LISA JEWELL – The Unusual Writing Method of This Best-Selling Novelist

I am, I’m hoping, a walking inspiration for people who are not a writer of any description, who would like to be a writer, because I was the absolute polar opposite of a writer, I guess. What is the polar opposite of a writer? Well, actually, I don’t know. That’s a really good question. Let’s rephrase that. I was not in a position in my life that anybody would have looked at me and thought, oh, I bet she’s gonna go off and write a novel.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is bestselling novelist Lisa Jewell. Lisa’s first book, Ralph’s Party, was published in 1999 and was an instant hit, becoming the bestselling debut novel for that year. Since then, she’s written another 19 books from the chick-lit novels of the 90s and noughties like 30 Nothing and One Hit Wonder, two more family-themed novels like After the Party, The House We Grew Up In, and more recently, she seems to have found her home in the world of psychological thrillers with books like Then She Was Gone, Watching You, and The Night She Disappeared, which came out this summer and instantly topped the bestseller charts. I really enjoyed my chat with Lisa. She was impressively honest and unpretentious about her talents and career. Her pragmatic, no-nonsense approach seems almost surprising considering the success she’s had in all her different genres. Anyway, so this is our conversation, which took place a few months ago just as the summer holidays were coming to an end. Where are you in your work cycle? Are you in the middle of anything, or did you clear the decks before your holiday?

I have got into the habit since having small children of stopping work for the summer holidays. And now I don’t have small children anymore, but I do still stop work for the summer holidays. But it actually does work for me, because it’s nice for me to have that space. And so I’m now at that point where I’m having to gear up to get back into it, which is, it hasn’t quite happened yet, but I’m hoping it will happen in the next few days. I’ll get back to work.

But had you finished a project and now you’re ready to start a new one, or you actually-

Oh no, sorry, no. What I mean is I stop writing the novel that I’m writing for the summer holidays and then come back to it after the summer holidays. So I have half a novel. So my writing cycle is January to December. So it’s really nice and easy to remember what I’m supposed to be doing at any given point.

You have a cycle per book. So you start writing it in January, you have it finished by December. Is that right? Each book?

Correct, correct. Yes, yes.

That’s impressive.

It’s really not. People say this to me all the time, but I have to remind them that this is my job and I don’t do anything else. I literally have nothing else to do all year. I don’t even have to look after children very much anymore because they’re big teenagers. So this is my job. And it only takes me three hours a day. I mean, it’s not much of a job really. So yes, it’s not such an achievement after all.

Well, you say that, but I mean, presumably you have to come up with an idea. On January the 1st, do you know what the book is you’re going to be writing? Or is that when you start with your, right now I must decide on the characters or the plot on January the 1st?

Right, well on January the 1st, I am still probably in the throes of liaising with my editor about what needs to be done to the book that I delivered in December. And then I’ll probably spend the whole of January editing the book that I delivered in December, probably going into February quite often as well. So it’s generally, it’s probably mid-Feb, early March when I actually sit down and type chapter one with a nice blank screen in front of me. And at that point, yes, I do know what chapter one will be.

Right. When did you work that out?

Oh, at some point in the shower or walking down the street or at some point, it’s something that I describe as a golden egg. And it happens to me once a year. It’s like I ovulate once a year. And this golden egg arrives and I just know it and I feel it and I just think you’re my idea. Here you are, you’ve arrived. And I can’t write you yet because I’m in the middle of writing another book, but you just sit there and I’ll think about you from time to time. And hopefully by the time I start that new document in February or March next year, I’ll have more of an idea of what you mean and what else I need to do to bring you into fruition. So yes, that’s how it happens. It’s just, and the golden egg is usually the tiniest, tiniest little thing as well. It’s not usually a huge, big sort of grand idea or high concept thing. It’s just a person I’ve seen or a feeling I’ve had that I want to explore somehow.

Could you, for example, has it ever happened that you’ve had more than one golden egg in a year?

No, and in fact, if I did get another golden egg, I would find a way to make it work in tandem with the original golden egg. Yeah, so I would try and link the two things together and put them in the same book. I’ve never been in the situation where I’ve been working on one novel and had an idea for more than the next one ahead. I’ve never got anything in the bank.

That’s unusual.

I’ve got the novel I’m writing and the novel I want to write after that and beyond that is just a big black hole.

How interesting, goodness. So you’re almost flying by the seat of your pants, but after all 19 or 20 novels, clearly it’s working.

Well, this is the most wonderful thing about being a seasoned writer is just all the things that used to freak me out about the way I work and the way my books happen that used to make me think I was doing everything wrong and that I was on the edge of disaster constantly. I now know is nothing of the sort. It’s just how I write books that people like reading. So I now embrace it all. I embrace the fact that I’ve only got one idea and I don’t freak out and think I should have a notebook full of ideas. I embrace the fact that I don’t plan my novels and that I’ve got no notebook full of chapter plans and post-it notes and whiteboards and what have you. And I just think this is how I write the books that I write and people like the books that I write. So yes, I’ve come very much into myself as a writer over the past few years.

Well, let’s get started then. Let’s hear your first offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called, when you wrote it and what genre it was written for?

Okay, this clip is from The Girls, which is a novel I wrote in 2014, which was one of my first thrillers and it was not used in the final version.

