Transcript
Speaker: To listen without ads, head over to patreon.com slash right and wrong.
Speaker: Ooh, a spicy question.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
Speaker: You can fix plot holes, but if the writer... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
Speaker: So it's kind of a gamble.
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
Speaker: On today's episode, I'm joined by a New York Times bestselling novelist who has sold over 1 million books worldwide, all the way from Melbourne, Australia.
Speaker: It's Sally Hepworth.
Speaker: Hello, welcome.
Speaker: Hello, thank you for having me from the other side of the world.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker: Let's get straight into it with your latest release, the ninth novel, I believe, which is out in Australia, will be out in the UK by the time this airs.
Speaker: Tell us a little bit about Darling Girls.
Speaker: Darling Girls, like all of my other books, is about family dysfunctionality with a side serving of murder.
Speaker: So this particular family is three sisters who are not in fact biological sisters, but they were raised in foster care together.
Speaker: And now at the beginning of the book, they are adults and
Speaker: And they are living, you know, fairly functional lives, but, you know, with a few little idiosyncrasies.
Speaker: And then they receive a phone call from a police detective saying that a body has been found underneath the foster home where they grew up.
Speaker: And the three of them are sent back to that little town to revisit their childhood and to figure out who the body was and if they were, in fact, victims or perhaps villains.
Speaker: It's great stuff.
Speaker: I wonder, Cold Case kind of things is very in right now.
Speaker: What is it about having a sort of murder that happened a long time ago that is kind of really engaging to write?
Speaker: Well, that's a great question and you're absolutely right.
Speaker: I've been watching a lot of them lately.
Speaker: It's the first time I've done it, a cold case, and I wouldn't say that I planned it that way or because it was on trend.
Speaker: Every book just is kind of guarded by what that book needs and this book was inspired by a real-life foster care
Speaker: situation that I read about in the news where there had been a little girl who had gone missing from foster care when she was three and then 25 years later
Speaker: an adult woman was watching TV, saw this program about missing children and had an inkling that the little girl on the news was her.
Speaker: And she then went to the police and she ended up having a DNA test and proved that it was in fact her.
Speaker: So that became the sort of, that was the impetus for the book, but
Speaker: I didn't want to retell that story, but it got me thinking about what if a child had gone missing, but in fact had not survived and their body was found.
Speaker: It's about what really works for that particular story rather than finding something on trend and trying to jam it in.
Speaker: Yeah, it was just a happy coincidence that it was a very popular thing.
Speaker: Exactly right.
Speaker: So is this the first novel that you've done that's been inspired by real life events or have the other ones also kind of... Almost always there'll be something from real life that has inspired it.
Speaker: It might be...
Speaker: a news article, which it's been a few times, like with this one, it might be something that I've overheard at a cafe.
Speaker: It might be, you know, a suggestion that someone's made to me or something my children have said.
Speaker: It does, it comes from the world.
Speaker: But it's rarely just one particular thing.
Speaker: And I never, for example, with the story about foster children, I never hear that story and think, I'm going to recreate that story.
Speaker: because that's not interesting to me.
Speaker: I have to create my own characters with their own stories and I don't know the real people's stories.
Speaker: So I will take that little kernel of inspiration and then perhaps one or two other kernels of inspiration or things that I'd like to explore and they all kind of come together to become something that is fictional.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it sort of has to be that way because you kind of alluded to it earlier when you were talking about the novel, but your books are often the family unit, the kind of dysfunctional family unit comes first and the murder or the crime comes second.
Speaker: So obviously if you're basing it on a real life event, you don't know what the family dynamics are like necessarily, but you just know the step-by-step things that happened.
Speaker: Yes, exactly right.
Speaker: And that's how I see it too, that I always lead with it's the family dysfunctionality.
Speaker: That's what makes me tick.
Speaker: And that's what I love to read about.
Speaker: And that's what I love to write about.
Speaker: And the murder or the crime in my books is just sort of a vehicle to get us to really uncover what's going on with this family.
Speaker: That's so interesting that you frame it that way.
