Transcript
Speaker: Oh, a spicy question.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
Speaker: You can fix plot holes, but if the writer... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
Speaker: So it's kind of a gamble.
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
Speaker: On today's episode, I am joined by international bestselling romance author, Karen Swan.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Hi, Jamie.
Speaker: How are you?
Speaker: I'm great.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: How are you?
Speaker: Very well, thanks.
Speaker: It's lovely to be here.
Speaker: Yes, so nice to have you.
Speaker: Thanks for coming.
Speaker: Let's jump straight in with your, you have multiple upcoming releases, but let's talk about the big one and that being The Lost Lover, which is the third and final novel in your Wild Isle series out July 18th.
Speaker: Tell us a little bit about the series and this final entry.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So actually, The Lost Lover is the third book in four for the series.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So unfortunately for me, I've still got another one to write, which I'm about to start next week, actually.
Speaker: But The Lost Lover is the third book in what we're calling the Wild Isles series.
Speaker: And the Wild Isles is actually...
Speaker: archipelago in the North Atlantic called St Kilda and it's basically the outermost of the Outer Hebrides it's about 100 miles off the Scottish mainland and the islands were inhabited for 2000 years until the summer of 1930 when the islanders asked to be evacuated they petitioned the British government for help because basically their
Speaker: numbers had dropped below critical mass.
Speaker: There was only 36 islanders on the island at that point.
Speaker: And the reason survival was so difficult for them is that St.
Speaker: Kilda really isn't like any normal island.
Speaker: If you went to the rest of the Outer Hebrides, if you went to Skye or Lewis or Harris or Bembecula, you would be able to, you know, get there on a rowboat and drop anchor at a beach
Speaker: and make your way in.
Speaker: St Kilda is entirely different.
Speaker: As I said, it's 100 miles off the coast, so it really is off on its own deep in the Atlantic.
Speaker: And it's basically surrounded by sea cliffs.
Speaker: It's got the highest sea cliffs in Britain.
Speaker: And it's surrounded on all sides by these sea cliffs.
Speaker: And it's only two miles long.
Speaker: So if you can imagine...
Speaker: that it's got these really, really high mountains in it.
Speaker: And you can imagine the steepness of them if you've only got two miles of land mass and then these enormous mountains.
Speaker: And there's really only one landing point on the whole island, which is called Village Bay.
Speaker: And there's an approach way there.
Speaker: And so because it was such a, it's so extreme geologically, it's,
Speaker: It meant they suffered very high winds.
Speaker: No trees were ever able to grow there or crops.
Speaker: So they've got no shelter in that regard.
Speaker: And because they weren't able to grow crops either, because of the sea spray and the wind and the exposure, the only way really they could survive was by scaling the cliffs and catching the seabirds and living off them and their eggs.
Speaker: So in order to survive and in order to be able to climb these cliffs, you obviously need
Speaker: able-bodied people, uh, within a certain age range.
Speaker: And with only 36 Islanders, um, half of whom were old, some of whom were children, you can imagine that there just weren't enough bodies, um, to go around in order to be able to, uh, keep the food coming in.
Speaker: And so they had to request evacuation in the summer of 1930.
Speaker: Um, and, and I just had never heard of St.
Speaker: Kilda until I came upon, um,
Speaker: a tiny little mention of it in the Times newspaper one random Saturday morning.
Speaker: And it had this extraordinary photograph, black and white photograph of these, this group of men staring at the camera.
Speaker: They were quite, I don't want to say feral, because I don't want to make them sound like they were wild beasts, but they were clearly lived a very hard, rugged outdoor life.
Speaker: They were very weather beaten, very bearded, and they had these beautiful blue eyes and they were very arresting.
Speaker: It was a very arresting image.
Speaker: And the headline was 90 years since St.
Speaker: Kilda gave up.
Speaker: And it was sort of the gave up that piqued my interest because I thought, well, why not just say 19 years since St.
Speaker: Kilda evacuated or since they left?
Speaker: And it was only really when I did a quick Google and saw quite how extreme their circumstances were and how difficult it was to scratch out an existence there that my interest was piqued.
Speaker: That's so interesting.
Speaker: It's crazy to me that that's real because it sounds like something a fantasy author would come up with in a world building process of their novel.
