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#173 - Claire McGowan
398 Plays1 year ago
Best-selling crime/thriller writer, Claire McGowan is on the podcast chatting about her books, writing romance as Eva Woods and teaching an MA in Crime Writing.
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Transcript
Introduction and Patreon Plug
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To listen without ads, head over to patreon.com slash rightandwrong.
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Ooh, 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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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.
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So it's kind of a gamble.
Meet Claire McGowan: Author Introduction
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Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong Podcast.
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On this episode, I am joined by a best-selling thriller novelist who ran the UK's first MA in crime writing for five years and has also written a play, several published articles, short stories and non-fiction true crime investigations.
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But that's not all.
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When she's not writing thrillers, she's writing heartwarming rom-coms as Eva Woods.
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It is, of course, the Claire McGowan.
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Hello and welcome.
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Hi.
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Hi.
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Thanks so much for coming, for being on the podcast on the day.
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Really fun
Discussing 'Truth, Lie': Claire's New Book
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to get you on.
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There's so much to talk about, but let's start with the new book, Truth Truth Lie, out 21st of May.
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Tell us a little bit about it.
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So it's a kind of a locked room mystery or a fixed cast mystery, like I've heard him described recently.
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So it's a group of friends that go to an island, a small private island off Scotland for a 40th birthday.
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only to find that somebody has put an extra one into the box in writing they don't recognise, which accuses them of all having been responsible for someone's death.
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Things kind of start to unravel from there.
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And it's the point of view character is actually sort of an outsider within the group.
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Is that right?
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Yes, there's two point of view characters.
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So there's one of the wives of one of the guys in the group who's always felt like an outsider.
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And then there's the kind of queen
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Okay.
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Okay.
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Very cool.
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And it's got all those kind of like elements that we love in like a thriller, a sort of pseudo cold case, the kind of mystery.
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And you don't know if you're from the outside looking in, if you're in on the outside and things like that.
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It gives me, um, it's a kind of, the setting is kind of like a luxury, like fancy, uh, sort of retreat thing for this shared 40th.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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So it's just, it's, you actually can hire private islands, um,
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quite easily you can get them on airbnb even because some of these are just they're just like a rock basically with a house on it so okay not necessarily that luxurious to go to a small island but in this case the ed is quite a luxury large that they've gone to but it's also very remote and cut off okay yeah because it was giving me like glass onion or like white lotus kind of vibes
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A little bit, yeah.
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Probably not as luxurious as that.
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Well, I didn't know you could, yeah, that's new.
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I didn't know Airbnb had a private island on it.
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That's pretty cool.
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Yeah, it does, yeah.
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Was that part of the research for this novel?
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Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, you can get anything really on Airbnb, so it's worth having a look.
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Okay,
Claire's Diverse Writing Career
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cool.
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So the novel is a thriller, but I had a flick through your, your kind of back catalogue and it is eclectic.
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Am I right in thinking that whilst you've written, you're around 30 novels at this point?
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No, it's, this would be 24.
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24.
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Okay.
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Yeah.
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Approaching 30 at some point in the near future.
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Um, do you lean, whilst you do write a lot of, a lot of genres, is that, is it largely thrillers?
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That's like your kind of main thing.
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Yeah.
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So you mentioned the Eva Woods books.
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Um, I actually kind of wrapped that up now as a, as an alter ego.
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So mostly doing crime.
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And then I published a literary novel last year as well.
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So crime is my main thing.
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And then I usually do one or two other things on the side as well.
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Oh, okay.
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But you did quite a few romance novels as Eva Woods.
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I did seven.
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So they were, some of them were rom-coms and then some were more like uplit women's fiction.
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Okay.
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What came first, like your desire to write thrillers or your desire to write romance?
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I don't think I understood the genres that clearly.
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I don't think people necessarily do when they're, when they're starting to write.
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story and genre later on.
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Yeah.
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For a lot of people.
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So I didn't deliberately try to write crime, but then it just seemed to work for me.
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So I kept going.
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Yeah.
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I've heard that from other authors where they, I've said like, you know, you wrote this genre, like, was that something that you're interested in?
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And they said, to be honest, I was just writing a story and then my agent or like the publisher was like, Oh, so this is this genre.
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And they're like, okay,
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Okay.
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Okay.
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So you said you're kind of not really doing as much Eva Wood stuff.
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Is that because you wanted to just focus more on, on thriller stuff or did you, do you kind of prefer the kind of the pacing and the high intensity of a thriller versus the more coziness of the Eva Wood stuff?
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Yeah, I definitely find it easier to write things that are plot driven, story driven.
