[SPEAKER_00]: and welcome to our show.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shit no one tells you about writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm best selling author Bianca Marie, and I'm joined by CC Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone, today's guest is a writer from Belfast, based in Newcastle, Upon Time.
[SPEAKER_00]: She received a northern debut award for fiction from New Writing North and was awarded funding by the Arts Council for the Development and Completion of her first novel.
[SPEAKER_00]: She has also been shortlisted for the Francis MacManus short story competition.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the bread port pies and came in the top three of the Benedict Kylie short story competition.
[SPEAKER_00]: She is media subject editor of critics reviews for the British Society for 18th century studies and has a PhD in 18th century women's life writing from Newcastle University.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's my pleasure to welcome Grania O'Hare.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grania welcome to the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, that's one impressive buyer, very, very impressive for our listeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to read them the flat copy and then for those of you watching on YouTube, I'm going to show you the cover of the book, which is incredible, but just for now, here is our flat copy to tell you what the book is about.
[SPEAKER_00]: The book we're chatting about today is called First Trip.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Harley, Rocher and Maggie have been friends for ages.
[SPEAKER_00]: After meeting in primary school years ago, the women are still together, spending their nights on the sticky dons floors of bell-fast grandgears pubs, each woman is navigating her own tangle of entry-level jobs, messy romantic entanglements and late nights, but they always find their way back to one another and to the ramshackle house they shade.
[SPEAKER_00]: And amidst the familiar chaos, the three are still grieving their fourth housemate, whose room remains untouched, their last big fight hanging heavily over their heads.
[SPEAKER_00]: The girls' houses witnessed the highs and lows of their roaring 20s, rockers' parties, surprising, and sometimes regrettable hookups and hellish hangovers.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as they approach the tea, their home begins to crumble around them, and the fog lines in the group become harder to ignore.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the wreckage, they must decide if their friendship will survive into a new decade, or if growing up, sometimes means letting go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brimming with heart and humour, those trap is an exuberant owed to friendship, to not having it all figured out, and to ordering just one more round before heading home.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I loved this book so so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I must be honest, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the cover and we always say, don't judge a book by its cover, but I'm going to show this to you and it just seemed so simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, for those of you watching on YouTube, it is a cigarette that looks like it's wearing a little plastic high heel and it's like a felt purple background and a pink background and that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Grania, how much say did you have in this cover?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, whenever my UK editor said she was going to sort of kick off the cover design process, she asked me if I had any...
[SPEAKER_01]: like ideas or like a mood board or anything, anything I sort of envisaged would be on the cover.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, I don't really know what I would want or expect the cover to look like.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not my area of expertise.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why you have designers for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I was like I can send you over like a mood board of images that I,
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of associate with the vibe of the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean there is a lot of stuff, a lot of Pinterest pictures of heavy partying and I had a lot of screencaps from absolutely fabulous on the Pinterest board as well, which I think probably fed into the design that ended up being the final cover.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the designer then went away and got to the piece of artwork is by this artist
[SPEAKER_01]: thought for a thousand years and not come up with the idea of a cigarette and a doll shoe.
[SPEAKER_01]: But she's got this real eye for like weird things and combining weird things and yeah, and as soon as I saw that I was like that completely, I never would have come up with that, but that completely captures the spirit of the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's yeah, I think it's just really unusual and I hope distinctive.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I was really happy with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: very distinctive and again so simple you know so it's really grabs a person's attention i love that you use mood boards because i also use them the funny thing is when i was asked from my last book cover and i sent my mood boards they were like no this looks way too much like YA and they just ignored the mood boards completely
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me what I do is I put a big whiteboard to magnetic whiteboards and I print everything out and I put it above my writing space as I'm writing so that when you get those moments where you just stare into space, I'm looking at the feel of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell us how you use your mood boards or they also printed out or they're on your laptop, how does that work?
