Hannah Richell: Even published authors get stuck...how to find help.
Episode Summary
In this captivating episode of Writes4Women, we sit down with acclaimed author Hannah Richell to dive into her writing journey, the challenges she's faced, and her inspiring comeback to the world of literature. Hannah opens up about overcoming writer's block, the profound influence of setting in her stories, and the joy of rediscovering her passion for writing. Additionally, she discusses the impactful Richell Prize for emerging writers, sharing valuable insights and encouragement for aspiring authors. Join us for a heartfelt exploration of creativity, resilience, and the power of storytelling.
Hannah Richell’s latest novel THE SEARCH PARTY is out now!
Episode Chapters
Introduction and Acknowledgements [00:00:00 - 00:00:29] - Opening remarks, acknowledgments, and content disclaimer.
Hannah Richell's Writing Journey [00:02:00 - 00:05:00] - Hannah shares her path to becoming a published author.
Overcoming Writer's Block [00:33:34 - 00:34:01] - Insights into Hannah's approach to overcoming creative challenges.
The Power of Setting in Storytelling [00:36:11 - 00:36:42] - Discussion on how setting influences Hannah's writing.
Rekindling Love for Writing [00:43:12 - 00:43:45] - How a writing course helped Hannah rediscover her passion.
The Richell Prize for Emerging Writers [00:47:39 - 00:48:47] - Information about the prize and its impact on new authors.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Pamela: Welcome to Writes4Women, a podcast all about celebrating women's voices and supporting women writers. I'm Pamela Cook, women's fiction, author, writing teacher, mentor, and podcaster.
[00:00:16] Pamela: Before beginning today's chat, I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Dharawal people, the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is being recorded, along with the traditional owners of the land throughout Australia
[00:00:29] Pamela: And a quick reminder that there could be strong language and adult concepts discussed in this podcast. So please be aware of this if you have children around. Let's relax on the convo couch and chat to this week's guest.
[00:00:43] Hello everyone and welcome to a brand new year and a brand new season of rights for women. I am Pamela Cook, the host and producer of Rights for Women, and I am really excited to be hitting a new year in 2024 and continuing on with Rights for Women and. We're going to be reading, meeting lots of new authors.
[00:01:04] This year we're going to be once again having our fabulous guest hosts on the convo couch. And there's gonna be a whole lot of great new things happening on Patreon. Let me tell you, let's kick off the, by me telling you about what is gonna actually be happening on Patreon, I've rejigged the Patreon bonuses.
[00:01:23] Because it's been a little bit tricky to always get additional interviews with. Authors who I interview for the podcast, and then to have either them or new authors coming on to do the extra Patreon bonuses, I've decided that I'm gonna start to share some of the wisdom and experience that I have gained in.
[00:01:42] Over 20 years of writing and over 12 years of being a published author. So the Patreon bonuses this year are going to be mainly from yours, truly. There will be some additional little coffee chats and things that I'm going to have with other authors. So what is gonna happen with Patreon this year is that every month I'm going to do a writing update on what I am.
[00:02:03] Working on, but go into a lot more depth than what I talk about on the actual podcast. So I'm gonna be going into the processes that I'm using, the problems that I'm finding, the obstacles I'm confronting, and how I'm actually going about getting over them. I'll be sharing some of the writing tools and resources that I use on the Patreon videos and audios as well.
[00:02:24] And the other thing that I'll also be doing is each month I will choose a book that I've been reading and loving, and I will do an analysis of a scene, so an opening scene or a few pages where I actually go into a deep dive into how the author is doing, what they're doing. What it is about the writing that's working and look at some of the techniques used by other authors as well as some of my own work.
[00:02:48] That is going to be for the Patreon Family Bonus Supporters. So for the cost of a cup of coffee, which is $5 a month you can receive those extra Patreon videos and audios, and they'll be coming to you through your inbox in, via your email. You can also just, if you wanna just do a smaller contribution, you can also get the Patreon newsletter, which goes out once a month, which has four links to resources and interviews and things like that, that I've been enjoying and a listening and reading recommendation which will be for those who wanna contribute.
[00:03:25] Two or $3 a month to the podcast. So pop onto the website, writes for women.com, and have a look at the Patreon page. It's really easy to sign up for Patreon. And then once you sign up, it's just an automatic deduction that you don't even have to think about. And then you get those lovely bonuses into your inbox.
[00:03:43] And I wanna take this opportunity to thank everybody who has been supporting the podcast on Patreon. It's been absolutely wonderful to have your support, and it helps me to pay for the dis the the editing software that I use, the podcast distributor that I use, and also my fabulous VA Annie Bucknell.
[00:04:00] So thank you so much to Patreon supporters and I really wanna grow that. This year. Let me tell you also about what's coming up on the podcast. We're kicking off the podcast today with a fantastic interview with Hannah Mitchell. Hannah is one of my favorite authors. She is a lovely person and so willing to share things about the writing process.
[00:04:22] Her writing is fabulous. I'll tell you a little bit more about Hannah in the moment. We are gonna be talking about her brand new book, the Search Party, and her foray into the Crime thriller genre. Another fantastic new release that I have had the privilege of reading is. By Rachel Johns, one of our guest hosts, and I'm going to be talking to Rachel about her brand new book, the Other Bridget, which is fabulous.
[00:04:45] Have loved every minute of reading that and can't wait to talk to Rachel about the writing of it and another brand new release. We'll be following that when I chat to Kylie Awe about her second book. The 11th floor, which is absolutely nail biting, riveting, gripping, suspense domestic noir type suspense.
[00:05:03] So Kylie's done a brilliant job of her second novel. So that's what's coming up. We're going to have guest interviews from Joe Mii, Meredith Jaffe, Ray Kss, Penelope Janu, and a whole host of other guest authors who are guest hosts who are going to be coming on. So let's get to today's. Interview the very first one for 2024.
[00:05:25] As I tell you a little bit about Hannah Richel. Hannah is the author of five books starting with Secrets of the Tides, the Shadow Year, the Peacock Summer, the river Home, and now the search party. Hannah's stories are always imbued with a fantastic kind of sense of both love and loss, but there's also so much sense of.
