Listen to author Liz Fenwick in conversation with Rob Jones. How does she feel about being described as ‘The Queen of Cornish Romance?’
Transcript
Rob Jones
You’ve been described as the ‘Queen of Cornish Romance.’ Do you find that daunting?
Liz Fenwick
I was surprised and delighted because it sat me nicely where I wanted to be. It fit my brand that I'd been trying to build, so I was completely delighted and wear the crown with pleasure.
Rob Jones
It's interesting. You use the word brand there and just before we started recording, we were talking about commercialism and finding your market. I suppose as a writer you are always conscious of it?
Liz Fenwick
Completely conscious of it because I was aware that I was going to be a commercial writer, I was not writing literary fiction. And early on, I was trying to carve out who I was and the best example of learning this is, as soon as I got my agent, I went and got some headshots done because I knew a picture of me would be up on the website and they were fabulous and they made me look amazing and I loved one in particular. I was in a black leather jacket, and I was wearing a white T-shirt, black jeans. I was leaning against a wall, classic sophisticated author shot. And I thought, ‘oh, this is gonna be my headshot.’ My agent presented the selection of photos to my editor, and she picked a very lovely photo of me, but it wasn't the sophisticated author. It was a warmer version, and I was lucky enough to sit down with her, and I said, why did you choose that one? And she said, for the type of fiction that you write, your readers are going to want to be able to talk to you. And they couldn't talk to that one. And that told me what side of myself I needed to present.
Rob Jones
To me, that feels as though there are several layers of fiction going on here. There's the fiction that you're writing, but then there's also … people are demanding a fiction where the writer is concerned?
Liz Fenwick
I wouldn't say it's a fiction. I think any writer at the start of your career. You have to be sure about what you're willing to share and what side of yourself that you're willing to present, because today everything's lived out in social media. When I was starting out, things were still fairly new and that told me that the more academic side of myself really didn't need to be on display. What needed to be on display is the warmer side of myself and what part of that I was willing to share so that my readers feel that they can come up and give me a hug when they see me. And that was really vital at book one, that I knew that that was part of the work that I was doing. I was in Dubai, I wasn't published. I was helping with the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature and Jeffery Deaver was launching a new cover or something. I don't know if it might have been the Bond he wrote and I met a writer whose name, forgive me, I can't remember, who was actually doing the writing for Waterstones for them, but he was a crime writer, and we were in the old part of Dubai at the time and I wanted to just snap a picture of him and the first picture I took was of him smiling. He said, ‘Oh no, it can't be that. I can't have that on social media,’ he said, ‘It has to be sombre, I write crime,’ and this was long before I was published and I thought, oh, that's interesting that at that point in time a crime writer couldn't be shown as actually quite a happy jolly chap and that sort of thing. He had to keep that persona of being aloof. So, then my editor said to me, ‘Now this is the picture. You look approachable.’
Rob Jones
You mentioned social media there, which has become a crucial part I guess of any writer’s toolbox in terms of when it comes to the point after you've written the book, and it's out there on the shelves, and you have to attract attention to it. Is that something that you took to very easily?
Liz Fenwick
My first real social media was TikTok in its early days and that's how I got my first agent, and we became friends long before I was ready to submit to her. What social media does? It doesn't sell books, but it does increase name recognition so that if somebody walks into a bookshop and they're looking on the table, they'll see the name Liz Fenwick and think that rings a bell somewhere, so they might actually pick up the book, then flip it over. I've seen myself do it if I've seen a name so many times or, you know, a title so many times, then it's the likelihood that somebody will recognise the name. And for me, I've been on social media for quite a long time, long before I was published. I don't look at it as sales in that sense. I look at it, I suppose, as Marketing/PR. It is name recognition. It's just I've been around. People know me. People think I've been published forever, and I haven't. So, I mean, my first book came out in 2012, so social media is vitally important. I would recommend that you do the ones you're comfortable with. If you're not comfortable with it. If it’s painful, then don't do it. And I also look at where my readers are and how they want to contact me. So, like I'm on TikTok at the moment. I'm not in the demographic for that, but I am finding that it's a new way to reach a different demographic that are finding my books slowly but surely. The bulk of my contact is Instagram, Facebook author page and X (Twitter.)