Speaker: Would you ever write a story which was about a dysfunctional family that didn't have a crime or murder side plot to it?
Speaker: Again, I have never thought, oh, well, there needs to be a crime.
Speaker: What's the crime going to be?
Speaker: I always just write first stories.
Speaker: with the premise and then the characters.
Speaker: And some of my earlier books didn't have crime.
Speaker: I think my first book that had a murder was The Mother-in-Law.
Speaker: And, you know, with that title, obviously, we all knew who was going to get murdered and that was not the surprise.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: that the mystery was who did it um and and yes I would absolutely uh if if I understood what I was writing that book for and what was going to happen and if the stakes were high uh and and it wasn't the crime that did it then sure I would write that book it's just that
Speaker: I think crime really lends itself very nicely to high stakes and also, you know, when you put crime and family together, I just always think you end up with something pretty interesting and a pretty good story.
Speaker: Yeah, because it's, I guess, on one end of the, with the crime and stuff, you're sort of pushing people to a limit in a way that's sort of breaking the law and like, will they get caught?
Speaker: Will they get away with it?
Speaker: And then on the other side, it's family sort of problems seem much more mundane, but they can be just as intense.
Speaker: So you have sort of two ends of the spectrum.
Speaker: Exactly right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I like to play into that, you know,
Speaker: something that's familiar to people and perhaps that they can identify with, like, for example, not getting along with your mother-in-law as, you know, that book is about.
Speaker: I think everyone, that was the most universal of all of my books that everyone understood it, but not everyone has murdered her.
Speaker: So that is a way of kind of, you know, getting people nodding and understanding and feeling that character, but then just taking it perhaps a little bit further away.
Speaker: just to see what might happen.
Speaker: Maybe it saved a lot of mothers-in-law.
Speaker: I don't know that they might realise, but maybe I won't go through with it.
Speaker: I've seen what happened.
Speaker: You're doing a great service to humanity protecting mothers-in-law across the world.
Speaker: So based off that, I'm going to guess if I were to ask you whether you were a plotter or a pantser, you would probably be on the side of pantsing.
Speaker: Oh, good, good guess.
Speaker: I don't even know the answer to that.
Speaker: Early on in my writing career, I would have said I was a plotter.
Speaker: Absolutely, I would have said that.
Speaker: In fact...
Speaker: I would have told everyone else that that's what they needed to do because I'd written one novel and I plotted it and that was how I did it.
Speaker: Now that I've written nine and people ask me how I do it, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know the answer.
Speaker: I tell people to go and ask someone who's written one novel because they'll speak about it with great certainty.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they'll have a way.
Speaker: But for me, every novel is different and some of them are very tightly plotted.
Speaker: Some of them are more of a pantser situation where I have a premise and then I just go.
Speaker: And then I've kind of done everything in between, like a really loose kind of high-level plot or I will have a few scenes that I'll plan out and the rest kind of will be made up along the way.
Speaker: The thing that is consistent is that I always end up doing a lot of drafts.
Speaker: And whether I plot or I don't, nothing saves me from that fate.
Speaker: So a certain amount of it, no matter how much you plot, just happens as you write.
Speaker: And then for me, I get to the end and I finally figured out what the story is.
Speaker: And so I have to go back to the beginning and just make all roads lead there, I guess.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, they do say most novels are written in the drafts.
Speaker: So I think no matter how much you plot, there's always going to be at least several drafts to go through.
Speaker: Well, I've met a couple of authors who, a friend of mine actually, will write from beginning to end and type the end and send it to her editor, which fills me with horror and dread.
Speaker: But
Speaker: That's kind of what I love about creative people is that we're all doing the same thing but so differently and we're also all desperate for things
Speaker: someone to tell us the right way.
Speaker: You know, it doesn't matter how many books you've written, how successful you are.
Speaker: You know, I've sat in a room with Jane Harper and Leon Moriarty and, you know, really fantastic authors who all their ears have pricked up and when another author started explaining how they do it because, you know, we all kind of have this deep-seated belief that we're doing it wrong and that we need to figure out a better way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If anyone knows one, let me know.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: Because I think we're all, we're all searching for like, oh, come on, there must be an easier way than what I'm doing.
