T
he Big Five-O, my sixth novel, was
written in record time. Seven
months from start to inish. I can
still hardly believe it. Each book
has had a diferent trajectory but I feel I’ve
inally found a formula that works.
I tend to plunder my own life for all my
books and this one was no exception. I
didn’t quite spend my 50th birthday in a
darkened room with a towel over my head,
but it was a close thing. I was interested
in looking at the diferent places women
might be at as they hit their half-century,
in terms of career, family, health, inances
etc. A story began to form.
First I needed some characters and began
making rough notes. I thought about each
of the four characters I wanted to use and
what their conlicts would be and how it
would end up. One of them, Charlotte, was
the main character from my fourth novel,
Prime Time, so I already knew her pretty
well. The other three were Roz, Sherie and
Fay. As I added more information about
the characters, their lives and problems,
my rough notes grew and grew until, to
my surprise, I had an outline Even then the
characters continued to grow as I wrote.
I explained this rough outline to my
editor, Kate Bradley at HarperCollins,
and she immediately came up with The
Big Five-O as a title and it stuck. Titles are
funny things. Perfect Alibis and Prime Time
both started life as that from the beginning
but my other novels ended up with very
diferent titles from their working ones. I
think you instinctively know when you are
on to one that will work.
I had my characters, their problems and
conlicts and a rough outline. I also had
a title. Next I had a good think about my
irst page. If I’m in a bookshop, I’ll read
the blurb on the back of a book to make
sure it appeals to me but it’s the opening
paragraphs that decide if I take it to the
till. So I always spend a lot of time making
sure my irst page is exactly as I want it. If I
don’t get the tone right there, I ind it hard
to write on. Once I’m happy with my efort,
apart from some tiny editing tweaks, I’ve
never changed an opening page in any of
my books. I always set the scene, introduce
one of the conlicts and let the reader see
what sort of book she is about to read.
She’ll know right away it’s not crime or
sci-i or anything literary and highfalutin.
The problems of my four main characters
are gradually revealed. They are all good
friends but each has something going on
the others don’t know about. This is where
my outline helped. It also helped when
I reached the 60,000 word mark. There
was no struggle with that pesky bit in the
middle, where so many new writers give up.
This happened with my second book,
Perfect Alibis, though I managed to work
through it. I had what I thought was a
brilliant idea but that was about all. I
didn’t have a plot of any sort and when I’d
written about 60,000 words I got stuck. I
remember sitting on my bed, surrounded
by notes, crying because I didn’t have a
clue how to get the story into any sort of
order. It was like trying to stuf an armful
of spaghetti into something very small.
This time I had planned it all out in
advance. I had a one or two-sentence
description for each chapter, so the middle
had been worried about before I started
writing. If I had an idea to expand on
something as I went, it was added to the
description. And because I had four stories
running together, there wasn’t the usual
concern about it sagging halfway through.
The main plot remained as planned and
only a few little details were changed. I
admit my timeline got rather tangled up
at one point and time was spent swearing
over a calendar.
In the end I had quite a detailed outline
document which I kept open on one half of
the screen so that I could just follow it like
a route map. I was obsessively organised
for me and marked each character’s name
in a diferent coloured highlighter so I
could make sure they got even coverage.
By the time I wrote my third novel, One
Glass is Never Enough (and there were timesGETTING NIFTY
AFTER FIFTY
Jane Wenham-Jones tells Phil Barrington how
she inally found a formula that works