The afternoon grew warmer and Leo called at four o’clock to say he was leaving work early. The pale gold orb of the sun arched slowly across the sky above the garden, sparking off window panes now and then. And a sweet breeze rippled the leaves of the ancient trees that grew in a line from east to west. Adele opened the packaging of the huge tent that Leo had ordered on the recommendation of a friend who was a veteran of family festivals. She stared blindly for a while at the instructions. A job for Leo and the boys, she decided. She found Sophia’s sun hat and a newspaper, filled a glass with water, tucked her phone into her jeans pocket, hooked Sophia onto her hip and headed into the garden. It was busier now that the other schools had broken up. She saw Henry and George with Dylan and Violet. The boys were on their bikes. Violet was on what looked like brand new roller skates, her elbows and knees bound with strapped-on padding. Dylan was still in his uniform, the gray and black of the private boys’ school at the top of the hill, the one where the celebrities sent their sons. He flicked his dirty chestnut fringe out of his face and laughed scathingly at something Henry had said. He was only two and a half years older than Henry, but since he’d started secondary school, he’d been making a concerted issue of his age advantage. Adele suspected their friendship, which had started when Henry was the same age as Sophia was now, was in its dying days. This summer, she mused, would be a challenging one for the boys.

Why was this not included in the book?

It’s so hilarious. So, gosh, that’s just bizarre listening to that because everything about that changed apart from the setting. I started writing Adele as a mother of two sons and a baby girl who live on a communal garden, which is based on the communal garden I live on, which I’m actually looking at now as I talk to you, the line of trees growing from east to west. And it was when I was still in that phase of not trusting my instincts and sort of wrong footing myself a lot while I was writing, which is how I often used to write, of just sort of making corrections as I went along rather than ploughing forward. And I just wasn’t getting along with Adele as this mother. And I decided that, I can’t remember the precise moment of this happening, but I decided that I would like her to be not a, she goes on in that unpublished scene to go and, I think she goes to school or something at some other points and she’s outside the playground and she was going to be a classic middle-class North London playground mum. And I just thought, I don’t want to write about a North London playground mum. I’ve done those and everybody’s done those. So I decided that she would have three girls and that they’d be homeschooled. And so we would see the comings and goings on the garden from the perspective of a woman who never really left the communal garden because she taught her children at home. So yes, this was from very early on in the book. And I backpedaled very quickly to make Adele a totally different sort of mother. And I can’t remember the thinking behind giving her three girls instead of two boys and a baby girl. The three girls in the ultimate version of the book were all teenagers as well. So there were no babies and no small children involved. But yes, that’s why that scene is no longer there because none of those children are there anymore. Those children are gone.

And it was definitely your decision. It wasn’t an editor didn’t have a read and go, I’m not sure where this is going.

No, this was very early on in the writing process. This was probably when I talk about my writing year being from sort of February to December, this would have been something that happened in around March, I would have thought.

Does that happen a lot? You do a complete U-turn.

No, it used to. It used to happen all the time. I was always questioning myself and my decisions and thinking, oh, there could be a better way of doing this or what about if I switched over? And I used to do that all the time. And I don’t do that anymore. I very much commit myself to my decisions as I, I’m the same in life actually. I don’t dilly dally around making decisions. I just, I go with my gut, I go with my instincts and then I sort of metaphorically close the menu and just get on with things. And I’m the same now when I’m writing a novel. I just think, no, I wrote that for a reason. I’m not sure what reason. I’m not sure how that’s going to pan out or where it’s going, but I’m gonna stick with it and just keep writing forwards and not write backwards.

Now, considering the family dynamic plays a very big part in most of your books, how much input do your own family have in your writing? Do you ever give them bits to read before the book’s finished? Or have your daughters or husband ever suggested or requested that you make changes?

No, I cannot stress strongly enough how uninterested my family are in my work. They have zero interest. My youngest is starting to become sort of slightly tuned into the fact that I’m a successful novelist because one of her friends searched for me on TikTok and found loads of fan videos from people. Yes.

How cool.

Yes, so, and she’s now quite sort of, I think she’s vaguely impressed that people of her age read my books and enjoy my books. But in terms of what mum does, there is zero interest. Neither of my children have ever asked me about my processes. They’ve ever expressed any interest in what I’m writing, where it’s going, what it’s going to be about. No.

Really?

Yeah, no interest at all.

They’ve never requested that you name a character after somebody that they like or don’t like.

No, no. I tell you what they do, and this is classic, classic kid. They’re like, oh, if it gets made into a movie, can I be in it? That’s about it. If it gets made into a movie, then suddenly they’re on board with it. But as a paper book, no interest whatsoever.

And your husband, he doesn’t either have anything to do with it?

I will occasionally use him as a sounding board. If we’re out having dinner and I need something to talk about, I will bring up what I’m writing about and sort of use him as a sounding board, as I say. But no, he’s not a reader of fiction. Well, he’s not a reader of anything, really. He read my first few books politely, and he buys my thrillers. He downloads them on Audible and listens to them on holiday and gets to about chapter eight by the time we’re on our return flight home. And that’s it, really. It was just fine. I don’t need them. I don’t need them. No, of course you don’t. They’re not required for my writing process or my writing journey, so it’s all good.

Okay then, let’s move on to the next offcut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Okay, so this is an article called Thornham, which is a village in North Norfolk, and I was commissioned to write it for New Woman magazine back in May of 2005, just after my mother had died, but it was never published.

