How To Date - How to Write a Book | 8. PLOT (Part 2)

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

In the eighth episode of How to Write a Book, Elizabeth Day’s new podclass series, hosts Sara Collins, Sharmaine Lovegrove and Nelle Andrew take a slightly more structured approach to their discussion, having plotted out how best to talk about plot. After wise advice on plot mastery  from Nelle in part 1, we continue our discussion on structuring ideas, how plots vary across commercial and literary strands? And why novels with an interior focus, or stream of consciousness writing, still need to be plotted. As ever, Elizabeth joins us at the end for her final reflections. Together, Sara, Sharmaine and Nelle are your on-hand writing community giving you the push you need to get started on that novel, memoir, or piece of non fiction you've always dreamed of writing. Join us next week for a very special interview with Elizabeth Day herself. Books discussed in PLOT (part 1 and part 2) include: •  Secret History by Donna Tart •  Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins •  The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins •  Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn •  Fingersmith by Sarah Waters •  August Blue by Deborah Levy We also talk about: Jonathan Coe, Cormac McCarthy, Sara Collins’ new novel, Ghost Story,  Succession, Thomas Hardy,  Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, Toni Morrison, Will Storr, Elizabeth Strout, classical music and hip-hop. 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

Wait, was that the group chat? Ah, sent a text to the group that definitely wasn't for everyone. You're good. Enjoy some goldfish cheddar crackers. Goldfish have short memories. Be like goldfish. Hello, and welcome back to how to write a book. It's Elizabeth Day here.

author, podcaster and executive producer of this 12-week podclass, which takes you by the hand and guides you right through, from developing an idea to getting your final manuscript ready for publication. And how to write a book is also the place to come, if, like me, you're a passionate reader and want to find out more about what happens behind the scenes of the literary world. 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 help you through the process, I've brought together a crack team. Leading agent Nell Andrew, best-selling author Sarah Collins, and powerhouse

publisher Charmaine Lovegrove, three amazing women who are also really good friends. So 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 pod class on plot, and that was quite the mouthful, but it was a literative which I enjoy. In part one, things got a little more technical. We heard from Literary Agent Nell about the core components to consider when plotting our material, and then we learned from Nell, Charmaine and Sarah, their best examples of plot-driven books. But all of that's left me thinking. It's all well and good to hear about what works, but when do plots fall short?

And when might this hinder the other aspects of the writing? Can I tell you guys the most violent reaction I've ever had to a plot? Please. I was wondering when you were going to bring up the word violence. I've been doing this for a while. to me. And what was the violent reaction? I mean, was it literal violence? It was a bit violent, yeah. Okay, this is years, years ago when I was just starting a publishing and I got a proof. And I was told that it was like a psychological suspense. And the whole campaign was like, don't tell anyone about the twist. Don't tell anyone about the twist. So I was expecting all this like drama and all this plot and all this stuff to happen. I was hooked guys. I was obsessed. I kept like reading it. I kept like trying to figure out what it was going to be.

It's like, this is amazing. This is amazing. I was standing on Highgate platform. And I was like, I have to finish this book. I was like, I'd come back from work. I can't stop until I finished. And I got to the end. And I was so fucking angry. I picked up the book and I flugged. And this guy, like, dropped out of the way because it literally skidded at his feet.

Because the twist was that I had. Sorry, did you say sorry? I said nothing. I was too fucking angry. I was like, yeah, fine. You've seen an angry black woman. Whatever. Like, let that be your anecdote.

I know this isn't normal for, you know, Highgate, but we do exist in these spaces. Anyway, I turn around and I was like, because I had believed I was reading a psychological suspense novel, right? And the end was, I'd been reading a sci-fi novel. And this is the difference between, there wasn't a twist. That was on earth. It was a trick.

And you talked about Finger Smith, which I love, because that's a brilliant, brilliant twist, right? A twist is where you're like, this is literary prowess. I get to be impressed by you. You have done something amazing. A trick is where it's an act of deception. I didn't know that I was reading a sci-fi novel.

You had set it up to be a psychological suspense novel. Then you parachute some sci-fi-spective bullshit at the end. I was like... I've had that with a book recently and I got really angry. It's so interesting. It's such a lie. Sorry, I'm still feeling by this. Why do you think you get angry?

