Introducing How To Write a Book: Episode 1 - The Idea (Part 1)

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0:19Hello, everyone. As you might know, I started my very own production company earlier this year called Daylight Productions. And the idea behind it was to platform and elevate diverse and female voices in the podcasting space. I'm so proud to present to you our first ever podcast, How to Write a Book. How to Write a Book is a 12-week podcast that guides you through the writing process. You'll learn how to develop ideas, experiment with your voice, and get your finished manuscript out there. It's also the place to come if you just love reading and want a glimpse behind the scenes of how great books, films, and TV dramas get written.

1:02It's a masterclass in podcast form, a pod class, in fact. Packed full of frank, funny and practical insights, as well as listener exercises to help your creative juices flow, we offer a behind the scenes glimpse into the world of books. Hosted by bestselling author Sarah Collins, powerhouse publisher Charmaine Lovegrove and super agent Nell Andrew, with additional reflections from, well, me. This is the podcast for anyone who wants to write a book or simply wants to know how great books get written. It's the first in a series of how-to podclasses, hosted by experts, accessible to everyone. Here's an exclusive listen to the first episode.

1:46If you like what you hear, episodes will drop weekly on Mondays. But if you're a subscriber, you'll get all episodes at once. Just search How to Write a Book wherever you get your podcasts.

2:04Hello, I'm Elizabeth Day, author and podcaster and 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 pod class 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 non-fiction you've always dreamed of writing.

2:48And 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 bestselling novelist, screenwriter, and 2024 Booker Prize judge, Sarah Collins. I think it's quite apt that we start with a moment of failure as well, because for me, accepting that failure is built into the whole process of writing a novel is step number one, and we fail to start.

3:39But now we shall start to fail. Former Agent of the Year at the British Book Awards, Nell Andrew. We get to take our collective wisdom, hopefully, and a lot of our sass and translate it into something that I hope will be actually really practical and help people create better books and have the confidence to tell their stories in the first place. And you'll hear from Charmaine Lovegrove, co-founder and MD of Dialogue, an inclusive division at major publisher Hachette. I really am just so excited to talk about the craft and art of how to write a book. Our three hosts are absolute powerhouses. These are the voices you need to hear if you want to know anything and everything about books.

4:27They'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. So now, without further ado, let me hand over to Sarah, Nell and Charmaine.

4:54Right, go on. Sarah and Charmaine, please introduce yourselves and bring in your silky voices to this podcast episode. Go, go, go. I don't know if my voice can be as silky as yours, but I'm going to try it. So I'm Sarah Collins. I'm the author of The Confessions of Franny Langton. I am very, very happy to be represented by Nell Andrew and friends with Charmaine Lovegrove and Elizabeth Day, two powerhouses of publishing, and really, really happy to be here to keep you company in the writing trenches because I've got personal experience, which I will keep banging on about, about how terrible they can be.

5:34I'm Charmaine Lovegrove. I am the Managing Director of Dialogue. It's the 12th Division of Pachette. We focus on inspiration, inclusion and innovation, bringing voices to the mainstream for readers across our society. And I love talking about literature, how it's created. I'm absolutely obsessed with my job and how we get books to readers and how we cheer on and support writers on their journey. Also, I'm really loving this idea of having that agent's perspective, having that author's perspective and then having that publisher's perspective, because ultimately we're on different sides of this, but we're all coming together to make sure that the book is the very, very best that it can be.

6:27I'm Nell Andrew I'm a literary agent at RML and I was agent of the year in 2021 and with me are an incredible array of these two brilliant women I'm literally having a nerdgasm about how this is going to go okay talking about them a nerdgasm absolutely we are the girls we are sat at the front of the bus with our notepads ready to go oh yeah the type A's oh come on totally and I never Let's rep all Taipei. I'm sorry. I just think that... Managing director of dialogue and you don't think of yourself as a Taipei. What the fuck? What? Taipei star? Come on now. No. I'm always teasing Elizabeth about our sort of collective head girl energy.

7:07I mean, we just have to own it. Exactly. And actually, we're going to be owning it left, right and centre on this episode. So how are we kicking this off? So today we're going to be discussing the very first part of this entire process, which is ideas, where they come from, how to have one, when is it good, when is it bad, what to do with it. The thing you need to do first, which is have an idea that's going to work. So let's get down to it, girlies. Let's start with a round table question, which is, guys, where do you think the best ideas come from? I like the fact that the agent is taking charge already.

