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#182 - Ellery Lloyd a.k.a. Collette Lyons & Paul Vlitos
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Best-selling husband and wife writing team, Ellery Lloyd joins us this week to chat about their approach to co-writing, the tricky parts within that and their latest novel 'The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby'.
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question. I love it. Because the writing is sort of everything, right? Like, you could've... can fix plot holes, but if the writing... So some readers love that, and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this. So it's kind of... it's kind of a gamble.
Latest Novel: The Final Act of Juliet Willoughby
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello, and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast. On today's episode, I am joined by not one, but two authors, the New York Times bestselling husband and wife writing team, Collette Lyons and Paul Vlietos, AKA Ellery Lloyd. Hello. Hello.
00:00:34
Speaker
Thanks so much for coming on. um It's not often I get to do a two for one writing team. So like let's jump right in, talk about the latest novel, which just came out, the final act of Juliet Willoughby.
Plot and Themes Overview
00:00:49
Speaker
Which one of you has the better Stales pitch? Oh.
00:00:56
Speaker
We tend to just talk over each other. yeah You go first. <unk> It is a a mystery set over the course of a century, ah three mysterious disappearances and deaths linked by one painting which holds ah secrets. So um Juliet Willoughby is an artist, a an heiress who runs away um in 1938 to join her old and married artist lover Oscar and becomes part of the in paris it surrealist circle in Paris. Oh, you were going to say that anyway. yeah
00:01:32
Speaker
um After she paints there she paints her masterpiece Self Portrait as Sphinx which is ah exhibited for one night before she pulls it um from the exhibition ah and shortly afterwards she and Oscar die um alongside that painting in a mysterious studio fire. Then we cut forward to the second timeline, which is 1990s. Cambridge, two young history of art students, um they're doing their dissertations and they stumble across a series of clues that seem to suggest the painting may have survived, but also the fire may have been not an accident.
00:02:16
Speaker
And then you fast forward to present day Dubai, where the painting which has been rediscovered has just been sold by forty two for million ah by Patrick, the um one of the one of the students who is now an art dealer. um And almost immediately he is arrested for murdering the last surviving member of the Willoughby clan, ah his closest friend, Harry Willoughby. And then we unpick ah what how these ah how how this is all linked and how and the secrets may lie in this painting. Right. So multiple timelines, lots going on and sort of secrets carrying on through generations and and things like that figuring it all out. Exactly. It's been called the puzzle box of a novel.
00:03:05
Speaker
that That's a really great ah really great way to describe a novel. To me, that immediately is very
Inception and Co-Writing Process
00:03:11
Speaker
appealing. And it doesn't put it just within a sort of very congested genre of being like, oh, it's another one of those. It's another one of those. It's calling it a a sort of puzzle box. That's a great little tagline. I like that. It's always interesting to learn with authors about the so the inception of a novel, you know which what was the first part, the first idea, and and and even more interested because there's two of you involved here. How did the the kind of this begin? What was the inception point?
00:03:39
Speaker
Well, it always starts for us with a world, doesn't it? So we did like kind of parenting inferences in the first novel. We did like a private members club in our second novel, The Club. And we were really interested in exploring um the art world in this. I did a history of art degree. It's not um something that I ended up working in but um you know this surrealist especially and the female surrealists are you know a group that I've been very interested in and and also I just really really love mystery novels centered around art.
00:04:11
Speaker
Yes, you love mystery novels and you also love that kind of, um what's that Sunday afternoon antique hunt kind of thing? It's the Antiques Roadshow. You're really interested in kind of auctions and stuff, so it brought that world of mystery, lots of different worlds together actually. yeah It's nice that you a lot of people have degrees that they're never able to use. It's nice that you did find a way to use your degree at this point. Finally. And in terms of the process, um when it comes to like co-writing, do the two of you sort of sit down and kind of brainstorm and then plan everything out before you start writing?
