Rosamund Upton: Guest Post & Book Giveaway

Today I welcome back Rosamund Lupton. She is the author of the bestseller Sister. Her second novel, Afterwards, was released in the U.S. last week.  

Rosamund Lupton started writing when she could first hold a pencil. She studied English literature at Cambridge University. Following her BA degree, she was a freelance copywriter and reviewer, including writing reviews for the Literary Review. She won a TV play competition and became a full time screenwriter, working for the BBC and independent film companies. When her youngest child started school, she decided to write a novel – Sister which went straight into the UK best seller list. When it was published in the USA, it made the New York Times best seller list and received great reviews. I loved it. A unique voice.  Afterwards is different and equally gripping. 

**Book Giveaway: Make a comment below to win a copy of Afterwards. Be sure and add your email address (ex: joe at sbcglobal.net). Let me know why you'd like to read Afterwards. U.S residents only. Winner will picked at random. **

Rosamund Lupton: 
The Way I approach Writing a Novel

When I was a child, my father would play chess with me, encouraging me to think one then two moves ahead, progressing to about five or six moves when my brain would start to short-circuit. Fortunately he was a kind as well as brilliant chess player and didn’t take advantage of my brain explosion to checkmate me. Plotting the detective story part of my novels feels very similar. (If character A does this, then that action has a consequence on character B which in turn affects character C which a hundred pages later will have some meaning for character A.) And in this plotting game the other player is the reader. Am I leading the reader carefully away from the real perpetrator of the crime or would he or she guess – checkmate me – by chapter 7, if not before? And in this game, are the twists and turns engaging enough for the reader to keep reading/playing? Finally, when I reveal in the last chapters the real perpetrator, will the reader think ‘oh yes of course, why didn’t I see that?’ or feel cheated in some way. Because a detective story, like chess, can never involve cheating. It is this part of novel-writing that I find utterly draining and I’m sure I burn through more calories than if I’ve been on a treadmill all day. (I lost weight during the plotting part of each novel, even though I consumed huge quantities of chocolate biscuits and barely moved from my desk).

Playing a long difficult chess match wasn’t my idea of fun when I was twelve and I wouldn’t write novels if they were simply detective stories. The plotting - that hard brain-aching part, is simply the first stage. It’s a cerebral, intellectual thing that results solely in a map. Then comes the real writing of the book, driven and inspired by the characters. In ‘Afterwards’ a mother and daughter are terribly injured in a school fire. Their search for the truth of that arson attack is the plot part of the book, but the heart of the novel is their loves, fears, thoughts and beliefs and their relationship with one another. Characters are organic things, changing and developing throughout the novel. While plotting is hard work, characters are inspiring and create their own energy. They have voices demanding to be heard and recorded, they challenge me to understand them and to explore their imaginations and beliefs and make me challenge my own.

 I’m always glad to have that plot map pinned up in front of me while I’m writing. Grateful, to know where I’m going. But a map cannot describe the journey. So perhaps more importantly than my childhood chess matches, in terms of writing novels, is that almost every night my father would read – or invent – a story.

Rosamund Lupton:Guest Post & Book Giveaway

I read Sister last Fall, I guess when it came out in the UK, and I couldn't put it down. Rosamund Lupton is a fresh new voice on the mystery scene. So, I asked Rosamund Lupton to contribute a post to Mystery Fanfare. Waited until today to post since today is the launch of Sister in the US.

WIN A COPY OF ROSAMUND LUPTON'S SISTER. 6/13: WINNERS ARE KATHY D & JANET A. Congratulations!

When Rosamund Lupton set out to write her first novel, she had two objectives in mind: the first was to create a good old-fashioned detective story that would keep readers glued to the page; the second was to write about the incredibly deep and powerful bond shared by sisters. While at first seemingly disparate goals, in the hands of Lupton, they form the framework of her brilliant debut, SISTER: A Novel (June 7, 2011; Crown Publishers).

When SISTER was released this past fall in the UK, it became the fastest-selling debut novel in WH Smith’s sales history and made Lupton the fastest-selling British debut of 2010. The novel has received endless critical praise (the Daily Mail called it “stunningly accomplished . . . it’s devastatingly good and announces the arrival of a truly original talent”), was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club for 2010 (and was subsequently selected as one of Richard and Judy’s top 100 Books of the Decade), and spent weeks on a number of bestseller lists with more than 400,000 copies sold to date and foreign rights sold into twenty-seven territories. Lauded for expertly combining the pacing and suspense of crime fiction with the elegant prose and poignant tone of a literary narrative, Lupton has created a story that is dark, surreal, and utterly haunting.

Rosamund Lupton lives with her husband and two sons in London. Sister is her debut novel.

ROSAMUND LUPTON: The Story of Writing Sister

When I was working as a screenwriter, an exasperated director once said to me ‘You just write far too much stage direction! I want a script not a novel!’ Five years later I decided to try and write a book. I had the germ of an idea, but I thought as a screenwriter so it was a scene I imagined. I saw an uptight conservative young woman in a designer suit change into scruffy clothes so she could play the part of her missing little sister in a police reconstruction of her sister’s last known movements. I saw the older starchy sister – Beatrice – put a long wig over her own immaculately cut hair; I saw her exchanging her designer suit for her sister’s scruffy bohemian clothes. But despite their differences, I knew I wanted these two sisters to be devoted to each other. Close to my own younger sister, I wanted to write about the strength of that bond and a detective story – with Beatrice as detective – would be the ideal way to show it.

So the next scene I imagined was Beatrice having a dull and conventional lunch party, despite being in the glamorous city of New York, with her dull fiancée and dull conversation. And then the phone goes. It’s her mother saying that her sister, Tess, hasn’t been seen for five days. Beatrice gets on the first flight to London to look for her. She doesn’t for a moment think of doing anything else. It’s her job as older sister to look after Tess. It’s the start of the detective story but that desperate immediate flight to London also shows Beatrice’s fierce protectiveness. As I wrote the story this love and protectiveness makes Beatrice jettison her old safe life and take huge risks – eventually putting her own life in danger – as she hunts for the truth about what happened to Tess. During the book, Beatrice discovers courage she never knew she possessed.

I wrote the novel while my two children were at school and at weekends and into the nights. It was far harder work than I could possibly have imagined. I could read through a screenplay in a couple of hours, but it took longer than a day to read through a novel. I found I could quite literally lose the plot! And then there was the nail-biting time of sending it off to agents and publishers. Eventually in the UK a publisher took it but wanted me to re-write a huge chunk – effectively throwing the last two thirds in the bin. And I had three months to do it. It was all hands to the pumps, with my friends looking after my children, my mother coming to stay, and I made the deadline with a day to spare. A few months later it was published in the UK and amazingly, went into the best seller list and stayed there for 14 weeks. It has now sold over 420 thousand copies in the UK and has been translated into twenty seven languages.

On the eve of Sister’s publication in the US I owe that exasperated director a huge thank you for pointing me in the right direction and an apology. You were right. I was always, secretly, trying to write a novel.