Rachel Joyce “I have to have faith in good stories and good characters winning through. They are what I look for when I read – and they are what I want to try to write. There’s absolutely nothing wrong, though, with hitting all those story ‘beats’ and making sure your book works as a page turner. That is good story telling, I think.”
[Rachel Joyce, in an excerpt from an interview with ALCS News]
It was writing for radio that taught Joyce about story beats, though she says there were signs that she was ready to write a novel: “The narration in my radio plays was getting longer and longer, and my dialogue shorter and shorter!”
Thinking of the story I want to tell is the easy bit, the ideas, the creation. Working out how to tell that story and keeping the pages turning, is more difficult. Sometimes, I can only look at my work to check its ‘page-turning’ appeal after leaving it for a while and coming to it anew.
Read my review of Perfect by Rachel Joyce.
If you agree with Rachel Joyce, perhaps you will agree with:-
Val McDermid – If I published my first three novels now, I wouldn’t have a career
Janice Galloway – write about the credible now and the implied past
Simon Sebag Montefiore – it is essential to sit all day without doing anything
‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ by Rachel Joyce [UK: Black Swan]
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
Rachel Joyce wants faith in good stories & characters winning through http://wp.me/p5gEM4-xK via @SandraDanby #amwriting