The fear is always there but it's heightened when your career is in such a good place and you feel you have so much to lose. I'm thinking about it a lot at the moment as I'm reaching the closing chapters of my next novel and feeling very unconfident about it and terrified that at this point in my career, where everything has been on an upward trajectory for so many books and each one seems to build on the one before and I am growing a wonderful new readership, how disastrous it would be for me to write a dud book.īut I'm also trying to remind myself that I feel like this every single time. I do stop and think about this all of the time. A) do you ever stop and think about how successful you've been as an author and B) what is your secret to longevity as a writer?

I'm also a big believer in cliff-hanger endings at the end of each chapter.Ĥ. I write as a reader reads and can sense when the narrative is dragging or when I need to up the pacing or make something exciting happen. I'm not a planner, and a novelist who plans their books would give a very different answer to this question, but for me, writing at a steady pace of 1000-1500 words a day and not knowing what I'm going to write until it's on the page is how I keep the suspense going. What is the secret to holding and maintaining suspense throughout your novels?įor me it is probably not knowing what's happening until I've written it.

They have a sort of golden quality about them.ģ. As a writer, your brain sort of filters all these weird random thoughts and holds onto the things that might make a good book. Most of my books are inspired by tiny fleeting glimpses of things, throwaway comments or people who catch my eye on the street and make me want to write a story about them. The movie American Beauty, remember, was inspired by the writer seeing a plastic bag being blown around by the wind. You can't be a writer if you don't find inspiration on a granular level. It also features lots of interesting teenagers, a suspicious wife, a dodgy husband, an urban fox and some Taekwondo. It's set in January so it's quite dark and cold. This one is set in one time frame in one location and is much more of a classic London Domestic Noir set-up about a middle class family, a damaged teenage girl and a strange loner across the street who's just discovered the Incel community and may or may not have had something to do with a string of sex attacks in the area and the disappearance of the teenage girl. Invisible Girl is very different to the Family Upstairs, my previous novel, which was “gothic and quirky”. What can readers expect in your book ' Invisible Girl'?

Where i found you book