Speaker: Having people scale the cliff sides to sort of catch birds.
Speaker: It's one of those stranger than fiction things.
Speaker: Yeah, it really is.
Speaker: So the islands were inhabited basically since the Bronze Age.
Speaker: There was actually genetic modification of the St.
Speaker: Kildans over that 2000 year period.
Speaker: And because they would climb barefoot, they actually developed over the generations and frankly, the millennia to have
Speaker: longer big toes for grip on the cliffs.
Speaker: So it's actually the St Kilden toe is actually a thing.
Speaker: Because, you know, that they in order to survive, I mean, it was Darwinism at its, you know, at its simplest, you know, in order to survive, they had to adapt.
Speaker: And so they effectively grew these long toes for gripping the cliffs.
Speaker: But, you know, genuinely, it is like something out of a fantasy novel.
Speaker: I mean, I'd obviously looked at loads of photographs and books and I'd found old films and, you know, you can see it.
Speaker: But nothing really prepares you for that first journey over.
Speaker: Because it's a UNESCO World Heritage site now, there's only a certain number of permits given to...
Speaker: sort of operators to be able to go and land in Village Bay.
Speaker: There's only about six companies and they have very small little sort of 12 seater boats.
Speaker: So, you know, obviously they don't want the island to be overrun.
Speaker: So it's very strongly regulated and you can only sail between May and early September because the seas are just too rough the rest of the year.
Speaker: And so you're in this tiny little boat and out you go.
Speaker: And it takes four hours to make the crossing from sky, even now with these, you know, super duper engines.
Speaker: And, you know, you're going for four hours.
Speaker: And then after about the third hour, you see it come up on the horizon.
Speaker: And of course, there's nothing else to see, like 360 degrees round.
Speaker: It is just
Speaker: It is just horizon with nothing on it.
Speaker: You're in the middle of the sea, of the ocean, and suddenly this rock appears.
Speaker: And it's sort of like a cathedral that suddenly just rises from the sea.
Speaker: And the only way I can really describe it is to say it's like it's out of the Games of Thrones set.
Speaker: And genuinely, it is gothic, the rocks are black, and then you've got...
Speaker: thousands upon thousands of seabirds wheeling in the sky above you.
Speaker: And that is a sound that you just don't hear anywhere else.
Speaker: I mean, that density of seabird life is so extreme that it's sort of an assault of the senses.
Speaker: And you're coming in on this tiny boat, on these big waves towards these rocks and all these birds.
Speaker: And it really is extraordinary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: It sounds amazing.
Speaker: I can see why it grabbed your attention and you suddenly wanted to set, you know, a whole series of books.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I mean, on the one hand, it's brilliant because it just feels so raw and sort of primal and it allows a lot of scope dramatically, you know, high passions, secrets, things like that.
Speaker: But on the other hand, I mean, I've basically got 36 islanders in some fields with mountains, you know, and in terms of it makes it very difficult as a writer to create scenes that feel differentiated, to create tension, because I've really got...
Speaker: nothing at all to work with other than the relationships between these people and their environment.
Speaker: You know, I don't have any props I can rely on.
Speaker: I can't have them going out to the shops or leave, you know, going somewhere else.
Speaker: There's nowhere else to go.
Speaker: They're all stuck there.
Speaker: So there were definitely times during the writing process when I felt really quite furious with myself for deciding that I could sustain four books and
Speaker: um, with 36 Islanders in, in, um, on an Island with nothing to do.
Speaker: Uh, but it did concentrate the mind.
Speaker: That's for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I guess also that you can't bring in a sort of stranger because presumably everyone knows each other.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: You know, there's only, I say there's only one place to land.
Speaker: There's village Bay, which is the place to land if, and the prevailing wind direction is, um,
Speaker: not south east so if there's a south easterly wind you can't drop anchor at St Kilda but luckily that isn't the prevailing wind direction but when the wind does change you then can't land there and there is a very very tiny cove on the other side of the island on the north side which does give you an approach in that in that rare circumstance that the wind has flipped round but yes so you know 99% of
Speaker: of landings would have been in village bay.
Speaker: So all of the islanders would see anytime anyone came into the bay.
Speaker: There's no hiding.
