who's written quite a few books herself, but I'm in the schoolroom as well. And it's a vastly entertaining schoolroom. I just could listen to them talk to each other for decades. I find them so funny and so interesting. And also obviously experts in their field, but I also really enjoy just sitting in on their friendship dynamic. And I hope you did too. And I hope you've been able to take away some interesting triggers for thought and action. And I hope you take away a sense that we are your writing community. You can lean on us.

You can come to us for advice. We are here to hold your hand along every step of the creative process. because I do truly believe that every single person has a story to tell. And it's simply about finding that story, finding the right way of telling it, or the way that feels most meaningful to you to tell it, and putting it onto the page and enabling that story and that idea to connect with others. That is the process that we are engaged in. That, for me, is the essential truth of being human. I digress, because this week we were talking all about idea. And it's one of those

slippery, difficult things to pin down. As Sarah Charmaine and now put it, it's technical, but it's also mystical. I thought that was such a good phrase. And it made me reflect on where I get my ideas from. And it's one of those questions that is often asked of authors at literary festivals. And it's a great question because it really does go to the root of what we do. And as ever, with something that is a profound question, it can be really difficult to answer with brevity and clarity. But for me, I think I've now written five novels. Is that right? Have I written five or six? I think I've written five. And the idea process changes with each novel. With the first novel I wrote, this is Paper Stone,

I had this vision of what would happen in an unhappy marriage, which was pretending to be happy to the outside world, where one of them ended up in an accident and in a coma. And the thing that intrigued me about that was that people would have different versions of events, depending on what narrative they wanted to portray and pursue about that marriage or that family unit. And that intrigued me. That felt like there was a tension already in the setup. What might the husband have done, in this case, because it was a marriage between a man and a woman? What might the husband have done that the outside world doesn't know about? How might that

have affected the wife and what impact would that have had on the daughter? And now that they're gathered by his bedside, and he's no longer an active part in proceedings, because he's lost his voice, how might we be telling each other stories that might or might not be truthful about who he was, is, and who we are in combination with him? And that for me got to the heart of what a family is because a family ultimately is also the story the family tells itself about itself. Anyway, I was very excited by this idea and I told my partner at the time and he said, yeah, I think that's already a movie starring Richard Gere. And it is, and I forgot the movie's name, but I googled it.

I was like, it is. That is totally the movie's premise. But then I remembered what Nell said, which is that actually, there are so vanishingly few totally original ideas that actually no one can own a single idea. You can only own the expression. And I think that is a really, really key piece of advice because your uniqueness doesn't have to come from the idea itself.

Your uniqueness can come from the way that you convey it, the way that you tell the story. Your uniqueness comes from you. You are the only person in this big, wide universe who has exactly the set of experiences, of thoughts, of emotions. You're the only one. So you're the only one that can bring all of that to bear on the prose that you are about to write. So I wrote the book and I took the kernel of that idea and I actually started writing rather than planning. and that's just something that I prefer to do.

And along the course of this How to Write a Book, Podclass, you will discover what you prefer to do, what your preferred methodology is. My preference is to start writing without really knowing where I'm going because it's important for me to write into the headspace and the voice of a character, and then the character informs what happens next.

But there are other ways that I've got ideas that are slightly different from that one. So with my third novel, Paradise City, it was at the time that there was a lot of news stories around the former head of the IMF, the International Monetary Foundation. Did I get that right? I hope so. Listen, I'm a novelist. I'm not a financier. Unless by financier, you're thinking of the cake. I'm very happy to be the cake. Anyway, it was around the time that there were all of these news stories about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. and there was in particular a very, very troubling news story about how he had allegedly sexually assaulted a hotel chambermaid. And I was reading all of these stories and actually at the time I was a Sunday newspaper journalist and I was sent to cover Dominic Strauss Kahn's later trial for a completely different offence for the offense of get this aggravated pimping, which is actually like a legal thing.