[SPEAKER_01]: They're on my laptop, I think because I do collect postcards and images and things.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have always intended to actually have a physical pin-off kind of board for that space, but I have moved, I think, a couple of times, so I'm like not settled enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am now, so I'm like, I should really get myself a physical mood board sorted.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think any time I was in a flat, I was like, I don't know if I can,
[SPEAKER_01]: stick this to the wall, I don't know, can I kneel it to the wall?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've always just worked off my laptop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I can't imagine working with Adam midboard, I must be honest, but there's a lot of writers I know who, who don't use them at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love hearing from others who do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So could you please just read us a page and a half excerpt to set the scene and then we will take it from there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so this is from the very beginning of the book and the first chapter is called any old moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is almost midnight and the three of them are trying to persuade a member of door staff to let them bring a house plant into the nightclub.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maggie Harley and Rochette turned to explain that the plant was a birthday present given earlier this evening by a friend who went home around nine apparently blind to the practical challenges of accommodating a cactus on
[SPEAKER_01]: Rosha turns 30 next week and is informed by the gift giver that this particular breed is known as an old lady cactus, on a kind of its white cobweb of spines.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maggie resents overhearing this information.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sea arch and crown of the plant has in her mind taken on the earnest personality of an elderly woman for whom Maggie now feels responsible, despite Rosha having been insured that it doesn't
[SPEAKER_01]: They're allowed eventually to check the plant into the cloakroom with their jackets, and Harley pays the attendant with a five-pound note she has folded into it to stop it's bringing back scroll-wise.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the club of Maggie notes with disappointment that the spinning pole has been removed from its plentiful in the dance floor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maggie has been coming here with Harley and Roshis since they were 18.
[SPEAKER_01]: She once engaged the poll to aggressively in a dance tribute to WAM and needed medical attention for a briefs per annium.
[SPEAKER_01]: She claimed to the doctor that it was a cycling injury and had to sit on a ring shaped cushion for a week afterwards, feeling like a humbled pet in a cotton collar.
[SPEAKER_01]: That night has gone down as one of the grits in their group lore.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had gone into China on a Friday afternoon, chasing a rumor that Jimi Naz bit was drinking at the sunflower.
[SPEAKER_01]: The rumor turned out to be unfounded, and the night ended at 4am with Maggie injured, and Harley getting off with two cast members from a touring production of cats.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only Rocha had been uninvolved in the drama, but all spending that night on the edge of the dance floor for their face lit by the Bindike fridge glare of her smartphone screen, messaging her new boyfriend.
[SPEAKER_01]: She doesn't use this smartphone anymore, her new phone is an old phone without any ups or features.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her then new boyfriend is her NYX boyfriend.
[SPEAKER_01]: The two things are not unrelated.
[SPEAKER_00]: love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That really, really sets the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: This book is hilarious, but also just so tender, so heartbreaking, just so incredibly well written.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I'd like to pick your brain about first is your journey to publication, because I read your acknowledgments and you were talking about like an agent taking a chance on a messy draft, et cetera, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: So take us through that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, in my, I think in the bio you read it, it was talking about I got a northern debut awards for fiction from an organization based in the north of England called new writing north and they do these annual awards for sort of up-and-coming authors and they include like you get funding and mentorship and things and so I got one of those for
[SPEAKER_01]: a couple of my short stories and the idea was that I was going to get mentorship which I did to work on my short fiction which I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jenny, my agent, I think sort of keeps an eye on the northern writers awards because she's always kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: looking to see who might be someone she would be interested in reading or working with and she emailed me asking if she could read some more of my short fiction.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I sent it to her and I hadn't planned to send her because the novel wasn't finished.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't anywhere near finished at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I...
[SPEAKER_01]: Said just in case it's of interest to here's the first three chapters of a novel I'm working on and she really enjoyed the stuff that I'd sent and she was like I really like the idea of this novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the first three chapters.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't normally Offered or represent someone if they haven't got at least if finished first draft of a manuscript, but she was like I have a good feeling about this So I was working with her on that towards
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, for since then, basically, and I finished, it sort of lit the fire under me to actually finish before I stopped a bit, and then I worked on it with her for a while, and then it went out to publishers on submission.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I was very lucky because not everyone has that experience with the audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and there's acute saying on the podcast is so many different journeys to publication and you never know where you're going to snag someone's attention and selling short fiction like an anthology of short stories would have been so much harder, you know, then selling a book and a lot of times agents are like, I really like your short stories, are you working on a novel, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you never know when you put yourself out there who's a tension you're going to grab.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love that that was a more unconventional approach.