Speaker: An easier way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But deep down, we all know that there is no one way of doing it and you just have to do whatever works for you.
Speaker: Exactly right.
Speaker: Or whatever you decide to try that day is, is, you know, the right thing for them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I do think there's something to be said for trying different things.
Speaker: So like if you're someone who has only ever pantsed a novel and
Speaker: if you try plotting one, that novel might not work out for you because that's just not your style.
Speaker: But I think when you go back to the style you're used to, you will have learned or like picked up things just from trying at one time.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: And I'm a big trier.
Speaker: I love to try.
Speaker: I'm very Gemini of me.
Speaker: Love nothing more than a new regime, a new way of doing things.
Speaker: But I actually, another friend of mine, an author, I tried to convince her to plot at one point and I got out all the index cards and I was going there and she just ended up throwing the index cards at me and saying, I'm not doing this.
Speaker: This is not how I do it.
Speaker: And I was like, well, okay.
Speaker: So, you know, not everyone feels like me about those things, but I like to try.
Speaker: I'm still hopeful that there'll be another way I haven't tried that's going to make it easier.
Speaker: But there's no wrong ways.
Speaker: No, exactly.
Speaker: I'm really interested in your kind of approach, it sounds like, and this is not just from the plotting or kind of panting point perspective, but it also sounds like when you were talking about
Speaker: whether you would do something without a cold case or like whether the family unit would be first and things like that, is that you approach every novel in an entirely unique way.
Speaker: You don't sort of say, okay, so this is what I did last time.
Speaker: So I'm going to do that and put a twist on it.
Speaker: This is what I did last time.
Speaker: It sounds like you really kind of have an idea and then you're like, let's just see, let's see how that grows and let's see how I'll tackle it based on how it develops.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Exactly, yeah, which is why I find it really difficult to really nail down a premise when I'm speaking to my editors in the early days where they, you know, now my books, I'm lucky enough that my books are contracted before I start writing them and so my publishers, fair enough, want to know what I'm going to be writing about.
Speaker: And when I've decided on something, it's such a,
Speaker: pickle pie in the sky idea that I find really hard to explain.
Speaker: And, you know, the more they kind of push me to nail it down, the harder I find it because it, you know, reveals itself as I write.
Speaker: So I can pitch something that sounds wonderful, but I don't know if that's what the book's going to be like when it comes out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I know all of the authors I know also have trouble with that.
Speaker: So I think I'm in fine company.
Speaker: Yes, you definitely are.
Speaker: I've spoken to plenty of authors who they'll land on a pitch that they like, give it to their editor or the publisher, and they'll say, yes, go ahead.
Speaker: And then sort of halfway through writing, they're like, but I want to go in this other direction now.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And you absolutely just do that.
Speaker: And then you hope to hell that when you turn in the book,
Speaker: that your editor just won't have remembered what the initial pitch was about.
Speaker: I thought you were going to say that it'll be good enough that they'll be like, yeah, this was a much better decision.
Speaker: You're just like, please don't remember.
Speaker: Both.
Speaker: Either.
Speaker: You're always hopeful at that point.
Speaker: I'd love to dial it back a bit and ask about how long you've sort of been writing stories.
Speaker: When did you first start wanting to be an author?
Speaker: Oh, gosh.
Speaker: Well, I famously...
Speaker: I wrote my first book when I was seven years old and I decided I wanted to write a book and I sat down at my kitchen table and I wrote a book of short stories that I called Mustard and Ink.
Speaker: And my mum's sister, my aunt, was a publisher of school textbooks, you know, nonfiction books at the time.
Speaker: And so I rang her up and I said, I'd like you to publish this book for me.
Speaker: I didn't understand what nonfiction was.
Speaker: And I went to her house and she put a cover on it and I drew a picture and she wrote on that copyright, Sally Carradice, which is my maiden name, 1988.
Speaker: And at my first...
Speaker: book launch, you know, 10 years ago, my mum bought it and said, you know, it's always been written in the stars.
Speaker: And I said, well, thanks, mum.