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Um, I think it's quite, it's actually quite difficult to
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fiction book because it has to be it's so character driven yeah and you have to when you're writing something and i think this is the same of thrillers too i guess uh i mean writing's hard in general but when you're writing something that's very much genre based you have an obligation to fulfill a certain number of sort of
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um, tropes and like, not in a bad way, but it's like, if someone's reading a certain genre, they expect some things like in a rom-com, they expect a happily ever after.
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Do you, is it difficult writing in genre to always keep it fresh whilst also respecting that your audience does want those boxes ticked?
Crafting Twists in Thrillers
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I think it is because people, they want, they want the ending they expect, but they want it in a way they don't expect, which is
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quite difficult and also different people work things out at different times.
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So it's kind of impossible to write something where people haven't guessed the twist at all.
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And then they seem to be quite disappointed if they've guessed the twist.
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So you have to sort of say ahead of them or maybe throw in it.
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What I like to do is throw in an extra twist at the end.
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Oh, okay.
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Okay.
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So you, so you, you kind of tricked them by being like, Oh, you, you thought that there was any one twist, but there's actually two twists.
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Yeah.
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More than that, even.
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Yeah.
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And is it a very important, I mean, it's almost part of the genre of being a thriller.
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It's like that there is a big twist in it.
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How much focus when you're writing a story is about the twists?
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When I'm teaching, which I am teaching a course at the minute, and I've previously taught quite a bit, I always say, I don't think you have to have a twist in a crime novel because I think
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something out it's that's a reveal twist is something that you were deliberately misled about so i don't think that you do have to have that and i think that focusing too much on those can lead to unearned twists where they just kind of come out of nowhere and it's just to kind of shock you and they don't make any sense so i do but i do think most other authors are always trying to kind of one-up each other and discover the next great twist but i think the best twist has come out of character actually that
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where it's all kind of there already and you just didn't see because you were being distracted and looking at something else.
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Yes.
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So you could have worked it out, but you didn't, is the kind of best twist, I think.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Like the information was there for you.
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Yeah, you just didn't take it in.
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What they did, surprising yet inevitable, is one way I've heard describing twists.
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Yeah.
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Good twists anyway, I think.
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Yeah, I've seen Brandon Sanson has talked about an approach he takes towards twists, which is like sort of off brand.
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And he uses this metaphor of like his son when he was younger, he used to want this like toy car and he would sort of dangle this toy car in front of his son, but he wouldn't, he would be like, oh, maybe we'll buy it next time at the shop or every time they go shop, maybe we'll buy it next time.
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But every time he was there, he'd be like, wow, this truck's really cool, this plastic airplane or whatever.
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And very slowly, he says, this is what I do in the novel, is I make you think that you want this one thing to be the resolution, but actually very subtly, I'm pushing you towards this other thing.
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And then when the other thing turns out to be the right resolution, the reader is like, oh yeah, maybe I did want that all along.
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I didn't want the obvious thing that I thought I wanted.
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Yeah, maybe it's like you kind of want to find out everything that's been happening, but not yet.
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Yeah, exactly.
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The minute people kind of figure out what's going on, they're kind of disappointed, even though that's also what they're trying to do.
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Yeah, it's a balancing act, right?
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It's about feeding enough information that people are sort of somewhat satisfied by what they're learning, but also still eager to keep reading on to find out the full extent of it.
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Yeah, but it can't just be fake mystery as well.
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It has to make sense, I think.
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Yes.
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Oh, okay.
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Okay.
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Okay.
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So before we, before we, we delve into more of that, which was really interesting stuff, I did want to quickly rewind a
Claire's Writing Journey and First Agent
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bit.
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And, um, this is your 24th novel, uh, safe to say, you know, your way around a writing desk and the publishing industry.
00:10:03
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Uh, so I'd love to go back to, if you can, if you can indulge me here when you wrote your first sort of full manuscript, do you know, do you remember how long ago that was?
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Yeah, it was probably around 2009 when I finished it.
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It took me quite a while.
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It took me probably about three or four years to get to that point of having to actually finish something.
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Was that finished with redrafts or was that finished as in just the first draft?
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Yeah, so I think I was writing it in a slightly different way than I write now.
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So I was deleting a lot and adding a lot.
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Maybe it was longer than that actually.
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So definitely started sending it out in 2010.
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And that book actually, I've never, I still haven't sold that book.
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So it never got published as of yet.
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So let's say maybe three years it took.
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Oh, okay.
00:11:05
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Okay.
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But did you find an agent with that book or was it a later book that you found your agent with?
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I didn't really know much about the industry at that point.
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This was 2010 as well.
