Paula Hawkins, A SLOW FIRE BURNING: A Novel
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[0:38]Paula Hawkins is the author of a slow-burning fire, a novel.
[0:41]Paula worked as a journalist for 15 years before turning her hand to fiction.
[0:45]She is the author of two, number one, New York Times best-selling novels.
[0:49]Into the water, and the girl on the train.
[0:52]An international number one bestseller, the girl on the train has sold over 23 million
[0:58]copies worldwide and has been adapted into a major motion picture, which I saw.
[1:02]Hawkins was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in London.
[1:06]Welcome Paula, thanks so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read books to discuss
[1:10]a slow-fire burning.
[1:12]Thank you so much for having me.
[1:13]It's my pleasure.
[1:14]By the way, right yesterday, it came out as, I think, a Amazon book club and
[1:20]Barnes and Noble and Amazon, is that what it was?
[1:22]You may well be right.
[1:23]I don't know.
[1:25]Yes, I think that sounds right.
[1:26]Okay, well, whatever.
[1:27]It sounded good.
[1:28]So good news is all around.
[1:31]Paula, I know you're a wonderful, established, best-selling author already because of your
[1:35]other books.
[1:36]But would you mind telling listeners what a slow-fire burning is about?
[1:40]So it's a story of revenge, deceit, and murder, inevitably.
[1:46]And at the heart of it, there's three very intriguing women who may or may not be involved,
[1:51]so that the novel opens with a body that's discovered on a houseboat on the region's canal
[1:57]in London and a woman is seen in the vicinity and she has blood on her clothing.
[2:04]And this is a woman who has a troubled past.
[2:09]She's got a history of violence.
[2:11]It looks like an open and shut case, but of course it is not.
[2:14]There are a number of mysteries interlinked a number of people who are connected to
[2:19]the young man who's been killed and is a slow unraveling of loads of past tragedies and past
[2:25]traumas of the course of the novel.
[2:26]Well, it really opens with an excerpt from a book and the person reading the book,
[2:31]which was very, I always love these sort of like, you're in a book, but now you're pretending to
[2:35]be somebody who's also reading a book sort of meta-references.
[2:38]That was great.
[2:40]Yes, there is also yet there's a novel within a novel and I managed to have quite a bit of fun
[2:44]with that too.
[2:46]Wow.
[2:46]I also, I loved in your opening how there's this outreach, right?
[2:51]A girl desperate need reaches out to her dad and the mom is like, no, sorry,
[2:55]we're too busy playing bridge.
[2:56]And as someone whose mom is often too busy playing bridge, I must say,
[3:00]this is just quite quite a chord.
[3:03]Yeah, there's a lot of quite bad parenting going on in this novel, but yes,
[3:07]the Solaris slightly let down by her parents just to say the least.
[3:11]Yes, we'll just leave it at that.
[3:13]Not to say my mom's a bad parent.
[3:15]I'm sorry, no, I'm not sure it's your mom.
[3:16]But there is a bad parenting in the book and these cries for help when sometimes
[3:21]the people who you most want to hear you might not listen or
[3:25]yeah, absolutely.
[3:26]Yeah.
[3:26]And then of course you have this discovery where the woman who finds the body is
[3:31]all of a sudden throwing up on the deck and feels terrible about that and starts getting
[3:36]questioned and it leads you off onto this, you know, who done it essentially, what happened?
[3:41]Hell, draws you right in.
[3:44]Fantastic, yes.
[3:45]Yes, so that the neighbour discovers the body.
[3:48]And we, I mean, I think we, she's immediately an intriguing character,
[3:53]the character of Marion, but she's definitely not what she first appears.
[3:57]There's there are layers to Marion and she's quite a, that she's quite a dark person actually.
[4:02]So speaking of being a dark person, what draws you to all of these stories that have the same
[4:09]sort of undercurrent of mystery and murder and intrigue and how did you start even doing all this?
[4:15]Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
[4:16]Because I have always liked darker stories even from childhood.
[4:21]I enjoy it sort of darker fairy tales.
[4:23]I was intrigued by stories of murder in mayhem.
[4:27]And I have no idea where that comes from.
[4:29]But that's part of my sensibility.
[4:31]I've always enjoyed reading that kind of thing as a child.
[4:33]I really love that because the Christi, I love the puzzle of a mystery novel.
[4:38]And then, you know, later on I got into things like Donna Tarte, the Secret History Richard.
[4:42]And that was it.
[4:43]It was all the psychological stuff that was going on in the background, which I absolutely loved.
[4:47]I've always just enjoyed those kind of, you know, books.
[4:51]They didn't necessarily cry in novels, but novels with a crime at their heart,
[4:56]even if there's a literary fiction or I'd like worn novels as well for some reason.
[5:00]Tormat, give me Tormat, give me Tormat, give me Tragedy, and I'm hooked.
[5:04]So that's just the way my mind works.
[5:07]And I really can't tell you why.
[5:09]Wow.
[5:09]That's all right.
[5:10]Nobody understands them.
[5:12]Some steeped up.
[5:13]We're all just like a mismatch of random things.
[5:15]I'd love to, like, everybody else in the world, probably the girl in the train.
