Lexie Elliott, author of 'How to Kill Your Best Friend' - When the title comes before the plot, how lockdown changes writing spaces, and finding the story's voice

Writer's Routine

Dan Simpson

Arts, Books, Hobbies, Leisure

4.9 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2022

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Lexie Elliott accomplishes things. She graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in theoretical physics (?!) became a championship-winning swimmer, and even swam the English Channel.

She's just published her third novel, 'How to Kill Your Best Friend'. It tells the story of 3 friends who met on the college swim team. Years later, one is found dead in the ocean near a remote island. Can an elite swimmer really have drowned, or is something else going on?

We talk about why she wanted to make the location of the story one of the central characters, also how she's had to be much better with deadlines after becoming a full-tiime writer, and how lockdown has changed where she writes.

You can hear why she's pushed to be a writer in amongst everything else she's achieved, when she got a hold on her writing voice, and how quite rarely... the title came before the plot.

You can support the show at patreon.com/writersroutine

@writerspod

writersroutine.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello there, welcome along to writers' routine. This week, we're chatting to Lexi Elliott.
0:13.9	She is back with her third novel, How to Kill Your Best Friend. We chat about how lockdown
0:19.5	ending has completely changed where she goes to
0:23.2	write. Also, how quite rarely for an author, the title of this book came before the plot,
0:31.0	and you can hear why she's learned so much about the whole process of publication in the
0:35.9	space of a few years. The learning process was the first book being published was a big one for me. I didn't know
0:43.7	how publishing worked and going through that process taught me a lot and I was able to take that
0:53.3	on board for the future. One of the things that having a
0:58.0	publishing contract does for you is it puts in place a certain amount of rigor because your
1:04.0	editor will need to agree an outline of a writing project before you start on it. So there needs to be a pretty firm plan.
1:13.7	It doesn't need to be 20 pages, but as I mentioned before, it'll probably be a five or a six page file that I'll have discussed in detail with my editor so she knows what I'm planning to do with this.
1:28.4	There is more on the way with Lexi Elliott in this week's writer's routine.
1:40.1	Yes. Hello, welcome to the show. My name is Dan Simpson. Thank you for being there. This is writer's routine where we take a look inside an author's working day to see how they get stuff done, how they take an idea, how they plan their space and their life and their day around it to get it down on the page. This week we are with Lexi Elliott, who has accomplished things. She graduated
2:04.2	from Oxford with a degree in theoretical physics. Can't even tell you what that means, but she's
2:10.7	done it. She also became a championship winning swimmer and swam the English Channel, and she's now
2:16.2	a full-time writer into her, well, just published
2:19.4	her third book. And we talk about why she's chosen to do that, make the next stage of her
2:24.8	career as a writer. Why has it always been calling to her? Her debut was the French girl,
2:31.8	then came the missing years, and her new one is How to Kill Your Best Friend.
2:35.7	It's the story of Georgie, Lissa and Bronwyn, who have been best friends since they met at a college swimming team.
2:41.6	They do say, right, what you know.
2:43.0	But now Lissa is found dead, drowned on the coast of a remote island where she lives with her second husband.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dan Simpson, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Dan Simpson and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.