Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Souti and today I'm going to be talking

to the wonderful Lisa Jewel. Described as the Queen of Psychological Suspense, Lisa's novel, Ralph's

party was the UK's best-selling debut novel of 1999. Since then, she's written a further 19 books,

which has sold over 5 million copies in 29 different languages.

Her latest novel, The Family Remains, a sequel to the New York Times bestseller The Family Upstairs, was published by Penguin in July.

It revisits characters from The Family Upstairs like Lucy and Henry. After a bag of bones is

discovered on the Thames, all sorts of secrets are unearthed. Lisa, thank you so much for joining

us. Oh, thank you for having me. It's lovely to be here. Now, I've been reading your books for a long

time, but it was lockdown that really invigorated my love of the psychological thriller as a genre, because thrillers were the only time that I felt I could truly escape the reality of what was happening in the house and it's all kind of being locked in together.

But what I really love about you and what I think brings you head and shoulders above other writers is that the plot is so tight, but you also have these

wonderful, vulnerable, flawed characters that are totally believable. And I find that really

unusual. And I've read that you don't tend to plan your plots. No. I think that's amazing.

I think people would assume that you sit there for ages and just go, right, if that's going to happen there, like a jigsaw puzzle, you know, if I move that and if I move that, has it always been like that?

Yes, I started off writing relationship novels and, of course, plotting is, you know, is important, but it's not vital in a relationship novel.

And the more psychological my books have become, the more important it's been to home in on the plot. It's a process of putting things on the page. If you're not planning, if you haven't got anything to refer to, because you haven't really thought about it until you sat in front of your computer and started writing, it's just a process of putting things on the page and then working out what they're there for at a later point. You know, for example, I wrote a scene the other day where a wife is going through the pockets of her husband's jackets and she's looking for something and I didn't know what she was looking for and neither did she. So I just had to randomly pull out of my brain things that you might find in your husband's jacket pockets and then worry about it later, worry how that was going to feed into the plot later. And I'm now at the point in the plot where I'm having to refer back to the things she found in her husband's pocket. So it's informing what happens later on in the book. So it looks like I did it on purpose. It looks like I knew exactly what she was supposed to be finding in her husband's pockets, but I didn't. It's sort of a reverse way of plotting in a way, is like you put the things on

the page and then work out what to do with them later. So would you then go back and put things

into the pockets that are going to be key later on? Well, no, I could do that, but where would

you stop? If I'm working in this very sort of bold, forward, moving,

propulsive way, I could keep going back and changing everything and then I would lose all that

energy. So it's important to me to have faith in what I've written two months ago and stick with it

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