7:44I love it. Sit back and relax. I've got you. I love it. I feel comfortable. I need to be guided by you now you know this as an agent I'm always incredibly interested in the inspiration for an idea and what I find really fascinating is that so many different authors describe that moment in very very different ways you've got the Elizabeth Gilbert school of thought who I think ages ago she was describing how ideas and stories come to you like standing in a cornfield and they're like muses on the wind and that the muse either hits you because you happen to be in the right place at the right time or it goes and hits someone else because they're like 20 feet west or 30 feet south and I thought that was quite a generous interpretation in the sense that not all ideas are going to come to you and not all ideas are meant for you and on the other side you've got Alice Walker who I think once talked about writing The Colour Purple and she talked about how she was sitting in a house and she heard the voices of Celie and Mr.

8:47and Suge. And again, it was that notion that they came to her and she received it. And I think the notion of inspiration is that urge to act. It's an animus, like, I have to do this. It can't just be catering for something, servicing something. You have to be in a space to receive it, which means you have to be able to ingest what's happening in your cultural moment and create something unique out of it for something. But at the same time, it has to come from within you. What all writers talk about is the sort of living with characters and how the voices come to them. And I find that so fascinating, how you not just have an idea, but the full formation and how you're almost sort of seeing them in this like full space because they're not real.

9:36They're not in front of you. You can't go and have a conversation with them. They are entirely from your imagination. And then you have to render that imagination as fully formed people that are doing multiple things at the same time and how they interact with each other. You can't just come up with an idea. You have to be utterly inspired. And then you have to do the research. You have to do the work. when the book The Confessions of Franny Langton really came to life for me. It was a combination of research and magic. So the research bit was that I'd been reading a book about Francis Barber, reflecting on the fact that there was this deep, rich, Black cultural life in Britain during the Regency.

10:23I had been this obsessive Jane Austen bookworm, but the Black characters are ghosts in that, aren't they? They're sort of never in the center, always in the margins. So reading that book triggered something in me. The story about how Francis Barber had essentially been brought from Jamaica as an 11-year-old boy, given to Samuel Johnson, the great philosopher and dictionary writer, and raised by him and become quote-unquote beloved by him, so much so that when Barber ran off to join the Navy, Johnson called on all of his contacts high up and got him brought back. And I just thought, what a wonderful little capsule of emotional entanglement right there to be in that house with this very wealthy, very intelligent Englishman, the kind of symbol of the power that has kept you uneducated and to try to fight against that.

11:12And I thought, I'm going to do that with a woman. So that was the research bit of it. But then the magic bit of it came when I was starting to write. And I think, again, this is my manifesto for this pod class. I'm going to let people know that the writing is shit. Like, you know, I tried so many different hammy, derivative, like schlocky, awful, awful false starts for this book that Nell, of course, never saw. but then there was a moment where the thing that became the first line of my manuscript jumped out at me and I saw we talk about seeing and hearing characters I saw my woman and she was standing on the steps of this grand Mayfair mansion and there was a fog and everyone was against her she was being arrested and she wanted to say something and the thing she wanted to say was but I never would have done what they say I've done because I loved her oh my god I've got chills and that was the line that gave me Franny's voice.

12:08And so I made it the opening line of my novel. And guess what happened, Nell? Do you remember? When our editor got hold of it, she said, I think you should chop this whole bit. If you read the book, you'll see that I actually put it in as a kind of little fake epigraph because I'm like, fucking hell, that line is staying in. This line means something to me. She said, well, you can put it in, but no one's going to read it. I'm like, I don't care. It's staying in. So it's actually not the first line of the novel, but it is a little sort of epigraph. That's when the whole book just presented itself to me, which brings me to my point, I think, which is that having the idea is not the problem.

12:44The world abounds with ideas. It's judging the idea. And for me, there are two aspects to that. One is technical and one is mystical. So the technical part of judging it is, does this have the kind of DNA of a novel in it? Does the premise have conflict? Do you have a protagonist or protagonists who want something that is interesting and taps into something universal and they're going to have trouble on the way to getting it? But then there's that mystical thing. It's like that feeling when you're on a great first date, you know, you've met this idea on Hinge and you're like, oh my God, this idea is making something happen in my stomach.