[00:05:47] Resilience and family and overcoming trauma in them. And she has a brilliant way of weaving past and present using multiple viewpoints even before she started writing thriller, the thriller genre, which is what we're talking about today. She. Has always had this sense of mystery about her work, which actually really draws you into the story and has always made her books
[00:06:13] page turners for me. So I'm really excited to be chatting to Hannah today about her brand new novel, the Search Party, and let's get on with that and talk to Hannah right now so Hannah Rich, welcome to Rights for Women or Welcome back to Rights for Women. Thank you Pamela.
[00:06:31] Hannah: So nice to
[00:06:31] Pamela: see you again. Yeah, it's fantastic to have you back on the convo couch, and I can't wait to talk to you about the search party.
[00:06:39] Pamela: I've told the listeners a little bit about your history in terms of the books you've written and the type of writing that you do. The last book that you had out was the River Home. That's right, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's, yeah. It feels so long ago since I read that, Hannah, but when I looked it up, it was only 2020.
[00:06:55] Pamela: It wasn't really that long ago.
[00:06:57] Hannah: I know, but it with everything that's happened in the world since then, I think it does feel like a really long time ago. And certainly in writer's terms, when you write in the commercial space, there's this sort of pressure that you have a book every year and.
[00:07:12] Hannah: So for me it feels like a really long time as well. Yeah. And yeah. Yeah, it's a relief to have the search party out.
[00:07:17] Pamela: So interesting about the search party because it is very much being positioned in the kind of thriller genre, would you say That's right? Is that where your publishers yeah, they have,
[00:07:29] Hannah: they've very much gone into sort of crime thriller territory, which is interesting.
[00:07:35] Pamela: Yeah. I've read all your books and there's always a mystery element in there, so when I really thought about it, I thought, yes, it's different, but it's. The same in a lot of ways too. So I'm really interested to pull apart what you've done here and how it does really put it into another genre, but it's still bringing in a lot of the elements from your, writing Yeah. The style of writing from your previous books.
[00:08:00] Hannah: Yeah I'm glad you said that because I feel the same way actually.
[00:08:03] Pamela: So did you set, I guess the first question is, did you set out to write a thriller?
[00:08:09] Hannah: Honestly. No I'd written the River Home, which is quite a sort of emotional family drama, which is the space that I've been writing in previously. But as you said, I've always enjoyed playing around with suspense and I like to have a kind of puzzle in my book or a mystery that the reader's trying to solve as they go along.
[00:08:27] Hannah: And I often, with the previous books. Was playing around with structure and trying to create tension through the sort of puzzle aspect of the book. What's happening, what are the secrets that everyone's hiding and how does it all fit together? So I guess in that sense I was steering slightly towards the kind of suspense thriller genre, but obviously never writing a thriller.
[00:08:50] Hannah: And then I started writing the search party and it, I started writing it in lockdown in a very confused and complicated writing time for me. I was not feeling very confident. I dunno why. I think I just lost my mojo a bit and I'd lost that sort of joy of writing and why I was doing it.
[00:09:07] Hannah: And it had become a sort of must write the next book sort of pressure. I was outta contract with a publisher, so again, that felt freeing in some ways, but also terrifying because, that could have been the end of my career as far as I knew. If I didn't ever write a book again or no one ever wanted to publish me again, then you know, I'd be looking for another job.
[00:09:26] Pamela: Had you written the other books under contract?
[00:09:28] Hannah: Yes, apart from the first one. So my debut, I obviously wrote just free and then got a contract. So every other book, ryan swooped in after my second book and offered me a two book deal off the back of the second book.
[00:09:42] Hannah: So then book three and four were already contracted. So that was a really lovely place to be as a writer. And then to come out the other side of that was terrifying. So I. Yeah, I felt a lot of pressure and I, to be honest, I did struggle for a long time with what to write next and where was interesting me really.
[00:10:00] Hannah: And I started two other books actually, which I've still got sitting on my laptop. But then the search party idea was the one I was working on that really stayed with me. And I went for a lunch with some writer friends to a pub and sat there and had my head in my hand saying, I just don't know what I'm doing.
[00:10:18] Hannah: I'm in a right mess here. Sounds familiar. And yeah, I know. It's so familiar to so many people writing. The friends were brilliant. They just said tell us your three ideas. So I explained each idea and they said, the search party. What became a search party? That sounds great. Go for it.
[00:10:34] Hannah: And to be honest, it was the characters in that book that I've been working on that weren't leaving me alone, two characters in particular, kept resurfacing in my mind. And I just got to the point where I thought, if I don't write this story in these. These characters down on the page, I'm gonna be so cross with myself.
[00:10:50] Hannah: Yeah. So that was the motivation. And in terms of it becoming a thriller, I think I knew that I needed to put more suspense into my book. So I love the River Home. I think it's a really emotional book that says a lot about what I wanted to say at that time in my life. But looking back at it now, I wonder if the first third of that book could have been a little bit more pacey.
[00:11:11] Hannah: And and so that was my challenge as I set out to write the search party. How do I make it more pacey more of a page turner? How do I really engage the reader and create more tension? And then I just started falling into this sort of crime world, and you're right, it's not. Like a classic who done it?
[00:11:28] Hannah: Crime thriller. But there is an investigation through it. There is a crime and there's a lot of suspense and tension. I hope so. In that sense. I can see why my publishers have decided to go into that genre and I think it, it works really well. I love the package they've put on it, so that's fantastic.
[00:11:47] Pamela: We were just talking before I started recording and. For anybody out there that's watching on video, this was the, I can never get the angle right. This was the arc that came out in Australia anyway, what could you be capable of? And then there's this fantastic you open it up, sorry, when you're pushed to the edge.
[00:12:07] Pamela: And I just think, the whole package of the arc, it's, it doesn't give the same sense of the beautiful cover of the, the final copy, but. It's really intriguing and I think it just created such a great hook to be sending that out. Yeah. As an arc.
