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#135 - Suzanne Goldring
442 Plays1 year ago
Historical fiction author, Suzanne Goldring drops by to talk about her writing, how after almost a decade of submitting she finally found her break in publishing with Bookouture and how she'd never planned to become an historical fiction writer!
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Transcript
Balancing Plot Holes and Writing Quality
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Oh, a spicy question.
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I love it.
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Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
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Like you can fix plot holes, but if the writing... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
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So it's kind of, it's kind of a gamble.
Introducing Susan Goldring, Historical Novelist
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Hi, and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
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Today's guest is a PR consultant turned historical fiction novelist.
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It's Susan Goldring.
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Hi, Sue.
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How's it going?
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Hi, really nice to talk to you.
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Now I've got it all sorted out.
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Yes, we did have some technical difficulties.
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Thanks so much for coming on and bearing with all of the struggle that it took to get into the school.
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But we're here
The Girl Who Never Came Back: A Dual Timeline Novel
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now.
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And for everyone listening, just to give them a little insight into the sort of literature that you write, let's talk a bit about your latest novel, The Girl Who Never Came Back, out August 23rd.
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Tell us a little bit about it.
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Right.
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Yes.
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Like all of the novels I've written so far, it is dual timelines.
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So we've got a present day narrative along with a World War II narrative.
Fascination with WWII: Female Agents and Vera Atkins
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And I find it a really interesting way to write because you can see how the past is echoed in the present day and how we in the present day have been affected by actions in the past.
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This is, and talking about settings and things like that, this is by no means your first novel set during the Second World War, sort of wartime eras for that matter.
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What is it about those kinds of settings that really inspires you in your writing?
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Oh, there are such tremendous stories to be uncovered.
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This particular one, The Girl Who Never Came Back, explores the way in which the special operations executive actually functioned.
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And it's telling the story of the...
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main recruitment officer who was responsible for training and sending off to dangerous conditions in France, the female agents who encountered the most terrible conditions sometimes, and some of them didn't ever come back.
Guilt and War: The Emotional Weight on Characters
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And it was through reading about a real life woman, Vera Atkins, who had that role,
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that I wanted to write that story because I began to think, how did she feel knowing that she was sending these young women off into such dangerous situations?
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Did she feel a sense of responsibility and guilt?
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And so my character does feel guilt for the rest of her life and has spent a lot of time trying to track down the girls who went missing and will not rest until she
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learns what happened to the very last one.
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And her long-time companion, Peggy, who lives with her, observes her very strange behaviour in later life.
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And it is an indication of how she's feeling really guilty about what really happened to these young women.
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Okay.
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The war gives us so many potentially rich stories, some of them really terrible, very grim stories, but also stories of great courage and fortitude and determination, both
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in dramatic situations like with the Special Operations Executive, but also on the home front as well, which I have explored in other
Researching Untold WWII Stories
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books.
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In my third book, The Girl Without a Name, I explored the evacuation of children from London and
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and how people were coping at home as the war raged on, and also the after effects of the war on people who had suffered trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, which then went on to affect their actions in other ways.
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And I think that there are a tremendous number of stories to be explored.
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Yeah.
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It sounds like the real fascination is with these sort of untold stories that you find.
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Where do you, you know, where, where do you do your kind of research?
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Where do you find these untold stories?
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The one about to come out is my seventh novel.
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And six of my books have been World War II.
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I've done one, which was the First World War, because I thought it was really interesting to explore how women on the home front coped during that Derepol period and
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and were then faced with Spanish flu, which was devastating.
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And I wanted to look at the long-term impact on people's lives of both war and the terrible flu.
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And in fact, it published just as we were starting to face our own pandemic, which was quite interesting, although I obviously didn't know that that was about to break when I was writing it.
Uncovering the Past: Complicity and Guilt
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But yes, I want to get behind the facts and look at how people were reacting, what they were thinking.
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So in the book before this one, The Woman Outside the Walls, it was actually about a woman who had worked in a concentration camp but hadn't realized that
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when she was recruited, what she was going to be facing.
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She went there as a secretary.
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And I thought it would be really interesting to explore her mind and see how she acted and look at what she kept hidden for many, many years.
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And when I sold that idea to my editor, I said, look, you're not going to be able to call it this, but the concept is...
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the Nazi next door.
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And within the story, in the present-day timeline, this woman's neighbour greatly gets her to talk about her past, not realising that this woman has actually wanted to keep her past hidden very carefully for many, many years.
