Writer's Routine

This week, Ken Follett shares his writer's routine. He's one of the UK's most successful authors, selling over 170 million books across 80 countries. He has a staff of over 20 working on all aspects of book selling, so he can concentrate on book writing. We talk about whether that puts pressure on his writing, knowing he has staff relying on him for a salary. Also, what his writing routine of a ye...

This week's guest is Helen Paris. She's worked in performing arts, writing, performing and directing, for 2 decades, and has just published her debut novel, 'The Lost Property'. It's all about Dot, who strives to reunite lost property with their owners. It all came from a spell of unusual research she undertook at the London Transport Lost Property Office, the characters she met there, and their p...

This week we're chatting to Steve Cavanagh. He's won the CWA Gold Dagger Award, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, has published many Sunday Times Top 10 Bestsellers, and his new book has just been named as one of the Best Crime and Thriller Books of the Year by Waterstones. It's called 'The Devil's Advocate', and is the newest Eddie Flynn book. Telling the story of Andy Dubois, s...

Lucy Foley joined us back at the start of 2020... pre-pandemic! She spoke about her 2nd mystery thriller, 'The Guest List'. It's set at a dream wedding, on a remote island, where someone gets killed and everyone has a motive. We talk about the fundamentals you need to include in writing whodunnits, and how to flip the tradition on its head. It comes after the huge success of her first whodunnit, '...

Xanthi Barker has published novelettes and short stories, penned columns and articles, and has just released her debut book, 'Will This House Last Forever'. It's a memoir of her time with her dying father, the poet Sebastian Barker. She is also the granddaughter of George Barker and the cult novelist, Elizabeth Smart. We discuss whether because of her highly and successfully creative family, she w...

For this week's Random Routine, we chat to Rob Hart, who came on back in 2019 to talk about 'The Warehouse'. 'The Warehouse' is in the mold of 'Farenheit 451' and '1984', and focuses on one big business that suffocates all others, and the stories of 3 people who work there. Because of this, his characterisation needs to be truly believable and authentic, we talk about this struggle and how he beca...

This week we're joined by Joe Thomas. He's just released the 4th in his 'Sao Paulo Quartet', with 'Paradise City', 'Gringa', 'Playboy' and the new one 'Brazilian Psycho'. He grew up in Hackney, before spending 10 years in Sao Paulo, and being inspired to tell its story. It mixes fiction, true crime, historical fact, and high literature, in an utterly compelling style. We talk about how his routine...

This week's random routine, our bitesize chunk of inspiration, comes from Trent Dalton who came on the show back in 2019. Not many authors have debut success like Trent Dalton. His book 'Boy Swallows Universe' won the 'Debut Fiction Prize' and 'Book of the Year' at the Australian Indie Awards, and went straight into the top 10, selling over 100,000 copies. It's a semi-autobiographical story about...

Zen Cho is a multi-award nominated and winning author. She's published 3 novels and many short stories, and is back with her first ghost story... although that's not what she thought it'd be at the start. It's called 'Black Water Sister', and all came from one word she read in the dictionary. It's based on ancient Malaysian folklore, and Zen has taken great joy in playing with old language, and pr...

Along with Dan Gillespie-Sells, from The Feeling, Tom MacRae wrote the hit musical 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie'. It follows Jamie New who is determined to wear a dress to his school prom night. It's based on a a real story, explored in a BBC documentary. The musical is now a film, also written by Tom, which you can watch on Amazon Prime now. In this bitesize chunk, you can hear about his writ...

This week, we chat to Claire Allan. Her new book is 'Ask No Questions', a psychological thriller about Ingrid Devlin, on the search to find the truth of her best friend's disappearance 25 years ago. Claire started her career as a journalist, has written women's fiction under the name Freya Kennedy', and is back with a brand new psych thriller. She's written almost 20 books across different genres....

It's a BOOKSHOP DAY SPECIAL. Bookshop Day is on Saturday 9th October, and Books Are My Bag are encouraging you to spend time in your local bookshop, be it big or small. This week, we're chatting to children's author Piers Torday. He's published 7 books, they've been translated into 14 languages, he's won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and been nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal. His ne...

Bella Osborne has had a busy year. In the last 3 months, she's had 2 different books out with 2 different publishers. 'The Promise of Summer' is a romance novel with Avon. 'The Library' is a bookclub read with Aria. We try to talk about both of those, but it's mainly about the former. All in, Bella has published 9 books. 'The Promise of Summer' is about Ruby and Curtis, trying to reunite a engagem...