Speaker: And also, of course, I couldn't have people coming and going as they pleased throughout the year, because again, you can only get access to the island even now between late April, early May and
Speaker: end of August, early September.
Speaker: After that, the seas are too big and, you know, a big whaling ship could make it or, you know, the big fishing boats, but certainly not the sort of craft that the islanders would have had or any sort of leisure craft.
Speaker: It's just not viable.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's cool.
Speaker: I mean, it sounds amazing.
Speaker: It's such an interesting setting.
Speaker: And before we, before we hop onto something else, just to, I mentioned there were multiple releases, obviously the new ones coming out, but also the paperback of book number two, The Stolen Hours, that is coming out on the 9th of May as well, in case anyone was interested in getting that.
Speaker: I'd love to talk about your books kind of more universally.
Speaker: You've written dozens of books now.
Speaker: Do you know how many books it is?
Speaker: I've sort of stopped counting.
Speaker: I think it's about 26.
Speaker: My husband's in the council, so he's very good at telling me exactly what I have and haven't done.
Speaker: He has spreadsheets at his fingertips that could tell me anything.
Speaker: So I think I'm at about 26 because I do two books a year.
Speaker: So I haven't actually been writing for 26 years, but...
Speaker: It's a fairly hectic, intense schedule, but I also do quite like it that way.
Speaker: I think that otherwise I would just, I'm more productive if I've got stuff to do.
Speaker: The less I have to do, I just sort of begin to rot.
Speaker: I just sort of sit down and, you know, and I don't achieve anything.
Speaker: It's not like I'm particularly productive in those down times.
Speaker: So I've sort of worked out that it's better to just keep busy.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I totally understand.
Speaker: Sometimes it's like the more time you have, the less you actually get done.
Speaker: Is this the first time that you've done a series?
Speaker: Am I right in thinking the rest of your books are standalone?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And oh my God, I've so done it the hard way.
Speaker: I wish there was some sort of book about how to write books and specifically how to write a series.
Speaker: Because I suppose as with any author, you're constantly learning on the job.
Speaker: And of course, it's very public if you fail.
Speaker: If you make a mess of it and it still gets published, then of course the whole world is a critic and everyone's there to judge you.
Speaker: So it's a difficult thing anyway, being a writer and sort of trying to perfect your craft, so to speak, as you're going along.
Speaker: But writing a series is a whole other adventure.
Speaker: And with hindsight,
Speaker: I don't think that next, if I was to do it again, I wouldn't do a series that was contemporaneous.
Speaker: So what I've done with the Wild Isles series is I have a central mystery as to the fate of a man on the island, a very powerful man on the island.
Speaker: And each of the four books of the series, each one concentrates on a different young woman from the island.
Speaker: So in The Stolen Hours, the protagonist is Varee McKinnon
Speaker: And in The Lost Lover, it's Flora McDonald.
Speaker: And in the first book, The Last Summer, it's a girl called Effie Gillies.
Speaker: And they're all very different.
Speaker: And in each book, we see their life on the island.
Speaker: And each book is split into half of pre-evacuation and then post-evacuation.
Speaker: And we see their lives before and after the island life, but also their own involvement in this central mystery.
Speaker: which ties all the books together.
Speaker: And it's been really interesting to write it in this way because effectively we've got a bit of a murder mystery told from four different perspectives.
Speaker: And so it gives you that unreliable narrator feeling of, well, where is the truth?
Speaker: What can I rely on?
Speaker: Because what I've done is we might have a scene in book one with Effie in the last summer, and we think we know what we know in that scene,
Speaker: But then in the third book with Flora in The Lost Lover, we see that scene from another character's perspective and it's either added onto or it's preceded by action before that.
Speaker: Do you see what I mean?
Speaker: We're coming in all the time and giving further context and perspective to things that we think have been established as fact.
Speaker: So it's really fascinating
Speaker: for me, from an intellectual standpoint, to write a book in that way, to keep changing what we think is the truth.
Speaker: It's limiting because it means that if I have written a scene in book one or book two, then in book three, if I show that scene again, it has to be absolutely, like the dialogue, for example, has to be exactly as it was in the previous scene.
Speaker: So I'm very tied into that.
Speaker: But then, of course, I add on the other character's perspective, you know, there.
