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One of the questions I get asked most at events and talks is how I write \u2013 how I plot, how I come up with ideas, what an average writing day looks like.<\/p>\n
The truth is that it varies from book to book. Not so much the writing day \u2013 mine are very samey, as I try to treat it like a job. I go to the desk when my kids have left for school, and largely stay there, barring coffee and lunch breaks, until they come home.<\/p>\n
But the plotting and the way the books come to me\u2026 that feels like it changes every single time. So when I decided to write a piece about how I write, I knew straight away that it would have to be book-specific, because every book is different. Hence the title of this post.<\/p>\n
The It Girl <\/em>was maybe more idiosyncratic than most, because it was a book that came out of lockdown. I\u2019ve written a book a year ever since my first thriller, In a Dark, Dark Wood <\/em>came out in 2015. But like so many others, my working life was rudely interrupted by covid, and in 2020 I found myself suddenly not writing, but homeschooling, stressing out, and doomscrolling through endless graphs of exponential spread. My house was suddenly full of people \u2013 my husband (who is a virologist) was on endless zoom calls, my kids were struggling with virtual school, powerpoints and MS Teams. Everyone needed feeding and comforting and cheering up \u2013 and my time to write went out of the window, along with the headspace to think about plots. For the first time in more than five years, twelve months came and went, and I didn\u2019t write a book.<\/p>\n But when my kids returned to school and my husband got used to his new routine of home working, I found myself back at my desk\u2026 and it turned out that an idea had been simmering there all along. And it was one that chilled me to the bone.<\/p>\n Most of my books come out of some kind of fear or phobia of my own \u2013 one of those what ifs <\/em>that wakes you up in the middle of the night, wondering what you\u2019d do if it happened to you. What if you saw something terrible and no-one believed you? (The Woman in Cabin 10.<\/em>) What if a child in your care came to harm? (The Turn of the Key.)<\/em>\u00a0 What if poverty and desperation drove you to commit a crime? (The Death of Mrs Westaway.) <\/em><\/p>\n The It Girl <\/em>rests on a what if that leaves me cold with relief that I\u2019ve never been in Hannah\u2019s shoes. What if you made a terrible mistake that resulted in an innocent person going to jail? The It Girl <\/em>certainly isn\u2019t based on any specific court case, but miscarriage of justice cases crop up every few years and, understandably, the focus tends to be on the person mistakenly convicted of a crime and their suffering and relief when they\u2019re finally exonerated \u2013 usually at the end of a long, bitter process of appeal and campaigning. The news coverage, rightly, centres the innocent victim of the wrongful conviction. But I couldn\u2019t help wondering, how must it feel to be the person who gave the crucial evidence? Not someone who lied deliberately to get an innocent person locked up \u2013 I couldn\u2019t imagine ever doing that myself, and I wouldn\u2019t have much sympathy for a character who did. But someone who said what they thought <\/em>they saw, only to realise that perhaps they were mistaken. That person, I realised, was Hannah. Someone who\u2019s been through a terrible experience when her best friend is killed, only to find herself in a very different kind of nightmare when she starts to doubt her own judgement.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t typically plot much \u2013 by which I mean I don\u2019t sit down and plan out scenes, or write out a synopsis. I have done it, occasionally, usually when my publishers have asked me for a bit more information about what I\u2019m planning to write. But generally I keep things fluid, in my head, allowing me to play with elements more easily, shuffle them around, reorder, reassign. That doesn\u2019t mean, though, that I\u2019m not planning ahead. I think about the characters and their back story. I think about the scenes that I want to write, the ones I\u2019m looking forward to, and how I need to get the characters into position for them. And I almost always know how did it \u2013 certainly I did with this book. The antagonist was right there from day one. I knew who, and I knew how \u2013 which (if you\u2019ve read The It Girl)<\/em> you\u2019ll know is an important part of the plot \u2013 both those elements were in place long before I started writing, and that enabled me to drop the breadcrumb clues that might enable a sharp-eyed reader to solve the mystery (though I hope not everyone!)<\/p>\n Maybe it was because of the months spent not <\/em>thinking about it, and definitely not writing, but when I did eventually sit down, The It Girl <\/em>was a fast book to write. It was interrupted by two more lockdowns, but each time I parked the characters in the back of my head and trusted that I would pick up their threads eventually. In some ways it felt the closest to my experience of writing In a Dark, Dark Wood <\/em>when I was fitting writing in around a day job and small children.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t do much location research, because most of the colleges were still closed for covid, and\u00a0 barring a few technical legal details, there wasn\u2019t much procedural stuff to find out either. It was almost like the book was there, in the back of my mind, and I just had to get it down.<\/p>\n So maybe, the real title of this post should be not, how I wrote The It Girl<\/em>, but how I didn\u2019t write The It Girl<\/em>. Because the truth is that most of that book wasn\u2019t written at my desk, but dreamed up while I was preparing lunches, baking banana bread, or wrestling with MyMaths. And that\u2019s how I write.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …or rather, how I wrote The It Girl<\/p>\n One of the questions I get asked most at events and talks is how I write \u2013 how I plot, how I come up with ideas, what an average writing day looks like. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"2880","footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-it-girl"],"yoast_head":"\n