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So it's kind of,
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I think Twitter started in 2012, but I might be imagining it.
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So I didn't really know that much about how publishing worked.
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And I was just kind of using the old fashioned methods of writers and artists yearbook.
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And I was only sending it to one agent at a time.
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So that because with one agent for six months.
00:11:40
Speaker
Wait, why are we only sending it to one agent at a time?
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Well, like I just said, I didn't understand the industry.
00:11:46
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So that's what you were supposed to do because you didn't have the same...
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In the meantime, I wrote something else anyway, and I managed to get an agent for that and sell that.
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Oh, right.
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Okay.
00:12:02
Speaker
So was that the second thing you wrote, was that with Diana Beaumont, who is your current agent that you signed with?
00:12:08
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No, Diana's been my third agent, so I moved around a fair bit.
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And also people, you know, people leave and go into different jobs and things.
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So there's a fair amount of movement in the industry as well.
00:12:19
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Mm-hmm.
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Oh, okay.
00:12:22
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Was it, was it because of, um, things just like happening to, to move around that you, that you left with your previous two agents or was it just that, or was it that you, you know, it wasn't really working out?
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The first agent I had, she left to go and be an editor.
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Okay.
00:12:39
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Um, I think she still is an editor now.
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And then the other one, it was just that I wanted to write different things as well as crime.
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But I do always recommend that as a good move.
00:12:54
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a fresh start yeah and it's not sometimes these things just don't work out it's like a very complicated relationship I think between an author and an agent and it's not it's sometimes when it doesn't work out it's neither person's fault it's just like that's the way the way it goes yeah sometimes it might work for a while and then you might need something different as well
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I mean, in terms of needing something different, would I be right in thinking that what an agent does at the beginning of someone's career with maybe their debut novel or their second or third novel, is that quite different to what an agent will do for someone like you now who has written over 20 novels?
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It depends where you are.
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So if you're
00:13:46
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you just renew the contract or maybe you try to renegotiate the contract a bit but it's so for me at the minute my agent wouldn't read those books uh but she probably she would if i asked her to do it but i don't know what he's asking you just send them straight to the the editor now if they're under contract but if we're trying to sell something new then we'll we'll do quite a bit of work on that
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Right.
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Okay.
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Okay.
00:14:10
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And presumably, um, you know, the longer you're with a publisher, the more of a rapport you'll build up with the editor, I imagine.
00:14:19
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So in theory, I mean, there's a huge amount of editorial trying to think of the industry at the minute.
00:14:25
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So it's quite unusual now to hold on to an editor for a lot of books.
Challenges with Changing Editors
00:14:30
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Okay.
00:14:31
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So I'm guessing over the course of your books, you've had many different editors.
00:14:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:35
Speaker
Um, I think it used to be,
00:14:37
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an author could keep the same editor for 20 years, build up an amazing relationship, but I'm not sure that's happening anymore.
00:14:44
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Yeah.
00:14:44
Speaker
I guess just with the turnover is much shorter than it used to be.
00:14:48
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Yeah.
00:14:49
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So it's not unusual now to lose your editor before your books even come out.
00:14:53
Speaker
Oh, before it's even out.
00:14:54
Speaker
Wow.
00:14:56
Speaker
That's bizarre, isn't it?
00:14:57
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Well, it happens.
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When you have to start working with a new editor, do you find that there's like a period of like teething of like kind of figuring out how you're going to work with this new person?
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I think the biggest problem is if somebody hasn't bought you as an author, taking you on board as an author, then they're often less invested.
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Not always.
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So my editor at Amazon, she didn't acquire me to start with, but we've been working together.
00:15:31
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editor on a book that they didn't acquire for them to be less interested.
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Oh, okay.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah, I can see how that, because a lot of the time the person at the publisher who is championing whatever the book is, is obviously the commissioning editor, the person that picked it up in the first place.
00:15:50
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Yeah.
00:15:51
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Yeah.
00:15:52
Speaker
Oh, that makes sense.
00:15:53
Speaker
Um, going back to your, you were talking about writing and, and, and workshops, uh, teach writing and workshops and things like that.
00:16:03
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Um, the crime writing MA, you ran it for the first five years.
00:16:09
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This is the one in the UK.
00:16:10
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Were you, were you the kind of
Shaping UK's First MA in Crime Writing
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instigator in that?
00:16:12
Speaker
Did you, was it, was it you that kind of was the driving force in making that happen?
00:16:17
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I didn't.
00:16:17
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It wasn't my, I think someone else was supposed to teach it initially and then they had to drop out before it started.
00:16:22
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So I came on board pretty early.
