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#178 - Kate Young
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Award winning cookbook author and debut novelist, Kate Young is here to chat about her debut novel, 'Experienced', the process of creating a cookbook and the differences between publishing cookbooks and fiction. (Photo by Tom Jacob Headshots)
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Transcript
Introduction to Writing and Kate Young
00:00:00
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question. I love it. Because the writing is sort of everything. You can fix plot holes. So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this. So it's kind of a gamble. Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast. On today's episode, I am joined by a writer and chef who has released multiple cookbooks inspired by beloved works of literature and as of very recently published her own debut novel.
Exploring Kate's Novel 'Experienced'
00:00:31
Speaker
It's Kate Young. Hello. Hello. Thank you so much.
00:00:34
Speaker
Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Let's jump right in. Talk about the the the brand new novel. It's called Experienced. It's out right now in the UK. Tell us a little bit about it. It is a gay rom-com set in Bristol. She's about a woman, Bette, who is in a relationship with a woman for the first time. She's about 30. And she is very much in love with this woman, but her girlfriend in bed one morning says, I'm kind of worried that you haven't dated other women, that this is your first experience of this, and that somewhere down the line that might end up being an issue. So I think we should go on a break for three months. You should go have a lot of sex and have a lot of fun, and then we'll get back together in time for our friend's wedding in October. And the book is essentially that three months and then the fallout of that three months.
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. it's ah it's it's pretty It's a great little setup. Thank you. For the rom-com, as you said. ah you do you Do you live in Bristol? Do you have like an attachment to Bristol? I live very close. Yes. I live in a town that I could not have set this book because there's like 10 of us on hinge. um But I live in Stroud, which is just north of Bristol in South Gloucestershire. So I spend a lot of time in Bristol.
Discovering Sexuality and Personal Growth
00:01:44
Speaker
Okay, and the story itself um about people sort of um coming out, like discovering their own kind of sexuality later in life and then finding that situation where it's like, ah you need to date more people because this is like a brand new thing for you. and Am I right in thinking that that's quite a sort of, a lot of people do have that experience.
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that I also came out in my early 30s and I didn't necessarily have this exact experience because this girlfriend is kind of mad. um But i I certainly had a lot of people being like, oh my God, you're going to have these wild teenage years and really make up for like all that lost time. And I was like, I am 32 years old. And I don't think even when I was a teenager, I was very teenage. I have always felt quite like I've been my my natural age was 36 and I was heading towards it. And so it was a very interesting thing to be like that assumption that when you come out, you're going to have this second adolescence of needing to
00:02:47
Speaker
Have that time to kind of make up for what you lost and i think it is a really interesting place to start to go do you need that time do you want that time what would that look like if you had it um and what would it look like to kind of be thirty no what you want and go this is the thing i have been looking for.
Fiction vs. Real Emotions in Writing
00:03:06
Speaker
I mean, but if I picture that kind of thing, I'm just thinking like in my 30s now, the idea of a hangover is terrifying to me compared to when I was in my 20s.
00:03:19
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I think that that has all of that has had such an impact on it of just going, no, I mean, to have that want in you and that knowledge of suddenly who it is you fancy and what you fancy and what you want to do, but also be like, but then I wake up tomorrow and like, we're all 30 year old people with 30 year old emotions. And what does that then look like? Yes, the sort of emotional hangover of that is just as brutal as the physical hangovers from a night of too many martinis. Yes, exactly. Yeah, because obviously at 30 you have so much more lived experience of just what the realities of things are. Yeah, and what you're doing to other people in that situation.
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And and also what let you say, what you want, and not just in terms of you know genders and and sexuality, but like in terms of like what you actually want in a partner. you know Yeah, totally. And the fact that you can have a new awareness of your sexuality, but perhaps what you want hasn't changed. um It's just a recognition of who you want that has. um And I think that that dual assumption that what you want and who you want might all have shifted feels like a quite overwhelming place to be. um If you're kind of like, maybe it has or maybe it has, I don't really know. And what am I looking for? And all of that being questioned. And it's and it's scary. that Yeah, totally. You're suddenly like, well, my life's sort of been turned upside down and I've sort of done this and it's good, but I'm still scared. Yeah, absolutely.