Rob Jones
We're talking about just about everything else apart from the writing at the moment. I suppose we should be talking about the writing. There is that thought that you were talking about, you know, trying to connect with audiences and perhaps new audiences when you're writing, do you have a particular person? In mind.
Liz Fenwick
When I first started writing, I did ….. let me take a step back ‘cause I've just completed the first draft of novel 10 and that draft is written purely for me, so that I learned the story after that. Every other draft, and with me, there are many drafts, are written for the reader and when I was first writing, my ideal reader was a person … my hairdresser in Dubai, she was an avid reader. She was in her mid-30s, and I had her in mind when I was writing my books.
Rob Jones
How does it influence what you're writing, then, if you have this person in mind. Are you working towards their expectations? They have expectations about what is going to be in your novels and those expectations never change. I mean, each novel that you produce is going to satisfy your hairdresser in Dubai's expectations?
Liz Fenwick
No, I don't work that way at all in the sense that every time I write a story, it has to come from my heart, or it will never reach my readers. I listened to David Suchet last night at the Hall for Cornwall and he spoke about putting part of yourself in there. And if I don't open up and put myself on the page, I won't reach any reader. That's a very scary thing to do. Particularly when you start, when I talk about thinking about her and her experience and not writing to her experience, I suppose I'm writing to make it accessible, that the story should be an ‘easy’ read. Writing ‘easy reading’ is hard and what I want to make sure is that when she's reading my book, she's not seeing the words, she's feeling the story. So, in that sense, I'm writing to her expectations, and I want to make sure that it's relatable that she can find in the characters in my book something that she might connect to.
Rob Jones
Dubai, Massachusetts, Canada, Moscow.
Liz Fenwick
Yes.
Rob Jones
Indonesia?
Liz Fenwick
Yes.
Rob Jones
Have I missed anything out?
Liz Fenwick
Houston.
Rob Jones
But Cornwall, you've ended up in Cornwall. Cornwall is your primary inspiration. Or have you brought a lot of those other places with you?
Liz Fenwick
It's really weird because I have always been a writer. I did my degree in English literature while being in the US. I was able to concentrate on mediaeval studies and creative writing at the same time. Go figure. I've always wanted to write and the senior thesis that I did there was called ‘The Irish Woman.’ It was three quarters of a novel and I really wanted to write the experience of my grandmother leaving Ireland at the age of 16 and coming to the States, and tell that story. So, I wanted to do that, and I was desperate to tell stories. And at the time I also tried to write romantic fiction in the pure, you know, sort of Mills and Boon type of way, I never succeeded with that, left ‘The Irish woman’ aside and went to live life. And when I look back on it, I'm very glad that I did that because the fiction that I wanted to write, I couldn't write at 22, I didn't have the life experience. I hadn't been knocked around enough. I hadn't had my heart broken. I hadn't experienced enough of losing people to write what I really wanted to write. So, then we fast forward, and in 1989, I moved to England. 2-3 weeks later, I met the man who's now my husband, about a month after that, he brought me to Cornwall for the first time, had never been there, knew it existed. His parents had a home that sits above the Helford River. It was in June. The weather was magnificent, and I lost my heart. I always joke that I thought it was to meet his parents. It was actually ‘The Cornwall test.’ If I hadn't fallen in love with Cornwall, we wouldn't be coming up to our 32nd anniversary soon. It then snuck in and, I was then a mother. We were travelling the world and we kept coming back to it and I keep looking out at the land and seeing stories. I wasn't ready and, well I didn't have time to be quite frank. Finally, 2007, my godmother and aunt said to me, ‘when are you gonna write again?’ And that year, at New Year's, I said - I'm gonna write more. I didn't tell anybody I was gonna write fiction again. But that was the year I came back to it and I did try to write a Mills and Boon. That year we were actually transferred back from Dubai, but I did complete it and I think that was the biggest shift, if you will, and included Cornwall a little bit in it as well. It proved to me that I could complete a work of fiction. It also told me that my voice didn't fit there at all. Once that happened, I began to explore stories that were deeper and darker. And it was less about the love story contained therein and more about the other dynamics that were going on. That was all coming out of Cornwall.
Rob Jones
There is a strong historical element in some of the novels. Does that come from the fact that you like researching history, that you like, bringing history into your novels? You feel as though history is a good place to put the kind of messages that you want to say?