Because... That's interesting, isn't it? So I got angry with this book because I... again, I felt like I'd been sort of set up and I'm so invested and it's not that things have to go my way. It just felt like such a cop-out. It was a similar thing where I thought it was a psychological thriller and it ended up being a sort of a sci-fi where, and by that, I mean, it was so improbable that it's not even that you couldn't have guessed it. It's just like it physically couldn't happen because like literal metaphysics doesn't.

allow for that. Like, suddenly you're in a supernatural world and you're like, hold on a minute, I thought that I was in reality. I thought I was in reality, which means that all the things that I thought were going to come together to help answer these questions that had been posed throughout the whole narrative just didn't. I was so invested in figuring out this protagonist journey and now you're telling me that actually it was all a lie. It's like when you read something and it's like, it was all a dream. And you're like, sorry, what? And then they woke up and you're like, no.

Because you, that's not what I was reading. Like, you gave me a promise. Exactly. You gave me a promise that we were in this together. What happened to you? You know? Like, what happened to you? So that's a difference of like how when a plot shifts,

then it feels really kind of lazy because it's just like, this is an easy out because the writer could, quite, they didn't know how to end it. So they added, they've added something that's really superficial or something that's like so improbable that you can't even really question it. We've sort of been programmed to expect twists. I think we've got to move away from this idea that plots are all about twists. Actually, one of the books that annoyed me most recently, which I can't name or really talk about the plot of because it's a massive book this year. The reason it annoyed me isn't because of the twist. There was no twist and one wasn't promised. It's because it seemed to be stuck in its own premise. So the same thing kept happening to the protagonist. You know, we understood the premise was amazing, by the way. I was so desperate to read this book that I did something I never do, which is I preordered it. And I only just don't preorder books because I usually get the proof. I'm boasting here. But it's not that you must preorder books listeners. It's great for authors. But I usually don't have to.

So I pre-ordered this book thinking, you know, why has no one sent me this proof? And the protagonist was just continually reacting to the same things. And I detected no movement, no development, no kind of internal reflection, the consequences weren't landing. I think that's another area where plot can let a read down, where the plot actually hasn't moved far enough from the premise to develop into something that you're really invested in. And also, that as a reader you're learning in, that you're having that.

that experience that Charmaine beautifully describes as moving through the world with someone. Because part of that moving through the world is about how do you change? How is what is happening externally, impacting you internally? And I just thought that was completely missing from this book and it really just let it down for me. Love it. Can I lead off of that actually? Because since you are the writer among us, let's ask a question. How much do you plot in advance and how much comes to you as you're writing. Like, should our listeners be sitting down, writing everything down in a blueprint? Or should it just unspool as they're writing?

Like, what's the process? I'm laughing because this is the most emotive question you can ask a writer, as you know now. She's violence every day. Yeah, exactly. You know, we'll beat each other up over the plotting and pantsing of it all. And also, it's a really tricky question for me to answer because I'm not sure that I know. What I will say is that I wrote my first novel. slightly in the dark

and thinking that I should just be sitting and writing it as it came to me and I ended up painting myself into a corner and really sort of wasting a lot of energy expending a lot of energy I don't think it was wasted because I think in the end it was about getting to know the characters

but I wrote a lot of stuff that wasn't usable and then I realized when I had that big mass of stuff that I had to impose some kind of shape on it and so I sat and sort of fed it into a spreadsheet and color-coded characters and subplots and things that were happening. And I realized at that time I was imposing onto it what would have been the outline I would

have started with had I plotted in advance, which I didn't do. And so now I think it's useful to plot in advance. And actually, because I've been writing screenplays, I am utterly convinced of the importance of the outline because in screenwriting, the outline is everything. And so I am plotting in advance. But then I think you can fall into a different trap, which is you feel like you're writing to a formula, you're sticking rigidly to the outline, you're not allowing the magic in, and I have said it before, but I really do feel like the magic in a novel for the reader will usually come at the same place where it's come for the writer. And so if you're not feeling those moments of connection where things are leaping off the page into your own spirit and subconscious, then

And you're not producing the kind of book that will do that to readers. And so, yeah, useful to have a plan if you're a plotter. But you've got to give yourself space to be surprised. Those moments when the characters do come to life and start taking over. Give them space to do things that you hadn't planned. Plan and abandon the plan is what I would say. Plan and then put the plan in a cupboard. Don't stick to it too closely and see if you can find the magic in what is subsumed within you as a result of that.

