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Unlikeable Characters – Love Them Or Hate them?

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In All Your Little Lies, Annie is a lonely woman who longs for social contact. Unfortunately, she’s terrible at making friends and, worse, has a secret that she feels is so shaming that it stops her from behaving naturally around other people. In fact, she’s so very awkward that she’s hard to like; her desire to please, alongside her social incompetence, leads to the very opposite outcome.

As writers we’re often told that our characters don’t need to be likeable but they do need to be relatable. That is, we need to make sure it’s possible for the reader to connect.

Writing All Your Little Lies

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When my son was 6, a local child went missing and many posters with their photograph were hung up on the streets around us. My son would come home from school every day and insist that he had seen the girl on the poster and ask that we all go out searching – he couldn’t bear the thought that there wasn’t some way we could help.

Resurrecting Homer

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My love affair with ancient Rome and Greece started in childhood reading stories like Asterix, The Eagle of The Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff and Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy and peaked with three wonderful years studying Classics before the demands of adulthood rooted me in the present. But last year, I spent a couple of very happy months reading some modern retellings of ancient Greek stories and fell in love with the period all over again.

The Stars in the Night by Clare Rhoden

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The Stars in the Night tells the story of Semaphore lad, Harry Fletcher. In 1914, Harry and his adopted brother enlist to fight in ‘the war to end all wars’ despite his Irish mother’s disapproval. The narrative moves from Australia to Gallipoli, Egypt, the trenches of Paschaendale and back to Australia and is richly painted with the details of everyday life for the soldiers involved.

The Secretary by Zoe Lea

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‘When single mum Ruth has a brief fling with Rob, she’s mortified to discover that he lied to her. He lied to her, because he’s married. Worse still, he’s the husband of Janine, head of the PTA at the primary school where Ruth works as secretary, and when the truth of their fling is discovered, Ruth suddenly has a lot of enemies at the school gates.’

The Books I Nearly Didn’t Read

I saw a question bouncing around online recently asking readers for the most popular book they’d never read. It got me thinking about all the books I’ve loved that I would never have found on my own.

One of my greatest pleasures is sinking into something really special that I hadn’t been expecting so here are a few of those unexpected favourites that I needed a little nudge to discover.

The Summer of 1976

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My strongest memory of the 1976 heatwave is of the curious earthquake-like cracks that scarred our back garden. My family had moved back from Germany to a small village in Sussex that summer and my brother and I were amazed to find huge fissures across the lawn where the clay soil had dried and shrunk. I would lie on my stomach and look into the earth, wondering how much deeper and wider the cracks would get and what treasure might be revealed.

A Little Bird Told Me is partly set in 1976 because that summer was so remarkable and memorable for me.

In Praise of Editing and Editors

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Now that the proofs for A Little Bird Told Me have been printed I can breathe a sigh of relief that there’s no more editing for me – at least for the time being.

When I started sending my manuscript out, I heard so many anecdotes about successful authors who had received rejection after rejection but battled on to have their book published and loved by many readers. Ah, I used to think, but did they keep sending out the exact same manuscript or did they keep revising and polishing? Where does dogged self-belief and resilience need to give away to responding to feedback and striving for improvement?