Alex Hay, author of 'The Housekeepers' - Historical fiction author discusses shifting gears through the day, a work-space battle, and changing your routine
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2023
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alex Hay's new novel is 'The Housekeepers'. It won the Caledonia Novel Award 2022. It's all about Mrs King, a housekeeper from a world of con artists and thieves. She's dismissed from her position running the grandest home in Mayfair, and gets her revenge by recruiting an eclectic group of women to try and rob the house of its every position, right under the owner's nose.
We discuss how he organises his writing around his day job, and how he manages to shift gears through different work. Also how he manages sharing his working space, why he thinks so much about his writing routine, and how he is planning the tweak it.
You can hear how much he thinks about the first sentence, deep chats on fonts, and why his most listened to songs are always rain sounds.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to a brand new episode of writer's routine. |
| 0:12.4 | This week we're chatting to Alex Hay, historical fiction author. |
| 0:17.3 | His new novel is The Housekeepers. |
| 0:19.9 | We talk about how he shifts gears through a working day, |
| 0:22.6 | switching between writing and the day job. Also, the battle, the battle he has every day over his |
| 0:30.1 | workspace and the comfy chair. And you can hear why he's moving away from being a thorough |
| 0:36.4 | spreadsheet-type plotter. You do just let the plan |
| 0:40.1 | sit there as a framework to support you to make sure you're hitting those key beats and that |
| 0:44.3 | there's a sort of coherence to the overarching narrative, but you give yourself permission to |
| 0:49.1 | flee when you need to. And so I already had that in mind. And actually then when writing in the slightly |
| 0:55.2 | more organic way, I probably absorbed by osmosis certain rules about how scenes go about act structure |
| 1:04.2 | on a sort of micro level. And therefore, inevitably, I was writing bit by bit and making certain choices about, okay, do I feel as the reader of this scene for the first time, there's enough tension here? |
| 1:19.5 | Do I know enough about what's going on? Have I given myself as the reader enough context about why someone is doing what they're doing? |
| 1:27.3 | And so I think I was probably making some of the same choices that I would when planning out a book, |
| 1:33.0 | scene by scene, but I was just doing it straight onto the page rather than, you know, an Excel sheet first. |
| 1:39.0 | It's all on the way in this week's writer's routine. |
| 1:50.8 | Yes, welcome along. |
| 1:52.0 | My name is Dan Simpson. |
| 1:53.2 | Thank you for being there. |
| 1:55.2 | This is writer's routine. |
| 1:57.1 | When we take a look through an author's working day, |
| 1:58.3 | the idea is dead simple. |
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