00:04:50
Speaker
So it's not always the case, but with or authors, often the first novel, and this is by no means your first published book, but this is your first published novel. Oh, for sure, yeah. Often the first novel draws the most inspiration from their own lives. And based on that kind of brief brief chat that we just had, it sounds like that kind of is true for
Transition from Cookbooks to Novels
00:05:13
Speaker
you. I would say that I've i've thought a but a lot about this because certainly it's like sitting down to write, I was like, how much of this is like,
00:05:22
Speaker
is feelings that I've had, but no true events. And that that is kind of what I was aiming to do was write about every feeling that I had experienced in a bunch of different feelings, but the characters and what they go through and the specific events of the novel to a one have not happened in my life. So it was very much an imagined world filled with real emotions. Oh, okay. Yeah. Which I guess is like, probably a very apt way of describing most fiction novels. Yeah, I think so. I think that like I wanted to write about feelings that felt truthful to me and ah experiences that felt truthful to me and that's both the coming out story and it's also the importance of friendship and it's also the thrill and excitement of fancying people when you've kind of spent your 20s feeling like, Why is this not working? Why do I not to love this like everybody else seems to? um So all of those feelings are very true and I give them to both the central character and other characters around her. um But yeah, the the events I think needed to feel that they were different. And I felt like I would not be doing my best writing if I was writing about stuff I truly knew um yeah in terms of experiences.
00:06:40
Speaker
And it might not have have fit the rom-com genre. and No, indeed. My life is not not as narratively satisfying as this book, yes. Well, you know, you're only halfway through. No, very true. Very true. You haven't reached the peak of your arc yet. No, no, not even close. um Yeah, so, as I mentioned, not your first published novel, but here's your first published novel, not your first published book. um You, of course, have the award-winning Little Library Cookbook series. Yes. So, interesting question then is, writing a novel, doing fiction, was that something that you you had always wanted to do or was that something that came after doing the cookbooks and stuff? I think I am quite
00:07:24
Speaker
ah quite bad at remembering the true emotions here because I have very much told myself a narrative of like English was my worst subject at school because I was good at other things because I i really enjoyed maths, I really enjoyed science, I really enjoy having like an answer to go for and I think English where you are hovering and going oh what do they want me to say and how can I put this best it was always a less comfortable place for me to be I guess ah and so I really wanted to write a novel when I was like 10 years old and that was really beaten out of beat by school
00:08:07
Speaker
And i in my 20s when I was writing the cookbooks and when I was writing a blog and when I was writing about food, I kind of went, I'm good at the recipes and I'm like, I'm developing this skill of of being able to write. And about just before my first book came out, so when I'd handed in the first draft of it, which was in 2016, I sat down and wrote a chapter of a novel. i'm just seeing that i could see and i was like huh i'm probably gonna do anything with this but maybe whenever i have time in the next few years i'll just return to this so when i'm between a draft and an edit or you know whenever i got like a little couple of weeks i'll just go i'm gonna get up everyday and focus on this project.
00:08:51
Speaker
And i I was very much like telling myself that it was not for it to become a published novel, but instead to like practice writing and doing that. But I obviously thought it was going to become a published novel because I'm very clear about my time. I've always had a bunch of different jobs. I've always done a number of different things at once. And the idea of like spending time on something that I didn't have a goal for I just don't think I
The Intersection of Literature and Cooking
00:09:19
Speaker
would have done that. But it's nice now to remember that it was just for fun and totally fine because that novel took me six years and didn't go anywhere. So I gave it to my agent in 2021. And she was like,
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah. There's like seven different things here that you're trying to do and I kind of get some of them and like some of the writing is quite good, but this book needs like so much work and you need to decide what it is and you need to like go away and here's Patricia Highsmith's book on structuring a thriller and I was like, oh yeah, I have read that actually. and And it was a real moment of just, i i I have now told myself that I didn't think that that book was going to go anywhere, but I obviously did because I worked really hard on it. yeah And so i I kind of, yeah, had that sense of, I really want to write a story and a novel and a narrative, um which my cookbooks have small sections of narrative story throughout them.