Speaker: But it's very limiting.
Speaker: So if I've said it was raining in that particular scene, I can't suddenly come in and it's, you know, it's a blue sunny day.
Speaker: day.
Speaker: So that's just a really basic way of describing it.
Speaker: But it's a very limiting, it means that with each book I'm writing in the series, I have fewer and fewer options with the scenes that I revisit.
Speaker: And so that sort of restriction means I have to do a certain amount of forward planning, obviously, but it's very difficult to predict three books in advance to that level of detail.
Speaker: Um, so it's been challenging and there have been times when I've written, literally written a chapter and then I've gone back to one of the other books and realized that, oh no, oh no, I said something in that book and, and now that, that means that this can't stand and I've had to take it out or change it.
Speaker: And that's frustrating.
Speaker: Um, but it's pleasing when it does all come together.
Speaker: Listening to that,
Speaker: I know how difficult it is just to maintain continuity in a single book.
Speaker: You'll often go back and redrafts and just think, ah, this thing that I said now completely contradicts the thing that happens later.
Speaker: To juggle that between three or four different books must be so complicated.
Speaker: Do you have a kind of mind map kind of plan somewhere, which just kind of highlights where you can and can't do and go?
Speaker: Yes, I do have a lot of mind maps written down because those do help me a lot.
Speaker: And I do skim through the other books before I start writing.
Speaker: But still, you know, you can still miss a tiny detail.
Speaker: And there's a lot of flipping backwards and forwards, trying to make sure that I'm covering all of the bases.
Speaker: um it's definitely the hard way to write a series and what I should have done was still I could have still had the same story over four books but I could have spool I could have had split narrative throughout all the books and had them running consecutive consecutively um um rather than
Speaker: having them as standalones, but connected by a central mystery.
Speaker: So I think if I do a series again, I will probably do it in a different way, just because now I've done this this way.
Speaker: And hopefully once I finish the fourth book, and I hopefully pull it off, I'll be like, okay, I've done that.
Speaker: Now I'll try and do something new because that is something I try and do in all my books because I write so many.
Speaker: I have this real fear of sort of falling into patterns or tropes or just sort of a formula, I suppose.
Speaker: And so I,
Speaker: one thing that I do just to shake it up for me so that I don't rest on my laurels is I will change the structure of how I do each book.
Speaker: Because I do two books a year, I do the summer book, which is currently the St.
Speaker: Kilda stories.
Speaker: But I also do a Christmas book, which is completely standalone.
Speaker: So I will try to, either I might have a past present storyline.
Speaker: I might have a he said, she said story.
Speaker: I might have a prismatic experience with multiple narrators.
Speaker: So I'm trying all the time to change how the book reads so that the readers don't feel like, oh, yeah, I've read this book of Karen's before.
Speaker: You know, I want them always to feel fresh.
Speaker: But, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I guess that's something with the, you know, and you've written 25 plus books at this point, I guess the more books that you have, the more front of mind it is that you are actively trying not to retread the same ground to bring a new and original experience.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: And to the extent where I don't like to repeat a name that I might have used or if I had twins in a book or if I had, you know, someone died in a fire or, you know, just details like that, I really try not to repeat.
Speaker: But, you know, obviously at a certain point, you know, when you've written as many books as I have, you know, there's going to get to be a point where there is, I'm going to echo that.
Speaker: something like, like a detail or a name.
Speaker: Um, but that, that's about as, you know, as far as I'll, I'll allow it.
Speaker: Um, I really try really hard to keep them fresh and new.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, it's obviously something you're very conscious of.
Speaker: So I presume you will actively go out of your way to do that.
Speaker: Is that also something that when you get to the sort of editorial phase of a book, will your editor flag something and maybe say like, oh, you actually used a similar name or there was a similar kind of thing that happened in a previous book?
Speaker: Do you know, they haven't, but I think that's just because I've had about three editors over the course of my
Speaker: tenure so far.
Speaker: And funnily enough, it comes more from me.
Speaker: So I'll be much more aware that I've, and I'll sort of say to my husband, oh God.
Speaker: And he's like, no one is reading it forensically.
Speaker: No one's going to care if you put twins in book two and now you've got them in book 18, you know?