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But it was very interesting to explore how the woman who had been recruited as a secretary
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coped and how she had hidden it and how at what point in that job did she realise what she was doing was wrong and that even as a secretary, even she was responsible for the deaths of many people and that she was a cog in the system.
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And so, yes, I'm always looking to get behind the facts.
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So in the novel that is just about to come out, I wanted to really examine the mind of that recruitment officer and see how she felt about the responsibility she had had.
Positive Experience with Bookature Publishing
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And in fact, in the books...
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non-fiction books that I read about Vera Atkins, what came very clear to me was that when she saw those little planes departing from Tangmere Airfield flying into France during the war, she would feel this terrible pang of regret that these girls were going off and might not come back.
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she did spend many years looking for clues what had happened.
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And I thought, you know, how would that make you feel?
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What kind of burden would that be?
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And also there were hints that the relatives of some of the girls had pursued her for information for many years.
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So again, that would have been quite hard to live with, I think.
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Yeah, no, definitely.
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And when you, yeah, just talking about that kind of thing, it really does make you think, um, there are, you're right, you're so right.
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It's so rich that those kinds of wartime, um, settings, they're so rich with like smaller stories that aren't investigated because we all know the sort of the big battles and the big decisions by the leaders that were made, but you don't look at the individual kind of personal journeys that different people made throughout.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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I'd love to talk a little bit about your experiences with publishing and the sort of processes of how the industry works a bit.
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You are, and I think, am I right in thinking all of your books have been published through Bookature?
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That's right.
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Yes, they have.
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I got my break with Booker Church and I'm very grateful to them.
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I had been trying to get published for about 10 years, probably more actually.
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And it was my seventh full length novel that finally got me the break, which had already been rejected by about 30 agents and a number of publishers.
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So I'm very grateful to Bookature.
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So really, Bookature is my only experience of being published.
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But they are delightful.
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They are enthusiastic.
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They are supportive.
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They're always available if I want to ask questions.
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I have a lovely working relationship with my editor where I can...
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challenge suggestions she might make and we will actually have a constructive discussion about the points she might have about a book.
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And so I feel that's a really good constructive working relationship.
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And I feel very, very happy with that.
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And so I'm just about to publish my seventh book for them.
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I'm already working on my eighth book, researching it and starting to write it.
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And there's already been some talk about a contract for another
The Role of Literary Agents in the Process
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two books.
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So that would be 10 books in all.
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So I'm going to keep going with it because it's working really well for me.
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And we get the books out quite quickly as well.
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Yeah, no, you're not the first.
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I've had a few bookature authors on the podcast.
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All of them seem very happy.
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I mean, all I hear is praise for the way that the publisher runs and interacts and sort of supports their authors.
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Yes.
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Well, I can compare my experiences to those of other people.
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And I have good friends who are with bigger publishers like HarperCollins and smaller ones.
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But I must say that I get lots of help in the whole production of the book from the initial call of my editor through structural edits, through the copy edit and the proofing.
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It's really monitored carefully at every single stage, but in this collaborative way.
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So they might question something that I've put in, maybe a fact or something, and then I can go back to them and check my facts and make sure it's really good.
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I get a chance to comment on the audio.
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I get a chance to comment on the cover and the title.
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I might not always agree, but I know they know what.
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are doing because their aim is to make the book a success and then when it finally publishes they arrange a blog tour with reviewers and so it gets a lot of coverage straight away and if together we think we've produced a really good book and hopefully this next one is going to go down well the first comment my editor made when she's
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when I finally submitted, the first word on her assessment was, wow.
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So I think she quite liked it.
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So I'm hoping that a lot of other readers will as well.
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Yeah.
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So I guess you would recommend Bookature to people sort of looking to get into publishing and looking for different places to send their manuscripts.
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Yeah.
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It can take a long time with a traditional publisher to actually get that book out and actually see it in print.
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And I do respect traditional publishing.
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And I love seeing my books occasionally in independent bookshops as well.
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But I submitted this new book in March, beginning of March, and it's going to be published August the 23rd.
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Now, with a traditional publisher,
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that might not see the light of day until next year.
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So it's really nice to see the speed with which an actual book can be published.
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A lot of my sales are on e-book, Kimball, and the remainder are on print on demand.
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But there is a huge market for e-books.
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So I appreciate the publisher who really understands that market.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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And as someone who, as you said, you'd sort of been submitting to, I'm guessing, agents and publishers for many years.
