Carmel Harrington, author of 'The Nowhere Girls' - Bestselling writer discusses leaving it late, training to improve, and the novel that changed her planning
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Carmel Harrington is an Irish bestselling author of 13 novels. Her latests, 'The Stolen Child', was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and won Good Housekeeping's 'Good Books Autumn Collection'. She left it late to start. After wanting to be an author for so long, it was a conversation with her husband, and a dream for her daughter, that pushed her to start.
She's written family dramas, a tie-in with the hit TV show, 'Cold Feet', and has now switched to straight-up thrillers. Her new novel, 'The Nowhere Girls', tells the story of two children abandoned at a train station, and the investigative journalist 30 years later, who wants to find out where they ended up. It was inspired by a news-piece, which led her to wonder... 'what if this happened in Ireland, where everyone knows everyone?'
We talk about her path to publication, also why she started off with no idea at all, and how switching genre has changed her writing. You can hear about her love of notebooks, her ego-wall, and how she's trained to get better.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to a brand new episode of writer's routine where this week we're chatting to |
| 0:13.0 | Carmel Harrington. Carmel has published 13 novels. She's busy. Her new one is The Nowhere |
| 0:20.0 | Girls and it comes after a slight switch of |
| 0:22.7 | genre. We talk about her ego war, also why when she started writing, she thinks back and |
| 0:29.8 | realizes she really had no idea. Honest to God, Dan, I hadn't a clue what I was doing in the |
| 0:34.5 | beginning, and I really equate the early years. They were my apprenticeship. You know, in the same way, my nephew is a very talented electrician, but he's just spent three years as an apprentice and he's just qualified now. And that's what it was like for me. In those early years when I was writing books, I hadn't got a clue what I was doing. What I did do well was that I had good instincts I felt. So that's really |
| 0:55.7 | what I worked on. I worked on my instincts as a reader. I knew what I enjoyed as a reader. And so I |
| 1:00.7 | wrote these books. And the reason they did well, I think, were the characters, because the |
| 1:05.3 | plotting was nowhere near where it needed to be. And you can hear about what's changed in how she |
| 1:09.8 | writes since switching |
| 1:11.5 | genre. A lot of it was around dialogue for me because I have been told that one of my strengths |
| 1:17.3 | is in character and dialogue and I'm very pleased that that's the case that people tend to like |
| 1:22.3 | my characters. But of course when you're writing a thriller, you want a lot more secrets |
| 1:27.4 | and you've got to choose the moments when things are revealed. |
| 1:30.8 | So I really had to look at how I wrote characters' dialogues to make sure that there were no secrets given away inadvertently. |
| 1:38.7 | It's all on the way in a brand new writers' routine with Carmel Harrington. |
| 1:51.5 | Yeah. writer's routine with Carmel Harrington. Yes, welcome along to the show. My name's Dan Simpson. This is writer's routine, really simple around here. We take a look inside the |
| 1:54.9 | author's working day. We see what they do, where they do it, how do they plan their life to give |
| 2:00.5 | themselves the best chance |
| 2:01.7 | of getting words down on the page. Now, you can go a little bit deeper into that on our |
| 2:07.1 | substack page. Writersroutine.substack.com. There is a link in the episode notes wherever you're |
| 2:13.4 | listening. In there, I just pick out a few thoughts from the chats, maybe something that you |
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