"I need my character to talk to me and tell me things because there's so much I don't know."

A conversation with bestselling novelist Lisa Jewell about trusting your subconscious to come up with your plot.

Lisa Jewell is one of Britain’s most successful writers. She has sold more than 15m books worldwide, has won numerous prices including Crime Novel Of The Year, and is a regular fixture in both the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. She specializes in twisty psychological thrillers and her 23^rd novel – Don’t Let Him In – will be published on July 3^rd. I have known Lisa for almost 25 years, and like me, she has been through career highs and lows before she hit her current winning streak, which has led to the biggest sales and most glowing critical reviews of her career, especially Stateside. She also happens to be one of my must-reads.

I have always been fascinated by the fact that she says she never plots her books, but I had no idea until we spoke in depth quite how heavily she trusts her subconscious to come up with her extraordinary plots. I hope other writers will find it interesting too.

Jojo: Thank you for agreeing to do this. I’ve always wanted to find out more about how you do what you do.

Lisa: This is a good time to have this conversation because I’m in the middle of writing a book - which you know I do without ever having a plot - and at the moment I’m paying the consequences of that.

Jojo: Right. So we’ve discussed the fact that I’m a plotter and you’re a pantser but to be a pantser when you write the intricately plotted crime thrillers that you do must take …

Lisa; (laughing) Balls of steel.

Jojo: Yes! Balls of steel! So tell me what goes on in your head? How does that work?

Lisa: So I start with something really tiny. I’ll just get a shuddery shivery feeling at some point in the writing year of something … I can recognize the feeling when something arrives that’s going to bug me until I find a way to write about it. But it’s often not substantial enough on its own. It doesn’t arrive as a huge plot or a theme or a ‘what if’ scenario, where you can just jump straight in. It's so tiny that I need to wait for other elements to arrive. So I’ll need a couple of things where I think “ooh so I’ve got that weird house and that character…” and then I marry two or three things and then I wait until there’s enough for me to imagine the first chapter and then I kind of stop thinking at that point and I just wait.

Jojo: You only need enough to imagine the first chapter? Up to that point we shared exactly the same process. But then you stop?

Lisa: I stop thinking about it deliberately. I put it to one side. I know how this book will open and which character will be the main and where they will be. I can visualize it. But then I put it to one side and go back to my work in progress. And then when that’s done, I start writing.

Jojo: So you can visualize the first chapter. And you have your main character?

Lisa: Yes, it tends to be the main, but there will be others. I write from multiple points of view. I’m always in awe of writers like you who can do it from one character’s viewpoint.

Jojo: Oh no I love doing multiples first person narratives – but I’ve been told it’s a Marmite thing – readers love it or hate it.

Lisa: Totally - which is why even though I’m well-loved writer I do see enough on the internet to know that I do provoke a Marmite reaction in a lot of readers.

Jojo: Really?

Lisa: I assume I’m universally loved. I feel like that until I find myself in some reddit forum or Facebook group chat thing that I wasn’t supposed to be on. And then I think ‘oh those people really, really don’t like my book’ (laughs) and I do wonder if that’s what it is. I think (multiple first person) is an acquired taste.

It’s very important if you’re writing from multiple points of view that they are clearly delineated. I try to write them so that I don’t need to write the character’s name at the top of the chapter. I think I’m doing a good job if I don’t need to tell the reader who the character is. It doesn’t always work; I have written books where I think I need to give the reader some guidance.

Jojo: That’s an interesting point because when writing a script you should be able to tell which character is speaking just from the dialogue. I think it’s a mistake that a lot of first-time writers make that you can’t tell their characters apart.

Lisa: Or inexperienced writers who haven’t worked it out yet. Sometimes an easy way of working it out is just to change the point of view, so just have one character in third person and the other is in first person. I do that a lot.

It’s always the character that I introduce, so I have my first character and he or she is always in third person because I’m already familiar with them, but then I suddenly realize in the process that I need to introduce a new character so that they can help me plot the book as well, and move it along because I’m stuck. Then I will quite often give them a first person voice because I need them to talk to me and tell me things because there’s so much I don’t know and they are the person that’s going to tell me things. But that’s also a really good way for the reader to get to grips with which character’s voice they are listening to.

It was actually Selina (Lisa’s former editor) who told me it’s a good thing to avoid any kind of chapter headings. The ideal book would only have chapters one, two, three… nothing else to signify to the reader what’s going on.