I think that's the best way of being both organized about it, but then also setting yourself up to write something that has a chance of captivating readers. So when we were working together, I remember saying something to you, which I say often to new authors, which is to slow down. Because I felt like at the time you were trying to get so quickly into it to be like, this is why you guys need to read. And I remember saying you need to trust your reader a little bit more that we are going to invest to find out. And I remember saying, like, slow a bit down, which I guess is that kind of notion of states and jeopardy, but I do, sometimes publishing makes the writers feel as if, like, they have to throw everything at the kitchen sink. And then if they don't, it's going to be really boring. So, I mean, do you feel like that's a thing that kind of happens? You know, because obviously, can you write a book when nothing very much happens and is it good? How is it different from when you're writing nonfiction where you can't necessarily control a story in quite the same way that Sarah is saying? good questions. I'm a huge fan of things being taken slowly. I've discovered, which I didn't think I would be or could be, but it's really important, like the pacing on the world,

basically. When you mentioned like Elizabeth Strout or when I think about even sort of short stories as well, that can still feel quite slow. And they just have like a, it's like less of a twist but a turn, you know, and I think that that's really, really, really interesting where you're just kind of shifting and that perspective shifts and then it takes a new level and then you're kind of, you're understanding the character or what the writer is trying to say from that different perspective. I think where it's difficult is where the characters kind of gobble up the story in their dialogue and then you're like okay but we're not there yet so then basically you're going too fast and you're telling us about things in the dialogue with the characters and you're moving

the plot along through that without us as the reader knowing that we're there and that is really difficult because it's not fair it's not fair it's reminding us again it takes us as the reader outside of that experience of being on the journey with you you know because then it's like You already know what happened, whereas actually we want to experience with you. We want to be on those twists or turns as you're finding out. And so when the dialogue gobbles it up, it's just too much. Like another example of how people do that in sort of real life is I often find when I'm doing a talk with an author, if they want the questions first, I really hate it if they want to see what the questions I'm going to answer them because basically what they end up doing is. gobbling up all of my questions in one because they've read it. And I know people find it

helpful, but as an interviewer, you're like, well, now you know everything. And there's no, there's no room for surprise or you're thinking there's just no, there's just no space. And then you're like, great, I'm really glad that I have another five questions up my sleeve in case this would happen. But now I just prefer to not give people their questions before and just say, look, trust me. And that's also what I want with the book, right? I want the readers to feel as though they can trust the writer to bring them through. As a B-Mall-Eclipse Visa Infinite Cardholder, you don't just earn points. You earn five times the points. On the must-haves like groceries and gas, and little extras like

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Oh, this is it. The day you finally ask for that big promotion. You're in front of your mirror with your Starbucks coffee. Be confident. Assertive. Remember eye contact. But also remember to blink. Smile, but not too much. That's weird. What if you aren't any good at your job?

What if they demoed you instead? Okay, don't be silly. You're smart, you're driven, you're going to be late if you keep talking to the mirror. This promotion is yours. Go get them. Starbucks, it's never just coffee. So now we've heard about what works and what doesn't when it comes to plot. We can always learn from our mistakes and our missteps,

as I know only too well from my other podcast, How to Fail. Let's now return to Nell, who continues with her wise guidance, discussing some final tips we should keep at our fingertips. So are you like read loads of books now because you're a judge on various prizes? Gone from being judged to judge. Do you feel like it's changed your relationship with plot and storytelling because of that? do you have a different perspective now than you did, now that you've seen how the sausage is made, so to speak?

Yeah, it has, but I should say, actually, I saw how the sausage was made earlier than that because I think the thing that's kind of sadly killed my love of reading more than anything else has been writing a novel. And I know lots of novelists say this. And I think my theory is that writing a novel and seeing it from the inside affects the way you read everything else, not just novels, from that point onwards. I kind of have a

sort of a forensic antenna for story now. I see story and everything. I was binging. Amazing. Last night. Charmaine knows where it's at with Rob is Blind. I was glad. Love is Blind. Hair is the exposition. You know, they get all the people together and we're being introduced to them, but we're being introduced to them and their flaws. So the producers set it to up so that we know, okay, this one has got a challenge with their parent or this one is a commitment phob. And those flaws are being telegraphed as the thing that's going to have to be sort of worked on through the whole course of the series. So I do see everything now in terms of narrative. And I do, yes, I do get very judgy about plot. And one thing I've noticed,

even in the very sort of elite prizes, is that people persist in thinking that plot should just be endless things happening, a sequence of things happening, and the emotional heart of the story is missing. I'd say that's the one thing that's hardest to get right. And even where there is a kind of emotional or an attempted emotional balance, it's usually just too structured. It's thing happens, then we get a bit of absorption and reflection and change, then another thing happens, and then we get a bit of absorption, reflection, and change. And I think the thing that's missing, and maybe we haven't talked about here when we talk about building a successful plot is peace.