00:10:22
Speaker
but they are crucially like not a beginning to end narrative. I have friends who write books like that, and mine simply aren't. And it felt very much like I wanted to show myself I could write a novel, but also I think crucially, I wanted to write a novel. yeah and And I did write a whole novel that wasn't very good, and then went away and wrote a second novel that got published, and I think is good. Okay, so that's the second one is experience. The second one is experience, yeah. but I think it's such a um common story, though, for authors. A lot of authors learn to write by writing the first story or the first manuscript, which often doesn't go anywhere. Yeah, absolutely. How else are you supposed to learn? but yeah like There's nothing like sitting down and going, how would you fit together these pieces? What do these characters do? how are they going to you know I think there's lots of fantastic
00:11:19
Speaker
ways to go and learn in creative writing courses and other other ways to learn. But for me, somebody who had done my university and couldn't really afford to go back and do more, the only way to learn was to sit down and do it. Yeah, it's also doesn't really matter how many, I think some people might be able to do it this way, but for me, it wouldn't matter how many craft books I read or like lectures I watched or things like that. i It's like I could, yes, I could have all the knowledge in my head and be like, this is what you need to do, this is what you need to do, these are like things that you should watch out for and stuff like that. But until i I'd actually done it, i I would never understand how that implements in practice. Totally.
00:12:00
Speaker
So yeah, it's an interesting, and what yeah, I think very common for people to, it's very, very rare that the first book someone writes is is also the book that that gets published. yeah um And I wanted to touch back on, you mentioned your, that first novel that you were writing, obviously whilst you were doing the cookbooks, you presented it to your agent. So your agent is Zoe Ross. ah She is, yeah. agents they United, it yeah. did So you must have got her for the cookbooks. When you signed with her, was did you did you sort of mention, look, at some point I am thinking about maybe doing some like narrative fiction, like but a proper novel, or was that something that after you've done the cookbooks, you sort of said to her, oh, I'm thinking of writing a novel, what do you think about that?
00:12:42
Speaker
Oh yeah, I did not tell her that to begin with. I was very much like, oh my gosh, I'm so thrilled that somebody wants to represent me for these cookbooks. yeah um i I essentially had been writing a blog for about a year and a half um and doing a recipe every week from literature. So it was essentially the idea that became the cookbook. yeah And it was very much a way of like, I was a theatre producer that at the time, which is an incredibly sort of Creative and fun job, but also is very much the job in the team.
00:13:13
Speaker
that is the least creative um in terms of like art making. Most of the job of a producer is being like, how are we going to fund this? Let's bring the team together. Let's organize all of this. And like all of that is creative, but it's not coming to work and and making a piece of art. You are like a big part of that team, but it's not
The Cookbook Writing Process
00:13:33
Speaker
it's not the writer. It's not the director. It's not you know the set designer, any of those. And so I had this like nice side project that I was really enjoying that I was like, nobody is reading this blog. A handful of people in my first year would read every week and they were mostly people I went to university with. I had met since I'd moved to the UK or like my parents reading it on various computers ah so that my stats would look bigger. And they told me that much later. um And it was it wasn't until the blog was kind of picked up by the Guardian
00:14:07
Speaker
because I had submitted a photo that I'd taken to like, um ah share your memories of, this is so weird, share your memories of To Kill a Mockingbird because Go Set a Watchman has come out, which is a book that I still am like, that book shouldn't exist, but To Kill a Mockingbird exists and that's great. And I loved it when I was a kid and I, you know, I still love it now. And I had made the breakfast that Atticus has before he goes to court for the first time. that Well, he doesn't make it. Calpania makes it, obviously. yeah and ah he I had made that breakfast and I sent them a photo of it and they looked at this photo and they were like, ah we found this photo online and you actually can't steal other people's photos. But if this is your photo, get in touch with us because your blog's very cool.
00:14:49
Speaker
And they posted this and series of 10 of my photographs with quotes from the books. And that day I had 20,000 people visit the blog and it had gone from like, some days you'd have, you know, some days on it, when I'd done a book that everyone loves, there might be like a couple of hundred people who read it. And suddenly it was 20,000 and I i was putting, I had three agents get in touch and I met all of them. And so he was the one who I just instantly felt saw the same book that i did which felt really important so at that point again i was like i had never really considered this becoming a book but suddenly people email me being like this is already a book we could just put these things together but also if you want to make a book.