[00:12:21] Hannah: I think it was clever because it did even just that one arc, it helped to reposition me and hopefully, people who either thought they knew what I was writing or hadn't even read what I was writing before potentially might have picked it up and had a read.
[00:12:35] Hannah: So yeah, I think it was a clever move on their part. Yeah.
[00:12:39] Pamela: So as you were writing at Honey, you said you, you definitely, I definitely wanna talk to you a little bit more in a while about the pacing and the tension and all that sort of thing. But you must have had a sense by the time you got to the end of it.
[00:12:50] Pamela: Yeah. This is more in, in a suspense genre perhaps than what I've written before. Did you then approach publishers and pitch it that way as well?
[00:12:59] Hannah: I gave it to my agent first and had no idea what she'd think of it.
[00:13:05] Hannah: To be honest, in the back of my head as I was writing it, I kept thinking, think about those Sunday night TV dramas that, I don't, I can't remember if they're on Sunday night in Australia, but
[00:13:14] Hannah: Those sort of high level BB, C kind of suspense programs that everyone kind of sits down to watch.
[00:13:19] Hannah: And then you just want one more episode and one more episode. So I was thinking in my head, write it like that, but I didn't really know what I'd written because I'm sure you can relate. You get to the end of a draft and then you're like, I don't even know what this is. I can't see it clearly anymore.
[00:13:34] Hannah: It was Sarah, my agent actually, who came back to me with a brilliant email actually really quickly. She said, I just raced through this and. It's fantastic. And she was the one that positioned it actually. Okay. So when she went out with it to publishers it was her pitch really, rather than my pitch.
[00:13:52] Hannah: And I think that was really helpful actually, just to have some professional eyes on it who could look at what I'd done and say, okay it's a little bit different here. This is a new opportunity for us. Yeah. Which was exciting.
[00:14:03] Pamela: You mentioned, Hannah, that you had kind felt like you'd lost the joy in writing and that, you, it was becoming a struggle for you. Did you find that once you latched onto this idea and really thought, okay, the search party, that's the one I'm gonna go with, did you find that then got you inspired and you got that joy back in the writing?
[00:14:23] Hannah: Yeah. Definitely. I think it's one of the pitfalls of writing. It's to always have that shiny new idea floating just over on the horizon. And it's something that I constantly have to remind myself of is that, the only way to write a book is to write the book. It's to sit down and focus on it and not be distracted by all those like other great ideas that.
[00:14:44] Hannah: Seemed great at the time, but of course as soon as you go and pursue them, you're gonna end up down the same rabbit hole with similar but different problems. So it was a good reminder to focus and to just really follow the thread of one idea rather than have too many ideas going on at one time.
[00:15:02] Hannah: But I think also that sort of joy needed to come back. It was Vanessa Rad, she works at Hachette Australia. She's a publisher there. She said something to me really recently. During one of our ritual prize judging sessions, and it really resonated for me because she said writing is an art, but publishing as a business.
[00:15:20] Hannah: And I realized I'd been suddenly caught up in the idea of the business of writing and worrying about the business of writing rather than the art of writing. And. Actually writing the search party was a process of me rediscovering the art of it and the love of it too. And I think I only could have done that by being really single-minded and getting into that kind of slightly boring, slightly selfish zone where you just shut out the world and just go for it.
[00:15:53] Hannah: Yeah. Which is so hard to do, but that's what a book requires. Certainly in, in my. Anyway.
[00:15:59] Pamela: Yeah. And I think you're so right. And Vanessa, I has hit the nail on the head there about the separation between the creation of the work of art or the novel in this case and the business, but it's, particularly when you're under contract, I think it's very easy to get the two, the line becomes very blurry, doesn't it?
[00:16:18] Pamela: And once you've had a few books out and you're in the industry, and it's very hard to separate the two.
[00:16:25] Hannah: And it's easy to get caught up and worried about, how is the book going and are people reading it? And I think I'm trying now just to shut all of that out and just think that's not my job.
[00:16:35] Hannah: I trust the people that are publishing me. Everyone wants to do their best. And some books work, some books don't. Some books find the right readers and at the right time. And I try not to worry about that now. And it's just about. Focusing on my job, which is the writing. And so it's easier said than done though.
[00:16:54] Hannah: It's not easy to quieten down those other worries, but then what a privilege, to be a published writer and to be able to think like that. So I remind myself that as well, on days where. You a bit
[00:17:05] Pamela: wobbly. Yeah, I love that. A bit wobbly. So before we go any further, we better tell listeners what the search party is about and it's.
[00:17:14] Pamela: Hard to do that without spoilers. So I'm gonna hand that over to you. If you could let know in your words what the book is about.
[00:17:21] Hannah: Oh I'd love to. So it's the story of four families who go glamping for a long weekend in North Cornwall and they're hoping for this long weekend, a reunion of sorts their old friends and they're planning to catch up and have great weather and just have the best time.
[00:17:40] Hannah: What happens, of course, is a huge storm rolls in off the North Atlantic coast, and then one of their party goes missing, and then a body's found at the bottom of some cliffs and all hell breaks loose. And the stories really about how far you go to protect your loved ones. What your. Family members are capable of doing how far you trust your friends.
[00:18:03] Hannah: And it's about when that little bit of wildness inside all of us meets the wildness of the external world. And and what happens when you reveal that wildness to your closest friends and family?
[00:18:14] Pamela: Oh, great summary of the story without any spoilers. Well done, Hannah.
[00:18:21] Pamela: Was that question, what is it that you would be capable of? And those questions that you were just telling us about, was that the inspiration? Do you start with a question or did that come after you developed the idea? What was the actual inspiration for this particular story?
[00:18:37] Hannah: The question actually came about through the writing weirdly. The inspiration for the story I think was twofold. So landscape for me is always a kind of primary source of inspiration and I don't think I could ever start writing a book without knowing where it's set. And it's underpins everything.