thing in France. So I was immersed in this story and it struck me that whilst we heard a lot from Dominic Strauss-Kahn, the Chambermaid's voice was almost entirely silent and absent. And clearly one of my preoccupations I now see is looking into silences and absences and trying to bring them to the fall. So I thought actually I want to hear her story. I want to hear her story. I want to hear her version of events? What if I wrote a book where we hear two versions of events of a sexual assault where one person is in a position of power and the other person isn't? But what if the survivor of that sexual assault actually turns out to be a strong-minded woman who ends up being the conqueror of the situation. And I'm talking in deliberately vague terms, because I hope

some of you might go and read it, but what if actually then we follow the perpetrator of that assault and we discover what has made him into this entitled, abusive, toxic individual? And what if I could play the ultimate trick of trying to show what it is that makes these flawed individuals human and thereby trying to connect with the reader and trying to elicit your empathy, that even though someone might act in a terrible way, you might end up having a degree of understanding. And I wanted to play with all of those themes. And whilst it's absolutely not based in any way on Dominic Strauss-Kahn, it did give me a really interesting starting point for my characters of Beatrice Kisser and Howard Pink. And those two characters, once I started writing them,

unlocked the rest of the book for me. And it became a multi-character book. There are actually four main characters. There's Carol, who is recently widowed living in one's, And there's Esme, who is a Sunday newspaper journalist. Yes, I did write from life. And the four of them, their stories intertwine in ways that you don't realize at the outset. But it's also a book about London and how London is ultimately one of those metaphors for stories. Cities ultimately are just sort of collections of stories and of people and of intersections. So that became Paradise

City. And that's an example of getting an idea from a news story. But then warping it through the lens of fiction to such a degree that it bears no relation to the reality of events. And then the final thing I'd say about idea, my latest novel, Magpie, I wrote during lockdown and I was really struggling with the conceit. And I remember talking to a good friend of mine who's also a writer, who said to me, the only thing I can ever write about is the thing that is obsessing me right now, the thing that is preoccupying me. And for her, it was falling in love. She just got into a new relationship. And she wrote something unbelievably beautiful as a result of that. And it wasn't mirroring her own experience, but it was around the theme of what it

means to fall in love. And when she told me this, it unlocked something in my mind. And I realized that the thing that I had been obsessing over and preoccupied with was fertility. I'd been engaged in a decades-long fertility battle to try and have my own babies and I had failed. And very often, as anyone who has been through fertility will know, when you're pumping yourself full of hormones, you do end up feeling slightly unhinged and unmoored and out of control. And that all coalesced in my head. And I thought, actually, I want to write about these two women, both of whom really want to be a mother. But it's not going to be easy for them. That was the setup for Magpie, which became, I mean, it's been described as a psychological thriller,

and I'm extremely complimented by that description. But I don't think it is a thriller in the conventional sense. It's more, if I can invent a word, it's more of a compelling, and that I hope it's compelling, and there's a mystery at the heart of it, and there's a twist at the center of it, and you read on to find out why and what's happening. And that's an example of an idea that came from. from my personal preoccupations at that time. And I also don't think it's any coincidence

that, as I said, I wrote the bulk of that novel during lockdown and the bulk of that novel takes place within the four walls of one house. So that was a preoccupation too, not being able to get outside. I've learned so much from this discussion, but it did make me laugh when Charmaine and now we're talking about the arrogance required as a writer to take yourself away from the world and to truly believe you have something worth saying.

But that's so true. In order to take yourself away from your day-to-day life, from your responsibilities, in order to pursue this somewhat bonkers goal of writing a book, bonkers but brilliant, you actually really do have to invest in your idea, which is why it's such a good idea to give it proper thinking time. And I often say, you know, the thing about writing, obviously a lot of it is putting words on the page and sitting there slavering over your computer, but so much of it will be allowing yourself to think. And sometimes it's not even proactive thinking. Sometimes it'll just be you walking around or sitting on the bus and staring out of the window and not believing that

you're doing anything, but allowing thoughts and ideas to percolate. And that's why I was so pleased that they left us on that final idea of ingesting culture, ingest it all. That is how we connect with others, we connect with the world, we make sense of the world, and that is where we get our ideas, just ingest culture. So on that note, I'm going to ingest some culture of my own, and I can't wait to join you all again next week when our three wonderful hosts will be discussing voice. Until then. Goodbye. Thank you so much for listening and please do remember to like and subscribe and share a link with everyone you know.

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