We braved the bitter North Sea wind as we strolled down the seafront towards the fun fair and laughed so hard on the waltzes that we thought we were going to be sick. Afterwards, feeling quite shaky, we decided to head back to our cottage in Thornham where we reminisced for a couple of hours about all the funny things that had happened over those long childhood summers. Like the time Claire and Sasha got stuck in sinking mud out on the marshes on Thornham Harbour and came home shoeless and brown from head to foot. And the time when there were so many children to pack into so many cars after a day on the beach that James got left behind, his absence not noticed until we’d all got home. We talked about Darren, who picked me up at Hunstantern Fair and took me for a Bacardian Coke while the younger kids loitered around outside the bar, giggling because Lisa had a boyfriend. He drove me back to Thornham in a Maroon TR7, which Claire and James’ big sister Emma promptly reversed into a caravan. The dent was still there the following summer, long after Darren and his sports car were a distant memory. It was funny, I noticed how our roles were still the same. As kids, I’d been the sensible one. Claire and Sasha had been the naughty twins and James was the baby. I was always so gullible and felt like I was a step behind everyone else, a bit slow to get the joke. I still felt like that even now. But unlike the time my dad let all the kids sleep in his camper van one night and Sasha and Claire locked the doors and tickled me until I wet myself, I was 12, they didn’t take advantage. The following day, we’re up early for breakfast at the Victoria in Holcomb, followed by a brisk walk on Holcomb Beach and a wander through the pine forest. As a child, I’d felt like the forest could swallow me whole, like I could walk forever and never get to the other end. Now it just seemed like a bunch of trees. And then as the storm clouds gathered over the North Norfolk Coast, we packed ourselves into my car and headed home in torrential rain, back to our children and jobs in the real world. My weekend in Thornham couldn’t have come at a better time. Before I left, I’d believed that uncontrollable, side-splitting laughter was like snogging and midriff tops for young people. I’d convinced myself that a lot of things I didn’t do anymore, like giggling, like flirting, like getting overexcited about silly things, I didn’t do because I was grown up, because I was a mother, because my own mother had been ill, because real life was just too damn serious. I came back to London remembering that even though I’m a woman, I can still be a girl. And I’m going to try my hardest to keep that feeling with me until I’m a very old lady indeed.

Oh, it was such a lovely piece.

Oh.

What happened to it? Why was that not published? Do you know what?

I have no idea. Yes, so this was my mother died in May, 2005, and she was only 61. So it was quite sort of a tragedy at the time. And Claire, James and my sister, Sasha, we were basically, as children, we used to go to Thornham every single summer, four families with static caravans side by side on a caravan site behind a pub in Thornham. And that’s what we did every summer for six weeks. And it was clearly incredibly formative. And someone had the idea that in that sort of post funeral thing that happens when someone’s passed and everybody wants to come back together in their absence and sort of recreate some sort of sense of the lost history that’s died with that person, that we should return to Thornham and just spend some time there. And as you can see from that article I wrote, we had a whale of a time. It was, and I think you do have to do these things after the funeral. I think there’s something very final and you can move on to that sense of closure. And I can’t remember being commissioned to write this piece and I cannot remember why it got killed. I know that New Woman Magazine doesn’t exist anymore. It’s defunct. And I can’t remember the backstory to this at all. It was fantastic actually for me to go through all my old pieces of journalism and unearth it and read it, particularly with all that sort of sentiment about clinging on to girlishness and helpless laughter and not taking life too seriously in that sense I’d had at the time of writing it that this is something I wanted to remember and take on with me into life. And I’m not sure that probably happened because it kind of doesn’t in life, does it?

No, real life intercedes eventually.

It does. And you sort of revert to normal behaviour. But even though it wasn’t published, I’m glad I wrote it because it really does sum up that sort of kind of, there’s that sort of post-loss euphoria that you sometimes have because when somebody dies and leaves a hole in the world, the people around that hole come together in a way that’s more intense than it was when that person was there. And that does create a strange sort of euphoria. And it was nice for me to have captured it in that piece, even though nobody ever got to read it.

But we just heard it now.

There you go, it’s been brought back to life, yes.

Now, your mother, I heard an interview you did, your mother has a fascinating story about her upbringing. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, I mean, yes. So I was brought up with a sort of story inbuilt into my DNA, the story that I heard from my mother from being a tiny child all the way through to adulthood, which was the story of my mother’s childhood, which was, you know, you could make a screenplay out of it. So she was born in India in 1944 to an Anglo-Indian father and a Scottish mother. And when she was four years old, the family decided they were going to emigrate from India to the UK where they had a lot of family. And my grandmother, my Scottish grandmother got on a boat, as he did in those days, with her twin baby boys and left my grandfather and my mother in India and they were supposed to be joining her. A few weeks later, I think my grandfather had some affairs to tidy up before he could leave the country. And instead of tidying up his affairs, he actually reunited with his childhood sweetheart and made a new life with her. This affected my mother very, very badly. As you can imagine, she was four years old, she stopped eating and she got rickets. And back in these really post Victorian days, the way that people dealt with unhappy children was just sort of guaranteed to make them even unhappier. They sent my mother off to a boarding school up in the hills in a town called Nine-et-Al for three terms in a boarding school full of teenage girls and this four-year-old child. Yeah, so by the time she came back to Lucknow, which is where her father and his new wife were living, they were married and a baby sister came along, not long afterwards and she was not allowed to talk about her mother. She was made to call this new woman her mother. She wasn’t allowed to cry about her mother and then she watched her father and her stepmother love the new baby physically in a way that they’d never loved her physically. She got all the hugs and kisses and my mother was not read bedtime stories as she told the story to us. Anyway, when she was 10 years old, the family finally left India. This was around the time of partition and they were in Karachi at that point and came to the UK, but they settled, unlike my grandmother who settled in the Midlands, they settled in North London. And my mother met my father, my mother had me and then when she was pregnant with my little sister, this man appeared at her front gate and said, are you okay? And my mother said, yes. He said, I’m Brian, I’m your baby brother. I’ve been looking for you for years. So he was only 18 at the time and he’d been looking for her ever since he was old enough to look for her. And he’d finally tracked her down. I don’t know how he did it. And yeah, so he came back into her life, which meant that also my mother’s mother came back into her life. And yes, so quite a tragic and extraordinary story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very healing for my mother.

I was about to say, was there no happy, it sounded like there needed to be a happy ending.

Yeah, the happy ending was my mother’s relationship with Brian, they were two peas in a pod. They adored each other. But my mother never really bonded with her birth mother. She never really had that closure with her. The mother was very damaged as you can imagine. As you can imagine you would be if you’d gone halfway across the world with two baby boys expecting your husband to catch up with you with your baby girl. She’d already lost one child at a year old. So she’d gone through the grief of losing a child and then she’d lost her daughter as well and her husband. So she’s a very damaged person. She didn’t really have a lot to give.