Speaker: And I'm like, he said, I care, you know?
Speaker: And I put a lot of pressure on myself with it.
Speaker: And because I've had that break in,
Speaker: you know, continuity of care, so to speak, with three editors over, say, 15 years, they won't know the entirety of my backlist in the same detail, obviously, that I do.
Speaker: They'll just know the books that they work on.
Speaker: So I sort of have to hold myself accountable, really.
Speaker: So you mentioned two books a year and you write a summer book and a winter book.
Speaker: Is that, I mean, presumably it's partially to give you time to actually do them because you've picked sort of two opposite ends of the year.
Speaker: But is that also like an industry thing?
Speaker: Are those the sort of popular seasons?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, do you know, it's sort of funny how the way it happened.
Speaker: And it was all triggered really by the Christmas books, which was that I'd written, when I first started out, I wrote two, I had a two book contract and I wrote these two books and they were published, I think in the January slot.
Speaker: And they did fine.
Speaker: They didn't make the top 10, but they did well for a debut novelist.
Speaker: But they weren't, I was, you see, the thing was, I never really thought I was going to become an author.
Speaker: I was a journalist before and I loved writing, but I'd never, and I was obsessive about reading, but I never thought I would become a fiction writer.
Speaker: And I sort of fell into it by accident.
Speaker: An agent sort of said to me, you must give it a go, give it a go.
Speaker: So I did and suddenly went, oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker: That makes total sense of my brain.
Speaker: That was so easy for me to do.
Speaker: Like I've been telling stories in my head my whole life, but I just thought everybody did that.
Speaker: So I'd fallen into writing.
Speaker: And the first two books I wrote
Speaker: I didn't really know the sort of books I wanted to write.
Speaker: I was sort of looking at market trends and what was selling well at the time.
Speaker: And I slightly copied those, but they weren't really the sorts of books I wanted to read.
Speaker: So I'd had this two book contract and I was coming up for renewal and I thought, right, well, I've got to have an idea for a new book.
Speaker: And I came up with this book idea and my editor immediately saw the potential for it and said, oh my God, yes.
Speaker: And it was a slightly different market to where I'd been before, which was a bit of a punt for me because they'd signed me to be on a certain place on their list.
Speaker: And now I was slightly pivoting off that.
Speaker: But luckily they loved the idea and that book became known as Christmas at Tiffany's.
Speaker: And so they moved me from the January slot to the November slot.
Speaker: And it did incredibly well.
Speaker: It went top 10.
Speaker: It did amazingly well internationally.
Speaker: And it was sort of my first experience of a really successful career.
Speaker: book.
Speaker: And so because of that, I then ended up in the Christmas slot and I suddenly became known as like, you know, writing these Christmas books.
Speaker: But actually Christmas at Tiffany's in and of itself isn't really a Christmas book.
Speaker: It starts at New Year's Eve and it ends the following Christmas, but it's based around, it's set around the course of a year.
Speaker: But anyway, it was called Christmas at Tiffany's.
Speaker: So I then got put in the Christmas slot and
Speaker: And it was after I wrote Christmas at Tiffany's that I wrote my next book called The Perfect Present.
Speaker: And luckily, I was pretty much finishing that when Christmas at Tiffany's was published, which was good because it meant I didn't have time to panic about the fact that this book had done so well and how was I going to follow it up?
Speaker: So when I handed it in to my editor...
Speaker: And she read it and she came back to me and she said, oh, my God.
Speaker: And basically what had happened was there was a book that had been adapted.
Speaker: It had been bought by Hollywood and it was going to become this major film with Nicole Kidman and like all these major stars in it.
Speaker: And unfortunately for me, the backstory, it wasn't even the backstory.
Speaker: It was just a bit of a twist that,
Speaker: of my book was really close to the premise of this book that was being adapted into this film.
Speaker: And the book had only come out in hardback at the time.
Speaker: I hadn't read it.
Speaker: I didn't know anything about it.
Speaker: It was just a really unfortunate fluke.
Speaker: And she said to me, look,
Speaker: I know you have not copied this book, but she said, because you've been writing this for a year, the other one's only just come out.
Speaker: It's not out in paperback yet, but it's going to be massive because it's gone to Hollywood and it's going to be this huge film.
