Sarah Pearse, author of 'The Retreat' - Reese Witherspoon Book Club writer discusses moving to long-form fiction, changing scenes, and moving locations
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2022
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we chat to Sarah Pearse. Her debut novel, 'The Sanatorium', was the best selling debut fiction book of 2021. It was a New York Tiimes and Sunday Times bestseller, a Waterstones Thriller of the Month, and a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.
Her new one is called, 'The Retreat'. Set on an eco-wellness retreat on an island near Devon, it promises rest and relaxation, yet the locals believe it to have a cursed past. When a young woman is found murdered nearby, DS Elin Warner is called in to investigate.
We chat about how her writing routine is slightly dictated by family, where she moves for inspiration, and how she changes scenes that she wrote in the first few days of an idea.
You can hear how much she thinks about pacing and structure when writing genre, why her best thoughts come at night, and how she found moving from short stories to full on novels.
This week's episode of the show is supported by 'Believe Me Not', the fantastic new novel by Natalie Chandler.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of writer's routine. This week we're chatting to Sarah Pierce. |
| 0:14.6 | Her debut, The Sanatorium, was the best-selling debut fiction book of 2021. Her new one is called The Retreat. |
| 0:23.6 | Now we talk about how she moved from being commended for writing short stories to getting long-form fiction down. |
| 0:31.6 | Also how much she has to change the scenes that she writes straight away, and what she does when things just aren't clicking. |
| 0:39.3 | If you're struggling with a scene, quite often I find it's because the scene isn't working in general and probably wouldn't work for the reader, I guess. |
| 0:46.3 | Yeah, there's definite sort of scenes in both books that kind of came to me and worked really well. |
| 0:52.3 | I've given them quite a bit of thought. And I found that |
| 0:55.5 | even when they were edited, they weren't changed very much. And that's a sign you know a scene's |
| 0:59.8 | working. So yeah, I think coming at it from a different angle or trying to come in later can be |
| 1:04.7 | another good fix. There is more with Sarah Pierce in this week's writer's routine. |
| 1:17.0 | Yes, welcome along. |
| 1:18.1 | Thank you for finding us. |
| 1:19.2 | This is writer's routine. |
| 1:20.3 | My name's Dan Simpson. It's where we take a look inside the working day of some of the most successful writers around. |
| 1:27.0 | And this week's episode of the show is supported by the new book from Natalie Chandler. |
| 1:32.2 | It's called Believe Me Not. |
| 1:34.5 | Have a listen to the blurb for this story. |
| 1:38.5 | And tell me, tell me that you are not instantly hooked. |
| 1:42.6 | It's all about Megan, who wakes up in a hospital bed |
| 1:45.7 | and the first question that she asks is where's my baby? But her husband, sister and doctors |
| 1:53.2 | all say the baby doesn't exist. Megan isn't in a hospital ward. She's in a psychiatric unit, |
| 2:00.2 | but she is convinced that she was pregnant and that everyone else is lying to her. |
... |
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