Paula Hawkins was the most interesting and famous author on The Times crime writing course which I attended for six Fridays in February and March. She is renowned for her bestseller The Girl on a Train, published in January 2015.
This debut thriller became one of the top five fiction hardbacks since records began, and has sold 23 million copies worldwide, in over 50 countries and in 50 languages.
Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for 15 years before she was commissioned to write four rom coms under a pseudonym. Only one enjoyed modest success and she decided that her interests lay in psychological fiction.
She never undertook any courses but learnt her process as she went along. The Girl on a Train was in her head for a while and she had three or four false starts. Once she got going, the book took one year to write and another year in the publishing production process.
Her favourite books on writing are Stephen King’s On Writing, which is recommended in my Winning Copy Writing and Winning Novel Writing Guides; and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, a series of essays about how fiction works taken from lessons to university students by Man Booker prizewinner George Saunders.
Though her tips were aimed at novelists and thriller writers, many can apply just as well to non-fiction. First, she stressed the importance of pace, which is as true for non-fiction as for novels. So, in her books she focuses on having short chapters of about 2,000 words.
And the first draft of your writing is important. “The first person you need to please is yourself.” In the following drafts you need think more about your target audience.
Structure
This is crucial, because all writing needs a beginning, a middle and an end. Yet Paula Hawkins is not a novelist who plans her books in great detail before she writes.
“Structure is tricky and individual,” she said. “You need to feel your way in. Create expectations– and then react to and fulfil those expectations. You may get stuck. So seek techniques to work through difficult parts of a piece of writing.”
In copywriting, that may happen with your beginning, and in that case I advise starting in the middle. However, in a novel you tend to start strongly and then get stuck in the middle. That is a good time to share text with trusted readers and with your favourite advisers.
Again, all these comments apply to writers of every kind. Saunders and King provide good advice for when you are stuck, she told us before turning specifically to novel writing.
Characters
“I live with my characters for a time to see how they respond to challenges / relationships. I write profiles and dummy scenes to test them,” she said. “What makes a character distinctive? Don’t write a collection of symptoms. They need to be active. They want things and are willing to, or have to, act. Take risks.
“The back story of a character is fundamental.” This will include: their parents and their education; their beliefs and their doubts; their fears and their regrets; their weaknesses as well as their strengths.
Patterns
Readers like patterns, so some predictability can help. They also like and expect disruptions – and they like to anticipate them. However, she said that “Twists can be overdone” so lay the groundwork carefully for attentive readers.
Endings
In novels you can leave the reader to think about the book – and write an ambiguous finale with unresolved issues… However, in copywriting a writer must finish tidily and avoid loose ends.