00:16:24
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It wasn't my idea and I didn't, I wasn't involved in kind of establishing it, but, um, before it had started running, I came on board.
00:16:31
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So yeah, I did shape it quite a bit.
00:16:34
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Oh, okay.
00:16:35
Speaker
How did you go about approaching, like sort of making a curriculum for that?
00:16:44
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the MA novels.
00:16:45
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It was for literary novels.
00:16:47
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So I took that and I adapted it.
00:16:50
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I made it more commercial.
00:16:52
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One of the biggest changes I made was I asked the students to write a longer book.
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So they had to write, I think, minimum 60,000 words for the literary novels.
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I didn't think that was enough for crime.
00:17:03
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So I put it up to 80.
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Okay.
00:17:08
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Oh, are literary novels normally shorter than crime novels?
00:17:11
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It depends.
00:17:12
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It depends.
00:17:12
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I think you can probably get away with the shorter
00:17:18
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be a bit shorter as well yes because i guess i would imagine that's to do with the fact that crime has become a big thing in like indie publishing and ebooks and like the speed that those come out sort of if if an author is releasing like three crime novels in a year you can justify them being a bit shorter yeah there's also been more sort of literary crime i think which can be a little shorter
00:17:46
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Okay.
00:17:46
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Okay.
00:17:47
Speaker
So you're not teaching the MA anymore.
00:17:50
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I don't think it exists actually, sadly.
00:17:52
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I think they kind of scrapped it not long after I left, which was a shame because it was quite a successful course for quite a lot of people published from it.
00:18:01
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Yeah.
00:18:02
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And do you still, you are still teaching and you still do workshops and things?
00:18:07
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Yeah.
00:18:07
Speaker
More of an ad hoc or shorter courses.
00:18:11
Speaker
Okay.
00:18:11
Speaker
Okay.
Helping Writers Find Their Process
00:18:12
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And what can people listening, if they were interested in getting into, you know, doing one of your workshops, something like that, what could they expect to, to kind of learn about and hear about on one of your workshops?
00:18:24
Speaker
What I'm always trying to do, I think, is get people to discover their own process.
00:18:28
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So I don't want to be one of these authors, teachers that says you have to do it this way.
00:18:32
Speaker
You
00:18:42
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I focus quite a bit on story.
00:18:45
Speaker
But I also think that in some ways doing a course while you're writing a book is counterproductive because I do also have a theory that you have to sort of go away and just be alone with your work for a while or at least learn the information, take it on board and then go off and be alone with your book because if you're showing people bits of your work as you go along, I think you can just put you off actually in many cases.
00:19:12
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I guess it's the, the reason people love doing a vomit draft where it's just like, get the whole novel out.
00:19:20
Speaker
Whereas if you're working on it in a collaborative way, like in a workshop or something like that, and like, as, as you're doing each like chapter or whatever, people are looking at it and giving feedback and you haven't even written the next bit yet.
00:19:31
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It can definitely, yeah, I can see how it takes the wind out of your sails.
00:19:34
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Yeah, definitely.
00:19:35
Speaker
And then you, you're in your kind of editor
00:19:44
Speaker
things instead do you think it's important then for people to you said editorial brain so i'm going to guess that you you think that there's like a kind of creative writing brain do you think it's important to kind of maintain that writing brain to get to the end of the novel and then go back yeah and then okay i think so yeah so i wouldn't even
00:20:13
Speaker
So I just keep going.
00:20:15
Speaker
How much would be a decent chunk in terms of a percentage of the novel?
00:20:21
Speaker
It depends.
00:20:21
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I think ideally you would probably do the whole thing, but maybe 60,000 words is a good initial draft and then you can go back and fill in things.
00:20:34
Speaker
Every book is different and every writer is different too.
00:20:37
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah um 60 000 which would be on the shorter end so that would be like an incomplete story so then i would go back and fill in bits yeah yeah yeah what people call um additive editing right so it's like if you've written short that gives you the opportunity to edit without having to cut you're now adding stuff instead um yeah i've never heard that word before but yeah that kind
00:21:04
Speaker
And then some people, it depends on how you write as well, because some people end up writing too much and then they have to cut back.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yes.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:11
Speaker
And that, and that would be like, it's often hard to like find the spaces to cut, which is why some authors opt to, to, to say like, well, I want my first draft to be under what it should be so that I don't have to think too much about the parts I'm cutting.
00:21:26
Speaker
And then I can focus on the, when I'm editing, I can focus on the things that I need to add.
00:21:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:31
Speaker
Instead of take away.
00:21:32
Speaker
Okay.
00:21:33
Speaker
One more question before we get to the desert island.