Liz Fenwick
I love history. I always have done. I think I probably could have done my degree in history, but I was always afraid to write anything historical, and it wasn't until I wrote ‘The Returning Tide,’ when my editor encouraged me and said I did have the capable qualities to do it. I do love research and I could go down a research rabbit hole and never be seen again. There is no question about that. I think history adds an interesting dynamic in so many different ways. My fiction is primarily about women, usually strong women that are confronted by something in their life that they have to overcome. And if you look through history. You see how women faced different challenges but still had to overcome them. And I think that can be helpful for women today. Looking at the various challenges that they face, there's more reasons in history to keep the lovers apart, which adds attention to your fiction. That's also a tremendously fun thing to write. So, history adds a delicious layer to fiction, and it adds to the escapism and also, when I'm reading, I love reading historical books because I learn something. So, it's feeding all those things back. Before I was published again, when we were living in Dubai, the Emirates Festival of Literature introduced me to so much and Kate Moss, the writer, not the model was there, and one of the things that freed me was, you do not have to be the writer you are as a reader. And if you think of her and her own fiction in that sense, she describes the fiction that she writes as adventure fiction. It is commercial adventure fiction, yet she runs the women's prize, which is all about the literary. So, she tends to read literary, but she writes adventure fiction. That really freed me up in a lot of ways, because I'm a very catholic with a small ‘c’ reader, I read everything, but I suppose my go to comfort food is historical fiction and I quite enjoy writing it now.
Rob Jones
Let's talk about book inspiration. Who are the writers who you enjoyed reading and have they influenced the way that you write?
Liz Fenwick
You know that sort of real moment when you read a book and you think this is what I want to write. That was with Maeve Binchy ‘Light a Penny Candle.’ When I read that book, I thought, Oh my God, this is exactly the story that I want to write. So, her work influenced me when I was in my late teens, early 20s. Substantially anything by Kate Atkinson. I can't write that way. She breaks every rule known to man, and it works beautifully. I'm influenced by the writers of the past. I mean, Georgette Heyer. I could never write a Regency novel for love nor money, but I devoured those. And those are the books I will go back and reread. I rarely reread. The only modern story too that I have reread is ‘A Year of Marvellous Ways’ by Sarah Winman, which I just think is the most exquisite story, and ‘the Thirteenth Tale’ by Diane Setterfield. And I read that, and I read it twice, when I was really beginning to shape my own stories and I thought oh, actually this is kind of the type of story that want to write that's multi layered. There's a bit of mystery in there. Yes, all your reading shapes .. I mean, you read beautiful prose from various people and you think oh I want to write like that. But then again, I look at it and I I'm dyslexic, so that also plays into certainly my first drafts because I can't spell. You practically need to translate my first drafts because I look .. what the heck was I writing there? You know, it doesn't make sense. So many times my language is much simpler, which is not a bad thing because it can reach a wider audience.
Rob Jones
And if we broaden that out to other forms of inspiration, as I understand it, you wander around the countryside with a notebook in your pocket. Is that to write down things which you feel. Or are you seeing things which, you think, that's gotta go in?
Liz Fenwick
My plot walks. I'm known for those. It's not a notebook, it's my phone. I e-mail myself. It's a combination of things. When we were living abroad, my phone and my camera were reminding me of all the details of nature around me. So, if I was writing a scene set in May in Cornwall. When I was, you know, in the heat of Dubai I could open my phone and see, ‘Oh yes, the bluebells were up.’ We were starting to see early Fox Gloves and that sort of thing. That was incredibly important. Nowadays when I go out on my plot walks, sometimes I go out with a specific problem of the book that I have in mind and I'm just letting the landscape fill me. And it's the process of actually walking that allows the ideas and the subconscious in my brain to put things together in ways that I don't necessarily have when I'm sitting in front of the keyboard. So, I think. Oh great. Stop. And you know if my husband's walking with me, he's like, oh, right. OK. And I'll get the phone and I jot down these things, and then I come back in and transcribe them, but the plot work also fills me with locations and ideas and just the way Cornwall is, particularly around where we live on the Lizard, which is so unique.
Rob Jones
And people?