[SPEAKER_00]: The editorial process, were you sending her chapters at a time?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did she go, okay, send it to me when it's done?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm always interested in agents who are sort of editorial how you work together.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I sent her the the first full draft when it was finished and she sent back notes and I think we did maybe two two rounds of that so she was reading it all in one go which I think was probably helpful because I think I'd I'd been writing it for a couple of years so I've been working on it in chunks and you know like not really being able to see it as much as a whole because I've been working on it for so long.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was helpful to have that input from someone who was just reading at start to finish.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's great to get that objective feedback from an agent, but you also wrote a new acknowledgment about your writing group frames.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm a big cheerleader for beta-reader groups for writing groups, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: So can you tell me a bit about their input in the evolution of the novel as well?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I met my writing group whenever after I'd got at Northern Brighters Award for New Brighton North, I was able to go on an online writing course.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was 2022, so there were a lot of things that were still kind of hybrid, and it was helpful for me to have like,
[SPEAKER_01]: two nights a week where I was doing that, and the other people who were in my session group, I think there was 10 of us in total, and six or seven of us stayed in touch after the corset ended.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were writing very regularly, so like two or three nights a week together and zoom, and I think we've been doing it for a year, and someone suggested one or two of us have been to the same place for like an in-person kind of writing retreat thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's this library that you
[SPEAKER_01]: And we suggested like should we do like an in person thing?
[SPEAKER_01]: So we all met up in person.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think just having that kind of accountability and routine for a while and, you know, being able to chat through like, so what do we want to do this evening?
[SPEAKER_01]: What does everyone want to
[SPEAKER_01]: any time someone's having like specific trouble with one thing that they're kind of in a slump with or yeah anything like that then being able to chat it through and realizing like you might need to take your own advice at times as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was really helpful having that.
[SPEAKER_00]: yeah support and accountability and I also found that I became a much better writer through critiquing other people's work than actually just having my own work critiques because suddenly you have to evaluate it in a very different way as opposed to just I enjoyed it or I didn't enjoy it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to be able to substantiate which like you say is stuff that you can then take your own advice in terms of your own work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so you have three characters on the page, one character of the page, who is passed away, who are all pretty much the same age they're living together, and that is so difficult to pull off in terms of differentiating the characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have an ensemble cast and they're different ages and different gender and all kinds of things that makes it so much easier.
[SPEAKER_00]: So can you tell us your approach to the character development and making sure that each of these characters was so distinct, including the character who's off the page, who has passed away, who feels so very present?
[SPEAKER_01]: perspectives in the first person, which I think even though I didn't kind of stick with that as the way of telling the story, it did help me get into each of the women's heads a bit more and right from their point of view and kind of develop their tone of voice and like attitudes towards things and how they would react to something.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that was definitely helpful for me as an exercise even though I didn't plan out being a first person novel.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I think that was helpful.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think as well, like one thing that I find with my groups of friends here similar age and background to me is that like we we will adopt the same kind of tone if we're retelling a story that we all know for a memory or something and it's almost like this kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: hive mind thing, this lore that's embedded is in our shared history.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I find that even though I wanted to have the characters have different energies and different personalities, obviously, there is a lot that they've shared together as well, and there's this kind of shared language and shared memory and experience that I think helped to, if that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I love what you said about how it started off as first person and then move to third person because I call it circling the building of your work to try and find the best entry point.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's sometimes figuring out point of view.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's tense.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, where do we begin?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we begin in the middle?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we begin at the beginning?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where is the beginning?
[SPEAKER_00]: So at what point did that POV change?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it like
[SPEAKER_00]: Early on in the writing of it was a much later on and why did you decide the first person wasn't working?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I probably changed it to third person, like a roundabout a year and a half before I finished the full thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: which would have been three and a half years into the writing of it, which is quite a way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I've done various different in the beginning when I was writing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was centered around one character and the group of friends were kind of side characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I was like, I'm actually more interested in their friend Dynamics than this one, the characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: sorry excuse of the dating life.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wanted to write more about the friends than I did about just one person's kind of interior monologue and but one nightstands.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although some of those did make it into the final version.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I had I had gone right a lot of different like like you say, kind of trying to find the right way to enter into.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've done first person with one protagonist and the third person with one protagonist.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then first person with four protagonists, it was at one point and then first person with three and then it became
[SPEAKER_01]: third person eventually.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, this is a lot of mistaking that this is the one I refer.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I think with the the question of how to kind of make Lydia who's passed away a year before the novel feels so present.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think one thing that I find whenever I'm reading something or like watching a film or something is that if a death or a breakup or something like that
[SPEAKER_01]: I find it difficult sometimes unless the writers don't really good job of making that absence feel present.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless they've done that, I find it difficult to be convinced by someone being heartbroken or grieving someone.