00:04:55
Speaker
Yes. So with our first novel, which is called People Like Her, we had a kernel of an i idea and sat down to write pretty quickly, actually, but it was it was very, very voiceless, that novel. so um and And we tripped up halfway through because we hadn't really plotted further than the middle of the novel. um But with something with something like the final act of Juniet Willoughby, um
Task Division and Editing
00:05:22
Speaker
There's no way that it could have been written without a really um ah ah a detailed roadmap. We had like kind of a wall of um you know sticky notes in different colours for the different timelines because you're sort of also arranging it. like There's lots of mysteries, but you don't want it to be confusing and you want everything to kind of tie up and the timelines to kind of work together. So there was a lot of moving around of of sticky notes and stuff. And we we had, you know, this novel went through, I mean, as all novels do, um a few drafts, but um we we tried different ways of plaiting the timelines together. um Because as Paul says, although it's a complex um a plot, we never, never wanted the reader to be confused about what they needed to be focusing on at any given point. So um the structure we landed on, um hopefully, is
00:06:19
Speaker
Not confusing. um but But at least a bit intriguing. That's the goal, right? Not confusing, but intriguing and asking questions. Absolutely. Yeah. How do you divide kind of the the the writing into different parts to sort of say, I'll write this, you write that? Usually first draft, we take a kind of voice or a character each. So the fact that those two of us we've tried to make a kind of, you know, like a strength, like, oh, these do feel like do two different characters. There's in the club, there were, I think, four or five different characters, but we, um which was our last novel. remember too many
00:06:57
Speaker
So we we will, in the first draft, take a character or two characters each um and maybe in a successive draft. And then after that, we both edit everything. So I don't think in any of our novels, there's a single sentence that we haven't both had a hand in. um You just won't leave my lovely sentences alone. Oh, he's pruning them. Killing your darlings would want an abandon. Pruning. Secateurs. Okay, but so the fact but but generally the sort of foundations, the bones of different point of view characters, those are kind of tied to one or or the other. Yes, exactly. and And I guess something to sort of slightly differentiate is we tend to decide quite early on what the structure is going to be in terms of, right, there's going to be three voices, this is how it's going to organize. And then within that, we're still working out the plot and sort of
00:07:52
Speaker
yeah yeah what happens within the world. We've got to be pretty sure early on what the structure is going to be, and that's how we divide up the initial labour. Yeah. Right. And then you you kind of bring it all together and like you said, you'll look over each other's writing and then kind of line it all up and kind of complete the the puzzle of the kind of complete structure, I imagine. Yes, exactly. And that's not to say, you know, we start off with um a very detailed roadmap, but we do take detours. So, um and there is, you know, in successive drafts, there are always fairly major changes made, but um it's always easier once we have a first draft done, um to sit down and decide what those tweaks should be together.
Pre-Editor Feedback
00:08:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's I think that's the same as, um I guess you guys are almost doing the the beginning stages of what an editor would do because there's the two of you. Yes, and actually it's meant generally, and I ah don't want to jinx us. um But um we've never had major structural edits from editors, so I'm sure your listeners know this already, but um usually writers will submit a fairly early draft to an agent. If they've got a good relationship with their agent, the agent will give them feedback, then
00:09:18
Speaker
one or two rounds of that perhaps and then it will go to their editor and then the editor will also have um you know one or two rounds of feedback and the first round usually is something called structural edits which is lose this character or actually this starts from the wrong place or have you thought about changing this plot point because of x reason? Yes, the big one. Because we, the big one, ah the one that always makes your heart sink. um But um actually, because Paul and I ah have each other, we kind of have found that we tended to do the structural edits
00:09:58
Speaker
ourselves um before it gets to anybody else's eyes. um and ah And that, you know, that's a fairly sort of laborious process. But it it it means that by the time that we're handing our books over to anybody else at all, we're fairly confident that it makes sense because we've given each other fairly brutal feedback on um what works and what doesn't. Yeah.
Impact of Relationship on Writing
00:10:26
Speaker
And obviously you two are ah have a very close relationship and I imagine that there's not much holding back when it comes to, this isn't working. yeah exactly i mean like so because i do I sort of teach a bit of creative writing as well, but you would never be as rude to a student.
