May 5, 2020

The Storyteller: An Interview with Beverley Lee

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============================================================ Hi and welcome to Issue #3 of The Storyteller!

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How are we in the month of May already? I hope everyone’s doing whatever they need to survive and sustain themselves in these crazy times. There’s no magic solution or routine and the best thing I’ve found is taking it a day at a time, even if those days or the coping mechanisms we employ to get through them don’t always resemble each other. I’m also focusing on everything I’m grateful and privileged for, like the ability to work from home, be in a safe and lovely apartment with plenty of food and other supplies (including ALL the books and a good internet connection to work and keep in touch with family and friends), the chance to keep myself healthy and fit as best as I can.

Today, I’m happy to share with you this very cozy chat with Beverley Lee, whose latest book, The Ruin of Delicate Things was released just last month. She already has a best-selling debut trilogy to her name, and I’m proud to call her a friend (a big thank you to the Bookstagram community for all the lovely folks it has brought into my life).

For someone who doesn’t really read much horror/supernatural/paranormal fiction, the trilogy sucked me in and I cannot wait to revisit it or get my hands on her latest. Beverley has a way of painting vivid imagery with her words, which when combined with real stakes and well-defined, complex characters, makes for the best kind of escape.

If you go to her website (you should, the link’s at the bottom of the email), the About section says that she is “a people watcher, a dreamer, a lover of nature and simple things”, but is also passionate about helping other writers as they begin their journey. It’s this sense of community and a shared love of the written word that brought us together to begin with and what we hope to pass on with this conversation.

Thanks, Bev, for taking out the time to be a part of this!

AN: What’s your writing journey been like? Have you always wanted to be a writer?

BL: I have always written for as long as I can remember. I think I must have been about seven. We had a male teacher for English which was really unusual back then in primary school. I still remember him, and one of the daily things we had to do - write a story and illustrate it.

My stories, every single day, were pony stories. I kid you not, I wish I still had the notebook, but every day I used to take this notebook up to him and he would read it and give me a tick, and then when it came to the school report—I think I still have it somewhere. It said, “Beverley writes extremely well and has wonderful imagination…but she should really concentrate on the cliché-ridden pony stories she produces daily.”

So, yes, that was my start, but I didn’t write anything of any particular length until probably my late teens—we’ve all got those drafts, haven’t we, sitting on the computer? Where you start and you’ve got great ideas and then you get so far and run out of steam. I’ve got loads of those and then I had a few years where the kids were little where I didn’t write much on the computer or with pen and paper, but I had these characters going around in my head.

Then, when the internet was new and shiny, I went into fan fiction—I wrote a lot of vampire fan fiction, a lot of Anne Rice fan fiction—but it wasn’t until five or six years ago that I thought, “You know what, if I don’t sit down and write a novel, or try and write a novel, I’d always be wondering later on what might have happened if I had done it.

So that was Gabriel, really.

Gabriel actually had a very jumpy start because I wrote the first 3000 words of it for a story competition. I wrote that in the summer of 2014, I think, and then just put it away; never entered the competition, typical me, and it wasn’t until January 2015 that I pulled it back out again and said, “This is where I’m going to start.”

I had the first draft written in three months. And that was it. That’s how it really started.

AN: When you wrote the short story what was the inspiration behind it?

BL: It was probably the setting. It was the cottage and the thing that was in the cottage in the box, which isn’t really a spoiler since it’s right there in the beginning. That is what I got first of all and then I had the character of Beth and the baby. Originally, and this is quite unusual, the baby was a girl, it wasn’t a boy. But there was just something about it that wasn’t quite working but as soon as I changed the gender to a boy, I knew where I was going with it. It’s like the old imagination just knows something that you don’t know.

AN: Did you start out planning a trilogy when you wrote the first book?

BL: No. When I wrote the first book, I had the ending—I always have the ending when I write and I always have a few points I’d like to hit but sometimes my characters go on different paths—and I thought that it was a quite good, satisfying ending. As I got further along, I started to think that maybe there was more to the story but it wasn’t until Clove, Moth and Teal came into the story that I realised that there was so much more story to tell.