Was she alive? Did you meet her?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. She, in fact, my mom and dad went on holiday once and she came and looked after us for a week in our house. We used to go up to the Midlands a lot and spend time with her. She was an amazing cook. She cooked Indian food. She was very Indian because she’d been born in India herself even though she was Scottish. Yeah, no, so she was a big part of our lives but she was quite a cold, cold, unknowable person really. But yes, so that was the story of my mother.

And you’ve never been tempted to do anything with that story at all?

Oh, do you know, that’s a really good question. That’s a really good question. I don’t know, it’s not my style, is it? It’s not the sort of thing I write about, but…

It’s the starting point of something.

It’s the starting point of something, yes. I mean, as with, you know, I had a very traumatic early marriage and I always knew I wanted to write about it but I never found the right moment to write about it until I found it. And I put it into, I think, my fifth novel. And maybe that will happen with my mother’s story. Maybe I’ll be writing something and I’ll think, this is it, I found the place for it, this can be it. We’ll see, we’ll see. I haven’t found that moment yet.

All right, let’s find out about your next offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called and where it comes from?

Okay, so this is a deleted scene from my very first novel, Ralph’s Party, which I started writing when I was 26 years old back in the 90s and was published, in fact, in 1999.

First of January, 1986, 276 days till UCL. I must be the only 18 year old in the country waking up this morning without a hangover. Another lovely New Year’s Eve with mother Lulu and Alex watching other people enjoying themselves on the television and feeling like I always feel on the outside. Oh, God, I can’t wait till October. I can’t believe this year has finally arrived. Ten months to go before I get away from bloody mother on this miserable little bloody hovel. Mother’s downstairs now taking down all the Christmas decorations, i.e. the bits of holly she stole off the tree outside the Rowan’s, without the berries, of course. I’m surprised she can bear to have them up even for eight days. I can tell it makes her all edgy. She’s so relieved after they come down. I’m listening to John Peel’s Festive 50 at the moment. I wonder what will be number one. Atmosphere by Joy Division again, no doubt. He’s playing teenage kicks by the undertones at the moment, and it’s making me want to cry. I’ve only got two years left of being a teenager, and I’ve yet to have one single kick. I wonder what it feels like. I wonder if I’ll lose my virginity this year. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. It’s weird and so exciting to think that there’s a boy out there somewhere who I’ve never met, and I’m going to fall in love with him and lose my virginity to him. I wonder what he’s doing right now. Just think, in ten months, I’ll be away from bloody, miserable bloody barracks and horrible bloody mother, and I’ll be living in a wonderful sunny flat in London, maybe in a mansion block with a balcony, and I’ll be able to make friends and wear makeup and pretty clothes and grow my hair and drink beer and eat Chinese food whenever I want. And when it’s Christmas, I’ll buy up the whole Christmas Bloody Decoration Department in Woolworths, and you won’t be able to move in my flat for baubles and tinsel and fairy lights, and I’ll invite my boyfriend round and we’ll drink cold lager, and I’ll get teenage kicks right through the night. 267 days to go, 8th February 1986. Oh God! I don’t know what to do! Justin Jones asked me out to the Valentine’s Disco! Justin Jones! Oh, he should have seen Melanie Albright’s face. He said he didn’t know why he fancied me, but he did. He said I had awful hair and wore awful clothes, but there was something about me that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Get that? I’ve got something about me. That sounds a hell of a lot easier than having to make an effort to be fancied like Melanie Bloody Albright with her huge bloody tits popping out of her deliberately too tight shirt. I could just walk about with my spastic hair and my nylon clothes and sensible shoes and have something about me. I am very happy with this newfound knowledge. There was no point in saying yes, of course. I was honest with him. I just told him my mother was a witch and a cow and wouldn’t let me go because then I might enjoy myself and that’s the last thing she’d ever want for me. He told me he’d bring a ladder and kidnap me from my room. Very romantic idea, but too rebellious by half. I explained to him that I am not a rebelling type. I feel sad now. I hate my mother. 238 days to go.

Oh no, awful, awful use of politically incorrect language in the middle of that.

But it was written in 1997 when we were all saying things like that.

Yes, and it wasn’t published.

No, no, but even if it had been, it wouldn’t be the end of the world because it was colloquial. That’s what it is.

Yes, yes. And also, she was a teenage girl writing in a diary and I can imagine that teenage girls probably even now are not that politically correct when they’re writing in their diaries.

Yes.

Yes. Anyway.

So this is marvelous. Ralph’s Party. I remember when that came out. I loved it. So this, though, the note that accompanied this script was it has a load of diary entries written for Jem’s diary that you completely forgotten about. How do you completely forget about something like this?

That’s quite a quite a big chunk of text and I still have zero recollection of having written any of that. Oh, so there’s there’s a storyline that runs through it where so Jem moves into a flat share with these two guys called Ralph and Smith. And Ralph doesn’t have a job, so he’s at home all day. And he’s slightly he’s got a big crush on Jem and he goes into her room while she’s at work and reads her diaries because he wants to get to know her, but he doesn’t know how to approach her because he’s a bit hopeless. And clearly at some point I thought it would be a really good idea if the reader could see what Ralph was reading in Jem’s diaries and I wrote these entries, which meant that I had to create this whole backstory for Jem about this awful mother she had, horrible and living in a barracks and wearing horrible shoes and nobody fancying her and not being allowed out and no Christmas decorations. And I do not remember thinking, writing, imagining any of those things at all. It’s absolutely extraordinary to me. So yes, obviously I had to do an awful, I didn’t just have these things to hand when I was asked to find offcuts. I had to do some deep dark ferreting around in the sort of bowels of my word documents. And this is something that took me more by surprise than anything, I think. Finding these dead diary entries for Jem. But it’s also interesting to me that I have no recollection of doing it and no recollection of cutting them out at which point in the, I think it must have been way, way, way early on into the writing process I took those out. I can imagine my thinking would have been along the lines of this is going to take up too much room.