Liz Fenwick
People are a constant inspiration. As a novelist, you're watching people all the time. You're watching body language, you're listening to snippets of conversation, characters, the way they interplay. One of the things that I notice down here is Cornwall’s a lot more muddled than the rest of the UK in my experience as an outsider, and I think it's really helpful as a writer to be an outsider because you see things that other people take for granted and there's a much more mingling of classes that I didn't see when I worked up in London. When I first came over to the UK in 1989, I was working in Lloyds. I was a broker, and they couldn't categorise me. I didn't fit. They didn't know where to place me in the hierarchy and it was very troubling in some ways to them that I would go have lunch with the ‘Fax Girl’ as she was called. She was a woman that was 20 years older than me, but she was a fascinating woman who lived in the East End and was great. And I learned so much from her about UK life. But down here, you don't have those dividing lines and I love that about Cornwall. I think it's part of its magic that you mentioned.
Rob Jones
Dyslexia is one particular struggle that you've had to face. I don't know if you regard it as a struggle or just as a thing. How easy was it to actually get to the point where you have a book deal. I think you had a … was it a three book deal to begin with? Or two? At what point did you feel as though ‘I've arrived? I'm actually doing the thing that I want to do. And I have achieved it.’
Liz Fenwick
Dyslexia in some ways is a superpower because it means you do look at the world in a different manner. It is a stumbling block, if you're a writer because words are your tool. So particularly when I was first starting, my language inevitably was dumbed down. My speaking vocabulary is very rich and varied, but I can't spell many times the first word I want to use, and Google's made a huge difference in this because of Google's ability to figure out what I'm trying to say is very good. Word is not so good at that. So eventually I can get there now, but throughout my whole education I couldn't look a word up in a dictionary because I didn't know where to start. Yes, I know A or B, I could get the 1st letter, but after that I was completely lost. It was a real wall to climb, but it's actually maybe because of it, or to get around it, I am a storyteller first and foremost. I am not a wordsmith. It's not the words, the beautiful words that work for me so much as the story and the emotion that I'm telling. And I remember going in embarrassed to my editor on one of my first meetings with her and said I'm so sorry about the dyslexia and that, and she said it doesn't matter, you can tell stories, somebody else can fix the spelling. They can put the commas in the right place and, that was very freeing in that the value is in my storytelling and not in the words, but I've now, you know, nine published full length novels in, I've learned my way around that, and probably the biggest thing I do is I listen to my books. You know, most writers suggest that you read the book to yourself. I can't do that because the words move. So, I will rewrite sentences as I'm reading it. If you listen to me and I give a reading in a public appearance, the chances are it's not the words that are on the page, because I will have rearranged it in my head. So, I have the computer reread it to me, and that is a thing I'd suggest to everybody because it takes the emotion out of it. It's no longer your words when a computer generated voice is reading it to you and then you can hear the rhythm and the resonance and all the magic stuff that comes in with that. And with that it has made the whole process simpler. Was it a stumbling block? As I say, my editor didn't mind because I could tell stories. I was always afraid of it being a big problem.
Rob Jones
Apart from the United Kingdom, you're quite well translated, aren't you? Now, was that something that started at the beginning or is that something that has happened since? It came with the first few books that you wrote.
Liz Fenwick
My first agent, she passed away, may she rest in peace, Carol Blake always said you only sell limited rights. And then you resell the foreign rights. And she said you don't have to work for it again. The book is already done and it's not money for nothing. It has really paid off because a lot of times authors sell world rights and that means your publisher is then selling them on to other countries and that in itself is quite exciting if it happens, but if you look at the way writers are paid and a lot of people don't look at the way writers are paid, you know, you hear of this ‘big advance.’ We'll talk about my first deal. Two books. It was £20,000. For two books, which sounds absolutely great. And it was. But you don't get £20,000 when you sign the contract, you get a small portion thereof, and then you get another portion when you deliver a version of the novel that they find acceptable, and then you get another bit of it when it comes out in hard back, and then you get another bit when it comes out in paperback, you know, it's kind of passed out like that. And then when that money has been earned through royalties, you'll get another chunk of money. So, you get money, small bits of money and dribs and drabs, which makes it hard to manage money when you know you can't guarantee when your editor's gonna say yes, actually this draught is acceptable. And you're thinking, oh, no, the mortgage has to be paid. That type of thing. Whereas if you haven't sold all your foreign rights to your main publisher here in the UK, you may find that as I did my first sale, actually was to the Netherlands and ‘The Cornish House,’ sold for €750. OK, not a huge amount of money, but that's a nice thing. And then another one comes in and there's another €1000 or another €2000 and that slowly builds up and that fills in those gaps between the payments from your main UK publisher and it makes a huge difference. So, I'm published in 14-16, languages. I actually earn more money from Sweden than I do from the UK. Actually, I'm very well published in the Netherlands, and they bought my first book and they've been publishing the others ever since. And oh I had… they gave me my first ‘spredges,’ you know, sprayed edges. I had that in the Netherlands.