As soon as I got to the end of book one, I knew that there would be another couple. Though, I mean, I was just grateful that I’d got to the end of the first one! But then, of course, the story and the characters just had lots of other ideas.

AN: How do you develop your characters?

BL: Some of them come to me fully formed. I know that sounds weird—how can you have something living in your head when you haven’t even created it, so to speak? Clove was one. I knew exactly what he thought, how he dealt with things, his mannerisms. Moth was another. Teal, I had to work on a little bit. Noah, I knew extremely well. Of all my characters, Noah’s the one who is most like me—he is always trying to please people, always trying to put calming thoughts onto people who are getting a bit fired up.

But if I get a character I don’t know, I just pick away at them. I maybe have a vague idea of how they view the world but what I try to do is try to find out what makes them tick behind what they’re doing in the moment.

If I get stuck with a character, I’ll always go in and write a huge backstory for them, even if none of that ever makes it into the book. I know by the end of doing those notes or writing that backstory exactly who they are.

It’s like an iceberg, isn’t it? The reader only sees the top bit, but the rest, the huge bit of the iceberg nobody ever sees. If you have a character with no depth, you can’t expect the reader to, not fall in love with them, but understand them, or maybe even fall in love with them. If you haven’t given them the time and the energy, how can you expect your reader to do that?

AN: We’ve touched a bit on your writing process…one of the things I loved about the trilogy was that despite not being a big horror/supernatural reader (though I do love to watch that genre), I could relate to and be engaged with these really complex characters that you brought forth. Do you start out with something you want to show on the page and then go from there or is it more see as you go?

BL: I’ll start out with a very vague idea. Maybe I’ll start out with an opening scene, and then I’ll play around it and see if I can tease anything more, sort of, juicy out of it. I only know it’s a “go” if I have an ending, like I mentioned earlier. I never write anything if I don’t have an ending. So, all my stories, I knew as soon as I started, what the ending would be, and again maybe a few points.

But I’m very character-led, in the fact that I set them off on a pathway and if they don’t touch the points I wanted to touch, I trust them to carry me to the right points. A Purity of Crimson was really hard to write because I went down many dead ends. I mean I have pages and pages, thousands of words, where I thought it was a good idea, but then [as I explored those angles further] the characters stopped talking to me, and if they stop talking to you, you know you’ve got it wrong.

I find it very difficult to actually plot everything—I mean a lot of people are very organised (Scrivener, cards on their cork boards)—but I just can’t do that, and I don’t know why. I need to have that freedom of movement in my head, for my characters, to take me down the little pathways that I didn’t know were there. Because if the characters end up surprising me, they’ll end up surprising the readers. It’s that moment where you have the perfect sentence, the perfect idea; a character gives you a nugget of information and you think, “this is it, this is what I’ve been waiting for.” It’s like a high.

AN: Have your endings ever changed?

BL: No, they haven’t, yet!

AN: Is there any advice you wish you had before you started out? Especially as a self-published/independent writer?

BL: Just be prepared for everything to be very, very difficult. I know that sounds incredibly negative but it’s such a process producing a book in the first place, whether writing, editing or getting it ready, but actually the marketing side of it is a horrendous monster that is ever-changing. I mean, even the marketing I did for Ruin is so much more different and difficult and complicated than what I had to do for Gabriel.

There are so many things you can do that you’re not supposed to. It’s about getting it in front of the right people which is very hard because everyone else is also trying to get it front of the right people…and if you’re like me, I’m a bit introverted, I find it difficult to do a cold call and be like “hey, want to read my book?” I prefer to have a relationship with them first before broaching the “perhaps you’d like to read my book?” But you have to do that in a way because otherwise you’d just be on your computer 24/7.

So, it’s extremely difficult, but extremely worth it. You just have to be prepared to go through all the bad points and plan for everything; if you want it, it’ll be there.

AN: Can you talk through the decision of publishing independently as opposed to the more traditional avenues?

