10 Books Later: Do I Know More Now (or Less) Than When I Started?

A week post-publication, the book tour begins, and I climb out from behind my desk, talk to a lot of readers and sign many books. But a small part of me stays quiet, reflecting.

On the first Friday of every month, I write a post that’s usually more of a behind-the-scenes writing post. Here’s this month’s post!

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When I wrote my first book, I didn’t know how to write a book. I thought I’d need a plan, a chapter-by-chapter outline; at the very least an idea of where the story began and where it ended. Instead, I had a notebook of disconnected phrases, a poem that felt unfinished, and a Joan Didion sentence about what a mother cannot promise her child – little shards that could surely never be glued into anything worth keeping.

Trust. And write, my university supervisor told me.

But what exactly was I trusting?

I still don’t know the exact answer to that question. Perhaps it is a muse, or the subconscious, or the odd daydream-trance of writing. Perhaps it’s your mind. It’s definitely a kind of magic.

So the one thing I know for sure about writing after having just published my tenth book is that my university supervisor’s advice was mostly right. But to her words, I would add: And believe in magic.

I still begin every novel with a notebook of disconnected phrases. Rather than a poem that feels unfinished, I now start with an idea that feels incomplete, something I’ve played around the edges of in a previous book but need to plunge right into. And the dream of writing just one Didion-perfect sentence always lures me on.

Besides that, it’s all a bit of sorcery. I’ve written before about being led by serendipity to a Parisian theatre that became an essential part of The Paris Seamstress (sorry, I think this post is paywalled). And in terms of how I decide what book to write next – it chooses me. I could say I stumble upon my story ideas but that implies an accident. Instead, I feel like some force in the universe deliberately puts them in my path. That force made me read Anne Sebba’s Les Parisiennes and thus learn about Catherine Dior, who I wrote about in The Paris Secret. That same force or magic sent an article about the Battle of Versailles my way, which was the missing piece that led me into writing The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard.

I approach each draft with the same mantra of trust + writing + magic. It isn’t always easy – self doubt and lack of confidence can really mess with your magic powers! But when I’m deciding what scene to write next or what scenes to cut, I listen to my gut. It knows everything. There have been so many times when I’ve heard it whispering, you don’t need this scene, but I’ve kept it in anyway, only to have my editor say to me during a structural edit, I don’t think you need this scene.

As well as helping me shape my story ideas, the magic always gifts me one character, who falls out of my fingers and onto the keyboard and into the book almost fully formed. I never know whether this will be a minor character or a major character. It’s often someone I never intended to write about at all, but suddenly there they are, insisting they belong in this story. In The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard, it was Hawk Jones, who is one male point of view character amidst three female POV characters. In The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre it was Esmée, a friend of Alix’s who probably deserves her own book.

But magic will only get you so far. Yes, it’s gifted me characters and locations and ideas, but for every gift, there’s another character and a story element that’s HARD to get onto the page and needs to be written and rewritten and rewritten a dozen times to get right. That character and/or story element takes work, hard work, the act of sitting back down at your desk every day and trying to slip under the skin of a fictional person who exists only inside your head, but who still won’t let you inside.

Surprisingly, even though she’s the titular character, Astrid Bricard was the hardest to write in my latest book. She occasionally makes poor decisions. The things that drive her aren’t always the right things. She’s imperfect, sometimes weaker than you want her to be. She doesn’t have the ballsy fearlessness of a Jess from The French Photographer/The Paris Orphan. Her arc is much larger and because of that, I think, messier and more interesting.

So no, I don’t know a lot about writing a book. Just that you have to listen. Not to every voice, or to reviews, or to the demons of doubt. But to that tiny, easy-to-ignore voice inside that has so much more wisdom than I do. You have to sit and write and rewrite beyond the point where you think you can’t rewrite anymore. And you have to trust the magic. It’s there, I promise. But sometimes you don’t realise until the end.