00:15:33
Speaker
this would be great fun. And um and i it took me I did not just put the recipes together, we we did lots of new stuff and it took me a couple of years to do that book. But Zoe was the person who I met and instantly clicked with and thought she loved the same books that I did growing up, which felt really important for a book that was about literature that we were talking from the same page, I guess. um And I just thought she was really clever and really funny. And I thought, she also seemed really tough and good and I'm not tough. So that felt really good to me. I'm a massive people pleaser. So i I was like, I feel like I should probably have an agent who's really strong and tough and who scares me a bit. And she definitely did in a good way. Yeah, that's the kind of person you want fighting. Totally. Yeah, particularly if you're like, yeah, sure. Yeah, we'll do anything. That sounds great. Oh, you don't want to pay me? That's fine. You don't want to pay me? It's fine. Don't worry. I'll do a I love this. I'll pay you. Yeah, exactly. And she's really good at being like, no, we don't know. What are you talking about? So I kind of vaguely mentioned a few years later, oh, I'm like casually in my spare time working on this novel, but I didn't really properly talk to her about it until I gave her the full draft.
00:16:53
Speaker
Oh, okay. And Zoe does rep novels for for... She does. So, yeah, so she reps nonfiction, but she also reps novels and I'm very lucky that I was with somebody who, when I said, oh, also I'm thinking of this novel, didn't go like, oh, I might talk to a colleague about that, but was somebody who was already like, great, fantastic. I do that as well. Yeah, yeah okay okay, well that's good. So obviously it came from the blog. and it was So was the first little library cookbook, was that essentially more of a curating kind of thing than actually like building up a bunch of new recipes?
00:17:26
Speaker
No, so we decided that actually it wouldn't be good to just include the recipes that are already in the blog because they're there for free. so yeah It was very much like a big project of going. Also, the the difference between like a blog and a book is that a book has to work in its entirety as a collection of recipes that make sense, that follow on from each other, that represent like a broad spectrum of like times of day that you might be eating, or things you might want to eat, or experience levels in cooking and all of those things. so like The way that we structured the recipes, that list changed so much in the couple of years that it took me to write that book. and um and The ones that I initially had gone, they're definitely going to make it on and in. Lots of them didn't.
00:18:10
Speaker
um And I think as well, the the pressure of it being a cookbook and printed made me go back and look at every single recipe and go, do I stand by that? Is that what I'm still cooking? Is that the way I'd still cook it? Is that going to make sense to other people? A blog feels a bit more ephemeral that it just you know vanishes one week and yes it it all gets stored there but a book like sits on people's countertops and those recipes need to work yeah and so the process of it was a real it was fascinating I had a great time doing it and I i love writing cookbooks i I will have another one out next year this isn't like the end of cookbooks so it is it's a really great challenge that I really love and it's I think a really great combination of the sort of
00:18:57
Speaker
science, brain, get everything right, which is very much what it is to build a recipe and the creativity of what story do I want to tell with this recipe. Yeah, and these are all inspired by literary works that this is a library cookbook. So like you're sort of combining two passions as well. we Yeah, totally. And then obviously like books that you love and and have read and stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely. Can you remember what the, obviously you had to redo all of the recipes and like think of new ones for this book. You didn't want to reuse what was in the blog. So do you remember what was the first sort of like book to to recipe or character to recipe that you thought of for for the book? I think the one that
00:19:40
Speaker
went on there and has never gone is that I, through the process of writing the blog, I had learned how to make butter, which is very easy to do. You just churn cream past the point where it splits and you end up with butter and buttermilk. You wash the butter off, salt it. It is literally, it it's so fantastic and it's so cool. And then you can use the buttermilk to make bread or do whatever else. like It's a really great process that I just was so delighted by. And um that line in I Capture the Castle, which is, I shouldn't think even millionaires could think of anything nicer than ah to have to fatigue than bread, butter and and honey, is such a beautiful line. I've butchered it slightly, but it is such a beautiful line and I i love butter so much that it was, that was absolutely always going to make it in.