So, again, it will be your decision, not an editorial one, for example.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, these were not taken out by an editor. These were very much taken out by me.

Now, this is your first book and what I want to know is, I mean, obviously everyone has a sort of, I wrote the first book and it got published and from then on I became a writer. But who were you before you wrote your first book? Were you actually a writer of any description?

No, see, this is, I am, I’m hoping, a walking inspiration for people who are not a writer of any description, who would like to be a writer because I was the absolute polar opposite of a writer, I guess. What is the polar opposite of a writer? Well, I actually, I don’t know, I don’t know, polar opposite, that’s a really good question. What is a, no, let’s rephrase that. I was not in a position in my life that anybody would have looked at me and thought, oh, I bet she’s going to go off and write a novel.

So it wasn’t at school, you had no particular writing talents at school?

Yeah, no, I was, oh yeah, no, I was very good at writing at school. I wasn’t very good at anything else at all. I was very, very average child, average to bad at most things, but really exceptionally good at writing. But by the point at which I started writing this in 1996, I hadn’t written anything for, well, since I was a child.

What was your job? What were you doing for work?

So, at the actual point that I started writing Ralph’s Party, which was in October 1996, and I remember that because I’d had the conversation with a friend on holiday. One of us was a teacher, so we had to go on holiday during the school half term, even though none of us had children. So that’s how I know it was October. And somebody else on that holiday had made me a bet to write a book because I’d just read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby and was feeling kind of inspired, kind of thinking that I’d like to write a novel. There’s a long backstory. It wasn’t quite as clean cut as that. I suddenly from out of the blue decided I want to write a novel. There’s an awful lot of other stuff behind that. So when I got back from that holiday and started writing it, I had actually been made redundant. I’d been working as a marketing, a PA to the marketing director of Thomas Pink, the shirtmakers in German Street in Mayfair. That was the precise job that I was doing. So I had been working in an office behind the Thomas Pink shop in German Street for the marketing director as a secretary. And I had just lost my job before we went on this holiday, this life-changing holiday where I had this life-changing conversation with my friend. And before I’d been on that holiday and had that life-changing conversation, while I was still a secretary, if you had asked me, what do you think you’re going to end up doing? I would have been thinking of pay rises and promotions. That’s where my head was at. I wasn’t living in a world where I thought that I was going to change my life or that I was going to take a risk or that I was going to do something brave.

It wasn’t a secret dream, for example.

It wasn’t a secret dream. It was something that I just, I knew I was good at writing, but I also thought that I didn’t have any right to write a book. I thought I was young and a flippity gibbet and hadn’t had any life experience and bad things hadn’t happened to me. And I thought that particularly back then in the 90s, there weren’t really any young female writers. Any books I read by women were middle-aged women, post-menopausal women on the whole. So it wasn’t something that I thought. And also as a human being who had not even been to university, didn’t even have a degree or any A-levels, I certainly didn’t think that I had the right to even think about writing a book. So yeah, it was only losing that job, but that pivotal moment in my life, losing that job and I cried. I cried for 24 hours after I lost that job because I loved it so much. But that was what forced the conversation that I had with the friend on that holiday, which led to me shaking hands with her and saying, okay, I’ll give it a bash. I’ll write three chapters. And those were the three chapters of Ralph’s Party. But it was an absolute sliding doors moment. It really was a sliding doors moment. It wasn’t something that was inevitable and that was going to happen anyway at all. It was something life presented me with a moment, which I could grab hold of or ignore. And I grabbed hold of it, thank God, and made it happen. And here I am.

What a fantastic story.

Yes, it is fantastic.

Right. Well, let’s move on to your next offcut. What’s this one?

Right. So this was from my, I think it’s one of my middle novels, The Truth About Melody Brown, which I wrote in 2008. And I can’t actually remember what it is. So I’m quite excited to hear it.

It smelled different today. The corridors smelled of sickly pine scented disinfectant. And the classroom smelled of chalk dust and wood polish, even though the floor was linoleum and the whiteboard employed markers. And the children seemed taller, taller, bigger, and somehow more ominous. But the strangest thing of all was that all day long, she’d had this worrying sense of watching her back as if someone was about to pounce on her. And worse than that, a voice inside her head, but somehow everywhere whispering her name. Melody, Melody, Melody. Wherever she went, it was a child’s voice in as much as it was a voice at all, more like interference, but harsher, deeper, without the softness of a child’s voice. Melody found herself turning abruptly to locate the source of the name calling at several points throughout the day. And each time she turned to face a blank wall or an empty corridor, her heart raced and her hackles rose.

I suspect that the reading we gave of this might be a little bit more sinister than the actual story in the book.

Whoa, that was spooky.

I thought we’d go for a change of tone there.

Yeah, definitely.

There are certainly creepy overtones or undertones in that clip. How accurate is that? Well, first of all, what happened? Why is it not in the book?

That’s a really good question. So Melody Brown is a dinner lady. She’s a single mother to a 17-year-old son and is a dinner lady at the primary school that he went to that she took the job because it worked in terms of being a single mother. And she’s still working at the primary school that he went to, even though he’s nearly an adult. And Melody Brown has forgotten, she experienced a house fire when she was eight years old and has forgotten everything that happened in the first eight years of her life. And she’s accepted the fact that she doesn’t remember the first eight years of her life. And then at the beginning of the book, somebody takes her on a date to watch a very fashionable back in the noughties, a live hypnotist show. And she is hypnotized on stage. And after this event, she keeps getting strange flashbacks, little fragments of things, vignettes, moments that she doesn’t recognize, but which she knows intrinsically are to do with her and her childhood. So the book, The Truth About Melody Brown, is about her voyage of discovery. She follows these little clues like breadcrumbs. She sees, for example, one of the flashbacks she sees is of a house by the seaside with a balcony that looks like a smiling face. And she locates this house and it’s in broad stairs on the Kent coast. And anyway, slowly chapter by chapter, she pieces together the truth about her childhood and about who she really is. But the whole book is set in the summer holidays. But clearly at some point I had written a scene or I had changed the timeline somehow because this is clearly Melody going back to work at the beginning of term. At the moment, the book finishes in July on her son’s 18th birthday, which is at the end of July. So yeah, I at some point clearly decided that I didn’t want it. I can’t remember what again, what mental shenanigans I was processing to make that decision to truncate the storyline so that it didn’t go over the summer holidays and into the new term. But yeah, so that scary stuff in that clip is merely the fact that Melody can feel that her memory has been infiltrated somehow and she’s feeling quite freaked out about it. So it sounds like from that dramatic retelling that it might be a horror or a ghost sort of thing. It’s not, it’s neither of those, it is very much just she’s feeling haunted, these encroaching memories.