[SPEAKER_01]: I need to be able to imagine what it was like when this person was there or when this relationship was still going on.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I really wanted to make her feel present.
[SPEAKER_01]: I ended up doing a mixture of kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: storytelling through flashbacks and then also little every day things that just kind of remind the main characters who are still around of things that they liked or missed or didn't like about Lydia who's not there anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, you didn't excellent job, and the thing is, is that when it comes to intentionality with storytelling is, you know, you could have begun the story when Lydia died, right, if you think about it, you can start a story anywhere, but then you've got characters that I experiencing grief and you having to write more about the grief, whereas starting, you know, a year later, we know this terrible thing has happened, we know that they're all dealing with it in their own way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can skip past that sort of debilitating part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, like you say, you bring the flashbacks and we've feel her presence the whole time because they're all live together in a room is still there and no one's gone inside it, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: So was that intentional in your part to not begin with when she died?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was there something you played around with or were you very much no?
[SPEAKER_00]: I know exactly where I want to begin.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think when I first started writing the novel, I had the four of them,
[SPEAKER_01]: all together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was going to have her die towards the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it felt the more I wrote of it, the blaker felt that that was what it was going to be rattling towards.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wanted to change it around and have it happen off the page.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think in terms of setting it a year after it's happened, I think it was maybe trying to combine these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like,
[SPEAKER_01]: it's not linear and it doesn't have an end point necessarily.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just changes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think I wanted to kind of have these aren't just feeling like, you know, oh, we should have got over this by now or we should we should have made some kind of change after, you know, we've passed the point where it's cute and acceptable to be just really distressed over this horrible thing that's happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think even if
[SPEAKER_01]: The friend hadn't died.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're still at this point in their life where they're sort of starting to think, because they're turning 30.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like, we should be past all this kind of behavior by now, we should be more grown up.
[SPEAKER_01]: We should own a house instead of renting this horrible, mold cursed place.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I think it was kind of trying to,
[SPEAKER_01]: to show like, how they were our feeling versus how they thought they maybe should be feeling, and how they were repressing things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love hearing about the evolution of it because so much of writing a novel is moving things around.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's constantly moving things around and trying to find the entry point and realizing that's not the entry point and things shifting.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me, that's always incredibly fascinating.
[SPEAKER_00]: As well, what you've just said is what I realized with this book is,
[SPEAKER_00]: With a lot of books, we see a huge change in the characters in terms of their character arc, who they are at the end is completely different to who they are at the beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I found satisfying about this book is that we did see them change.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were changes, but it wasn't like a complete change.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like they had changed, but they were almost still the same, which to me felt much more authentic and true to life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think because this story had been one of this kind of chaos and I'm using very unhealthy coping mechanisms for grief and also just for life, then I think it would have felt quite disingenuous to have the ending, unless and even if I just sort of jumped forward to like years on or something, that wouldn't have I think clicked for me at the end of
[SPEAKER_01]: this story that I've written about the kind of chaos and feeling quite unmerored at the end of their 20s but trying to hang on to the things that they can that they think are providing them with stability.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wouldn't have felt right for me to just go kind of, oh, and to that they're healed now at everything's all right, everything's better.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I hope that the ending is a hopeful one
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't want to end it with just, and yeah, they're gonna stay the same forever, and it's all gonna be really grim and bleak in different ways as they get older.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's like, unfortunately, I did want to have a sense of hope on a bit of warmth in the ending as well, even though all things aren't perfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was definitely intentional.