Jojo: That’s quite challenging. So you’ve got your main character in third person, and then you have several other characters who might be in first person. So that gets you round the problem of who sees what, who is privy to what info? Did you do that when you were writing your earlier, non-thriller books?

Lisa: I’ve only written one book that had one point of view and that was The Truth About Melody Browne and that is actually my shortest book as well – it’s 100 pages shorter than any of my others. And it was still a huge story I was telling. It makes me wonder if having all these different points of view puffs the book out as well. Because you’re sometimes accidentally covering the same ground. I always thinking having multiple points of view is kind of a cheat.

Jojo: Are you creating the plot by inhabiting each character as you go and…

Lisa: Seeing what happens to them. Yes. I’m in the thick of it at the moment. The opening of my new book - that chapter I saw for months before I started writing it - involves Jane, a minor character from a previous book who I loved writing and wanted to use again. She’s walking her dogs through the bluebell fields in this big country estate, and this little white Westie appears. And she thinks what’s this dog doing on my land? Then she feels its ribs and realizes the dog is dehydrated, takes it to the vet and gets the chip read, and discovers the dog is from Hampstead in London. So I have Jane decide she will return the dog to its owner.

And that’s all I had. She returns the dog and a man is at the house and she gets a bad feeling about it. There’s something not right. Turns out the girl who owned the dog had only just arrived in the village and had disappeared and left all her stuff in an Airbnb. So that was the first chapter. And that was it. That’s all I had.

I don’t know why this guy in Hampstead is dodgy, I don’t know why the girl arrived at the Airbnb with her dog and left all this stuff and disappeared. I am slowly building up the history of the house, which is based on this house in the Vale of Health (in Hampstead). The working title is The House At The End of The World and the real house backs onto the Heath and it’s kind of scruffy and it just fascinates me. So a lot of this is me wanting to get into that house and feel the weirdness.

Jojo: You’re slightly blowing my mind. You have given yourself this man who is clearly going to be a key part of it, this woman who has disappeared. Do you have any clue at all where you’re going?

Lisa: No. No clue. I am halfway through and I’ve really made some huge developments but they come in the moment while I’m typing. Okay - here’s an example – I wanted to express to the reader that this family who live in this house are wrong-uns. And I hadn’t worked out how to do that. What I’ve done with my second point of view is take it to the weird man who opened the door to receive the dog, so I’ve gone first person with him, given some backstory how he ended up living there and he’s starting to get strange feelings about this family that he’s living with and I knew I needed to write a scene where something really jarring happened. But I didn’t know what it was going to be.

And then I found my character in the kitchen with the grandmother of the family – there are three generations in this family - and I thought this is the moment, this is the moment something needs to happen but I don’t know what the fuck it is. And she opens the drawer in the kitchen to find him a screwdriver and there’s a plastic clown mask in there. A really scary vintage one. The minute I wrote that I thought ahhh, because I knew there was a brother who had gone missing as well, I knew that he was going to be a bit of a weirdo and now I’ve realized this whole thing about circuses and killers and it just unlocked the whole thing and gave me enough to write another two chapters.

Jojo: But you have to trust your subconscious enough to be able to do that.

Lisa: Yes, totally. Not only trust that it will come but to commit to it. Not come back afterwards and change it to something else but to commit to it and just think ‘okay that’s on the page, I’m stuck with it now’. I don’t allow myself a lot of elasticity or reworking. I just think if I’ve written something on the page it’s there for a reason and sometimes that makes me want to kill myself with a knife. Because I’m just such an idiot. And other times I think oh my god this is actually magic. How did this happen? Where did it come from? That’s how I work and I’ve owned my processes.

Jojo: But can that make things difficult?

Lisa: Yes! So I knew I needed a moment of tension because it was falling flat again and I did something and I suddenly thought of an interesting twist about the girl who lost the dog and tied myself up in a knot. I knew where I was at, but to inject more steam I’ve added complications that I’m now going to have to deal with. It has to be that way. It’s so important to keep it exciting, but now I have to deal with it.

Jojo: So you’re the only person who can solve this. Like I’ve sat with you in the past and you’ve helped me un-knot an ending but I can’t do that for you?

Lisa: No. Actually, it’s happened once that a third person’s input - with Then She Was Gone. My then-editor Selina. I gave it a happy ending – where the mother and daughter were reunited - and as soon as I wrote it I knew that that book had just died.