00:20:29
Speaker
OK, I'm curious as to how you obviously that's like a one line thing and butter is a it's not really a meal. No, I mean, some people might argue with that. But how do you go from here's a line in in a story which might just be like they sat down to eat this thing or it might actually describe some of the ingredients to like, I'm going to figure out how to do a ah recipe out of this. So it's it's such a varied process, depending on your right, how much detail there is in the book. There's so many context clues, I guess, in terms of time and era and
00:21:09
Speaker
the sort of social class of the house and what ingredients they would have had access to. It's like a lot of research. um so For example, like the curry that they have in Vanity Fair that Becky Sharp eats and she eats a chili thinking that chill is going to be a word that will that surely implies that this thing will cool her mouth down. and bites down on a chili, and obviously it is not. The sort of process of going back and doing all of that research, but then also going, the recipe has to work in somebody's kitchen in 2024.
00:21:45
Speaker
In a way that feels like i can get those ingredients i can do those processes i can access those ideas and it's the best possible version of that recipe. That is delicious now so i think there i really wrestled with it for a while whether i was going to be like historically accurate and recreate something very very specifically or whether i wanted to do a cookbook full of delicious food that reflected. ah sort of a collection of recipes, a collection of things that characters are eating. So I think the best example of it is the goose in A Christmas Carol that they make for, this is before um Ebenezer Scrooge brings the turkey. um When Mrs. Cratchit is making the dinner, she is making a goose and obviously she is cooking a goose on a spit. And there's just simply no way that to give anybody in 2024 in England an instruction that is like,
00:22:40
Speaker
put your goose on a spit. This is how you turn it. This is what it must look like. like It has to work in your kitchen now. yeah And so the big fun is, okay, here's a version of it that I can imagine that is perhaps how Mrs. Cratchit cooked it. And I'm going to take inspiration from that and joy from that and then recreate it in a way that feels like people are going to want to cook it.
Balancing Fictional and Real Culinary Experiences
00:23:02
Speaker
Because at the end of the day, if the book is only a historic document and not a cookbook, that is a different kind of book. And that kind of book also exists and is great fun and really interesting. But I wanted to write a cookbook full of food people wanted to make. So that had to be the thing at the end of the day that it came back to is like, I am taking inspiration from these very, sometimes you're right, very brief lines and making something that I think those characters would enjoy if they landed here and now.
00:23:30
Speaker
It's sort of thematic more than yeah anything, right? Yeah, yeah exactly. ga Do you ever do... Obviously, those those are things that do exist in the real world. Would you ever do something like ah like something from Lord of the Rings, like they talk about Lemba spread or something, and would you try and do an interpretation of that? So I did on the blog, but I always felt um kind of antsy about doing it in the books because i I read a lot of copyright law and I don't understand it. So I just got to a point where I was like, I think that a blanket decision of like, I am not going to put the Whipple Scrumptious Fudge Moly Delight in the book yeah because I don't know whether I can literally say those words. And what I will do instead is make the chocolate cake from Matilda.
00:24:14
Speaker
Oh, okay. yeah just yeah Just phrase it in a way that you probably don't have liability for anything. Yeah. I just think like I only ever did food that exists in our real world rather than taking somebody's intellectual property and trying to make a recipe for it. Yeah. And also then it's, there's no like, Obviously, we were saying it's kind of thematic, but it's like, this is a magical fake thing that doesn't exist and can't really exist. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I really wanted the book to exist in this space that was like, come for lunch and I've made X and I don't have to tell you this is what it is, rather than just this really only works if we're having a themed Lord of the Rings watch party.
00:24:56
Speaker
Which is great. which is great yeah my um my My best house and I did that last year, like my my sort of family and I around Christmas, we watched all three and ah we had a really great time doing it and we made a hobbit's feast for the watch and it was fantastic. But again, it's like, going to the supermarket and getting the bits that exist in real life. We didn't make Lamberspread. We created something that felt really fun and good that is essentially the big feast at the beginning of um The Hobbit and an unexpected party when everybody shows up to Bilbo's house. But yeah, I mean, it was very much just we're getting nice food and having but and watching some films.
