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]

Although The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was Joyce’s first novel, she had already written more than 20 original plays for Radio 4. Harold Fry in fact started life as a radio play called To Be a Pilgrim about a man walking. It was broadcast and won Joyce the Tinniswood Award for radio drama in 2007.

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