Five things I learned from Lisa Jewell about writing a bestselling novel.
By Will Brooker.
In January 2021, somewhere in the middle of the UK’s second lockdown, I began shadowing the bestselling author Lisa Jewell. In many ways, it wasn’t an ideal time for shadowing someone – the streets were so empty, it would be easy to spot a stalker, and if you did track your target down, you couldn’t stand within two metres of them or enter their home without opening all the windows – so I started on Zoom, watching her on webcam.
Luckily, this was a consensual stalking. Lisa, after months of consideration, had agreed to let a complete stranger into her life. I would follow her process through the writing of The Family Remains, her second-ever sequel, from one January to the next: reading her drafts, interrogating her about her back catalogue and ultimately becoming part of her creative process.
I think it’s fair to say we both learned a lot, about each other and about writing, and perhaps also about ourselves. Here are some of my own take-aways, specifically on how to create a bestseller within a year.
1 FIND YOUR SPACE AND TIME
Lisa lives and writes in a beautiful house. (She also has another beautiful house, in which she does not write.) But like most people – certainly, like most women – she has to fight for her own time and space. At the start of the year, I foolishly assumed that her success would have lifted her onto some blissful higher plane of life, where the author wafts out of bed to a perfectly-assigned writing table as assistants bring fresh coffee and croissants. Not so, of course. Lisa mailed me in between folding her family’s clothes, painting her nails and cleaning the fridge, between dealing with teenage-daughter emergencies, between walking dogs and taking sick pets to the vet.
Lisa has a nice life, certainly, which sometimes involves champagne and cupcakes and being feted at festivals. But she is also a working mum with a large family, and sometimes struggles (don’t we all) with juggling her responsibilities. When we first spoke over Zoom, she’d rented a beige-looking apartment across the road from her family home, where there were no distractions except watching the queues outside Waitrose. In normal times, outside lockdown, she would often spend the day at a coffee shop – not a boutique, bijou or exclusive club, I discovered when I joined her there, but a completely average outlet situated between the escalators of a shopping centre. This year, as she began her next novel (to be published in summer 2023) she wrote to me with excitement that