00:10:44
Speaker
would be someone else because I think the other thing I think all writers need to do it is quite a hard thing to do is do like an impatient reading of a draft where you're just like oh my god you know and and get on with it yeah get on with it is boring you've told us this already which you know I will quite happily write on the stuff that Claire and I have written but you wouldn't necessarily write on anyone else Yeah, and my background is um I was a magazine um journalist editor section editor for years, and you have you have to, you know, get sort of into um fairly deep edits on um features quite frequently. um And so we are both, because we're both used to giving feedback, I think we're fairly relaxed about accepting it as well. Yeah. And I've had i've had a number of journalists turned kind of author on the podcast. And one thing that I'll always hear from journalists is how kind of coming into publishing from from this direction is there they're always surprised at how nice the feedback and critique is and like how how pleasant it is. There's a, um I won't tell you who, um but there was ah ah someone who ah is famous for other reasons, but has since segued into novels, um who I gave some edits to for a feature once. And it's fairly typical as an editor to um give your edits in square brackets in capitals.
00:12:18
Speaker
um which is obviously quite shouty. But most journalists know that that that's just the form of of your, you know, a new universe. So, um but ah he he was, he, I got quite an angry response. It was a sad sad and sad and angry response to my edits. Why are you shouting at me? It was about a page and a half of vitriol from him. um So I do sometimes think, oh, I wonder how his poor editor fares when he gets his structural edits back. But anyway,
00:13:00
Speaker
Yeah, I've spoken to a number of editors on the podcast as well. And what I've learned is that there is a beyond the actual sort of um logistics of editing and working with an author, there is a whole adam element of being an editor, which is a sort of social element of understanding how much give and take each author can handle on a sort of unique personal level. It's a really interesting point and and presumably they modulate their yeah exact method um and and tone.
00:13:32
Speaker
um yeah um whereas but you know We've already but already gone through with a red pen with each other, so it's all good. Yeah. And I think most journalists who who move into publishing novels, ah probably ah the editors will know that that they're going to have a thick skin towards critique and feedback and know that yes how this how this process works. Exactly.
Evolution of Writing Process
00:13:56
Speaker
um Getting back quickly onto under your process, the two of you writing together, you mentioned that your first book was relatively unplanned. This new one, The Final Act of Gula, will be very planned out. You said because you felt like this novel needed to be planned out. Is that because of the necessity of this novel specifically, or is that a mark of like how much your process has evolved since the first one?
00:14:23
Speaker
The novels have become more ambitious, ambitious um more research heavy. um and and we have you know We are currently writing our fourth novel and the process has been very similar to um the final act of Juliet Willoughby. This one involves time travel. so um Time travel murder mystery. Yes. So we thought we were going to go go back and you go back to basics and go really simple. We'll write an easy novel next time. and We have not done that. um and And so no, I think this is, to be honest, it's more a refining of our process rather than anything else. But whenever you write ah your first novel, and Paul's written two novels before and I i hadn't ever written a novel,
00:15:11
Speaker
um I think you'd go into it with wild hope, don't you? that you know it it will sort of It will turn into um something, if not publishable, then at least readable. Well, it's just that I'm writing a novel. I'm actually doing it. I even learned to ride a bike. Look, it's getting longer. It's got chapters. We wouldn't have known how to to but structure or or sort of work together at that point, we just sat down and started writing. um And, ah you know, over the course of, but I guess, six years, it's basically since our daughter was born, and she's she's nearly seven now. But um I think that has it's just become clear. You know, with the first novel, which is called People Like Her, um we did just sit down and start writing. And ah then I stopped.
00:16:07
Speaker
I basically stopped two thirds of the way through because Paul kept going like Road Runner off a cliff um and and it just missed, it didn't have one of the voices for the last third of the novel because I knew that the plot didn't work. And and i wasn't I couldn't find a way to write into the void. um And paul can Paul is brilliant um at at just sitting down and ensuring that words make it onto the page. And you will always be able to use some of the thoughts you've had or you know some of the sentences that you've written in in um chapters and chunks that don't actually make it into the final you know novel as written.