Yes. You know, you can't just think about external and internal kind of marrying up together. You have to think about how quickly are these things going to happen. When should I have long moments for reflection? How should I vary the pace? When should I be making these reveals? Those are all really important questions

at going to building plots. And I think commercial and literary writers really struggle with that, in my opinion. I know I do. I felt like plot came. to you very naturally, but I think that's because you use plot as a showcase for character. And I think that is why, like, if we go back to our original analogy about scaffolding, the scaffold, you know, is the kind of the structure, but it's bare wood, it's bare brick,

it's not, it's not got the embellishment, you don't notice plot, you notice other things. And I think the plot for you is your showcase for the things that you really want to talk about. The other key, though, is it can be really true. tricky to plot something because, you know, there's a blank canvas, all the infinite possibilities in the world, all the millions of stories, and you've got to make one. If you're stuck at any point, you go back to that kind of shape and you think, I'm around about at the beginning, so, you know, the character should be doing this. It kind of helps to give you a nudge about what should be happening and where your balance should be and what the character's focus

and the focus of the action should be. In other words, you don't have to pluck the answer from thin air. That thing, although it feels formulae, can actually be quite helpful when you're stuck. That's really, really helpful advice, I have to say. Because I do think you can get stuck in too much of one stage. You can get stuck in too much of a rising action. You're like, when's the thing that's going to actually happen? This is endless rising action. Exactly. Where are we going to? But also the difference between writing a book and life is that you can actually see what's coming ahead. Right. And, you know, which is why knowing what's coming next informs what comes before. And so it's like you're always dealing with the sort of the

past, the present and the future. That's the way to look at it. You have to hold all of those things in your head simultaneously. And so although it sounds sort of lofty, but this is this is what makes it really special is how you bring all of these different ingredients together. I think just before we get into our listener exercise, I think we've demonstrated quite a lot that plot is important and in an in and in of itself is not bad writing. I think explanation when you're explaining what's happening is for me bad writing. Like when you said earlier leading us through, walking through with you, experiencing, demonstrating the plot, for me is good writing. That's when I care. When someone's like, this is what's going to happen and then this happened next. And did you not get it? Because this is what,

that's when I go, okay, wow, it's a data dump. The author isn't sure. I know, because I I do this when I'm not sure, you know, when you're a bit tentative, you're kind of working it out and, you know, that you're telling yourself the story. That's the stuff you have to chop before you send it out to an agent or a publisher. Those are your crutches. And then when the thing is ready to fly, you take those off. This episode is brought to you by Defender. With its 626 horsepower twin turbo V8 engine, The Defender Octa is taking on the Dakar rally. The ultimate off-road challenge.

Learn more at landrover.ca. Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days, delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well-groom lawn delivered, but you can get a chicken parmesan delivered. A cabana? That's a no. But a banana, that's a yes. A nice tan, sorry, nope. But a box fan, happily yes.

A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. Thanks, Sarah. For not only telling us how to plot, but for framing why it matters. It's about moving things on, keeping the reader engaged, shining a light on different parts of the composition. In a way, the plot demonstrated. In a way, the plot demonstrated. respects respect for your reader. If your fictional world isn't evolving, you can't assume they'll remain interested. But if you do nail plot and pacing, your reader won't be able to stop turning the pages. And with that, let's go to the exercises that will help you put all of this technical advice into action. Okay, guys, so now we would like to hand this over to you a little bit, and I'm going to talk about the listener exercise for you guys to do this week. Hopefully this will

help you with your own plotting issues. So why don't you read one of your favourite novels? And in the first 50 pages, write out bullet points of notes on the exposition, the inciting incident and the rising action. Then stop. Think about what's been shown here versus what you know is going to happen at the end and the impression that you're being given as a reader of where this is going. Note the points of interest to you as a reader. What questions are you asking and what do you hope the story will answer? more importantly, where do you think it's going to go? Next, go back to the book. Write out the climax, the falling action, and the denouement points.