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Is the submission process similar to the rest of BookerJump?
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It's slightly different in that for literary agents, you normally have to submit whatever they ask for.
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It might be the first three chapters, it might be the first 10,000 words.
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You have to respond by giving them what each individual agent is asking for.
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Which is time consuming.
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You've got to get that document prepared and everything.
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With Bookature, you submit the whole thing and they say on their site they will respond within three weeks.
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And they certainly did.
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And I've heard of other people who get a very quick response because it's very hard as a writer to make a submission and just sit there twiddling your thumbs and thinking, well, is anyone going to want to use this?
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And these days, I began to find that sometimes you wouldn't even get a response from an agent if you hadn't heard anything after six weeks.
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Well, you might as well just assume they'd looked at it once and just thrown it away.
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deleted it as an email.
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So it's quite an agonising process, submitting.
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So at least Booker shall let you know really quickly, one way or the other.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And you're sort of, am I right in thinking that you are with the Literary Agency?
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I am.
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I am with Heather Holden Brown, who is absolutely lovely.
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Bookature do say that if you're with them, you don't need an agent.
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But because I was completely new to publishing, I thought I would really like to have somebody I could turn to, whose shoulder I could cry on and who I can ask advice and not be afraid of sounding absolutely stupid.
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So she's lovely.
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She's warm and supportive.
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She's very wise.
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She's been in publishing a long time.
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And in fact, she knows my editor.
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She knows other people at Booker Chair.
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She knows lots of people in the whole industry.
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So I feel very lucky to be with her.
Journey to Becoming a Historical Novelist
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Okay.
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Did you sign with her after you'd signed with Booker Chair or was it before you'd signed with Booker Chair?
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I have to be honest, I actually signed with her after I'd had the Booker Shaw offer.
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I hadn't yet signed with them.
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And the site of this great big long contract was
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sent me into spin thinking, I want someone to help me.
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I had already approached Heather previously.
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She had liked the sound of it.
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She said, what a good title I had.
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But she said she didn't have quite the capacity to take on another person.
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I already knew two authors who were with her.
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Um,
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But then I went back to her when I got the book at your offer.
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Now, I suppose, Nick, you're thinking, oh, well, of course she took you one because you already got a contract.
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But I still felt I wanted to have that experience.
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And two friends who were with her had always spoken about how wise and sensible she was.
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And so she was top of my list anyway.
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So I was very grateful to be taken on by her.
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And, yeah, she continues to be really supportive.
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So, for instance, with the new book, The Girl Who Never Came Back, I wanted to incorporate quotes from the actual special operations executive manual, which,
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And I had to get permission to do that.
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So she organized all of that for me.
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So it's really lovely to have that extra help and support.
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Right.
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I have to worry about things.
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So, yeah, it goes beyond just the things that you expect from an agent a lot of the time.
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Yes, it does.
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She's someone I can ring up with any kind of stupid questions.
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Okay.
00:18:05
Speaker
I'm curious about, so you said that you've been doing this for, for, for a while now.
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Um, and I did notice you, your first book was published in 2019.
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So that's only four years ago.
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So at the moment you're releasing more than one book a year.
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Are a lot of those books, things that you had previously written and you've sort of, you're now sort of touching them up or are they all, are you, are you, are you literally writing more than one book a year at the moment?
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I'm writing a book in slightly less than a year, most of the time.
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Two of the books were in my book.
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bottom drawer pile, as it were.
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But they had potential.
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And so they were then rewritten to bring out the dual timeline and certain aspects that my editor thought would work.
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And those two were Burning Island, which was about the decimation of the Jewish community in Corfu during the war.
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And also the Shutterway Sisters, which is the one which is a dual timeline, but the past timeline is set during the First World War.
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But I did have to extend both of them considerably, so they still required a lot of work.
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But those were the only two with some historical potential out of my old pile, as it were.
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Ah, okay.
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What were you writing before that was not historical?
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I had written contemporary.
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And in fact...
00:19:48
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The first book that Booker Ture took, which is called My Name is Eva, I hadn't even thought of it as a historical novel, and I certainly hadn't thought of myself as a historical novelist.
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My Name is Eva just happened to be about an elderly lady living in a care home, trying to keep her secrets hidden.
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And in order to help the reader understand the depth of the secrets she had and the enormity of them, I had to go back into the past as well as writing about this old lady's reactions to people around her, encouraging her to...