[00:18:55] Hannah: It's like my foundation to lay all the words on top of, landscape for me is really important. And I often find as I work through a book, it's informing the plot as well, or helping to develop and create tension and provide opportunities for dramatic moments. So landscape's always the first starting point for me which I find really interesting 'cause I know lots of writers start with character, but I'm slightly different.
[00:19:18] Hannah: In that respect. And the second question I think was in my head, or not so much question, but just theme was the idea of old friends and. How we change as we grow older and the people that you meet in your twenties. So the friends in my book, the core group have all met at university and they've shared this really tight knit experience that kind of bonds them together.
[00:19:42] Hannah: I. Then we meet them in the book 20 years later, and they've all had relationships and career success and career failure. One of them is quite famous. They all parent in a very different way. Some of them have struggled to become parents. So I wanted to look at all those tensions really about.
[00:20:03] Hannah: Pulling back people 20 years later and seeing how different they are and whether they're actually even still friends anymore. And I just thought it'd be a really fun thing to explore because most of my books previously have focused on family. Yeah. And and I thought this would be a nice area to dive into.
[00:20:21] Pamela: Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned before, that there were a couple of characters that really. Wanted that story told and kept calling to you. I, it's a little while since I've read the book, but I went back through it when I was preparing the questions and was trying to work out how many points of view there are.
[00:20:38] Pamela: And I think I got up to about six, but that couldn't, could be wrong. There might be more. How, can you remember how many points of view there are?
[00:20:45] Hannah: It's probably about six. I think you might be right. Yeah. Could be. If you include the police detectives. Yeah. I can't remember if there's a couple of chapters which sort of dive into their world. So yeah, it might be slightly more if you include them, but yeah, it was.
[00:21:00] Hannah: It was fun to look at all those different shifting perspectives and tell the story and the sort of different truths of the weekend through different eyes, but it was a complete headache to write. Oh,
[00:21:11] Pamela: that is my next question, Hannah. So the actual timeline of the story is quite condensed, but you managed to also bring in a lot about the past from, of these characters as you always do in your writing. I found that another similarity with your other stories.
[00:21:28] Pamela: But you have this kind of timeline that jumps from. Around with each character as well. So can you talk a little bit about your process in writing the book? Where you started with it and how you tackled this problem of telling a story from multiple points of view and jumping around a little bit with the timeline the way you did.
[00:21:50] Hannah: Yeah, I absolutely can. I think. If I'm rem remembering correctly, all of my previous books have always looked at events through different characters, points of view, so that wasn't new to me and I started off telling this story as I wrote it.
[00:22:04] Hannah: It was very much a kind of it's one condensed weekend. Different shifting perspectives off we go. And I just thought, yeah, this is gonna be great. This is a really neat structure that I could just bash this one out. Yes. And then of course I started writing it and I realized it was really boring and it just didn't have any kind of oomph to it or questions that, it just felt very flat and, when I was trying to write another book, so I mentioned that I was struggling and ping-ponging between different drafts of different things. I was writing a different book, which had a sort of past and present backwards and forwards, and I suddenly realized that I needed to pull the past and the present back and forth into this search party book.
[00:22:52] Hannah: And the way to do that was to not go way into the future, but just to have it a few days later. So that we meet the characters during this police investigation where they're all being questioned about what the hell has happened on this weekend. And then the characters go back and we see the weekend unfold through their eyes.
[00:23:11] Hannah: So that then became the structure. And once I had that locked in, it became much easier to make it more of a pacey read. And more dramatic. It's always. A tricky one to slide backstory in to make your characters feel more three dimensional and less cardboard cutout in the present day narrative.
[00:23:32] Hannah: And I think it's always quite important to know a little bit of history about your characters, the main ones anyway. And how to weave that in is always quite tricky. But for me it's usually done through, a sort of a memory, they might be having a moment of kind of quiet thoughtfulness and it's at that moment that you can slide back in memory to to pull back a kind of scene perhaps that's important for illustrating a character quality that you want to emphasize in, in that person.
[00:24:03] Hannah: Yeah, I think that's how I pull in the sort of backstory. Yeah, it, but it's never easy and you have to do it quite carefully, I think. 'cause if it's too shoehorned in, it jolts the reader out of, out the existing story and it doesn't feel natural. Yeah, it's, I never quite know if I get it right, but I certainly try hard to make it feel quite seamless as they go back in their minds to an experience that they're thinking
[00:24:27] Pamela: about.
[00:24:28] Pamela: It comes through really naturally in the book, and I think it just, as you say, it adds that other level. And it also fills the reader in, on the history between the characters. Yes. Like you're, it's almost like you're stitching a quilt together, and you've got different bits of it.
[00:24:42] Pamela: And then gradually the quilt appears over the course of the story, and we get to know the, as you say, the characters know about each other and they know they know some things about each other, but the reader is learning about their present and their past at the same time.
[00:24:57] Hannah: That's such a great metaphor, the quilt one. And yeah, I sometimes think of it like a jigsaw puzzle where you're literally putting the pieces in and some pieces look like they fit and then they don't quite, so then you have to take it out and put it somewhere else and then it all suddenly creates this whole Yeah.
[00:25:10] Hannah: Beautiful picture. Hopefully.
[00:25:12] Pamela: So because it does shift from point of view, from one chapter to the next
[00:25:17] Pamela: how did you make that decision at those different points, say at the end of a chapter? Okay, now I need to shift into this particular character's point of view. How does that process work for
[00:25:26] Hannah: you? It comes quite naturally, I think. And you're right in that I don't, I just do it as I go along. But generally like the arc of the story and who's telling it flows, I think and then occasionally I might get to a point where I think, oh, hang on, I've got two Tanya chapters here back to back. That's not gonna work. I need to insert another character's point of view. Or actually, this character shouldn't be telling this part of the story.
[00:25:52] Hannah: I'd rather see it from someone else's point of view. So occasionally there's some tweaking to be done, but generally it's just a flow where I have a sense as to who I want to shift between and it's probably just keeping myself engaged as much as anything, by darting around and looking at different characters.
[00:26:09] Hannah: I keep myself interested in the story as much as anything.