Compare the results against your earlier impressions. How has this changed? What do you think? What is satisfying for you as a reader and what is not? And also, finally, how has the novel answered your question or has it at all? Think about the difference that the plotting has shown you between action points and the consequences of characters. And finally, are the characters? as reacting to events or creating events through their reactions. At the end of this series,

we are actually hoping to have a bonus episode where we are going to be asking you to send us through some of your submissions that we hopefully are going to be able to read and critique with kindness. And so hopefully we'll be able to kind of encompass all the things that we've talked about over this series and bring them to practical application on your own work. And now I'm going to hand over to the amazing Charmaine who was going to gently lead us out of this episode and tease up what's coming for the next one. So I am so happy to be doing this. Like it's really amazing. I'm learning so much from Sarah and now and as friends and as colleagues. It's just really great to see all of this expertise coming forth in this podcast. And it's just so good that you as

listeners are joining us. I also can't wait to hear and read your thoughts and what you come up with given this podcast. A plot, my old nemesis, how lovely to see you again. It's Elizabeth Day here with my final reflections on plot, which there's always one thing above all else that writers struggle with. For some, it's dialogue, for some, its character. For me, it's plot. And it's not necessarily that I struggle with it. It's more that I'm fearful of it. And I think I mentioned in my earlier final reflections on the character episode that for a very long time, I sort of shirked my responsibility as an author towards plot. And I made my books very character-driven. And my books now still are very character-driven. And I completely agree with what Sarah was saying,

that the way that I write plot is informed by character. So I have to get to know the characters first, and they will then do the things that need to happen to make it, hopefully, compelling read. But in the past, and in my early days as an author, I found the idea of devising a plot very intimidating. And I think it's for a number of reasons. I think, number one, I wrong. assumed that a plot had to be entirely original. And actually, as we've heard in previous episodes, there's only so many plots to go around. I mean, archetypally, there are seven big plots. The other thing was, I thought they had to be incredibly complex, which again is also a lie that we tell ourselves. Some great plots are complex and multifaceted and have lots of minor characters

and subplots. And there are authors who are able to weave just extraordinarily really rich tapestries out of those, Dickens being prime amongst them. But other plots can be extremely simple. And when I say simple, I don't mean that in a dismissive or critical way, because actually when you make a plot really simple and you strip it back to its most important clarifying elements, then there's nowhere to hide. And so actually that can be quite tricky to navigate on the page. And I think when I started taking plot seriously, actually, coincided with when I got Nell as an agent. So I had written three books before Nell took me on. And with Paradise City, my third novel, I definitely was experimenting more with plot. And the opening

chapter, something really shocking happens in the opening chapter. And I hope you to read on to find out why and how it unspools and what's going to happen next. But Nell, and as you've heard, Nell is so brilliant at expressing herself with total honesty but also with an understanding of where a writer is coming from and sensitivity to that. And she took me for breakfast and said, you've really got to work on your plot. And I remember exactly where it was.

This is going to make us sound so meager. It was in Dean Street Townhouse on Dean Street in Soho. And she said, you know, let's look at what does plot brilliantly in popular culture. And at that time, the first season of The Affair, that TV show with Dominic West and Ruth Wilson had aired, and I didn't know it then, but both Nell and I were obsessed with it, so I had watched it independently. And what the affair does so brilliantly is that the opening episode, you see two versions of the same set of events. And one is from the Dominic West character's point of view, and one is from the Ruth Wilson character's point of view. And there is are so many subtle but deeply revealing differences between how they see the same set of occurrences and it makes it totally riveting and I think that really helped unlock something for me because I understood that that sort of plot architecture could be used as a vehicle for character and it fed into another thing that I'm obsessed with which is the idea of the unreliable narrator

I really enjoy as a reader but also as an author having that kind of game of concealment and revealment? No, revelation. You couldn't tell how I was a writer, could you? Concealment and revelation where you are never quite sure whether what you're being told by the narrator is the truth, but because we have a natural inclination as humans to believe the storyteller, it takes us a while to piece that together. At prime amongst unreliable narrators, I would put Tom Ripley in the Highsmith novels. And also, people forget that Wuthering Heights has a narrator who is, I believe he's unnamed and he's unreliable, although we don't realize that for a while. And I really like playing with that. And when we had a chat about the affair

and plot, I was working on a novel at the time that would become my fourth novel, The Party. And it was being narrated by your quintessential unreliable narrator Martin Gilmore, who is also a bit of an outsider and very damaged in somewhat sociopathic ways, which makes, I hope, for a fascinating unreliable narrator, because not only are they unreliable to you, but they're unreliable to themselves, so you'll never quite sure what they're going to do because they're never quite sure what they're going to do next. And talking about the affair with Nell over that breakfast, the affair opens up with a police interview and the watching of the program becomes an act of reconstruction, an act of piecing together on the part of the viewer and on the part of the characters.