13:21But 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? And can I live with writing this for six months, a year or two years and day in and day out spending time with these people in this concept?

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14:40So we've heard about how ideas can come to you, sometimes in unexpected and inexplicable ways. But how do we know if it's an idea worth pursuing? We pick up again with Sarah. Can I ask you both, because people will want to know this as well, when in the process do you know when you're looking at something that's on submission to you, if it's a good idea, if it's one of those ideas that you're going to fall in love with and you think you can sell? Is it with the pitch? Is it with the first chapter? Is it something else? How long does it take you to make that call? So maybe you should start, well obviously I've been thinking about this quite a lot as a publisher and as someone who runs a publishing division because people come to me with their ideas all the time and there's just this instinct where you're like oh tell me more or you're like oh don't tell me anymore please stop talking and it's so awkward when that happens but also interesting to see how you feel about something in that moment I would say that for me, I think that you can almost say anything, but it depends on how it lands.

15:47And if it lands in a way that is intriguing and you have that moment, tell me more moment, then it's obviously a good idea. If someone's recoiling from your idea, then it's not a good idea. Yeah. I love this idea about recoiling because I tell you, one of the things you have to develop as a novelist is an ability to recoil from all the ideas that people are constantly foisting on you without looking like you're recoiling. Because as soon as people know you're a writer, at least half of them will say, oh my God, I'm going to have to tell you my life story because there's such a great book in this.

16:23And it's like being forced to sit listening to people's dreams. I'm going to be real. I'm going to be really real. I judge things based on the back of a book. When you walk into a bookshop and you pick up the book and you look at the back of it and you read the back and you put it down, that's them going, nah, not for me. When the pitch comes in, I will pick it up. I will read the pitch and I will go, not for me. People might be literally gasping in horror at this point, but that's how people read. You read the back of the book. You look at the synopsis and you go, does this sound compelling to me?

16:56No. And in part, that's also because of how people write their pitches. I'm always very much like, if you can't write a submission letter, I do not believe you'll be able to write a novel. If you cannot condense your notion of what this is down in this one moment, when you of all people who spent time on this should know what this is, if you can't do it, then no. And the minute I saw your entry in the Lucy Cavendish Prize, Sarah, and I saw your pitch for Franny Langton, I was like, absolutely, 100 % yes. 100%. It was a yes from me as well. That is so interesting. I was like, I'm ready. Please keep feeding my inbuilt arrogance guys yeah yeah yeah no that's what we're here to do that's literally the job um i'm gonna say something kind of controversial here but we love controversy yeah we love it i think you've got to be really deeply fucking arrogant i do i'm sorry yes tell them wait what are you saying that writers are deeply well okay i agree it's not controversial i think honesty is important i'm gonna again be real i think this is kind of a controversy that I find in a lot of female writers more than non-female writers.

18:02But I think because I do, I think there's a level of, I need permission to move forward with this. I need to outsource and make sure, am I allowed to do this? I think you just have to be really arrogant because I'm sorry, I think our industry is based on a little level of arrogance. Oh, because in a way, writing is a very arrogant thing to do if you think about it, like by its very nature. Come on, let's be real let's be real you have an idea it comes to you are inspired by something whether that be a painting whether that be an experience whether that be a conversation whether that be an article you could be inspired by anything whether just anything that's happening and then you're just like from that kernel of an idea that flicker of a thought you are then like characters come and then their voices and you only you can hear them and you're like i can hear them and then i'm going to write it down.

18:52I'm going to write it down on a page. And that is really, really difficult, but you're like, I'm going to do this. And I'm going to take myself away from all the other things that I was doing before in my life, from my friends and my family and my work and all the other things. I'm going to take myself away. And I'm just, because these things in my head, I can't stop hearing them. These different people, their personalities, their drive, their ambition, all of it. At which point most people would say this is a mental illness. But it's arrogance but not being an asshole. Arrogance is an act of faith.