This is actually your seventh novel. And you have, as has been noted by many people, you’ve changed from the Ralph’s Party, I think you called it, was it Flatmates and Curry kind of book?

Yes.

And obviously the books have gradually got darker. And I was trying to work out when the actual change occurred. Now I read an interview that you said it was The Third Wife in 2014 that defined your change of style.

Yes.

But your publisher appears to disagree with you because I’m looking at the book covers and hold on a second. Melody Brown is the book where the font changes and becomes a bit more stark, although the background isn’t quite scary. And then after that, they’re quite frothy, the earlier books. And then all of a sudden the images get darker, the font gets bigger.

Okay, well, there’s actually quite a dull technical reason for that, is that The Truth About Melody Brown was the first book published by Random House when I moved from Penguin to Random House. And they have just done a backlist rejacketing exercise. So they have rejacketed everything that they have published for me, which is The Truth About Melody Brown onwards. But this was a point at which I started giving my publishers books to publish that weren’t chick lit. And I think they found it quite challenging to know what to do with me over the next few books from The Truth About Melody Brown onwards until The Third Wife, which is when I finally killed someone. So then they were just like, okay. So I kind of wrote out of genre for about three or four books in the middle of my backlist.

But they went well, surely the publisher.

Yeah, so The Truth About Melody Brown sold really well. And after that came After The Party, which was the sequel to Ralph’s Party, which was a very grown up novel about long-term love and parenthood. And then after that came The Making of Us, which was a book about anonymous sperm donor, the four children that he’d sired coming together to go to his deathbed. And then after that was The House. Oh, I wrote a historical novel called Before I Met You, which had a historical dual timeline set in 1919 in London. Then there’s The House We Grew Up In, which was a novel about a family blighted by the mother’s obsessive compulsive hoarding disorder caused by a trauma within the family. So these were books that were fish nor fowl. Nobody was dying, but nobody was falling in love with anybody. And so for quite that chunk of time, my book sales did go down to the point where I was slightly worried about my long-term future as a novelist, never to the point where I thought I’d have to get a job, but certainly to the point where I just thought, if this carries on, I may have to rethink my long-term plans. And yes, very difficult to publish a non-genre book for publishers.

Is that why you, when you got The Third Wife started, did you make a conscious decision to go, right, I’m now going to make things a bit easier for my publishers?

No, absolutely not. Again, very much just, it was a very instinctive thing. I was actually halfway through writing The Third Wife and The Third Wife was going to be yet another out of genre book about a man who has clearly been married three times and it was just going to be a study of the impact that having a father who keeps going off with other women and having children with other women, the impact that that has on the families that are left behind and all those interesting inter-dynamics between ex-wives and new wives, young wives, old wives, teenage children, babies, all that sort of interesting stuff that happens in families like that. So that’s what I was going to write about and I got halfway through and just genuinely thought, I am bored. I’m bored. This is boring me. And if it’s boring me, then it’s going to bore the reader. And I just thought, I need something really exciting to happen. So I killed someone. And in fact, if you read The Third Wife and you’re expecting it to be a classic kind of domestic noir, domestic thriller, you may not get exactly what you want because it is a bit of a sort of a pig’s ear in a way, because I had to sort of rework things to fit around this new dead person in the middle of the book. So it’s not particularly successful, but as a diving board for me to then find my way into a genre, which I think I should always have been writing into being completely honest. And yeah, to head off in the direction that I’ve since headed off in, it was the right thing to do. And it’s not my favorite novel of mine by any stretch, but I’m so glad I wrote it because obviously had that novel gone out into the world and my publishers had said, hold on, this isn’t a Lisa Jewell novel, you’ve killed someone, what’s going on? Had my readers said, oh, I used to like Lisa Jewell but then she started killing people and now I don’t like her anymore. I’d have had to have pause for thought and rethink things and find another way to move on creatively. But neither of those things happened, which gave me carte blanche to just keep on killing people and keep getting darker and darker and going further and further into a place that I feel really comfortable in. So yeah, so The Truth About Mildy Brown was a turning point in as much as it was the first novel where the focus wasn’t a romantic relationship.

Right, well time for your next offcut. Tell us about this one.

Okay, so this is from my novel, Watching You, which I wrote in 2017. And again, it’s something that I cut out myself.

