Alison Stockham, author of 'The Cuckoo Sister' - Thriller writer talks about overcoming doubt, reading aloud and finding the right word
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2023
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alison Stockham's new book is 'The Cuckoo Sister'. It tells the story of Maggie, who has a seemingly perfect life, only... she's cracking under the strain of it all. One day, when Maggie walks out on everything, her sister Rose is all too willing to step into her life.
We talk about why she's half and half between planning and pantsing, also how she overcomes the doubt of good it is, and why every book is brilliant and awful at the same time.
Alison works for the Cambridge Literary Festival, and has worked in documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, and we discuss how much this experience set her up for writing novels. You can hear why reading aloud to her kids helped her understand pacing and structure, also what questions she asks herself to begin, and what to do when the computer screen stares back at you.
We also run through your best books of the year so far.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along to writers' routine. This week we're chatting to Alison Stockham. Her debut is The Cuckoo Sister. We talk about overcoming the doubt of whether what you're working on is actually any good or not. |
| 0:21.6 | Also, why reading books to her kids at bedtime really helped her figure out pacing and structure. |
| 0:28.7 | And you can hear what she likes to know when she starts, or actually maybe it's what she likes to not know. |
| 0:35.3 | That's always a really good place to start with the stories asking questions. |
| 0:39.3 | So I sometimes run a writing workshop where I just have a collection of pictures, |
| 0:46.3 | postcards or whatever, and I get people to look at them, pick a character in that and then start asking questions. |
| 0:52.3 | Why are they there? Where have they come from? |
| 0:57.7 | What are they feeling? Where are they going? Why are they going there? Why are they by themselves? |
| 1:01.3 | What are they carrying? All that kind of thing to just kind of fill out the story. |
| 1:07.8 | And I think when a story pops into my head, that's kind of what I do. I start asking questions of it. |
| 1:11.6 | And then it kind of hopefully develops into a book. |
| 1:15.2 | There is more on the way with Alison Stockham in this week's writer's routine. |
| 1:27.1 | Yes. Welcome to the show. My name's Dan Simpson. This is writer's routine. It's where we take a look inside an |
| 1:28.0 | author's working day to see how they get stuff done. It's really that simple. To see how they plan |
| 1:34.0 | their day and their space and their own life and everything else that always tries to invade |
| 1:39.4 | your day and space and life to give themselves the best chance of getting their creativity down, |
| 1:45.1 | of getting their ideas on the page. |
| 1:47.4 | So hopefully they can get it out there, they can get the agent, they can get it published, |
| 1:50.7 | and they can sell a lot of copies. |
| 1:53.2 | This week we are chatting to Alison Stockham. |
| 1:56.8 | Now, Alison has always been around stories. |
| 1:59.4 | She's worked in TV, working in documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK. |
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