Speaker: And she said, you're going to have to change it.
Speaker: And I was like, oh my God.
Speaker: And out of like a hundred thousand word manuscript, I'm going to have to change it.
Speaker: I basically had to cut about 70,000 words.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And I had to completely reconfigure my characters.
Speaker: So who had been a villain before was now a hero and vice versa and all of this.
Speaker: I had to completely rethink that.
Speaker: this story, which was a disaster.
Speaker: And I was crying.
Speaker: I couldn't stop crying.
Speaker: And they said to me, look, if you want this book to be on the shelves for next Christmas, and bearing in mind, this is coming straight off the back of Christmas at Tiffany's.
Speaker: She said, if you want this book to be out, you've got to rewrite it in six weeks.
Speaker: And I was like, there's no way I can do that.
Speaker: How am I going to do that?
Speaker: It's taken me a year to write this book.
Speaker: Anyway, they gave me six weeks and I wrote it in five.
Speaker: And it was so much better than the first version.
Speaker: And it made me realize how much drifting around I would do and how much dead time I would have.
Speaker: And I just wasn't focused in the same way.
Speaker: I just wasn't as productive.
Speaker: Whereas give me, you know, there's the journalist in me, give me a deadline and I'll turn it around.
Speaker: And so that was how I ended up writing two books a year, because I realized that I could actually write very quickly when I was super focused.
Speaker: And so because I had the Christmas slot, and that was obviously, you know, doing incredibly well for me, it sort of meant that if I was going to do two a year, then have to be the summer, you know,
Speaker: summer period in order to make the timings work for editing and getting covers and sell through and all of that.
Speaker: So I sort of ended up with those slots off the back of a disaster.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: It's funny how we end up in the kind of places that we do.
Speaker: Obviously, we're talking about you're writing a book every six months, give or take, and that's where you're kind of thriving.
Speaker: But do you have a strict routine?
Speaker: Is there like a day-to-day where you're like, I start working at this time, I stop working at this time, I do this, that, the other?
Speaker: Yeah, I do have to be really disciplined about it.
Speaker: It's easier now because my kids are in their late teens and early 20s.
Speaker: I'm not doing school runs.
Speaker: Everything is much easier in terms of demands on my time.
Speaker: I'm sort of sitting alone in the house with the dogs.
Speaker: So my time is my own.
Speaker: So I'll get up in the morning, walk the dogs.
Speaker: I live in Sussex in the Ashdown Forest where Winnie the Pooh was written.
Speaker: And so I have these lovely walks every morning.
Speaker: And I consider that my commute.
Speaker: And it just gives me time.
Speaker: My mind just goes on a, you know, a bit of an amble.
Speaker: And if I am in the process of writing, I'll be thinking about what I'm going to write that day so that when I sit down, I already know what I'm doing rather than sit down and stare at the screen blankly.
Speaker: So I sort of use that.
Speaker: I use walking and driving as my thinking time for the books.
Speaker: And then I will really just sit down all day and, and,
Speaker: work, which, you know, I've actually had to buy a treadmill so that I get up in the day and I walk.
Speaker: I do more walking because I am so sedentary.
Speaker: And I think it's really bad for me.
Speaker: So I've bought and I now I now insist on doing 10,000 steps a day, just so that I know that I'm moving because I'm otherwise all I'm doing is sitting down.
Speaker: And I will
Speaker: when I'm coming in towards the deadline, invariably I have to start working weekends as well.
Speaker: With each book, probably I will do about three months of thinking and research before I start actually writing.
Speaker: But while I'm in that thinking and researching period, I'm also editing the previous book that I've just handed in.
Speaker: I have copy edits and page proof edits to do.
Speaker: Those will take about eight weeks, eight to 10 weeks.
Speaker: So that sort of straddles that thinking and researching period.
Speaker: And also in that period, I'm likely to be promoting the book that's just coming out as well.
Speaker: So I've sort of got three books in my head.
Speaker: twice a year like that.
Speaker: And once I'm actually writing and I'm sort of clear of the other books, you know, they're edited, all the thinking is done, I'm just writing now and all the promotion is done.
Speaker: When I'm actually just sitting down and writing, I'll probably, for the St.