Speaker: Why didn't you tell me for those 10 years when I didn't know what to do with my life?
Speaker: But, I mean, suffice to say, I always loved to write.
Speaker: And I think even more than to write, I love to tell stories.
Speaker: And so it might have been, you know, verbally I love to tell stories and
Speaker: And, you know, I love to write them down and to share them and to listen.
Speaker: And I was a big reader, I'm a big reader.
Speaker: So, yeah, I always feel like,
Speaker: when I'm talking to other writers or particularly when writers say that thing about the second book syndrome or, you know, getting that first book out and then they're looking at the second book and they feel a bit lost.
Speaker: That didn't happen to me because it wasn't,
Speaker: so much that my first book was the story I'd always wanted to tell.
Speaker: I just like telling stories and I could, you know, I wouldn't mind if someone said to me, here's an idea, go and write that story.
Speaker: But the fun part for me is bringing it into life and
Speaker: you know, a new story with all the bits and pieces that can make people feel and laugh and cry and be scared.
Speaker: So that's what really does it for me, that storytelling piece.
Speaker: So, yeah, so to bring that back, always loved it.
Speaker: I didn't start writing my first book, my first novel until I was 20,
Speaker: 28 so 20 years after that first collection of short story um I then started writing my next my next and my first novel was that the was the first novel that you sort of wrote in full in seriousness was that your first published novel the secret of midwives
Speaker: No.
Speaker: In fact, this is a good story.
Speaker: This is the only author I've known that has this particular start to publishing.
Speaker: I wrote that book.
Speaker: It was called Love Like the French and it was the first novel I'd ever written during my first year of maternity leave.
Speaker: And I ended up landing a literary agent with that book, but he didn't find a publisher for it.
Speaker: He was based in New York and tried the New York publishers.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: When it wasn't successful, he decided to send it over to the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Speaker: And at the Frankfurt Book Fair, it had an offer from a German publisher, a very small, you know, offer.
Speaker: And so it was published.
Speaker: And so my very first book to be published was, in fact, in German.
Speaker: So the only two words I can understand in that book are Sally and Hepworth.
Speaker: So I thought...
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I have never met anyone else that that has happened to.
Speaker: So then my next book and my first book to be published in English was The Secrets of Midwife.
Speaker: Oh, that's so interesting.
Speaker: Did it sort of feel like you had two first publishings?
Speaker: Because the German one, I imagine, you couldn't do the same level of press or the same kind of fanfare because you couldn't read the book that you'd written.
Speaker: nor could anyone else, which I will say that now, you know, I've written nine more novels.
Speaker: I'm very grateful that no one can read it.
Speaker: And every now and then some people say, oh, my mum speaks German or I speak German or I'm going to buy it for my wife.
Speaker: And I say, oh, buy it.
Speaker: Just don't read it.
Speaker: Because there is something to say for, you know, those first books, you know, aren't always our best work.
Speaker: And I'm really glad that I did, I was able to kind of
Speaker: mature my writing and take it in a different direction.
Speaker: And The Secrets of Mid-Vibes is a book that I'm still, you know, really proud of and lots of people tell me that they love it.
Speaker: So I'm glad that that was the first one that was published in English.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Speaking from that, do you feel like, and I'm going to guess the answer is yes, but do you feel like you have improved as an author with each book?
Speaker: Well, that's the hope, isn't it?
Speaker: I mean, you always want to.
Speaker: You always want everyone to say, you know, this one, the latest one is the best one yet.
Speaker: You know that you're in trouble when everyone's saying that book you wrote 10 years ago, that was your best one.
Speaker: You peaked.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I suppose at some point we will all peak, but look, I can see absolutely that the craft has improved and I find a lot of things easier.
Speaker: And I feel like probably most importantly, I've really nailed my voice, you know, that elusive voice that takes so long for a writer to kind of fully understand.
Speaker: I know my author voice and it comes very naturally.
Speaker: I don't
Speaker: think I could write that any other way other than, you know, in my own voice.
Speaker: But every book then is still a challenge in a different way.
Speaker: One book might be the plot that gives you grief.
