Guest Posting: SJ Watson
The Author of 'Before I Go To Sleep' Shares His Thoughts on Genre Fiction
Hi Bootcampers
Sometimes I like to share this space with other writers I admire who also post on Substack.
This week the book post - which appears every Tuesday at 4pm BST - I have handed over to SJ Watson, who achieved massive success with his first novel ‘Before I Go To Sleep’, adapted as a feature film starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth and Mark Strong ( see picture above).
I can recommend SJ Watson’s Substack:
It’s full of great advice for writers and stimulating discussions with his many followers.
The post , which on his site is behind a paywall, appears for free below:
Introduction
The other day, on Twitter, @WritesJo mentioned that an agent loved the ‘writing style and the tone’ of her book but told her that ‘horror stories no longer sell.’ He advised her to focus on romance and fantasy because, according to him, ‘that’s what’s in demand.’
There are several things to unpack here, and I thought it was worth taking a look at genre fiction generally, and also the bigger question: What should you be writing?
First, a disclaimer
I’m a crime writer (so far at least). My first three books were sold as psychological thrillers (notice I wrote ‘sold as’ not ‘written as’ - more on that later!). The writer friends I’ve made have largely been other crime and thriller writers, and the festivals I go to and events I do tend to focus on crime and thriller fiction. Therefore, this is the genre I know most about. It isn’t the only genre, of course, and what I have to say applies to horror, romance, fantasy, LGBTQIA+, sci-fi, historical, memoir, self-help, etc. etc. etc. — all the other genres I haven’t mentioned in fact. (And yes, ‘literary fiction’ too, because what is that if not just another in the list of genres?)
“You do know it’s a psychological thriller, don’t you?”
Allow me to share my own story, by way of example.
I wrote the first draft of The Book That Originally Had A Terrible Title But Would Become Known as Before I Go to Sleep (don’t worry, we’ll just call it Before I Go to Sleep from now on) in spring and summer of 2009 and edited it during autumn and winter. At the beginning of 2010 my agent, Clare (who back then was ‘an agent’, not ‘my agent’) read it, and invited me to her office to talk about it.
This was a good sign, surely? I was excited, but nervous. She sat me down with a cup of coffee and, once we’d got ‘Well, it’s got a terrible title so that’s going to have to change’ out of the way, said, ‘You do know it’s a psychological thriller, don’t you?’
Because, the truth was, at the time I didn’t. I’d taken the idea I’d had (see Writers’ Lodge Issue 3 for more on that) and worked it up into a set of characters and a story. And, because I like books that have a strong psychological element, and I love a twist or two, and I’m a fan of page-turners in which plot is the engine of the book, I’d naturally tried to incorporate these elements. But — like someone who’s eaten a dish they really like and knows it contains aubergine and potato and garlic and tomato, but has no idea in what quantities or what else it might need or how to blend everything together to make a moussaka — what I’d come up with was, well, frankly a bit of a mess.
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