[00:26:12] Pamela: What's this hap this person doing? What's happening with her now? Yeah.
[00:26:15] Hannah: Yeah, but it was tricky because they all spread out. They're in this sort of locked peninsula, cut off by this storm, but they do all go off in different directions.
[00:26:24] Hannah: So I had to keep track of my characters, where they were, what they were doing, what the time was during the sort of evenings and day. So it all slotted together and you didn't have, one character doing something at three o'clock in the afternoon. And then the next chapter was. Two hours before that, it had to work.
[00:26:39] Hannah: So it was tricky. I did have a lot of head scratching moments where I just thought this is not gonna work.
[00:26:45] Pamela: Did you map it out? Do you, did you map it out on, a whiteboard or a scrapbook or a computer program or anything? Or you just hold it in your head?
[00:26:53] Hannah: I hold a lot of it in my head.
[00:26:55] Hannah: I have a lot of notes, like scraps of paper, just everywhere. I've seen people do really clever things with post-it notes and stuff, and I've tried to do that, but it just doesn't work for me. I never quite know how to use them. When I get quite far into it, I often start an Excel spreadsheet, which sounds really weirdly anal, but it's not, it's literally just columns.
[00:27:15] Hannah: I find it the easiest way to keep columns of information. I have, time and date character and what's happening, and then literally just do that intersection so I can see all of my characters. But then actually, I've just remembered a really cunning trick that I learned from another writer. Claire Fuller.
[00:27:35] Hannah: I watched a Instagram story, I think from her or it was a reel or a post, and she. I think she tried Scrivener, which I've also tried and didn't get on very well with but I know loads of people love it. And she said all she does is on Word. There's a navigation pane that you can view on the side, and if you use headings in your Word document, they pop up on the navigation pane.
[00:28:01] Hannah: So you can have chapter one as heading one, and then under that you can have subheadings where I now put, the character's name and any action points I want to happen in that scene. Wow. And then when I'm looking at the whole document, all you have to do is jump to navigation pane and go and look down and go, oh yeah, I want to go to Tanya.
[00:28:21] Hannah: In chapter 23 when she's in the storm. Then, if I'm bouncing around trying to fit things back in and edits and tweaks and, oh, I've had a really good idea for, what needs to happen there. It made it so much easier to navigate around, a hundred thousand Word document. I.
[00:28:38] Hannah: That I couldn't believe I didn't know that before, and probably everybody is going, yeah,
[00:28:44] Pamela: yeah, no, I've done it. I do use Scrivener, but I don't use it very well in that. I don't use many of the functions but what you are describing is very similar to the kind of chapter lists and everything in Scrivener.
[00:28:57] Pamela: Where you can sort it out through that and it's
[00:28:59] Hannah: so great. 'cause you're inward already. So for me, 'cause I write in Word, I don't have to bounce around through different software and I, I don't really understand scr. I know there's a really clever way to suddenly just assemble your book and it sounds magical, but maybe I just didn't read the instructions properly, which I'm a classic for not
[00:29:17] Pamela: doing that, so I don't either.
[00:29:19] Pamela: Every time I go back to it with a new novel, I have to go and watch the help videos, like, how do I do that? Color coding again, even though I've done it millions of times,
[00:29:27] Hannah: I'm so impatient. I just didn't do that. So that's probably why I'm going.
[00:29:33] Pamela: So you mentioned that there were a couple of characters that really wanted that story.
[00:29:37] Pamela: Told Who, can you tell us who they are?
[00:29:39] Hannah: Yeah, they're my two favorites in this one. So Kipp the boy who is the adopted son of the couple who've set up the glamping site he, with this voice in my head that I just really wanted to get to know and I felt like he had a really.
[00:29:56] Hannah: Good story to tell. And the other character was Tanya, who I could just see so clearly in my mind as this sort of slightly showy second wife, a little bit younger than the original gang who are there. She's complete fish outta water in this glamping site and she's quite brittle, but she's also quite misunderstood.
[00:30:19] Hannah: And I really wanted to explore more with her. So when I was thinking, oh, this is terrible. I'm gonna abandon this, it was those two characters that I kept thinking about at night, lying in bed, going, oh, KIPP. And I just didn't wanna leave them alone.
[00:30:33] Pamela: They're great characters. And Tanya, very much the outsider, isn't she really in the group? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that whole sense of who is the outsider is interesting and there's more than one. Yeah. But yeah. In
[00:30:45] Hannah: my head, the outsiders was one of the titles that I was playing around with because Oh, okay.
[00:30:49] Hannah: It's very much like the idea of stepping outside and outside your comfort zone, but also this group of people and there are outsiders who are influencing what's happening. Yeah. The out outside insiders a quite an important theme in the book.
[00:31:02] Pamela: Yes. Yeah, it's great. So you've got all these characters that you're working with, you have those initial ideas and everything, and these are the people I'm gonna write about, but are you then learning about the characters as you write the story or do you do character bios and things like that?
[00:31:18] Pamela: How does that happen for you?
[00:31:21] Hannah: I probably should do character bios, but I tend to write my way into the characters and then get really stuck about halfway through and whenever I get stuck, I'm learning now that it's usually that I don't know my characters well enough. And the way I find to get unstuck is often to then.
[00:31:39] Hannah: Go back and really think about the characters, who they are, what their backstory is what's motivating them and where do I want them to go. And that often then helps to pull me out of any kind of big tangle of plot or just where you feel like you've hit that really saggy middle where you start to feel like, ah, nah maybe this isn't a book.
[00:32:01] Pamela: Maybe I'll go and crush her a rug or something.
[00:32:02] Hannah: Yeah. But I have tried to do character sheets and I think it is relates back to my personality, the Scrivener, and not looking at instruction books. I find it boring to just sit there and write out every detail about them.
[00:32:14] Hannah: Meaning, what their favorite food is and what their favorite subjective score was and stuff. I don't wanna know all that stuff and. I tend to explore them as I write, I think. Yeah.