Speaker: Kilda books, they take about three to four months to write.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And that's pretty much seven days a week because I have to go quite slowly because I'm having to do so much cross-referencing with the other books.
Speaker: With the Christmas books, I can write them in six to eight weeks.
Speaker: And I'll have a word count of 3,000 words a day, five d ays a week.
Speaker: And that then means that if I make my 15,000 words a week, then I don't have to work the weekend.
Speaker: And that's sort of my incentive to make that target.
Speaker: And of course, if I do have a bad day at the office and I don't get the words down, then I know I've got to sit at the weekend and do it.
Speaker: But it sort of helps keep me very calm because it can be very overwhelming stuff.
Speaker: I hate that the week before I start a book, I feel quite anxious because it feels like a mountain to climb.
Speaker: And you think, oh my God, where for me, the hard bit isn't, what do I write about?
Speaker: It's always, how do I tell this story?
Speaker: How am I going to reveal it?
Speaker: How am I coming in on it?
Speaker: And
Speaker: I find that having the structure of saying by, I'm going to start on Monday and by putting my diary on the Sunday, 15, and then the following Sunday, it will say 30.
Speaker: And then the Sunday after that, it will say 45 and then 60.
Speaker: And I can literally plot that.
Speaker: where I will be in the book in my diary, to the extent that if my editor rings and she's like, oh, you know, how's it going?
Speaker: I could say to her, I'm at 60,000 words.
Speaker: I will have finished this book on this date.
Speaker: And I think she finds it a bit freaky that it's so specific.
Speaker: But it actually, by breaking it down into these chunks, it makes it feel much more manageable.
Speaker: I think that if I was to simply go, right, well, I'm going to write a book now and then just sit down without any shaping, without something different.
Speaker: to guide me, I think I would just, I would lose shape.
Speaker: I would just have good days.
Speaker: I'd have bad days, but I would, I would feel quite chaotic because I wouldn't know.
Speaker: I would feel at the mercy of the process really.
Speaker: And I'd be like, well, when will it finish?
Speaker: I just don't know.
Speaker: It'll get finished when it finishes.
Speaker: And unfortunately my deadlines don't allow for that.
Speaker: You know, there's a lot of people
Speaker: who cannot do their job unless I do mine.
Speaker: So I have to be able to say, yes, I will get the book in on this date so that everyone else can do their jobs.
Speaker: So it's not for everyone.
Speaker: It's a very tough discipline to do 15,000 words a week, every single week for two months.
Speaker: But it does allow me to have weekends off and
Speaker: And it does allow me to sort of have a bit of peace of mind knowing that I'm getting there bit by bit.
Speaker: I think I would just have a breakdown otherwise.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it makes sense.
Speaker: I mean, that's the, it's, you know, setting manageable goals for yourself and sort of being like, no, I'm going to get this much done and then I'm good and then I can, then I can stop for a bit and I'll do the same onwards and onwards.
Speaker: No, I think that's, I think that's great advice.
Speaker: And hopefully anyone listening who's, who's sort of struggling to find a rhythm or a pattern can sort of take at least some part of that, whether it be like the same thing or something slightly different.
Speaker: But that brings us to
Speaker: the half hour mark-ish, which is the desert island question.
Speaker: So Karen, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be?
Speaker: Well, I mean, so it's a question of, would I be allowed a series or just one book?
Speaker: Could you get the series in one large anthology?
Speaker: Do you know, I bet I could.
Speaker: I bet I could.
Speaker: I think I could.
Speaker: So I'm obsessed with Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, the Neapolitan series.
Speaker: It was such an eye-opener for me, that book, when I read it, because...
Speaker: To see it's based around two women's friendship from childhood throughout the course of their lives.
Speaker: They're both very intelligent women.
Speaker: They're growing up in impoverished Naples in Italy in the 1950s and 60s, and it follows them through their lives.
Speaker: And they're both very intelligent women with ambition, but not resources.
Speaker: And their lives diverge.
Speaker: One of them is able to sort of pursue her academic dreams and the other one isn't.
Speaker: And there's this really fierce, intense rivalry between the two women.
Speaker: And they love each other, but they hate each other as well.
Speaker: And it was so fascinating for me.