I didn’t know how to fix it. And it was she who said ‘that child has to be dead’. That was the only time when a third person has entered my creative space. I was so wedded to the idea of a happy ending and maybe I learned a lesson which is - don’t have any arc. I don’t usually have an ending in sight. I now try not to give too much thought to what is going to happen in the end.

Jojo: And it’s worked out every time.

Lisa: Yes.

Jojo: I plan all my twists. I seed them early on. I was thinking about None of This Is True. You have a double twist at the end. Did that only come to you as you were writing it?

Lisa: I delivered that book to Selina without the epilogue and I knew it had an twist but I hadn’t found it yet. And it was so full of half-truths and sketchiness and there was so much to work with but I wasn’t ready to find it yet. I had no clue. And so I gave her that to read and she sent it back and I said I will go through your notes and then I’ll write the epilogue and I got there and still couldn’t see it. So I wrote some epilogue, and I knew it was a damp squib and did not do the book justice. So I thought I would go away from it for a couple of days, wrote a second epilogue and again, I thought no, that isn’t right. And then a couple of days later it just came to me and I thought of course! Of course Josie didn’t kill Brooke, it was Roxy! Roxy has been red flagged the whole way through the book why didn’t I see it? I set this child up with all these antisocial behaviours and violent tendencies why did it not occur to me that it must have been her to kill Brooke?

Jojo: You know what’s interesting about that? It’s entirely character based. Which is that it’s true to the character. You’re not slinging in a plot twist just to have it there.

Lisa: Exactly I’m not going back and retroactively changing Roxy to fit that epilogue. It had been there the whole time. I just hadn’t seen it until the very last moment. It was very satisfying.

Jojo: I remember doing the same with Someone Else’s Shoes when as I was writing the end I realized she could to testify against her husband if she agreed to the terrible divorce. And there’s that amazing moment when suddenly … it’s like neurons firing. You’re channeling and it’s not coming from you, but from somewhere else and it’s the highest high in writing.

Lisa: It really is. Do you think A.I. could do that? I just don’t think A.I. could do that. I really hope I’m touching wood there.

Jojo: Has this process ever gone wrong for you?

Lisa: (laughing) It might be about to. I don’t know.

Jojo: Do you feel like it’s this tentative magic box that you get to open?

Lisa: You have moments and when you’ve jumped up on a ledge and you’re safe. You’ve written yourself onto a ledge and you think ‘I’m safe. I’ve written myself into a safe place. I feel comfortable now, I know what I’m going to be doing for the next three or four chapters’. And then you do something like I’ve just done – changing the identity of a character because I thought it would be fun – and now I’m free falling again and who knows where I’m going to land. I could have just fucked it up. I don’t know.

Jojo: This is really interesting because a lot of discussions I’ve had when writing about writing is confidence, namely people’s inability to have faith in the process. As soon as it gets difficult, they think it must be wrong. And one of my arguments is - when I start writing a book I feel like a sculptor with a big ugly block of stone and I’m going to start chipping and have faith that at the end it’s going to look something like the story that’s in my head but in that process I know that there will be days when I want to stab myself with scissors because I’m so rubbish, that my writing is going to be terrible, that there will be other days when I’m just yeaahh! and then huge swathes of something in between - just writing and deleting words. But the emotion is part of the process.

All these stages are fine but I have a rough template. I have a safety net. You are flying blind for the whole duration. So there must be emotions that you’ve learned to accommodate – anxiety or lack of faith or annoyance.

Lisa: Yes. When I think about what I did to my book last week - that I over complicated it – yes, I could have a panic attack but then I’d start trying to fix it.

Jojo: So you’ve decided to have faith it will work out.

Lisa: Yes I’ve totally decided to have faith. Totally. Um. And that only comes from writing as many books as we’ve written. You can’t know that after three, four five, even seven or eight books. You can’t know that until you’ve written so many.

This is my 24^th book. And I think writers need to be kind to themselves at the early points of their careers. It’s only writing enough books that aren’t complete fuck ups that gives you the confidence. I’ve always done it this way. The only time I wrote a book with an arc was the House We Grew Up In and I vividly remember sitting in your kitchen and saying this is it… a hoarding house, a broken family, they unhoard the house and find their way back together. That’s the only book I’ve ever written that had a preordained arc.

Mind you, that’s still one of my favourite books so maybe I should think about having an arc.. again

Jojo: No! If it’s working for you don’t mess with it!

Don’t Let Him In – will be published by Penguin Random House on July 3^rd