[00:32:25] Pamela: Yeah. And what about plot wise with this one, Hannah? Because I have interviewed people like Solari Gentil who never knows who did it until she finds out who did it.
[00:32:36] Pamela: In the writing. Did you know where the plot was going or was that something that you worked out as you, you wrote as well?
[00:32:43] Hannah: Did I know where the plot was going? Not really. I think I had a rough idea, but then I realized that I needed to twist the plots and I needed to do a kind of a bigger thing.
[00:32:58] Hannah: I can't, I dunno how to say it without giving stuff away. Yeah, no you
[00:33:01] Pamela: can't.
[00:33:01] Hannah: So yeah, to that degree, a lot of the plot in the last third. Shifted in my head as I was writing and I was like, ah, okay, this is what I want to be doing now. And it was such those moments where you suddenly get that light bulb over your head and you're like, ah, this is how to make it good.
[00:33:18] Hannah: They're just magic. And I think that's half the joy of. The writing process is those, first of all, the flow, but then secondly, those moments where you just go, oh, I've done it. And then you can't
[00:33:29] Pamela: wait to get back to the keyboard
[00:33:30] Hannah: Exactly. You're literally running from the shower, dripping, scrambling words out.
[00:33:34] Hannah: But did I know who did it? I think I did, but I didn't necessarily know how I was gonna get them to the point where the reader was gonna believe that they'd done it and why they'd done it and how it all came together. That was the tricky bit, and certainly the book I'm writing at the moment, I knew, or I know who's done it, but my massive problem the whole way through was why did they do it and how did they do?
[00:34:01] Hannah: So I knew who my sort of terrible person was, but I just didn't know how to get them to that point. No, I don't know everything. And I think that's half the funnel, although it's also half the headache.
[00:34:12] Pamela: Yeah. Equal measure. Yeah. And so I guess by the time you got to the end of this draft and you're thinking, yeah, okay.
[00:34:19] Pamela: I've upped the pace, I've upped the suspense, the tension, did you then go back and deliberately plant, the red herrings that the crime sort of genre is so well known
[00:34:29] for?
[00:34:30] Hannah: Yes. A lot of them did come in retrospectively or I had to make sure that they were there. And a couple of things I thought were there.
[00:34:38] Hannah: And then in the editorial process the editors said, look. You don't want the reader to feel cheated. So can you just emphasize this point a little bit more at the beginning? And I hadn't done that because I didn't want to make it too obvious. And that's the thing with these sort of crime suspense books is you don't want the reader to, by page three be like, all right, yeah, I think I know who did it.
[00:34:59] Hannah: It was a sort of balancing act really, of how much information to give, how many breadcrumbs to put in and. And I think that's where you need other readers to guide you a bit into what is obvious and what's not too obvious. Yes. I don't honestly dunno how editors do it, because I think you get better and better at spotting the clues the more you read these sorts of books.
[00:35:20] Hannah: Yeah. And so for them to be able to have this overarching view and say, it's okay to put that in there because I don't think, or maybe, the reader will have forgotten it by the time you get to, to chapter 28, they've forgotten about the little weapon that you've planted or, whatever it is at the, in chapter three.
[00:35:39] Hannah: Yeah. But it is something that the genre is known for and I was fully aware of that once. It was clear that I was writing more into this space, and certainly once it had been picked up by a publisher, it was one of my worries is do I have all those sort of. Have I checked all the boxes for the genre that people are gonna expect or will they be disappointed?
[00:35:57] Pamela: And you mentioned the setting before Hannah, and the setting is so atmospheric in this book. You, as you say, they're in this sort of quite wild place and the storm comes in and is it a setting that you are familiar with yourself?
[00:36:10] Pamela: Yeah, so it sets in North
[00:36:11] Hannah: Cornwall and I do know North Cornwall quite well from various holidays and I actually had a glamping holiday there with some friends. Just after I'd moved back to the uk I think it was 2017. So it was just me and my kids and then and another family. And we had this really lovely week.
[00:36:28] Hannah: But, it was challenging in different ways. Glamping is soft camping, so it's not hard, but at the same time, you're still lying under fabric at night and you're at the mercy of the weather and if it's cold, you are cold. So there's not much getting around that.
[00:36:42] Hannah: Yeah. But what I did do is I created a sort of fictional peninsula within the area that I knew to allow myself some artistic license to then put, various reference points within the landscape that I needed to be there. I didn't want readers to be saying I know Zenna and that little beach doesn't exist or that, ruin building isn't there.
[00:37:05] Hannah: And to give myself permission to just have free reign with my imagination. I felt it was best to fictionalize it, but I do then mention some real places. So St. Ives, for example, comes up which is a real town on the north coast of Cornwall. And yeah, I think I needed to know the area a bit to be able to write about it.
[00:37:23] Hannah: Otherwise, I think I would've felt quite hamstrung.
[00:37:26] Pamela: Yeah, because you really do capture that atmosphere, as you say, this kind of ruins and there's farmlands and there's a towns mentioned. And that they're these cliffs, that are these really imposing cliffs that are Yeah.
[00:37:37] Pamela: Just set the scene so beautifully. Oh, thank you. Yeah. That's nice to hear. Which leads me to ask you too, about the prologue. So again, we don't wanna give too much away, but there is a short prologue in this book, which is it's quite anonymous who the character is. We don't really know who the character is.
[00:37:55] Pamela: Was that something that you did right from the beginning? Was that something that your editors said, I think we need to have a prologue in here to increase the suspense. Where did the prologue come from?
[00:38:06] Hannah: I didn't have a prologue to start off with, but then I think I put the prologue in quite near the end of the writing process and I realized that it would be, a sort of echo really, of a later section of the book. And I thought it would create a sort of question in the reader's mind, which is quite an important question in the book. It's what's happened? Yeah. Who's it happened? And someone's lying in hospital and you don't know who they are for quite a big chunk of the book.