Advice for Aspiring Authors: Keep Writing
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tell them things in the present day.
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So yes, I hadn't even thought of myself as a historical novelist, but now I am, apparently.
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Big surprise.
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Yes, here we are.
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Amazing.
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Well, that almost brings us to the final question of the interview, which we'll get on to in a sec.
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But before I do, I did just want to ask, as someone who you've been trying to break into publishing for a long time and you have since broken in and you now have...
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Six novels out, seventh on the way.
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Very exciting.
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Congratulations.
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What advice would you give to people who were on that kind of same journey that you were on for a long time, trying to break into publishing and just sort of hitting that wall?
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I would say never give up and it's never too late because My Name is Eva published only a couple of weeks before my 70th birthday.
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And I had been trying for a long time after a previous career.
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And for some women who've had a career and brought up families later in life is the first time they get a chance to do something they've always wanted to do.
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And I would say, yes, definitely, never give up.
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And keep writing.
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My husband used to say to me, why are you writing another one when the first one hasn't been accepted?
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And I would just say, but I love doing it.
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I find uncovering stories and having that adventure of developing a story so exciting and
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And I still
Supportive Writing Communities
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do.
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I'm uncovering really interesting aspects about the Kindertransport at the moment for the book that I'm next planning, which is going to be a pivotal role of the Quakers in making sure that the Kindertransport, which saved the lives of 10,000 children, actually happens.
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Wow.
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Yeah.
00:22:36
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I mean, it's one of the best pieces of advice that I think people give is, I do often hear, never give up, just persevere, keep going, but also enjoy what you're doing.
00:22:46
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You know, if you're not enjoying it, maybe you need to rethink your approach because if you're not enjoying it now and you get signed, you're going to have to keep doing this thing you're not enjoying.
00:22:55
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So, yeah.
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Yeah, I think enjoying it is really, really important.
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And find ways to have fun with your writing and link up with other writers.
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And I'm linked into three really, really supportive groups.
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And we share each other's work and talk about it and try and work out all the problems that are involved.
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And that makes it really fun and really helps you to keep going.
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And when you have disappointments, they're the ones who are going to pick you up and
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and help you to
Favorite Books: The Impact of 'Rebecca'
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keep going.
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But yes, I really, really enjoy it.
00:23:30
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I don't always enjoy, you know, negative reviews, which happen a bunch of times, even if your book is successful.
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But you know, you've got to just take it on the chin.
00:23:40
Speaker
Yes, you can't please everyone.
00:23:42
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And that, I think, brings us on to the final question, which as always is, Sue, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book would it be?
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Right.
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But I knew what I was going to say the minute I saw that question, actually.
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I half wondered whether I should take War and Peace just because it's really long.
00:24:05
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But my go-to read at times of stress and at the time of the first lockdown, actually, was Rebecca by Daphne de Moura.
00:24:17
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And my reason for that is it's not just that it is a great story and I've enjoyed reading it a few times, but it is a masterclass.
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in how to have a suspenseful, thrilling story.
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And so I think every writer can learn from reading Rebecca.
Closing Remarks and Social Media Connections
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Yes, you're not the first person to have chosen Rebecca.
00:24:40
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Great praise for that book throughout.
00:24:45
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I've also had previous discussions with authors about the film adaptations, which are not as highly rated.
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But yes, excellent choice.
00:24:54
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A brilliant book to take with you to the library.
00:24:58
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Susan, for coming on the podcast and telling us all about your writing and your books and your journey through publishing with Bookature.
00:25:05
Speaker
It's been awesome chatting with you.
00:25:07
Speaker
Thanks.
00:25:07
Speaker
Well, thank you very much for inviting me.
00:25:10
Speaker
Thanks so much.
00:25:11
Speaker
You're so welcome.
00:25:12
Speaker
And for anyone listening, if you want to keep up with what Susan's doing, you can follow her on Twitter at Susan Goldring or on Facebook, also Susan Goldring.
00:25:22
Speaker
And to make sure you don't miss an episode of this podcast, follow along on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
00:25:26
Speaker
Oh, I should say X, whatever we're calling it now.
00:25:29
Speaker
You can support the show on Patreon.
00:25:31
Speaker
And for more Booker's Chat, check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and other tropes.
00:25:35
Speaker
Thanks again to Susan and thanks to everyone listening.
00:25:37
Speaker
We'll catch you on the next episode.