Speaker: to read a book about two women for whom actually the most important relationship in their lives wasn't their husbands, it wasn't their children, it was this friendship.
Speaker: And it was so nuanced and they were so flawed.
Speaker: But I just thought, my God, I have never seen this written like this before, women written like this.
Speaker: You know, no one's, no one's
Speaker: an arch villain.
Speaker: It's not about villainy.
Speaker: It's just about flawed humans and the best of them and the worst of them and fate and circumstance and luck and
Speaker: I just could pick it up any day of the week and I would be lost in it again.
Speaker: I mean, there would never be a time when I wouldn't want to fall into that world.
Speaker: And I felt sad that I didn't grow up in impoverished Neapolitan slums.
Speaker: I was like, oh my God.
Speaker: I mean, it was amazing.
Speaker: The BBC did actually adapt it into a series that
Speaker: And when I saw that, I thought, oh no, this is going to be terrible because the books are sublime.
Speaker: And actually, I have to say, it is an excellent production.
Speaker: The casting is so on point and I loved it so much.
Speaker: So if people don't want to read the book, and of course, everyone should always read the books, but if they don't want to, there is the BBC series as well.
Speaker: And it's absolutely fantastic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I know what you mean.
Speaker: Every now and again, you'll sort of read a book or watch a film or a television series where it's sort of inexplicable, but no matter what role a character plays, whether it's the protagonist or the antagonist, there's some things where I'll come away from it being like, wow, that was such an incredible story because I resonated with every single character.
Speaker: It's like I was sympathetic to the villains.
Speaker: I was sympathetic to the heroes and everyone in between.
Speaker: I felt
Speaker: they felt like real people and everyone felt relatable.
Speaker: And it also, it's kind of when a story is so well written that every character is a product of their circumstance and you get it and you're like, yes, I understand why you, why you made those decisions and why you are the way you are.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And I think I'm always really interested when, when I'm a reader, I catch myself.
Speaker: I'm always so prepared to, you know, even in a,
Speaker: a villainous character.
Speaker: I'm always so prepared to try and be on side with them.
Speaker: I'm always amazed at how much as readers we will try to forgive, we will try to like, we'll try to go on a journey with them unless they're presented ultimately as being completely irredeemable.
Speaker: And that's what Elena does so well.
Speaker: She does make them utterly hateful
Speaker: I mean, some of the things they do are unforgivable.
Speaker: I mean, you simply cannot say, yes, that was fine.
Speaker: They are very, very flawed, nuanced characters, but that's what just makes them feel like all of us.
Speaker: That's what makes these characters live and breathe.
Speaker: And I think readers are always prepared to go on that journey with you.
Speaker: You know, you don't need, I really buck against this, particularly in commercial fiction, there's real,
Speaker: sort of want for the characters to be really likable and really relatable.
Speaker: And that's great.
Speaker: I get that.
Speaker: But my books just always tend to be a little bit darker.
Speaker: I don't particularly feel the need for my protagonists to be hugely likable and sweet, as long as we can understand them, why they are the way they are.
Speaker: I think the reader will go with that and can relate to it.
Speaker: I mean, obviously you don't want it to be completely hateful, but, you know, it's, it's, I just think there's, there's room for allowing some of the shadows to come through as well.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're going to keep talking about some of this stuff.
Speaker: I've got some questions about settings and imposter syndrome, but this is the end of the regular episode and into the extended cut exclusive to Patreon subscribers.
Speaker: So anyone listening who hasn't yet joined the Patreon, please do think about it because it goes a long way towards covering the costs of running this podcast.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much, Karen, for coming on the podcast and telling us all about your writing and your kind of publishing antics and everything that's been going on with you.
Speaker: It's been awesome chatting with you.
Speaker: Oh, thank you so much.
Speaker: This has been great fun.
Speaker: I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker: And for anyone listening, if you want to keep up with what Karen is doing, you can find her on Twitter at KarenSwan1, on Instagram at SwaneeWrites, and on Facebook at KarenSwanAuthor.
Speaker: To support the podcast, like, follow, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and follow along on all socials.
Speaker: Join the Patreon for extended episodes ad-free in a week early and check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
Speaker: Thanks again to Karen and thanks to everyone listening.
Speaker: We'll catch you on the next episode.