00:21:36
Speaker
And that is, you've obviously been teaching for many years now, and you've kind of experienced lots of different students and people learning to write.
00:21:47
Speaker
What is the sort of most common mistake or like biggest mistake that you see new writers coming in with when they're trying to learn the craft?
00:21:58
Speaker
That's a good question.
00:22:00
Speaker
Well, when you said mistake, I immediately kind of wanted to say, oh, there are no mistakes.
00:22:03
Speaker
It's all a process.
00:22:04
Speaker
It's not trusting yourself and not having... The biggest problem people have is their own mental blocks, I think, rather than particular errors.
00:22:14
Speaker
But I think people struggle with viewpoint quite a bit.
00:22:18
Speaker
The idea of a narrative viewpoint rather than a kind of free-floating one.
00:22:24
Speaker
And of course you can do a free floating one, but you have to know what you're doing.
00:22:28
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:22:30
Speaker
So as in, yeah, yeah.
00:22:31
Speaker
Defining whether it's like an omniscient narrator or you're doing like a first person narrator or like a third person narrator.
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, I just, just kind of jumping around between those.
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah.
Struggles of New Writers
00:22:40
Speaker
Also I think probably the biggest factor in whether someone will get published or not is the strength of the story and the concept.
00:22:48
Speaker
A lot of us when we're starting out to write, we,
00:22:51
Speaker
We're just writing some kind of thinly veiled version of our life.
00:22:53
Speaker
So it's not necessarily a commercial story.
00:22:57
Speaker
So it doesn't really matter if you're a talented writer because it's not going to sell.
00:23:00
Speaker
It's not a sellable idea.
00:23:02
Speaker
Yes.
00:23:04
Speaker
People often say that usually the first book an author writes is the most autobiographical.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:11
Speaker
In many ways.
00:23:13
Speaker
Awesome.
Desert Island Book Choice
00:23:14
Speaker
That brings us to the point in the episode where we send Claire off to a desert island and we ask if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be?
00:23:28
Speaker
I'll probably say The Secret History, which I normally say for questions like that, just because I've read it probably 12 times.
00:23:36
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:23:37
Speaker
I will read it, I'm sure, again soon.
00:23:39
Speaker
I think the last time I read it was four years ago, so I'll probably read it again soon.
00:23:44
Speaker
It's a book that's just endlessly rewarding, I think.
00:23:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:23:49
Speaker
Because it's got such a strong story, but it's also really beautifully written, so it rewards kind of slow, close reading.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, Donna Tartt is a real talent.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just really sad that it's never been made into a film or TV.
00:24:03
Speaker
There are reasons for that.
00:24:05
Speaker
There's a lot online about it as to why it's never got to that point, but it is a real shame.
00:24:11
Speaker
She's had, one of her other books got made into a movie, I think.
00:24:15
Speaker
Goldfinch, I think, did.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:17
Speaker
Goldfinch.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:24:19
Speaker
I don't think people liked it that much.
00:24:20
Speaker
I haven't seen it.
00:24:21
Speaker
I haven't seen it.
00:24:22
Speaker
But that always happens with adaptations though, because we have such high expectations from the book and then it's like, oh, it's not how I thought it would be.
00:24:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:32
Speaker
Amazing.
00:24:33
Speaker
I've got some more questions about plotting, pantsing, writing schedules, but we're at the end of the regular episode and that will all be in the extended cut exclusive to my amazing Patreon subscribers who make this podcast possible.
00:24:46
Speaker
But that brings us to the
Conclusion and Social Media Links
00:24:48
Speaker
end of this interview.
00:24:48
Speaker
Thank you so much, Claire, for coming on the podcast, telling us all about your latest book and everything that you've been doing in writing publishing.
00:24:55
Speaker
It's been awesome chatting with you.
00:24:57
Speaker
Thank you.
00:24:57
Speaker
So next book is out May 21st.
00:25:00
Speaker
Yes, it is.
00:25:01
Speaker
And it is called Truth, Truth, Lie.
00:25:03
Speaker
Truth, Truth, Lie.
00:25:04
Speaker
For anyone wanting to keep up with what Claire is doing, you can follow her on Twitter at Ink Stains Claire or on Instagram and TikTok at Claire McGowan Writer, on Facebook at Claire McGowan or her website, clairemcgowan.co.uk.
00:25:18
Speaker
To support the podcast, like, follow and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and follow along on socials.
00:25:23
Speaker
Join the Patreon for extended episodes ad-free and a week early and check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
00:25:29
Speaker
Thanks again to Claire and thanks to everyone listening.
00:25:31
Speaker
We will catch you on the next episode.