He was wearing a sky blue shirt and midnight blue trousers, a thin blue and gray striped tie. The jacket that made a suit with the trousers was hung haphazardly over the back of a chair around a board table. In the waste paper bin to the left of his desk was the cling film wrapping of a homemade sandwich and a crushed empty packet of chili flavored rice cakes. Paperwork in piles of varying sizes covered the surface of his desk. A hank of his hair hung distractingly over his forehead. I’m really well, she replied. Excellent, his eyes followed a triangle from her left eye to her right, to her mouth and back again. He pulled himself back, smoothed down his tie. Excellent, he repeated. Everyone being nice to you? Of course. Good, and now you’re off to the trips? I am, Sharon’s coming with me. Sharon was the attendance officer. She had just gone part time and had no problem sharing her remit with Joey. So she’s briefed you? Yes, fully. Suicide father, mental health mother, decreasing attendance. Tom leaned forward and touched a folder on his desk. Awful, just awful. Ethan, such a lovely boy, was on course for a full set of GCSEs. Too late for that now, I suspect, but maybe not too late to get at least five reasonably good ones. Set him off on the right footing. He looked up from the folder and smiled at her. It was a slow, serious smile. She felt a thud of yearning in the pit of her stomach, then a prickle of fear. Everything felt so onerous. Her job, her responsibility to these children, her need to please Tom, her terrible, overwhelming crush, as it was now. It was fully realized and undeniable. Her whole being had been reduced over the last few weeks to a hard, inflexible rock of wanting, wanting to see him, mainly from a distance, so she could hold the pleasure quietly inside her. But wanting these face-to-face encounters, too, wanting to be able to smell him, to study the creases in his shirts, the creases in his face, the hairs on his wrists, the pale gold band on his ring finger that he twirled and twisted as though it might open a portal to another dimension.

Do you remember why this didn’t make the story?

Oh, yes, so Joey is a, in fact, this is an interesting thing. Joey, in the original version of the book, was 36 and had just come back from 10 years working the sort of the hospitality scene in Ibiza, doing parties and what have you, with a much younger boyfriend, 10 years younger than her and moved in with her twin brother. And she finds that her brother is living next door to the head teacher of the big local comprehensive school and he’s called Tom Fitzwilliam and she immediately finds herself attracted to him in a quite unexpected way. And yeah, so clearly as you can hear in that clip, she has a massive crush on him. Before she went off to Ibiza, in my original version, she had done a degree in social work and then run off to Ibiza. And in the original version, she finds herself talking to Tom Fitzwilliam and he offers her a job at his school, working with children who have got social problems that she based on a friend of mine in real life who has that exact job. So I got her, I remember I went out for, that’s interesting. I’ve just had a memory come back to me. I took her out for a coffee to pick her brain because I knew I was gonna be writing about her having this job. So I got all this information. And yeah, so she goes to work at Tom Fitzwilliam School. And at some point, I clearly decided that that was absolutely the wrong path for Joey to take and for the storyline to take. And I went backwards and having said that I don’t write backwards, here I am. Here I am and this is only like four novels ago. So I’m misremembering my own past here, like doing the old rose tinted spectacles. Oh, I’m such a great writer these days. I never have to change anything. Clearly here, I absolutely changed Tak quite dramatically and removed Joey from Tom’s school and put her back in the house next door and have it had her just watching him once more from a distance and not being a part of his life. So yes, a little lost moment of what might have been had Tom Fitzwilliam offered her a job working at his school.

Would that have changed the plot very much, do you think?

Oh, it really would have changed the plot. The whole plot ultimately hinges on the distance between her and Tom Fitzwilliam and the fact that she does only get to see him from a distance and fantasize about him and make up stories about him and use him as some sort of emotional crutch to get through the sort of the feelings that she has of inadequacy and being lost in the world. So had she been face to face with him every day, that would have taken all that tension out of the story and all that sort of.

Did you have any idea where it might have gone?

No, I never have any, no, no, no. I never plan anything or know where anything’s going. I have the one thing, it’s on my screen and it just grows a thousand words a day. And that’s what it is. That’s all that exists is my brain and my fingers and this thing on the screen that is just for me, it’s words on a screen. I don’t have that sense of being sort of absorbed into my own imaginary world and the world around me doesn’t exist. I’m very, very aware of the world that I’m in. I’m very aware of the biscuit tin. I’m very aware of jobs that I need to do. I’m very aware of the fact that I want to go up and put some warmer socks on because my feet are cold. I’m very aware of the fact that I can hear my husband coming upstairs and he’s gonna want to talk to me. And yeah, all of these things, all of these things I am aware of. So what I do feels very, very mechanical almost when I’m doing it. It’s just a screen, fingertips, keyboard, words.

You make it sound very unenjoyable though. Is there no delight?

There’s very little delight. The delight comes afterwards. The delight comes when it’s finished. And the delight comes when I can give it to my editor and she tells me how to make it better and then I can make it better. And then people read it and say they’ve loved it. But actually writing is very rarely delightful. It’s very rarely delightful. There are moments where I just think something clicks into place and it feels a little bit like magic and then I get a moment of thinking, wow, you know, there is something else going on here beyond just my fingertips and the keyboard. There’s something else at play here. But mostly it does feel like a mechanical. I’m just watching the word count going up. I’m just selecting text and looking at the bottom of the screen to see how many words is in the thing that I’ve just written and it’s like 800 words. And I think, okay, let’s see if I can get another 200 words out. That’s what it feels like.

Wow, well, I admire your pragmatism. Okay, we’ve come to your final offcut now. So can you tell us about this one, please?

Wow, this is from The Night She Disappeared, which I only finished writing in December 2020. So hopefully I should remember very, very, very clearly why this didn’t make the final cut because, yeah, this was just from last year.

