Category: Writing

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.

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?