00:16:51
Speaker
um But at that point, we did just realise that we needed to sit down and properly, properly plot because, you know, we're through the writers, so you need you need the plot to work. Yeah. I guess we we're also quite complementary kinds of writers in that Colette is much better at saying, oh hold on, we've got... It's like asking for directions. It might just be gendered. Oh, doggedly keep going! yeah We'll end up in Scotland when actually we wanted to go to Harrogate. I will say, no, hold on. This has got lost. Let's stop. Let's rethink. Yeah, let's ask some directions. um So, yeah. um But, yeah, we've we've just become we've become more adept at it over time, I think.
00:17:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. and And sort of, but yeah, I mean, it's, I'll have to talk about Paul a bit and you, like you said, you, you have been teaching creative writing and you've published two novels prior to this, but I imagine it was a whole, despite that kind of, you must have like a pretty vast knowledge of the craft and different approaches to writing, but it must've been a learning curve to actually like co-write a novel with someone else. um Yeah, and I think that's probably why it didn't occur to us for so long, because Colette had always had these brilliant like novel ideas that we'd be like, you should write this, and you you know, we do that thing of being on holiday and sort of plotting out the ideas. So it's very obvious that you had great ideas and had lots of interesting material.
00:18:20
Speaker
to use but it didn't occur to us for years and years that actually we could do it we could do it together and we could you know actually work together and I suppose or that it would work or that it would work and and actually so I was made redundant when I was pregnant. and um And so any writing that I would ever have done would have been before or after work and I hate mornings and ah I could go to the pub in the evening because we didn't have a dog we didn't have a baby. um So actually after um she was born and we didn't have a social life and we finished watching all eight seasons of Game of Thrones twice, um
00:19:01
Speaker
we decided to ah sit down and start writing a novel, but I think it was just, it was kind of life stage dependent as well for us. Well, also, it was nice to have something to talk about that wasn't the baby, like, because we'd spend all day with her and then you get into this stage of like, oh, should we now spend the whole evening cooing over pictures of her? Actually having something else to talk about was quite useful, even if it was murder. um Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Future Projects and Genre Exploration
00:19:30
Speaker
It seems like it was almost like ah a bit of a lifeline for you guys, having this this new kind of aspect to your to your life, which you did entirely together as a partnership. it Yeah. It definitely allowed me to use my brain in ways that um i ah that I wasn't able to otherwise at that point. yeah And working together on something was also really nice in the sense that it wasn't like we were working on separate novels. So you'd sort of be like desperately juggling time or feeling like you were taking time away from someone, you know, it it would, you know, it was kind of quite a nice, quite nice to have a collegiate shared goal that sort of, you know, because also you're like, God, I desperately need an app and you come out and your novels 500 words longer. yeah because get
00:20:12
Speaker
ah I'm going to have a bath, make my novel longer. I've had a plot idea in a bath. You can make it happen. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I think many authors would dream of such a thing. just The novel just writes itself in way in and out there. Ideal. Before we head over to the desert island, I wanted to ask, and prefacing this with, I imagine that we, there will be plenty more Ellery Lloyd novels to come, but Are either of you interested in doing any any kind of solo writing in in the future as well, maybe to explore different genres and styles?
00:20:49
Speaker
to break the band up. Not necessarily. i did practice I'll just keep replacing you. It would be like, it would be one of those things like take that where we then we might have solo careers of wildly differing success. like um You know, and because um we both still have other um jobs, um not currently, um because, you know, we we're sort of um prioritising Anne-Marie Lloyd. Definitely, it's not a no. Yeah, I mean, I do academic writing. People who've enjoyed Final Act of Julia Willoughby may enjoy my forthcoming book about Victorian literary advice.