00:25:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In my head, because I just go to the the the movie trilogy. and i Oh, gotcha. Me too. I've read the books, but I go to the me movie trilogy as well. Yeah, but the Hobbits are just doing, like, fry-ups and English breakfast. but Yeah. That's basically all they do. Oh yeah, they're eating like a lot of mushrooms that they can forage. And yeah yeah, exactly that. And drinking like potatoes. And before they leave, they have a lot of nice beer. But even at the beginning of Lord of the Rings, when that big party for Bilbo's 111th birthday happens, there is no food described in that chapter.
00:26:17
Speaker
You do not know what those characters eat. It's mad. It feels like there should be because the party is so vivid in my head. yeah And it's like they ate really well. It's like, tell me more. Tell me more, Tolkien. What are you talking about? I'm trying to make cookbooks here, Tolkien. Yeah, right. I'm trying to make cookbooks here. It's been 80 years since this came out. I need more. Amazing.
Crafting Novels: Structure and Creativity
00:26:38
Speaker
So let's get back onto a bit of publishing stuff. Now that you have published your first novel, how different um have you found the process of writing and publishing a fiction book, a novel ah versus the cookbooks? It's been massively different, um the experience of them. ah ah from At all stages, really. So from sitting down and doing the writing in the first place, I found
00:27:07
Speaker
at the sort of structure of writing a novel ah very, very different to how I wrote a cookbook because the cookbook has, I guess, like 100 unconnected short stories. And half of that short story is instruction. Half of it is an introduction that places you in ah in a space where you might want to make this thing. But then the second half is like, here's the directions for how you do this recipe. And so I could move around between
00:27:42
Speaker
sort of the prose introductions and the instructional writing and the cooking and be in all of those three places at once. And so it meant that like whenever I was working, whenever I was writing, no matter what mood I was in or whether the prose was easy come or not, I had work to do. There was sort of something to be getting on with. right um And on days where I was like, I am just a terrible prose writer today. I'd be like, I'm going to write instructions and I'm going to come back to them later and I'm going to make them more beautiful. But I am at least going to get the instructions down here today, or I would stand up and go to the kitchen or whatever else.
00:28:21
Speaker
um Whereas writing a novel is very much like it's it's all writing in a novel. It's like all character and and events and putting things on a page and sending people to a place that where they don't know where they're going. And it always felt like I want to write X number of words a day. I'm going to try and do that. And sometimes the words would come very easily, and sometimes they wouldn't. But unlike cookery, there wasn't anywhere else to go and feel like, oh, it's fine. I'm being productive in another way today.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah. So i i am I remain a big planner. So I guess the my sort of planning for both cookbooks and the rom-com are not as different as I imagine people would think they would be in that my i I know that a lot of my friends who are novelists write very much in a like, I'm going to see where these characters take me. way and I don't I know what those girls are going to be doing and they sometimes might react in ways that I don't expect when I'm writing but I am essentially like I know what events are going to happen I know where they're going I know what's what's going on from the start so I
00:29:36
Speaker
this This never makes me many friends, but what I did was I watched loads of rom-coms and I read loads of rom-coms and I kind of mapped out the satisfying beats at which a certain event in a rom-com, because a rom-com is such a like beautifully structured thing. that is so deeply satisfying because it gives you everything you want at the exact moment that you're anticipating it and want it. So at the exact moment that you're like, these characters should just get together. It almost does and then doesn't quite and like, sort of throws one over on them. And you know, it's so satisfying to read or to watch because you are being given exactly what you want, but in a way that hopefully doesn't always feel entirely predictable.
00:30:20
Speaker
Yes. But the thing about Aromcom is from the very start, as soon as you're sort of 10 or 12% specifically, I think, of the way through the book, you know who that character is going to end up with. Because you know the beats of a rom-com, you know the satisfying feeling of like, oh, there's chemistry here and these characters have just met and they can't be together for some reason, but they will be by the end. And you're kind of reassured by that truth. And that is what the fun and joy of a rom-com is being reassured by that truth, but also having the fun of how are they going to get there.