Rob Jones
Did you say that when we started that you began to find success in about 2012? You've got nine books at the moment, you're working on your 10th book so that's working on about one a year, it becomes a bit of a treadmill?
Liz Fenwick
It was at the beginning, and there was reasoning behind that. I now no longer publish a book a year. You need to build up a name so that people know who you are and look for your writing. Unless you're one of those big books that comes out that everything's thrown at and everybody knows about. You can get lost in the vast number of books that are being published. Whereas if you have one book a year, there's some regularity, readers will come back to you. So, I did that initially. First book was 2012, 13, 14. I think the first five books came out one a year and then they started slipping a little bit because it was doing more historical research which takes longer and when I moved publishers from Orion to Harper Collins, I said at the time I would really like more time because, you know, you find yourself in the funny position that you're writing the next book, you're publicising the one before. You can't remember what's in the story of the book you were telling about because your head is so fully submerged in the new one that you're about to write, but it served its purpose, and I've built up a readership, although technically I'm still not yet a brand name.
Rob Jones
Do you have a routine and do you stick to it?
Liz Fenwick
I don't have a routine. As such, I think it would be marvellous if I did, but when I started writing fiction again and the year was in 2005, I had three small children and there was no routine that could be had, you grabbed whatever free moments you had. So, I learned to write anywhere, anytime. Anyhow, I'd be sitting in the car at school pick up with one of those little Acer things, you know, tapping away using that time without the kids. When I'm researching, I try to do a chunk of research every day enough so that I can write the first draught of the novel. I do tend to use a process journal if I'm being good, which Deborah Harkness put me on to, so I understand how my writing process works, so I try to jot in that at the beginning of the day … this is how I'm feeling … because inevitably I go through phases. This book is great. This book is sh … terrible. I'm never gonna finish it. Does it have enough legs to go through all that sort of thing, so I can go back and look at where I am in my process. So, I try to do that most days. That's pretty consistent, when I'm in full writing mode, I'm now finding that I'm very effective writing in sprints and actually quite short sprints. 10 minutes on the clock set my phone write for 10 minutes, give myself 5 minutes off, move around the house, check social media, come back and that's how I finished the first draught. The other thing, but now I'm back into research, I've got a deep dive into the holes that I know are there now that I know what the story is and where I need to develop and to go with it. But I'm a writer who writes many drafts and the only time that I have to begin the day and end the day and don't do anything else is when I'm editing the whole book. That final edit, because at that point, any time you change one sentence at the beginning, it can impact the end and you've got to hold every single thread of the story in your head.
Rob Jones
What is success?
Liz Fenwick
Ooooh, it changes, but the most important bit of success it happened to me last night. We were waiting to see David Suchet at the Hall for Cornwall. I checked my emails and from my website an e-mail came in from a reader in Canada who had seen me on escape to the country. And she had just read my least read book, ‘One Cornish Summer’ worst title ever, because it doesn't relate to a book that said, from the end of September to the end of January. But I actually feel it's a very important book. It's about early onset Alzheimer's. It's a very powerful book and she wrote to me that she'd read all my books, loved that. But she just finished that one, and her husband had died of early onset Alzheimer's. And she said, ‘You've captured it. I've never seen it on the page. So beautifully done. Thank you. To see what I lived through,’ and to see it because I also write from the person who has the early onset, from her point. And she said, ‘you seem to have captured it beautifully.’ So that's success.’ When you reach a reader and it gives them something, then that's truly success. Awards help, bestseller list would be great, but it's actually hearing from the readers its success.