00:21:29
Speaker
if They yes, they may. I'm not sure it's going to be New York Times bestseller. There's probably some crossover there somewhere. There's a very slim yeah bit of Venn diagram crossover. How would you find that Discord to deal with if my academic book was... No, I would be very, very surprised, but I wouldn't be traumatised. Okay. So I think maybe eventually, you know, who knows, we've talked about screenwriting, we've talked about sort of slight genre shifts, maybe we, you know, is there a kind of another pseudonym we don't... we are focusing on the writing that we have in front of us. It's Ellery Lloyd at the minute because we're still really enjoying it. Yeah. Are there any genres that maybe one of you would like likes but the other one doesn't like maybe like a rom-com or like a fantasy or something that one of you would like to pursue and the other one's like, I don't think that's for me.
00:22:29
Speaker
I got really into romance because I taught a bit of romance on, like because we do lots of genres on the novel writing course, I teach at Greenwich. So we had a week on romance, everyone was dreading, but everyone loved it. They were so good. Well, Paul's first two books were kind of romantic comedies. Yeah, but yeah um I mean, I can't, I i can't do that. i can't I definitely couldn't do romance or no, no. I quite fancy horror.
00:23:02
Speaker
It's trending right now, horror romance. Is it? Yeah. Oh, okay. Great. Right. There we go. Get working. Nailed it. Perfect. Unfortunately, you're both here, so the novel won't start writing itself. Yeah.
Desert Island Book Choices
00:23:20
Speaker
Well, maybe we'll get our daughter to do it. Well, she's keen to do a kids book, isn't she? She is. It would involve unicorns, so I'm not sure we could shoehorn that into a horror romance, but... I think that could work. Horror unicorns? Oh. Yeah. Exactly. Edgy. That brings us to the desert island. So... one at a time, I guess. If you two were stranded on a desert island, which book do you hope that you would be stuck there with? Do you know what? You must get this all the time. I'm going to have to say... Welcome to a working week, but probably just... Yeah, that's what I'll have. I do get that all the time. How do you know?
00:24:08
Speaker
it's ah Yeah, actually, I'm going to flip. Paul's first novel. I'm going to take my second novel, which you never finished. I found my second novel, everything's on Sunday, with a bookmark like three quarters of the way through, like three years into a match. So I would take that one, see how see how it ends. Oh, right, yes. Yeah, does it does it just sort of fizzle out for? But without you there, to put a murder in. Yeah, exactly. I should have told you there's a murder. You should have done, there's a murder in the end. I'll just about feel it, it's not a genuine joke. I'll take both of Paul's first novels. I'll both choice this one. I mean, I do, you can occasionally catch me without reading one. But what I'll probably do is just look at Instagram instead.
00:24:59
Speaker
Is that allowed? Sure, yeah. guess Okay, I'm just stuck on a designer with both of my own books. Yes.
00:25:12
Speaker
We do occasionally, you know. I know you do. Paul does, okay, but we we've got obviously like all writers, we've got shelves of our books and Paul does fairly frequently take one of them down off the shelf and just chuckle to himself. alive Sometimes it's at one of your bits. Yeah. Oh, Paul, what are you going to take? No, we've got it. We've got it. We've got it. There you go. So for our two. Okay, that is an excellent choice, guys. Really, really good stuff. I mean, because Ireland is literally the only time you would read literary advice and British literary culture to me. Yeah, so we'll take that as well. Which I haven't finished yet. I take a fucking finish it. Amazing. Well, I love that. I love that for both of you. Next up, I've got some questions about potential teething problems of co-writing literary agents and the Reese Witherspoon Book Club, but that's going to be in the extended episode exclusive to my amazing Patreon subscribers.
Conclusion and Social Media Sharing
00:26:24
Speaker
Okay, okay. And on that note, that brings us to the end of the episode. Thank you so much, guys. It's been so cool and interesting and fun chatting with you and hearing all about the new book and your kind of experiences with writing and publishing. It was lovely to chat. Thank you. And for anyone listening, the final act of G that Wanna Be is out now. You can go and get it in all the usual places. And to keep up with what Paul and Kellett are doing, you can follow them on Twitter at Ellery Lloyd on Instagram at Ellery Lloyd underscore author, or on the website, www.elleryloyd.com. 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.
00:27:13
Speaker
Thanks again to Paul and Collette, and thanks to everyone listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.