BOOK CLUB
“Having the plan means you’re never lost”
HELEN’S CAMBRIDGE I spent a lot of time on the Backs, where I jogged and exercised, which was really beautiful and good for my mental health – for someone who has a very sedentary job, I need the outdoors a lot. I really miss the Cambridge University Library: it’s a lovely place to work, and I don’t know when it’ll be opening again. Most of my second book was written there. It’s entirely possible to sit there all day and not see anyone, and have a beautiful view over to Clare College.
I also love the Panton Arms on Panton Street – that’s a great little pub.
people are very interested in processing the event while it’s happening, but then no-one wants to relive it.” Though she won’t be writing the first coronavirus thriller, Helen can definitely see a number of potential plots. “You’re not meant to visit your holiday home, but my book’s set in Cornwall, so of course there are holiday homes – if people visit them and bad things happen, what can they do? Can they tell anybody? What do serial killers do during lockdown? What about lovers? I went jogging on the Backs during lockdown, and the amount of people I saw who were nominally dressed in running gear, talking to their lovers on their phones...” she laughs. “But no judgement!” Although writing about a place and community that suddenly wasn’t accessible to research definitely has its challenges, Helen’s confident she’ll find a way through. “It’s hard as a writer, because it feels disingenuous,” she says. “But I’m confident we’ll return to that world – hopefully by the time the next book comes out.”
place where she doesn’t know who she is, and you don’t know who she is – it raises the tension a bit.” Helen approached the task of writing differently for all of her books. “The last book, Everything Is Lies , had a totally nailed-down plotline that I started out with. Nearly all of that ended up being thrown away, but it’s still worth the exercise of having it, because when you actually write, you get better ideas, and having the plan means that you’re never lost. It’s like that Eisenhower quote: ‘Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.’ With this book I had a plan until about halfway through, but I didn’t know what was going to happen – so I knew I needed to write it to find out. Several of the main characters didn’t actually appear until quite late on: three, four weeks away from handing it in.” The writer always defaults back to notebooks and notecards, and laying her plots out physically on a table to work out where the story might be headed. “I’m a sucker for a whizzy app, but ultimately,
especially when in that very early stage, having those physical objects is so helpful. Praxis – there’s a word!” she laughs. “There’s something about laptops: the words come out, it all looks so even – so there’s also something about just taking a notebook and writing: you know it’s not going to ruin the book, and it takes the pressure off a bit.” Helen’s next book, which she’s been working on during lockdown, is set in Cornwall, in a community living in a touristy fishing village – which caused the writer a little concern when the world shifted on its axis at the start of this year. “I started to wonder if I was on the wrong track, if I was describing a world that certainly doesn’t exist at the moment – and it’s not clear when it might come back. I took the views of my agent and my editor, and interestingly they said that this will pass, and that when it does, people won’t want to read about it. They’ll want to forget it ever happened! Apparently – and Penguin had records on this – this was the case after the Spanish flu epidemic as well:
25
C A M B S E D I T I O N . C O . U K
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 0
Powered by FlippingBook