No fluke

Lisa Jewell was born to be a writer; it just took a dare

British writer Lisa Jewell is the bestselling author of 19 novels, which have sold more than 5 million copies. If it hadn’t been for a dare, The Night She Disappeared, not to mention those other books, might never have been written.

“I wanted to be a writer when I was a child, because I loved reading and I was quite good at writing and I wasn’t good at anything [else],” Jewell says in a video call from her home in London.

As a teenager, she lost interest in both reading and writing and went off on tangents in life and her studies. Then something clicked. In her 20s, after the joy of reading returned, she observed something.

“Back then, in the early ’90s, when I was reading a lot, there just wasn’t that female voice,” she recalls. “That young, contemporary, fresh female voice. That was the seed. That made me start thinking again about the possibility of trying to write a novel at some point, but I just kept putting it off .”

While out with a friend one night, she says, her friend told her, “You’ve got to do it. Just write three chapters and I’ll take you out for dinner to your favorite restaurant.” And then, Jewell says, “To keep her quiet, I wrote the three chapters and I got an agent and then I got a publishing deal, and here I am, 25 years later. It was all a bit of a fluke, really.”

Jewell’s work has evolved over time. That first novel was a romantic comedy. “Gradually, I’ve become less romantic, less funny and darker,” she says. “I just keep peeling some bits back and then bringing other things more to the light and then, about 10 books ago, I started killing people. That brought me further into the crime and thriller genre. It’s fantastic.”

Some might call Jewell’s career serendipitous. That also describes how she writes.

“Some writers have lots and lots of ideas and have to fish through them to find the one that they want to go with, and some writers start and stop and try things, but I only have one idea. I have one idea a year. So, once I’ve got my idea, I don’t have any options. I can’t drop it and try something else instead, so I have to make it work,” she says.

And she eschews planning or outlining. “I just start writing,” she explains. “I type ‘Chapter 1.’ I’ve got a vague idea of who might feature in Chapter 1 and what they might be about to do; then I just make decisions on the page as I’m typing. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve got older and more experienced is to have faith in those decisions and not question them. I wrote that for a reason. I don’t know what that reason was and I don’t know how I’m going to make it work, but I will.”

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