00:30:56
Speaker
And so I mapped out the whole structure of what I wanted to do and what I thought worked really satisfyingly in a rom-com and where the beats should fall. And then I worked out I had this like list when the first book didn't work, I'd made a list of scenes that I could imagine writing that I thought would be fun. Because I thought if I write a second novel, and it's still terrible, or still not good enough to publish, At the very least, I will have wanted to have fun. yeah And so the first book was a very sad gay book set in the past about a murder um and two women living in a house. can And I was like, this this book has to be like pure liquid fun. It has to be almost no research apart from life research.
00:31:38
Speaker
um And I love research, so I did actually do a lot of research, but i I went in thinking this will be something I can write with no research. So set now, set in a city I really know, set in a community that I really know, set with people who I could recognize. And I was like, great, I'm going to think of every possible fun scene, and I'm going to map them across this kind of graph of peaks and troughs in emotion. And then that graphic. Those scenes became the chapters and I knew before I sat down to write any words like what was going to be happening in every single chapter.
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, okay. So it sounds like what ended up being experienced became very much a polar opposite of that first novel that you wrote. Totally. In terms of mood and vibe. Yeah, in terms of mood and vibe, but also in terms of my planning and my process and all of those things. I went back to what really worked for me with cookbooks, which is the first document I had for the book was an Excel spreadsheet. okay And that is where I am most comfortable. I exist so happily on an Excel spreadsheet of just mapping out which scenes would go where. um So yeah, I started with voice notes, post-its and an Excel spreadsheet. The first thing I put on my laptop was Excel.
00:32:53
Speaker
And that's always true of my cookbooks as well. Yeah, yeah yeah that makes sense. um That brings us to the point in the episode where we go to the desert island. yes We're probably going to talk more about this in a minute, but Kate, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be? It's such a good question and it's such an impossible question. Yes. And it's, um I think that, so I am a great re-reader, so I know that there's um a big tendency perhaps to take a thing that you haven't read before that you're like, you know what? I'm on a desert island. I'm going to do this book that I'm going to finish War and Peace. I'm going to, whatever. And actually I think that I wanted to take, I Capture the Castle,
00:33:38
Speaker
And i because I read it every year, and the the sort of reassurance of it would be so, so good. The other thing I read every year is persuasion. um okay And it is a really difficult to choose between those two, but I think I Capture the Castle would give me sort of slightly less agonizing loneliness, which I definitely feel reading persuasion. It's just, yeah, I think that the the pain of reading persuasion, the pain and the joy, but like the pain through most of the book, I do not think is an experience I want to be having on an island of my own.
00:34:13
Speaker
I catch the cast is also deeply tragic, but it's very, it's, ah it's, I think I have a sort of much longer relationship with it from my early teenage years. And I would enjoy continuing to read it as I sit on it as violent. Okay. How many times do you think you've read it at this point? Maybe 20. Wow. Yeah. That's impressive. And you want to take it with you. and I do. I think I would be reassured by familiarity rather than... I really wouldn't want to take something I've never read before because I think the risk of being taken somewhere that I don't want to be is not what I would want. I think reassuring familiarity if I am somewhere aggressively new and terrifying.
Desert Island Reading Choice
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah, something to, something to sort of ground you and and then yeah remind you of not being stranded on those Island. Exactly. And I think it's really funny, which I would, I i really want and ah persuasion is too, I think like the, I just would want to be laughing at people and and having a great time. Yeah, well, I mean, anything that you've read that many times and you still keep coming back to it. Oh, yeah. You can't argue with that. I mean, I can't argue with it. um I have coming up some questions about advice for writing and getting into the cookbook world, but that will be in the extended episode exclusive to my wonderful Patreon subscribers.
00:35:36
Speaker
um Yeah, did we just become best friends? Yeah, and exactly. that Amazing. Well, that's a a lovely way to to end the ah end the the episode here. So thank you so much, Kate, for coming on the podcast and chatting and telling us all about ah the the novel experience, which is out now and about your cookbooks and everything you've been up to. It's been awesome chatting with you. Thank you so much, Jamie. And for anyone wanting to keep up with what Kate is doing, you can follow her on Instagram at KateYoungRights. To support the podcast, like, follow and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and follow along on socials. Join the Patreon for extended episodes ad-free and a week early and check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes. Thanks again to Kate and thanks to everyone listening. We will catch you in the next episode.