Speaker: Another book might be the characters.
Speaker: Another book might be the particular research that you do or the way that you wrote it means that there's some knotty part in the middle that you can't figure out.
Speaker: And I've yet to have written a book that I found very easy or without troubles.
Speaker: So I think that might just be the way it is.
Speaker: But yeah, my goal, like all of us, is just to keep writing consistently good books that people enjoy.
Speaker: And if I can do that, then I'm happy.
Speaker: I think there's a strong argument to be made that if it were easy, everyone would do it.
Speaker: There's a reason that it's difficult to write a book, let alone write a commercially successful book.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not easy, but it is the best job in the world.
Speaker: I wouldn't do anything.
Speaker: Luckily, because I don't have any other skills.
Speaker: So let's hope that we keep getting published.
Speaker: I am sure that's not true.
Speaker: No, it is.
Speaker: It's actually 100% true.
Speaker: But look, I'm doing okay right now, so I can keep on keeping on.
Speaker: Speaking of writing and like, I'm sure that you, it sounds like your approach nowadays is very kind of fluid.
Speaker: Like you said, you kind of tackle these stories as they sort of grow themselves.
Speaker: But do you have like a schedule?
Speaker: Do you keep yourself on a strict routine that kind of locks you down, forces you to write for a certain amount of time per day or something?
Speaker: Yes, if I'm in the drafting period, then yes, I usually have got a word limit.
Speaker: I usually kind of try and write 2,000 words a day roundabout.
Speaker: But now I write a book a year, which means that I'm pretty much straddling three books at any one time.
Speaker: I might be working on a first draft for one book.
Speaker: I might be doing publicity for another book and I might be editing a third book.
Speaker: And so it's a balancing act and it's very rare that I would have a whole week where all I'm doing is working on that book.
Speaker: I'd be jumping across all of the different parts of that.
Speaker: of being a writer, which includes, you know, paying invoices and editing and marketing and putting stuff on my website or touring or so, yeah, I mean I'm absolutely lusting to get back from the tour that I'm about to go on so I can sit down and maybe have a few uninterrupted weeks where it is, you know, get up and put on my tracksuit pants and sit at the desk and, you know, just get those words out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's more of a rarity than the norm now.
Speaker: It's much more like, you know, finding a couple of hours here and there.
Speaker: But as you say, I mean, it's absolutely a job and I'm at the desk now.
Speaker: you know, eight to 10 hours a day.
Speaker: It's just that it's, you know, it's more likely to be like anyone at work that you do a bit of work, have a meeting, you know, jump back to something else.
Speaker: It's much less writerly than I thought it might be when I started out.
Speaker: Let's say that.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not like it's depicted in the movies where you're sitting looking out the window.
Speaker: It's not Colin Firth in Love Actually.
Speaker: All the time in the world.
Speaker: And also where is my house cleaner bringing me a sandwich?
Speaker: That's what I want to know.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: you you said you usually have sort of three novels you're sort of somewhere between a certain point across three novels at any one time is it do you find it useful to have that kind of to be able to sort of be like okay I'm doing this one for now I'm going to move to that one then I'm going to move to that one does it help kind of keep things fresh as you're constantly changing so that you can never kind of get bogged down in one story
Speaker: I think there are pros and cons.
Speaker: Like sometimes I think that there would be a lot more, it would be a lot better if I could just keep my head in one book at a time because, you know, it's just that kind of,
Speaker: you know, you pack up your tools and put them away and start working on something else and then you kind of have to get them all out again, so to speak, and that can take some time to get your head back into something.
Speaker: It definitely keeps things interesting and keeps things ticking along.
Speaker: It doesn't – and it means that I –
Speaker: I'm time poor and I'm constantly kind of jumping around.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: That actually works with my brain pretty well.
Speaker: If it was, you know, if we're talking about what is the most practical use of time, I think it would be much faster and probably more effective to just do one thing at a time.
Speaker: But who gets to do one thing at a time in this life?
Speaker: You know, no one.
Speaker: Everyone's, you know, at work and their kids are there and they're, you know, late for this.