19:22Arrogance is an act of faith that what you have to say someone needs to hear. And the problem we're going to have to dive into a little bit is when is the idea shit and you need to not be so arrogant and receive the information that this is not for you? And when do you have to keep going? This whole industry is based on a level of arrogance of being like, I like this. I think you'll like it too. Based on what? We don't have any data. My husband finds it insane. He's like, how do you guys know? And I was like, what do you mean? Because I know. I'm not a tourist. I'm a native. I'm enmeshed in this world.

19:55We don't just read the books that are published. We read the books that don't get published. I spoke to an editor today. It's like, I spend a lot of time basically reading bad books to find the good books. And it's true. That's kind of what we do. So I think you do have to be a little bit arrogant, but an idea is a promise. It's a promise. It's I am asking a question and I'm setting up a level of expectation and then the reader decides have you fulfilled the promise and have you lived up to the expectation and that's where things move on and then it's my job to tailor what you've done to make it as attractive as possible when I send it on to to Charmaine but I mean Char I mean how many times do agents probably call you up and go I've got this book and they start pitching and your eyes just go Jesus Christ especially with a division and imprints like mine, it's very clear.

20:45Our messaging is very clear of what we want. I'm very vocal in the industry about what I want. And part of that is because there's a specificity to what I'm looking for. So for example, I really love multi-generational narratives. I love family dramas. I'm really into, and I think I publish really well, books that have that sweet spot between the crossover of literary and commercial. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a really good example of that. I want to give that book a shout out because it's one of the best books you've ever published, in my opinion. I just, it's such a good example of that.

21:22Exactly, exactly. And that's my kind of book. It just has all of the elements and we'll go through those elements in later episodes. By the time it gets to me, then the agents know me, they know my team, they know all the editors in the industry, and they're making a list of all the people that they think would like these books. So I'm not really getting that many books that I just think, no, immediately. And I know that they've taken the time to think about me as a reader. So I'm doing the same thing that Nels described, which is reading the synopsis and the synopsis has just got to hit me. It's just got to hit me.

21:58Like that pitch letter has got me and sometimes I write to agents and I'm like this pitch letter is so incredible I cannot wait to read this and I'm going to clear some space but then I think the thing that happens is the living up to the promise did those characters do what you said did that world building work in the way that you allured to when I was reading the synopsis bring me in and keep me there and then I'm home you know it's like I just want to be lost in that story Nothing else matters. What I really loved about being a bookseller when I was 16 and then owning a bookshop later was the fact that you were taking people into a different world for kind of eight to 12 hours of their lives.

22:43And I just felt that was such a huge responsibility. I think all my friends were going off and doing sort of big jobs and, you know, earning lots of money. And I was like, I just want to work in a bookshop and I just want to help people find a different way into a different world and books are the best way of doing that. When you think about those eight to 12 hours, then you have to be quite confident that this story is going to keep you there and that these characters are going to keep you there and the world is going to keep you there. I take that experience of being a bookseller and use it in my practice as a publisher and as an MD.

23:19and the focus of all of that is that kernel of an idea that you are going to be illuminated by the world that's on offer on promise from that blurb and when the writer gets that right it's magic absolute magic and then when that happens on the page it all has to be woven together there's a lot going on. When you read a synopsis and you're like, it's very clear to me what this writer wants to do. I've got goosebumps just talking about it right now. Like so intoxicating when you're just like, I am in. What are they going to do next? What are they going to say next? Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.

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25:38we've spoken about how an idea not only needs to have promise but it needs to live up to that promise in the execution and we've also chatted about how authors need to have a little arrogance to keep going. Just a little, mind. So now we're going to look at which ideas are for you and whether some ideas are best left for other people to pursue. Here's Nell. Can I ask a controversial question? Another controversial question. Miss Controversy. I know, Miss Controversy. We're trying to help people write their stories and you're like... And chose violin.

26:19that's my energy today please god when i go let that be part of my eulogy please god and it depends on whether or not it's true babe it depends on whether or not it's true i feel like for most women most days it is true whether we show it or not but i'm gonna ask a question about the moral quandary around ideas because i've been thinking about this a lot since the name were going to do this podcast. I loved Memoirs of a Geisha when it first came out. I loved that novel. I adored that novel. I still love that novel. Yes. I do. I know where you're going with this. Of course you don't. Oh my God, she's going there.