[00:38:33] Hannah: And so I wanted there to be ambiguity and questions raised by it, but I put it in and I. Sounds really weird, but I've actually put it in slightly reluctantly because I think all of my books have had a prologue and I have seen like a lot of, there's a lot of debate about prologues and whether it's a cheat, whether, a good book doesn't have a prologue and so I was like, can I write a book without a prologue?
[00:38:57] Hannah: And it turns out I can't. No, but I don't I actually like prologues. For me personally, I don't understand why there's this big kind of. Over them because I know you hear all this stuff about, oh,
[00:39:10] Pamela: publishers don't like prologues. Editors won't like a prologue. But then there's so many books published with prologues in them.
[00:39:16] Pamela: I think that must be a myth.
[00:39:18] Hannah: Surely. I think it's a myth. I've never had a publisher say to me, or Can we get rid of your prologue? I don't know. I've tried again with the book I'm writing at the moment not to have a prologue. And then my beta reader, who's my sister, who's just brilliant, was like, what about if you just at the beginning?
[00:39:33] Hannah: And I was like, oh, yes. And so I don't know if the book will get off the ground, but if it does, it might have a prologue.
[00:39:40] Pamela: Yay. I think the thing is if they're serving a function that's, if they're doing something rather than just being stuck in, and not really. Serving any function pointless.
[00:39:51] Pamela: I agree. Yeah,
[00:39:52] Hannah: I completely agree. That's when a prologue annoys me. You are right when it's just a nice piece of writing. And then I'm feel slightly cheated, like I'd rather just jump straight in.
[00:40:02] Pamela: Yeah. You mentioned your sister. I was gonna ask you about beta readers. So is your sister usually your first reader?
[00:40:09] Hannah: Yeah, she's amazing. So she's not involved in the books world at all, but she's a massive reader and ever since I started writing, she's been the person, the only person that I will show a first draft to. I feel I'm quite secretive about my writing. I don't like to release bits of it and I don't belong to a writer's group or anything like that.
[00:40:29] Hannah: And I feel really squeamish. I went away on a writer's weekend recently and it. Someone said, oh, should we share what we've been working on? And I felt a bit sick 'cause I thought, oh, I don't wanna, it's really terrible and no thank you. Which I don't know sounds. Really silly and introverted, but my sister's the person I trust to tell it to me straight.
[00:40:50] Hannah: And because she's such a big reader of such many different genres she's got a really good eye. And I keep saying to her, you should be a book editor because the notes she gives back to me as phenomenal. And, yeah, I think I'm so lucky to have her and if if she wasn't reading my work I dunno if I'd be a published writer, to be honest.
[00:41:10] Pamela: Amazing. To have someone like that, and particularly a sister, because often, family members either say, oh yeah, it's fantastic. And they're not giving you that constructive stuff or, they might make some other comment that completely puts you off writing it. But to have, yeah, someone that you're close to be able to give you that really nitty gritty, constructive feedback is fantastic.
[00:41:31] Hannah: It's true. 'cause you don't want someone just blowing smoke and saying, oh it's wonderful dialing. They're there. You actually need someone to pull up the floors and say, this bit doesn't make sense. And why the hell is that person doing that? And they really wouldn't say this in that way.
[00:41:44] Hannah: Which are all kind of recent examples of things that my sister's said. On a recent draft of something. And but she always delivers it in this really lovely light funny way. So I'm always laughing as she sticks the knife in.
[00:41:58] Pamela: That makes it so much easier. It does. Yeah. What would you say was your biggest challenge in writing this
[00:42:07] Hannah: particular book? It was definitely holding all the different threads together and pulling them all into a sort of cohesive quilt as we said earlier and making it feel like a book that made sense and, I could have gone off in so many different directions with the characters, but it was maintaining that focus and always trying to get to that end point of where is this story going to land at the end? And what's gonna happen at the very end. And so even if, I dunno what's happening in the middle part of the book as I'm writing it always helps for me to have the sort of final destination in mind because that acts as a sort of beacon to head towards when I start to get a bit distracted.
[00:42:48] Pamela: And was there a moment where you just felt really joyous about the writing of the book?
[00:42:53] Hannah: I think writing, kIPP's sections and particularly his sort of internal thoughts and feelings that he has were sections where I just felt that kind of flow and I felt like I was so in his head. That came quite easily and fluently down onto the page, which was really nice.
[00:43:12] Hannah: It's. It wasn't an easy book to write, I have to say. I think, pulling myself off the, out of those doldrums and keeping the confidence really. And I'll be honest I was just so stuck. Yeah. I was really stuck. And I signed up to Catherine Haman's immersion course, which is a sort of, forum really where you go and she gives you prompts and you meet once a week and she gives you your writing exercises. And I did that because I'd just completely lost my way and I felt like my confidence was on the floor and I didn't honestly know if I had another book in me.
[00:43:45] Hannah: And, but I didn't wanna let it go. 'cause I love, I. So much. And I, to be honest, at this point in my life, I dunno what else I could do. And that panic doesn't help. Catherine's course was fantastic. And I also have a friend who worked in publishing who was setting herself up as a mentor for writers, and she asked if.
[00:44:02] Hannah: She could use me as a Guinea pig. And it was just the most fortuitous timing because I needed exactly what she was offering and she wanted to train and use me as her kind of test subject really for her course. And so we had these amazing sessions where she would talk to me about what was holding me back Kelly Weeks is her name. She just really helped me rediscover the joy and to forget all the kind of head noise and just focus on the joy and the flow of the writing. Oh, sorry. That was a massive
[00:44:32] Pamela: tangent, but it was great. It's great for people to hear that, I think and I think so many of us have those periods where we feel like that, yeah. Having somebody that you can talk you through that I think is really important and really helpful. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:46] Hannah: Absolutely. And also other writers, being part of a writing community and connecting with writers and, staying not too distracted by social media, but my goodness, social media's so amazing for being able to link up with other people who are doing the same thing and we're all in the same boat, feeling the same.
[00:45:03] Hannah: Worries and anxieties and joys and actually you do need, it's such a solitary job. I think you do need, people around you, even if it's from an electronic point of view. Yeah. Just to, put that arm around once in a while and say, don't worry, you've got this. And vice versa.