Speaker: And so it's true with writing too.
Speaker: Certainly at a book a year.
Speaker: Some of the authors I know who write a book every other year or less than that, they get a lot more Colin Firth time.
Speaker: But for us one book a year people, no, it's a lot more jumpy than that.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: I know that some authors deliberately will be working on two.
Speaker: This is usually when it comes to series.
Speaker: And as a big fantasy reader, a lot of these big fantasy series run for like seven or eight books, but a lot of the authors will have sort of two concurrent series that are not related so that they don't have to write that one series back to back to back for like almost a decade so that they can move between the two.
Speaker: But I guess that's a certain thing.
Speaker: By the time I've finished a book, I'm definitely ready to dive into a completely different world.
Speaker: So I can see that, I think, to not have a bit of a palate cleanser between writing a series, which I've never done, so I'm kind of imagining this.
Speaker: I would find that really hard.
Speaker: And turning in a book, particularly having done all the edits and read it so many times, to then go back into a world with those characters, I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe I...
Speaker: I don't know if I could do this.
Speaker: You'd want a break.
Speaker: I think I would, yes.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: A palate cleanser, as it were.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Speaking of books and their worlds, how many of your books have been optioned for TV and film?
Speaker: I think they all have now.
Speaker: I was just, there was, I'm pretty sure, and I need to confirm that, but I'm pretty sure all of them have.
Speaker: And I think the mother-in-law was the first one to be optioned, which was my fifth book.
Speaker: But since then they have all been picked up and, yeah, there's one I'm not sure about, but I'm pretty sure that all the rest of them have and they're all in different kind of,
Speaker: stages of development and seeing some scripts and things and
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's really exciting and, you know, who knows?
Speaker: It's such a long game that it's so exciting to have something optioned and then, you know, things start to happen but then there's a delay and there's writer's strikes and there's someone attached and then they're not attached.
Speaker: But just to have, you know, people interested and reading the books and talking about the books in Hollywood is, you know, incredibly humbling and I'm so excited and grateful.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes, it's one of those, but it's one of those things where it's, there's some wild statistic of all it is, where it's like the number of books that are actually made into films from their optioning versus not.
Speaker: But it's, it's just nice to sort of dream.
Speaker: And you think one day, maybe I could go to cinema and see my book and realise it in live action.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: And look, it's happened to some of my friends and I've been able to go along with them.
Speaker: And it's just, yeah, it's a really, it's a cool thing.
Speaker: And even if, you know, nothing happens with my books, it's fun to have got it to this stage.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And for me, I suppose, one question that I've had a few times is,
Speaker: you know, do you dream about your book going to screen or, you know, the big or the small screen?
Speaker: And, of course, the answer is yes.
Speaker: But for me, I think that the most rewarding part is seeing it do well as a book because I am a, you know, a reader from way back and reading is still my number one thing.
Speaker: And so, you know, to have people actually enjoying my words and, you know, the scenes that I have created, I think that's the point
Speaker: that is the real privilege that the kind of screens that's a nice to have but the book doing well um for its own kind of sake that's that's pretty exciting to me yeah for sure i mean and that's its kind of original most raw most true form an adaptation will always be and like a version of the original right exactly right yeah
Speaker: If one of your stories were to progress through the kind of inter-pre-production and the adaptation was being made, would you want to be involved in that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, in the
Speaker: the option agreements that I have.
Speaker: I am an executive producer in the contract, which sounds so cool, doesn't it?
Speaker: It's actually far less cool than it sounds.
Speaker: It pretty much just means that I get a credit at the end and I have a seat at the table.
Speaker: So they'll include me in their conversations about scripts and about writers and about
Speaker: casting and things like that.
Speaker: And I, being, you know, almost British in my ways of doing things, am very good at just deferring to the people who know me.
Speaker: more about it than me.
Speaker: And then, you know, every now and then reading the script and writing a comment just so they know that I've actually read it.
Speaker: And then just staying out of it and leaving them to do their best job.
