In 1996, Lisa Jewell took a creative writing course and got positive feedback from others in the course. "Everybody told me I should try writing a book, that I had a commercial style," she recalls, "but I didn't think about it that seriously." Six months later, she was laid off from her secretarial job and went on a holiday with some of her friends, who asked what Jewell planned to do when they went back to London. "I told her that I wanted to write a book, and she asked, well, why don't you? I was only twenty-seven then, and I thought that you had to have all sorts of life-experience before you could write a book. So I told her I couldn't possibly write a book." The friend urged her to write at least three chapters, just to see if she could, and even offered to take Jewell out to dinner when the chapters were done. "It took me three months to do those chapters, but as far as I was concerned, I was just writing three chapters to win the bet. I wasn't actually trying to start a book. I didn't think it was going to go anywhere." But once the chapters were completed, her friend had her send them out to agents, one of whom wanted to see more. Jewell spent most of 1997 writing what would become her first novel, Ralph's Party, and has never looked back. (It took almost a year, though, for her to get the Thai dinner she'd had in mind when she wrote those initial chapters.) This summer, she took her first trip to America to promote her third novel, One-Hit Wonder.
RH: Are the three chapters you first wrote pretty much the first three chapters of Ralph's Party as they finally appear?
LJ: They are the chapters I originally wrote, but when I started writing the novel, I liked literature that had a dark undertone to it, so I thought I was going to write a book like that. Ralph was supposed to turn into a complete obsessive who sabotages the relationship between Jem and Smith. But I found that I liked Ralph and wanted him to get the girl, and I went right off Smith, so he became the baddy. And one of the agents who had rejected the first three chapters sent me a handwritten letter saying that the characterizations were strong, but I needed more plotlines. That's the point where I brought in the other characters and came up with the idea of putting them all in the same building, on different floors.
RH: One-Hit Wonder reads like it might be the sort of darker book that you had in mind back then.
LJ: Yes, and even more so my fourth book, which I've just finished writing. I got so dark with that one, in fact, that the fifth one is going to be a lot more lighter, because I just feel so bogged down in the darkness now... I just didn't have the confidence, writing the first one, to really do what I had set out to do. I kept thinking I hadn't had enough experience to write about death or dysfunction, so I kept things light and airy. But I'm getting a bit more confident, so I can turn my hand to that sort of thing now.
RH: Even with the increased confidence, was this still a hard book for you to write?
LJ: It was incredibly hard. My agent always says, though, that if it's not easy to write, it's going to be rubbish... It's a coming-of-age, a romance, and a mystery, and I didn't realize it was going to be a mystery until halfway through. Originally, the whole reason for Bee's depression and suicide was going to be simply the failure of her pop career, the fact that her life had gone nowhere. But even then, I didn't quite feel ready to depict that kind of downward spiral, so I decided I needed a more specific reason for her to make that decision. But I really didn't know where the book was going until I had finished it.
RH: How hard was the second book?
LJ: They've all been incrementally harder. I thought Ralph's Party was hard, and then Thirty Nothing was really hard, and One-Hit Wonder was even harder, and this last book was just a nightmare. I don't know if that's because I'm pushing myself harder to write different things, or if it's harder to keep going, to keep finding new ways to talk about things.
RH: How does a story start for you?
LJ: Usually, my next story idea comes about halfway through whatever book I'm working on, when I realize there's something I'm not enjoying about writing it, or something I'd wish I'd done. When I was writing Thirty Nothing, I set it in one corner of London, and I missed writing about the whole expanse of the city. So I thought, "Oh, I'll write about a girl who comes to London from the countryside," because then I could have her exploring the city and write about different locations that way. That became One-Hit Wonder when I needed to give her a reason to come to London, so I thought a dead sister would be interesting, and things went off from there.
Then, while I was writing that, I felt that it had a much heavier female perspective than my first two books, and it was almost a bit like a fairy tale in a way. Towards the end, I started to find it a bit too saccharine, so I decided my next book would be much more masculine. That's how I came up with writing about the three brothers, and by now, they're all such awful bastards, that the next book will be a really nice love story to make up for it.
RH: But even the "bad" characters in your book tend to have some sympathetic streak to them, like Sheree in Ralph's Party...
LJ: One of the most tragic things about Ralph's Party was that the version I first turned in to my publisher was much longer, and that was because Sheree had this huge storyline, one of the largest storylines in the book, actually. It was a whole redemption story, and there was a long chapter where she went back to her home in Liverpool, confronted the ghosts from her past, met with her grandmother... She has a nervous breakdown, then returns to London and slowly repairs herself. That's why she helps Ralph out in the end; she's gone through this whole process that makes her into a good person.
The publisher said that the novel was too long, and he thought we should get rid of Sheree. Not entirely, of course, but just turn her into a background character. So now you've got this shallow bitch who suddenly turns nice at the end. I miss that story. I really love redemption storiess. I don't believe that anyone is through-and-through bad, unless they're psychotic. Most people want to be good, and if they behave badly, it's because they don't know how to behave well. I like following that process through.
RH: People act of their own interests...
LJ: ...and they do the best they can with what they've got.
RH: When you started writing, the whole field of young women writer's wasn't quite in existence yet.
LJ: Right. Nick Hornby had just come out with High Fidelity, and that was a revelation, because he proved you could write in plain language about ordinary people doing nothing of any particular interest whatsoever, but with just enough charm and insight to carry you through. It was so refreshing, so new, so unlike anything I'd read before, and it was the first thing that made me think I'd be capable of writing a book. Then Bridget Jones came out in 1996, and they're very different books, but they both have plain language, modern references... I hadn't even read it, though, when I started Ralph's Party. The hype was there, but I hadn't gotten around to it, and didn't until after I'd finished writing my book.
At that point, things just exploded. All these girls said, "That's my life she's writing about! I want to write about my life!" And of course suddenly there was money in it as well, which there never really had been, unless you were writing Jackie Collins-style bonkbusters. Now...I think it's still quite healthy in America, because you're just cherrypicking the best books coming out in England, and your own writers have a little more integrity, so the stuff coming out here is generally of better quality. In England, though, it's disgusting. Any girl sitting at her computer can hook up with a greedy publisher who'll take anything by a woman under the age of 35, slap a bright cover on the front, and pile it up at the bookstore. It's turned chicklit into a real insult to have put on your book. The whole thing has just turned in on itself. It's a bit of a shame, really.
RH: Even though you're usually labelled a "chicklit" author, your stories have generally been balanced as far as gender perspective goes.
LJ: I love writing male characters, and that's because I love men, unlike some women who use writing as an excuse to get the knife out and stick it in because they're bitter and resentful and twisted. Nobody's done anything really bad to me, so I've got no revenge to take. And I always subconsciously write for men. I imagine a man reading my novel. But obviously I'm a girl, so I'll always have that female perspective.
RH: What have you been reading lately?
LJ: I've just been writing so much, I haven't read a book in ages. But I did put The Rotters Club, by Jonathan Coe, in my suitcase before I got on the plane. My reading tastes are usually very catholic, as far as contemporary fiction goes. I'm most comfortable reading contemporary fiction. It's a place that I can relate to and understand.
So many of my friends now are writers, though, that I get stuck in this loop of continually reading my friends' books after they've read mine. I miss being able to go into a bookshop and just pick something up I've never heard of, but I really don't have the time anymore. One day maybe I can give up writing and be a full time reader for a change.