[00:45:17] Hannah: I hope I can do that and do that for other writers too. It's it's part of the job, I think.
[00:45:22] Pamela: I think it is. I think it's so important. And speaking of other writers, can you tell just for anybody who is. Not familiar. You are a judge on the Ritual Prize, which is a yearly prize for emerging authors.
[00:45:34] Pamela: Can you tell us a little bit about your work with the Ritual Prize? Yeah,
[00:45:37] Hannah: I'd love to. The ritual Prize is actually 10 years old this year, which is Wow. To me. So yeah, we're having a sort of lovely anniversary event later this year. But it was established in honor of my late husband, Matt, who was a publisher at Hachette.
[00:45:52] Hannah: And he died in a surfing accident 10 years ago. And on his death, we were also shocked and for me it was a sort of personal shock, but there was also this. A great sense of loss for the fact that he'd taken on this huge job at Hachette and he had all these sort of amazing plans in place for nurturing the Australian literary scene really and developing new writers.
[00:46:16] Hannah: And it was heartbreaking to a lot of us really, that he was gone. And so a group of us got together and we established the ritual prize, which is quite a unique. Offering, I think in the Australian literary world, in that it invites writers who have not been published before to submit three chapters of their work and an outline of what they're working on and what they hope to complete.
[00:46:39] Hannah: And then a panel of judges of which I've been fortunate to be on for the last nine years. We sit down and we look at the long list and then we get it down to the short list and we pick a winner. And it's fiction and nonfiction. And the prize is a mentorship for a year with a Hachette publisher who will help you steer your work however you want to work with them.
[00:47:01] Hannah: It's quite open. And you also get $10,000 prize money, which is, the idea of which really is to help fund your time to, to complete your work. And with the ultimate goal being that your work is then hopefully published. And it launches your career as a writer. So I think it's a really beautiful prize, and we've discovered some amazing writers.
[00:47:21] Hannah: There's a writer coming out, our 2022 winner, Susanna Beby. Has a debut novel coming out in May called The Deeded, which I know Hachette are really excited about. Yeah. Yeah, to see it really creating new careers for writers is, was the ultimate goal. And that I'm really
[00:47:38] Pamela: proud of.
[00:47:39] Pamela: Must be really rewarding for you to see that and just to be affecting so many lives. And of course, every time you, as a writer, every time you enter a competition, you are. Polishing your work and you're learning more about it. So I think the value of entering prizes is just phenomenal. Yeah. Even if you don't make the short list, or the long list.
[00:47:58] Pamela: I know.
[00:47:59] Hannah: What it teaches me is there are so many great writers out there and, maybe doesn't win the prize. It doesn't mean that there wasn't merit and value in, in all of missions. And that's really hard. And one of the really interesting things about sitting there with the, four or five other judges is we all have such different tastes and it really reminds me each year that, good books and good writing exists.
[00:48:21] Hannah: In so many different forms and, we have this value on bestsellers, but actually, if you love writing and it feels like something you wanna do, then you know you should do it regardless of the business. It's about the art and going back to what Vanessa told me and I find it such an uplifting and hopeful process each year and it really does feel like it's something wonderful that's come out of something incredibly sad and tragic.
[00:48:47] Pamela: And can I just do, would love to take this opportunity as well to congratulate you on your wedding. Was it last year or was it the year before? It was
[00:48:57] Hannah: know what now? 'cause we've just entered 24.
[00:48:59] Pamela: It was the year bef. Oh no, that's so scary. I loved seeing all your photos on Instagram. Thank you. Beautiful.
[00:49:06] Pamela: And yeah,
[00:49:07] Hannah: no, it's some kind of weird, I've met another Matt and Yes. Matt one and Matt two. It's very complicated in house. But no, he's a lovely man and he's got three amazing kids. So we're this kind of big, busy, blended family now. It's very chaotic and noisy in our house when we've got everyone here, but it's so much fun and I just, yeah, I love it.
[00:49:27] Hannah: I feel very.
[00:49:29] Pamela: Lucky. And I saw your recent holiday photos too, being in Australia must be Yes. Coming back. Yeah.
[00:49:36] Hannah: So amazing. I honestly, I didn't want to leave. I was, I probably spent the first two hours at the plane trip home just weeping quietly into my, oh yeah. I just, oh, I, yeah, I'm coming back this year though yeah, I just, the pandemic was such a, it just cut us off.
[00:49:52] Hannah: From each other, so you know, everybody experienced it. It's so lovely to be able to travel again and come back and, yeah, my dad and my sister over there, so I need to, I want to. Oh, fantastic.
[00:50:03] Pamela: Yeah. Will you be doing any book things while you're
[00:50:05] Hannah: here, do you think? I hope so. Nothing's lined up yet, but once I've got my dates confirmed, then hopefully we can lock some things in.
[00:50:12] Hannah: I'd love to, to do it. I guess we see how the book goes and and if there's, if
[00:50:16] Pamela: anyone wants me. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, look it's out in Australia now. Is it out in the UK as well now? It's
[00:50:22] Hannah: out next week in America, Canada and the uk. Okay, so australia got the starting gun. We
[00:50:28] Pamela: I'm just hoping it flies off the shelves. It's a fantastic, I'm a slow reader and I read it in a couple of days. It's just, I really nailed the tension and the pacing and everything, Hannah. It's amazing. And are you working on a book in a similar genre?
[00:50:42] Hannah: Yes, I'm I've just completed a draft which I've sent to my agent of a my sixth book, which is more of a kind of who done it still with the same elements that I like to play around with a lot of character and quite a lot of emotion I hope in it.
[00:50:57] Hannah: But it's quite dark, so I'm really interested to see what my agent thinks. And it's that awful kind of. Nerve wracking weight now to see if it's got legs or not. Yeah, who knows?
[00:51:08] Pamela: Fingers crossed. And yeah, all the best for the release in the other territories.
[00:51:13] Hannah: Thank you so much, Pam. It's always just so lovely to talk to you. Thank you.