Lucy Hooft, author of 'The King's Pawn' - Why writing flash fiction really helps, thinking about your genre, and plotting like a mini-series
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we chat to Lucy Hooft. She's had an incredible, interesting career travelling the world. She worked in the UK's Foreign Office and for the Department of International Development, going to work for HRH Queen Rania of Jordan.
Lucy has taken her experience in geopolitics and written her first spy thriller. It's called 'The King's Pawn' and is the first of the Sarah Black series, that looks at a young, female spy. Lucy has planned 5. We talk about planning so much before you even have a contract - did she feel guilty for devoting time to unpaid work?
It's inspired by a real life event no-one has heard of, and takes place around the South Caucus region, which few people know about.
We chat about why her genre demands concision, how it started with writing games to fend off baby brain, and why writing flash fiction helps with full-blown novels.
You can also hear why she has started to structure her books like a Netflix mini-series, and how that's really helped with the plotting.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, ahoi, welcome to a brand new episode of writers' routine. This week, we're chatting to Lucy Hooft. She's worked all around the world in geopolitics for the foreign office, and she's now used that experience for a novel that's |
| 0:22.3 | called The King's Porn. We talk about how Nanorimo helped her ride but also skewed the numbers |
| 0:29.1 | a bit, also why she likes writing scenes with three purposes and why writing short flash fiction |
| 0:35.3 | really helps with the novels. I find it a really, really nice relief from writing a novel, which is of course such a huge undertaking that takes months and you can't, |
| 0:46.3 | you can't even reread your own work in, you know, just a few hours. |
| 0:51.3 | It's just such a big thing, whereas a piece of flash fiction you can bash it out in a few minutes, you can revise it in a few hours. It's just such a big thing, whereas a piece of flash fiction, |
| 0:54.7 | you can bash it out in a few minutes, you can revise it in a few minutes, or weeks or months, |
| 1:00.2 | you know, depending on your style. But it's a really kind of concentrated little bite of creativity |
| 1:06.5 | as opposed to a large meal of a novel. There is more with Lucy Hooft in this week's Writers' Routine. |
| 1:18.7 | Yes, welcome along to the show. |
| 1:21.5 | This is Writers Routine. |
| 1:22.8 | Thank you so much for being there. |
| 1:23.9 | My name's Dan Simpson. |
| 1:25.5 | It's where we take a look through an author's working day. |
| 1:29.0 | All forms of authors, that's what I really like about doing the show. I get to have conversations |
| 1:33.4 | with people from all around the world at all different stages of their publishing career. |
| 1:39.0 | Some have published so many. They're all bestsellers and they crack out as many as they can. Others have sat |
| 1:46.7 | there for a little bit of time just waiting for that perfect first book. And this week, |
| 1:52.2 | we're chatting to a brilliant debut author, Lucy Hooft. She worked for the Foreign Office and for |
| 1:58.8 | the UK Department of International Development. She's had quite an |
| 2:02.4 | incredible career travelling all around the world. She then worked for Queen Rania of Jordan and spent |
| 2:08.7 | time in the jungle. She now lives in Namibia. So she's done a lot for loads of different people |
... |
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