And I used that format. So apologies to the affair because I stole that opening bit of the structure. The party also opens with the police interview. And it's a police interview with Martin Gilmore that he is narrating in the first person. So already you're not quite sure of the ground that you're standing on. And something happened. And the reason I hope we read on as readers is to find out what happened. And essentially something happened at his best friend's 40th birthday party. At the time that I wrote the party, I was four years off 40 and it still seemed like a whole different life phase. Now, on the other side of 40, I'm like, wow, Ben Fitzmores had a very good 40th because he'd made a lot of money and he had it in his country home, which was a nice stately pile.

And it was about something that happened at the party and it was being reconstructed in retrospect through the medium of the police interview. And I think what Nell taught me was not only to think about plot more, like actively to construct it rather than to believe it would just all sort of happen and fall into place as I wrote the characters, but also to think of it as a character, as an additional character, which is something that I've said before. Like, what is the informing your plot and what is the thing that you're trying to say with it. And that really, really helped me. And I think that when the character informs the plot and when you give it some serious thinking, that avoids that sensation that Charmaine, Sarah and Nell spoke about of a book

feeling like a cheat. I loved the image of Nell throwing that particular novel that had cheated her with its tricksy ending, throwing it across the station platform. I can just imagine her doing it. And I think ultimately what this all comes back to is the idea of trust. We have to have trust in the writer of the story that we are reading or listening to or being told. And I thought Charmaine's comparison of an interviewer, so when Charmaine does these interviews of authors at literary events and when they ask to see a little bit of. list of questions in advance, and then they use up all of her questions. They just gobble them up

with the first answer because they know what's coming and they use all of their material. I thought that was such a great metaphor for that concealment and revelation that I was talking about. Like, you're not going to see everything in the plot on the first page, but you have to trust that you are going to get a sufficiently satisfying payoff by the final page. And that's also to do with that idea of pacing. And I really appreciated Nell's technical breakdown at the beginning of this episode. Again, as a writer, I often don't give enough thought to what I'm writing. And I think there's nothing wrong with that, really. I mean, we can all be sort of overtaken by the muse and feel inspired just to go on a sort of rightly tangent and address the things that we find

interesting on any given day in any given moment. But with something as specific and technical as plot, I do think it is helpful to think of those stages, to think of your climax, your denouement, and to think of the difference between plot and premise. And I found that's something I've been thinking of ever since listening to this episode, Nell explaining plot and premise through the prism of the Hunger Games, that the premise is, oh my God, whatever the Hunger Games premise is, and the plot is what happens if you volunteer yourself as Tribune? Listen, Mia Culper, I haven't actually read The Hunger Games, but I did go and see the first movie. My best friend Emma took me along. She was like, you don't think you'll like this, but I promise you will, and it was absolutely

brilliant. Anyway, those are my thoughts on plot. It can feel really. It can feel really. intimidating, but actually when you get into it, it's inspiring. And the best way of getting into it for me is to look at other things that do plot really well. And it doesn't just have to be books. It can be TV programs. It can be podcasts. Actually, a lot of true crime podcasts. Tell stories amazingly. One of my favorite recent podcasts is Ghost Story. And that is a great act of storytelling over eight episodes in terms of the cliffhangers they leave you with that keep you coming back for more. And, you know, great people who do it include Agatha Christie. Her books are so plot-driven and so technically gifted in that respect,

but also very accessible to read. And I'm not quite sure how she does it, but she does. And And any time I think I need a little pallet cleanser or a little inspiration of my own, I often return to Agatha Christie. Actually, one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels is the murder of Roger Akroyd. The premise of that book is that it's a diary written by Dr. James Shepard, the story's narrator. But the plot is the murder. And, oh my gosh, it's so good. I don't want to ruin it for you if you haven't read it. But that's a treat in store for you. And we'll put that in the show notes. Anyway, until next time, I look forward to seeing you then. We're talking about genre. Bye bye. Thank you so much for listening and please do remember to like

and subscribe and share a link with everyone you know. This is a Daylight Productions and Sony Music Entertainment Original Podcast. Thank you.