BL: Well, when I finished Gabriel, I did go down the agent route and worked on submissions and synopses and I was drafting letters. I’d said to myself that I would give myself ten months and if at the end of that, I hadn’t received a positive response, I’d publish it myself. By that point I knew that I wanted the story out there and that was more important than wait maybe another couple of years to wait and see if anything worked out [with the more traditional route]. So that is what I did and, funnily enough, even when Gabriel had been out for 18 months, I was still getting notes back from agents I’d written to that said, “oh, I don’t think this is quite right for us” and so on. I mean, I know it’s difficult for agents because they have a certain criteria, and, of course, there’s timing.

AN: With Ruin, did you find that the writing process changed for you? You have a trilogy already out there that’s done well, is a bestseller. Was there a different sort of pressure?

BL: Well, I knew it was going to be a standalone, just the one story, so the writing process was different. I had to stop myself from going in too deep with the characters as I’d done with the trilogy, because obviously you’ve got so much space and time in that instance, but I still went as deep as I could with them without letting the manuscript go over like a 100k or something. I think it stands about 89-90k which I think is a decent size.

But yes, it was a different animal to write. I felt like I had to treat it a little bit like it was there and it was waiting; whereas with the trilogy, I didn’t have to think about everything at once, I knew I had enough time to bring it all together. I think with a standalone you don’t have that freedom. You have to make it stick to a certain place and a certain time.

AN: What do you like about the editing process? BL: First drafts are you telling yourself the story. They’re not meant to be anything more. At least, for me, they don’t! Quite often, while writing a first draft, I’ll have a paragraph where I’ll make a note—Insert something about this. I quite like the second draft because then you pull away much of the excess flesh of the story and you can actually see where the story is going. The third draft is more of the same and maybe altering a few things, but it doesn’t go to my beta readers until the fourth draft. My fifth draft is their feedback and the sixth is me working on the feedback before sending it off to my editor. So, mine go through about 7-8 drafts.

AN: I know this is a loaded question, but what draws you to write the kind of stories that you do?

BL: I’ve always been fascinated by that blurred line between darkness and light; the kind of hazy greyness that’s there but nobody actually knows what it is. Even as a child, I was always wandering out into old places—not looking for ghosts because that sounds ridiculous (laughs) but trying to peer into places I wasn’t allowed. You know, playing in the woods and imagining stories. There’s something about the dark fiction genre—it’s maybe that we’re not supposed to play around with what we’re playing around with? Everybody tells you, “You shouldn’t go out in the dark”…

I never set out with a theme, though. It’s the story that produces it. I don’t mean for it to come off as preachy because that’s not like me to be, but if the story decides there is a theme and wants me to go deeper into it, I will follow that. And it’s only sometimes when people review and say, “oh, the theme was such-and-such” and you go, “oh?”

That said, I take a lot of inspiration from my surroundings. I’m walking through the woods and maybe I’ll see an old tree that’s on its side and just the profile of it draws me in and gets me thinking about possibilities. And even from snippets of conversation. You know when you’re at an airport and you’re waiting for somebody and there’s loads of people about and you’re sitting next to somebody and they’re having a conversation which you end up overhearing parts of and you think, “I could use that in a story.” Or even song lyrics. Sometimes there’s a line in a song and I’ll like the idea and it’ll set me off on a path.

AN: Finally, what’s in the works now?

BL: I’m writing a short story for a charity anthology that I’m not allowed to talk about, but I also started, a couple of months ago, a new story, but I don’t have an ending so it hasn’t morphed beyond like 10k words where I’ve tried to get a hold of the characters. I’m not going any further with it until I have an ending. I know it’ll come when it’s ready but that’s one thing with writing—you can never push past, never force that ending.

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Quite an apt note to end on. Hope you enjoyed reading that and that you’ll check out Beverley’s work. Go to the bottom for all relevant buying and social media links for her and her work.

Also, if you aren’t following me on social media yet but want to, the links to my Instagram and Twitter are in the email footer. Hope everyone’s holding up okay. Please take care and stay safe.

Thank you and until next time!

Anu

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