Alex Michaelides is the only ever UK debut writer to go straight in at number 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His novel, 'The Silent Patient', was the 2nd bestselling novel on Amazon in 2019, they named it their 'thriller of the year'. He's followed it up with 'The Maidens', about an exclusive set of students at a University under the influence of a sinister Professor, and a murder he kno...

Paul Rudnick is an acclaimed Hollywood scriptwriter. He's worked on 'Addams Family Values', 'The Stepford Wives' and the 'Sister Act' movies. Now, he's just published his 3rd novel, 'Playing the Palace'. It's about a New York event planner who falls in love with England's gay Crown Prince, Edgar. It's a satirical look at romance stories and Royal life. We talk about writing for movies, working wit...

A few years ago, Bridget Collins came on the show to talk us through her novel, 'The Binding'. It was a huge, genre-defying success, and she's gone on to publish 'The Betrayals' to equal acclaim. Before then, Bridget published 7 Young Adult books, a few plays, and she's beavering away on her 3rd book right now. Here's a little snippet from our chat, as Bridget runs us through her writing space and...

Christina Sweeney-Baird works as a lawyer. It's a busy full-on job, working all hours under the sun, and she had barely any time to write. Until a life-changing moment changed everything, and forced to her sit up, to sit down and write. 'The End of Men' is her debut novel. It tells the story of a pandemic that wipes out 90% of the male population. We talk about the idea, how she developed it, plan...

Helen Fields first came on the show back in 2018. Starting with 6 DI Callanach thrillers, Helen has written standalones, and her newest novel introduces a new cahracter, Dr Connie Woolwine, an American Psycological Profiler who arrives in Edinburgh to pursue the Shadow Man. After working in Law with police, social services and Doctors for many years, Helen has a peculiarly accurate insight into th...

This week's guest taking us inside their working day is Jamie O'Connell. He's published short stories before, runs an editing and mentoring site called 'Blackwater Writing', and his debut novel, 'Diving for Pearls', is out now. It's a story set in Dubai, a mystical, alluring, divisive and controversial place. It's about a woman's death which influences a whole cast of strange and inter-connected c...

This week's Random Routine comes from Mark Billingham. His new book is 'Rabbit Hole', his 4th standalone thriller, which comes after his 15th Tom Thorne novel, the series he's best known for. Mark joined us back in 2018 to take us through his writing day. Where we chatted about how Mark's writing style and method has changed in the 17-or-so years since he published his first novel 'Sleepyhead', wh...

Claire McGowan goes by two names. Claire for crime thrillers, Eva Woods for women's fiction. We talk about how she switches between the two, and how thoroughly she thinks through style and different readerships when she writes different genre. Her new work is an audiobook series exclusive to Audible, called 'The Vanishing Triangle'. It shines a light on the unsolved disappearance of at least eight...

This week's Random Routine comes from bestselling Tim Marshall. He came on the show back in November 2018. Tim Marshall worked for some years as the Diplomatic Editor for Sky News, travelling and living all over the world to get the stories. His book 'Shadowplay: The Overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic' is widely regarded as one of the best accounts of life in the former Yugoslavia. Tim reported in th...

Michael Arditti is an award-winning author of 11 novels, he's written short stories, and worked as a theatre critic and book reviewer for national newspapers. His new novel is 'The Anointed'. It's a retelling of the biblical King David, as told through his 3 wives, Michal, Abigail and Bathsheba. We talk about how he put his own spin on history, and why he chose to write about such a specific time,...

Liz Nugent is an Irish Book Award Winner, whose 4th Novel is 'Our Little Cruelties', which is out right now. She came on the show back in 2018 to take us through a day writing her 3rd novel 'Skin Deep'. After working as a stage manager, running all over the place in a theatre, then being shackled to the desk writing for soap operas, Liz Nugent became bored with dull, desk-driven office work, and b...

There was a time when Joy Ellis couldn't get her books anywhere near a shelf, one sale, anywhere. She was living in her car, she managed a bookshop, she had many almosts with publishers. She carried on, kept writing, self-published, and was finally tracked down by a publisher who stumbled across her in a newspaper. Now, she's sold over 2 million books, is an Amazon bestseller, and was nominated fo...