[SPEAKER_00]: I found it very hopeful, but also very authentic because you're going to have these crises throughout your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the end of your 20s, you freak out about turning 30.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then at the end of your 30s, you freak out about turning 40, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's never like I think I wrote to my first novel that a story that's ended happily is just a story that has an ended yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think I like much more realistic endings, which I really loved about this one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something else I want to discuss is writing a plot with high personal stakes, but a quiet story line.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because yes, you have a friend who has died and yes, they're going through dating issues and this house and whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But these are sort of common things that we go through every everybody goes through these kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not like some
[SPEAKER_00]: huge plot plot plot and when we speak on the podcast we say that when you write a quiet a novel because this isn't quiet a novel, it's an examination of friendship.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so much interiority, you know, back to to film the movie trailer of this book would kind of be difficult because it's not boom, boom, boom happening so much is inside them and yet you made it feel so compelling so your advice to listeners who are writing
[SPEAKER_00]: quiet and novels and in raising those personal stakes, what would you say to them?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's a good question because I think I think good advice to bear in mind generally is just just that something is a seemingly everyday and not blockbuster experience doesn't mean that it's not worth
[SPEAKER_01]: writing about.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the more that I wrote their shop, the more that I kind of began to bear in mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, okay, I've written another, another chapter about a bad one-night stand or a terrible hangover or a night-oight.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I did eventually have to start thinking about is this serving the overall story because, you know, even though it is as you say, like a quiet or novel that doesn't got this enormous climax or a spike of an arc and then dramatic conclusion, I think I didn't just wanted to be this kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, clop of endless chapters, just kind of showing the way that their lives are spiraling, I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: But so that was definitely something that I started thinking about more whenever it was getting.
[SPEAKER_01]: to the stages of, okay, I'm coming towards the end of this novel, and I, so I do think that just because you're writing maybe more of like slice of life stuff or, or everyday kind of scenes, it doesn't necessarily make you mean to questions about momentum or plot arcs, even if there isn't a huge, you know, roaring sense of plot.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I think that's something it's it's good to have a balance of both.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really love reading stuff that spends, you know, half a page talking about how someone figures about a particular type of drink or noticing something really small, but I think it is important to think as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no point in just kind of mirroring yourself in detail for the sake of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, what is this telling you about?
[SPEAKER_01]: the character on their story.
[SPEAKER_01]: If that makes sense, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it also, you know, it makes those moments relatable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the characters vulnerable, the reader is like, I've been in that situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know how that felt.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is being articulated in a way that at the time, I didn't see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it makes you stop and it resonates with you and so you're able to apply it to yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: which I think is a point of quieter novels is that you see yourself reflected in so many of these experiences and so it becomes sort of deeply personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've passed our time but I have to ask you one more question, your dialogue is just phenomenal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is just so witty, it's authentic, you've got especially with groups of friends who know each other so well and who has
[SPEAKER_00]: that you say have law.
[SPEAKER_00]: They finish each other's sentences.
[SPEAKER_00]: They know what the other one's going to say, and if the one looks at them in a certain way, they're like, you know, I know what you're thinking, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, again advice for our listeners in terms of capturing that kind of really authentic organic dialogue.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I was very scared whenever I was writing dialogue especially because I hadn't written anything that was set in modern times before I used to write historical fiction where I felt like there was a lot more freedom to just make the languages flurry and kind of Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen here as I wanted because I was like well it's historical fiction I don't need to worry so much about
[SPEAKER_01]: it's sending authentic coming off, tripping off of modern tongue or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think I got quite intimidated and the thing that I did was try to make the dialogue signed more authentic by making it very high people with speak day to day.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it came out quite boring because people are menar and don't speak in for the sentences and don't
[SPEAKER_01]: do what I've just done, but just straight off in the fifth middle of a thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think it is helpful to, for me anyway, there's stuff I kind of like reading and that I like writing is something that you're like, I can believe that someone would say that, but it's the kind of thing you might like, right, rather than
[SPEAKER_01]: See, I'm rambling, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I dial, I really can bring setting alive in so many different ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, our time is up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could pick your brain all day.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a long list of questions that we didn't get to, but for our listeners, we are linking to those traps on our bookshop.org affiliate page.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you get the book there, you support an independent bookstore and you support the podcast at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Get this book, read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one of my favorites of the year, and we wish you much luck with the Grania.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: CCLera is a literary agent at Wendy Sherman Associates.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you'd like to query CC, please refer to the Submission Guidelines at www.wshuman.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Carly Waters is a literary agent at PS Literary Agency, but a work on this podcast is not affiliated with the agency and the views expressed by Carly on this podcast,
[SPEAKER_00]: are solely that of her as a podcast co-host, they do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of PS literary agency.