Write-Off with Francesca Steele

It’s hard to express quite how much I love Liane Moriarty's writing. I have read all of her books, some of them many times, and I just think she combines such a good eye for women's interior lives and the complex issues we confront in ordinary, everyday life with a great sense of humour and unique momentum. Liane published her first novel at 38, spurred on when her sister Jaclyn, also an author, was published. Her first attempt, though – a children’s book – was, she says, rejected by everyone. I love listening to Liane talk about sibling rivalry and support and the embarrassment of that first rejection.Before The Husband's Secret and Big Little Lies became bestsellers, Liane spent years as a mid-list author and is very honest about the little humiliations she endured before hitting the big time, like doing events where no one turned up. I love Liane’s observation that she’s always trying to get back to the simple joy of writing as a child, unencumbered by publishing needs or expectations. I hope you enjoy listening to her as much as I did. This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steelePlease do rate or review the podcast on your Apple podcast app – it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You probably know David Duchovny from decades on our screens as the FBI agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files and the TV show Californication, as well as the recent Judd Apatow film The Bubble and last year's Netflix hit The Chair, a campus comedy in which David plays himself – taking the mick out of himself.It’s not often that Hollywood and literary fiction collide in this way but David Duchovny is in fact now a successful novelist as well as a musician and actor, with four novels under his belt and a new novella, The Reservoir, out this June. We talk about how David originally intended his debut, Holy Cow, to be a film until it was turned down everywhere he took the idea, how he planned to be a professor and use holidays to write – his father was a magazine writer and playwright so it was a long held dream of David’s to be a writer too – and how his teenage poetry was bad, just like (he says) his early acting skills. You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steelePlease do rate or review the podcast on your Apple podcast app – it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This interview has a special place in my heart because Joanne Harris, the prolific author known for the gorgeous Chocolat, among other things, was the first person I ever interviewed. I spoke to her for my university newspaper 20 years ago, and she was, thankfully, very nice then and remains very nice today. I’m not sure I’ve spoken to a more adventurous novelist. Joanne fearlessly tackles whichever genre she is interested in at the time and indeed isn’t fond of the notion of genres at all actually. We talk about her excellent new thriller, A Narrow Door, and how it felt to write that compared with, for example, her 'gastromances' (not a word she’s keen on, completely understandably) such as Chocolat. We also discuss her making (and burning) a sculpture out of rejection letters, rewriting her fantasy novel Runemarks from scratch because her daughter wanted to see it published and how mistakes are all signposts on the road to success. Oh, and also the time she met Harvey Weinstein. You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steelePlease do rate or review the podcast on your Apple podcast app – it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jeffrey Archer is a bit different from many of my usual guests. He’s not at all sentimental, he’s very confident – I mean this is a former MP who went to prison for perjury after all – and in many ways that confidence seems impenetrable. But this is, I think, what makes him so interesting to listen to because even Jeffrey Archer is afflicted by self-doubt and even Jeffrey Archer has had to come up with strategies for dealing with it, even if sometimes the strategy is basically just being ferociously productive. Since his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, was rejected by 17 publishers before selling in 1976, he has sold more than 300 million copies of his books worldwide, which makes him one of the top 25 fiction authors of all time.We talk about his incredible self-discipline when it comes to his writing routine, how lots of editors rejected his debut because none of them believed he would write a second book and how he would not have made a good prime minister! You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steeleDon’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.ukThis season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I loved talking to Abi Elphinstone, a bestselling children’s author who writes about dreamsnatchers and sky gods and wildcats. She has been called a worthy successor to C.S. Lewis by The Times, and talks regularly at schools about her writing process, with great enthusiasm even when the kids mistake her for JK Rowling. I was especially grateful to Abi for fitting me in when she was practically moments from giving birth, and I think that’s testament to how she’s always keen to chat about her work whenever she can. We actually haven’t had an author on Write-Off before talking about rejection at the agent stage specifically but Abi is an extremely good example. She was rejected a grand total of 96 times before she got her first book deal, and she is not afraid to talk about it, once posting some of those rejections online. We talk about what she learnt from all that feedback, how her dyslexia stood her in good stead for years of hard work and mapping out stories before she starts. You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steeleDon’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.ukThis season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Chris Paling, a BBC radio producer, had an auspicious start as a writer, accidentally stumbling across a very starry agent with his first attempt at writing a novel. That novel didn’t actually sell though, along with several others, and later in his career, after he had been published, Chris began to keep a diary of his musings about the industry. Not originally intended for publication, that diary is in fact now published as A Very Nice Rejection Letter, a lovely, very funny book. Chris is really good on that sort of sixth sense as to whether something is working or not, and we also talked a lot about whether writing is really a dialogue with yourself or something you are desperate for other people to hear.You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steeleDon’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.uk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you don’t already know Sandra Newman, you are going to be hearing a lot about her in the next year or so. Her new book, The Men, about a world in which everyone with a Y chromosome vanishes, is out this June, and she is also currently writing a much anticipated feminist retelling of George Orwell’s 1984. Sandra has experienced plenty of failure, notably when her publisher declined to publish the second book in her two book deal, We discuss unlikeable books, and she tells me all about the time she pulled off a remarkable publicity stunt fort her first ever play when she was a creative writing student, only for it to get savaged in the press. You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steeleDon’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.ukThis season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When The Girl on the Train came out in 2015 and went straight to number one on global bestseller lists Paula Hawkins was pitched like a debut. But in fact Paula had written several previous novels, romantic comedies, under a pseudonym, the last of which hadn’t done well at all, leaving Paula feeling seriously rejected. What I loved about talking to Paula is they even though she is now one of the most famous thriller writers alive, she remains extremely cautious and circumspect, with vivid recollections of how it felt before she was successful and before she started to really love what she was writing,  Her latest book, A Slow Fire Burning, is out now and is, I think, her best yet, a really clever mystery with a lot of subverted tropes and jokes about book writing. We talk too about not being able to give publishers what they want, the horror of bad reviews - yep, she had them - and the book that The Girl on the Train very nearly was until another author wrote it.You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steeleDon’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.ukThis season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I find this interview so inspiring. Matt Cain is a successful arts journalist and at the time of his first book submission he was Culture Editor for Channel 4, praised in particular for his coverage of the Woman’s Prize for Fiction. But 2010, the semi-autobiographical book Matt had been working on about a child growing up -like himself - gay in the north of England - was rejected in part for being what he says were coded ways of saying it was “too gay”. Matt’s book was put up for submission three times over the next decade and rejected by more than 50 agents and editors. Matt didn't give up though and today that book is published as the wonderful The Madonna of Bolton with the crowdfunding publisher Unbound. We talk about how he really tried to learn from the feedback on early submissions, how creative rejection changed him - almost more than homophobic bullying did - and how his therapist made it into his book.Don’t forget that I list my guest’s books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews! You can also find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steeleThe lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.ukThis season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome back! Clare Chambers is kicking off this season. Clare has written nine published novels - her first when she was just 26 and her latest, Small Pleasures, a wonderful book long-listed for the Woman’s Prize last year. But just before Small Pleasures there was a failed novel that nearly caused Clare to give up on writing altogether. It took her five years to write and then no one wanted to buy it.We talked about her feeling her career was over aged 50, working as an editor herself for the legendary publisher Diana Athill, how she switched from being a pantser to being a committed plotter and being given permission not to be funny.  Don’t forget that I list my guest’s books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews! You can also find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steeleThe lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.ukThis season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.