Speaker: But, yeah, look, all of the people who have optioned
Speaker: my books they're people that I'm so excited to be working with and people who are real experts in their field and so I would really just consider it a learning process to be involved and then maybe if a few of them get made then I might have some things to say down the road when I've got a bit more experience with it
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I think that's the way to do it really, especially because screenwriting is a very different skill to writing prose.
Speaker: And then even beyond that, adaptation is a whole skill of itself.
Speaker: Making that kind of translate onto a different medium is a tricky thing to do.
Speaker: It's what I would do.
Speaker: And as an entirely British person, I would say, yes, 100%.
Speaker: I would immediately defer to everyone around me.
Speaker: Yeah, well, no, and I agree.
Speaker: It's a completely different skill to do screenwriting and I wouldn't be any good at it because I love narrative.
Speaker: I love the stuff that we say in between words
Speaker: the dialogue and, you know, what's really going on in their head.
Speaker: And, you know, so much of that is to do with the director and the actor if it's a screenplay.
Speaker: So, yeah, it wouldn't be something that I would be desperate to do, write a screenplay.
Speaker: Not yet.
Speaker: Anyway, maybe never say never.
Speaker: Maybe one day.
Speaker: So that brings us to the point in the episode where we go to the desert island.
Speaker: So Sally, if you happen to be stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope to be stranded with?
Speaker: It feels a bit basic to say this, but I loved Where the Crawl Don't Sing.
Speaker: I think that that's probably, I mean, I loved it and I also think that that is a book where I would really go over and over and, you know, you imagine on a desert island you might get to read it
Speaker: quite a few times if we're talking, you know, as long as Gilligan and, you know, the skipper were there for, I'd probably get to read it hundreds of times.
Speaker: And I think that there is so much more in that book than I would have got the first time that I read it or actually listened to it on audiobook.
Speaker: because some of the way she describes the swamp and the marsh, it's just so beautiful.
Speaker: And there's, you know, I think it's just such a beautiful story.
Speaker: So I think that would probably be it.
Speaker: My other favourite is A Man Called Ove.
Speaker: And I think, again, like a completely different book.
Speaker: But I think that character was just so well drawn.
Speaker: And, yeah, I could definitely read that book a few hundred times as well.
Speaker: A few hundred times.
Speaker: I mean, they're great choices.
Speaker: Both of those great choices.
Speaker: What is your Desert Island book?
Speaker: It depends on the week.
Speaker: What am I reading this week?
Speaker: My usual go-to is Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.
Speaker: Yes, yes, good choice.
Speaker: As a lover of fantasy and whimsy, Terry Pratchett really connects in a way that not many other authors do.
Speaker: Also Douglas Adams, but very similar trend.
Speaker: Because for me, I would need something silly and lighthearted, but also that refers to the sort of mundane things in life.
Speaker: And both of those authors are very good at being in the most British way, being like very mundane whilst also very silly and epic.
Speaker: Yeah, good choices.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, thank you very much.
Speaker: And for everyone listening, look, I've got some questions coming up about craft and books and writing, as well as advice for aspiring authors and marketing as an author.
Speaker: But we're at the end of the regular episode and into the extended cut exclusive to Patreon subscribers.
Speaker: So anyone listening who hasn't yet joined the Patreon, please do think about it.
Speaker: It goes a long way towards covering the cost of running this podcast.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: What a way to end the interview.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Sally, for coming on the podcast and chatting with me.
Speaker: It's been super fun chatting with you and super interesting learning about all of your books and writing and your publishing experience.
Speaker: It's my pleasure.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: And I'm glad that the sound is okay from the other side of the world.
Speaker: Yes, who would have thought?
Speaker: Technology nowadays, eh?
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: For anyone listening, if you want to keep up with what Sally is doing, you can find her on Instagram at Sally Hepworth and on Facebook at Sally Hepworth Author.
Speaker: Or you can head over to her website, www.sallyhepworthauthor.com.
Speaker: To support the podcast, you can like, follow and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Speaker: To stay up to date, follow along on socials and for extended episodes, join the Patreon and you'll get it all ad free in a week early.
Speaker: Thanks again to Sally and thanks to everyone listening.
Speaker: We'll catch you on the next episode.