Thomas grabs her by her throat again and pulls her under the water again. Then he disappears too. And for a second, they’re in amorphous, LED-lit writhing mass at the bottom of the pool. And there is nobody here to help. And someone is going to die if they keep doing this. And so for the second time that night, Tallulah takes off her shorts and jumps feet first into the pool. Her hands find Thomas’s hands around Scarlet’s throat and try to unpeel them. But she feels Thomas’s foot hard just above her groin and recoils. She starts to feel her breath run out. She didn’t take enough in when she jumped. And she shoots to the surface of the pool gasping for air. Help, she calls out into the black night, her voice fighting hard against the pounding music. Help! But nobody comes. Nobody is here. She goes onto the water again and feels that Scarlet is starting to lose her fight, that she’s becoming soft and pliant. And she realizes that Scarlet is drowning. She throws herself bodily between Thomas and Scarlet. And finally his hands come away from her throat and all three of them emerge once more from the water, all choking, all gasping and coughing. Scarlet tries to make it to the side of the pool, but Thomas grabs her by her legs and tries to pull her under again. This time she manages to kick him away and swim quickly away from him. But she seems to have winded him and he’s curled up at the bottom of the pool. And seeing him there in a pathetic fetal ball, Tallulah feels a terrible shadow of repressed rage pass over her, blank fury at this boy who she used to love, this boy who ignored her throughout her pregnancy because he didn’t think her baby was his, this boy who wants her to stay small and compressed and stick her in a box on the side of an A-road, this boy who has just tried to take the life of the girl she loves, and she gulps in a big lungful of air and pushes herself to the bottom of the pool and sits on Thomas’s head. He struggles against the weight of her and is about to push her off when Scarlett appears by her side. They exchange a look through the pinky blue haze of the disco-lit water. And then Scarlett takes Thomas’s arms and pins them down against the bottom of the pool. And as the lights change from pink to orange to green to red, the fight slowly leaves Thomas’s body.

Oh my God.

Why didn’t you put that in?

Oh, right. Well, here you go. Here you go. Well, here’s one little interesting factoid about that. So Tallulah’s boyfriend throughout my whole first draft was called Thomas. And then I gave it to my editor and she said, Thomas, Thomas just sounds like a nice boy. He doesn’t sound like a, you know, an evil boy. I think, can you not give him a slightly harder name? So I changed his name to Zack. So he’s in the final book, he’s called Zack, not Thomas. And this was a perfect example of what happens when you don’t plan. And I knew, I had assumed, all I knew from the beginning was that Thomas and Tallulah, and now obviously Zack and Tallulah, go to a pool party at a mansion in the middle of the countryside and they never come home. Until I got to the closing chapters, I still wasn’t, I had no idea whether they were dead, whether they were alive, whether one of them was dead, the other one wasn’t, whether, who’d killed who. I had no idea. The only thing I could assume was that because they’d been at a pool party, a bad thing happened in the pool. So I was just geared towards making something bad happen in the pool. Gosh, that’s shocking. She sits on his head. I mean, that’s really quite shocking. But when I got to writing that scene, I suddenly went into a tailspin of realizing how many loose threads this was going to leave.

Such as?

Oh, like the sort of the DNA evidence of what would they do with Thomas’ body? How would they manage to get it from the pool? Where would they hide it? How would nobody see? There was still other, in that draft, there was still other people around. So there’d have been more people complicit in what had happened because there would have been witnesses to it. It also meant that Tallulah had killed Thomas, which at that point I still wasn’t entirely sure was the right outcome. I wasn’t, because I didn’t know how the book was going to end. I felt uncomfortable with being so sure at that point that it was Tallulah. Maybe at that point I was thinking they could like pass it off as an accident. I suppose that’s what I was thinking. If that had been the case, if he had drowned and they had allowed him to drown at the bottom of the pool, call an ambulance, say we just found him there. There were so many things that a reader would read and think, well, why didn’t they just do that? Or why didn’t they just do the other? Or it left just too many questions and vagueness about it. And I just thought this is not, it’s having listened to it just now, it’s a great scene. It’s a really great scene, but I just, it wasn’t going to work. It didn’t do what I needed it to do. So I sort of pressed the rewind button on it, got them all back out the pool and then I got them back in the pool, but I let the narrative take a different direction just to see if there was, and it’s interesting actually, you can almost visualize it in your mind as a video with a rewind button.

Yes, that was as you were saying it.

And you press it and you go backwards.

And he’s alive again.

They’re outside the pool, they’re all alive. They’re all about to get in the pool. And, but something bad is going to happen, but I just knew that the bad thing was going to happen, but it wasn’t going to be that Thomas stroke Zach drowns in the pool or is drowned in the pool.

Right, well, we’ve come to the end of the show. So I’ve got one final question for you, which is particularly of interest to me actually, because apart from the unpublished article about Thornham, every piece we’ve heard has been from a published work where it’s just that particular clip that didn’t make the final cut. We haven’t heard anything from a rejected or an unfinished project. Normally we have quite a few of those. Is that because you don’t have any?

Yes.

Really?

I have no unpublished work. Every single book, I’ve beaten it into shape somehow. Every single book that I started, I have finished.

So you don’t waste a single bit of your output. You make sure everything gets used.

Yes, it’s the investment of my time. I find it really painful to think, I’ve invested six months of my life into this and I can’t just abandon it. I’m somehow going to make it work, which is what happened with The Third Wife. I could have abandoned it, but I chose to just keep thrashing it until it made itself work.

That is unbelievably impressive, that nothing defeats you. At no point do you go, I’ll come back to this later, or more to the point, nobody’s ever gone, nah, not good enough.

No, that hasn’t happened either. Finding some wood to touch here, there you go. I’m touching the wood. No, that hasn’t happened either. Or maybe it would have been more fun if I’d introduced some projects that didn’t ever come to the lighter day.

But if there aren’t any, then it doesn’t matter. Well, that is now the end of the show. How was it for you?

Oh, loved it, absolutely loved it. And the acting was absolutely superb. Really, really spine-tinglingly good. I enjoyed listening to my own words being spoken to me. Strangely.

You must hear that quite a lot. Obviously, all your books are audio books, I imagine.

I don’t listen to them. I deliberately don’t listen to them because I feel like it will make me uncomfortable. But now I’m wondering if I should.

Yeah, well, they’re very good. You’re a very good writer.

Yes, babe, you should. Right, so that’s it, really.

Thank you, Lisa Jewell, for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Oh, thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed every minute.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Lisa Jewell. The Offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent and Rachel Atkins, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com, and please subscribe, rate and review us. It helps to grow our audience so we can keep making the show. Thanks for listening.