[5:18]And, you know, haven't stopped thinking about that particular story.
[5:22]When you come up with these ideas and characters in particular, what comes first?
[5:27]Do you think of the characters?
[5:29]Or do you think of the plot?
[5:31]And how do you go about the books?
[5:32]Like, where do you start?
[5:34]They definitely start with characters.
[5:35]So the girl on the train very much came from Rachel.
[5:38]Rachel's character, I've been thinking about for a long time,
[5:41]about a woman who had a drink problem.
[5:44]And the memory loss was the thing that really intrigued me.
[5:47]It was like, if you can't remember what you've done,
[5:50]that opens up all kinds of possibilities, and it also affects how you feel about your actions.
[5:55]You feel not responsible enough or too responsible,
[5:59]and you can be manipulated really easily.
[6:01]It just opens up all sorts of different avenues.
[6:04]In this novel, I started with Laura,
[6:06]who's had an accident as a child, and as a result has some behavioral problems.
[6:10]But again, it's what that means for her.
[6:13]Like, how does she navigate the world?
[6:15]How does she deal with the fact that people judge her really unfairly sometimes?
[6:18]And she, you know, she sometimes reacts in ways that she can't really help.
[6:22]And then, fights all sorts of trouble on down on her own head.
[6:25]So it's these characters who are at once kind of troubled, maybe problematic,
[6:29]but also vulnerable and raw.
[6:32]And have, you know, for me, I still love these characters.
[6:35]I think they have goodness in them.
[6:36]They're not, they're not like bad people.
[6:39]They're just people who can terrible things keep happening.
[6:41]Sometimes from their own bad choices,
[6:44]but not always. Sometimes they're just, you know, they're just unlucky.
[6:47]So having written these successful books in the past,
[6:50]when you sit down to write a slow-fire burning,
[6:53]like, were you nervous about it at all?
[6:54]Or do you ever think to yourself?
[6:55]Like, I hope I can do it again, or are you just like, okay, here we go.
[7:00]I mean, there are so many moments of self-doubt
[7:03]and then over the process of writing a novel, you know,
[7:06]it takes a long time to just want to look over two years.
[7:08]And so there are so many moments at which you think,
[7:11]oh, this is terrible.
[7:13]Oh, I can't finish this all.
[7:15]I don't know where this is going.
[7:16]So I think it's not, it's not just one moment.
[7:19]It's many moments.
[7:20]And then there'll be times when you're like, oh, yes, thank you.
[7:22]This is amazing.
[7:23]This is really working.
[7:24]And you know, so it's kind of a rollercoaster for me anyway,
[7:28]that you have moments where you're loving it and it's working,
[7:30]and you really believe in it and moments where you just want to throw your hands up in the air.
[7:36]And all I can say is you just have to push through.
[7:39]It's a long slog writing a novel.
[7:41]It's a math, I'm definitely.
[7:43]And how do you go about sort of dealing with the rest of your life
[7:47]when you're so immersed in the characters and the writing,
[7:50]like, on a good day or a bad day,
[7:51]when you shut down the left ever, you know, walk away from the desk
[7:55]and then have to re-enter sort of the real world.
[7:57]Do you ever have trouble without?
[7:59]You know, I don't, but I think I am.
[8:01]Well, I guess I, because I don't have a family, I don't have kids.
[8:05]I don't have, so I don't have to take care of anyone else.
[8:08]Like, I can just take care of me, which is sounds really sad.
[8:11]But no, I think I can be quite work obsessed at certain times.
[8:17]I can find it a bit difficult to leave it behind.
[8:20]But yeah, I think you just have to go with your own rhythm.
[8:23]I think it's very different from people who are taking, you know,
[8:26]I don't, I don't know how people cope when they have three children at home as well.
[8:29]I just don't really understand how that works.
[8:31]I have four children.
[8:32]Oh, my God.
[8:33]But plenty of people do.
[8:35]Most of my writer friends have kids and manage to find
[8:39]that for me, it's like a mystery.
[8:41]I'm not saying I'm in a fun at all.
[8:43]I did not say that.
[8:44]I just said I had the kids.
[8:47]Quite a different story.
[8:48]Yes, well, still.
[8:50]I feel like a lot of times different creative outlets can help in the writing process.
[8:55]Do you have anything else you go to?
[8:56]Do you like to even just like taking a walk or something like that or photography?
[9:00]I don't know.
[9:01]I feel like there's this big intersection of those creativity and anxiety that feeds novels.
[9:07]There's a lot of walking goes on.
[9:09]Yes, definitely, particularly over the past couple of years, where everything's been shut down
[9:12]and we didn't have a lot of other outlets.
[9:15]Because generally, I do like going to museums and art galleries and that kind of thing.
[9:19]And that I find very inspiring to let visual arts, that helps me a lot.
[9:24]But it hasn't really been possible so much because of the pandemic.
[9:27]But so yeah, lots of walks.
[9:28]I read a lot.
[9:29]I simply just go and I often, if I'm struggling with a novel, I'll go back to all
[9:34]favourites and just read novels that I've loved and kind of remind myself,
[9:39]why is I want to do this?
[9:41]I go back, one of my favourite authors is Kate Atkinson.
[9:44]She likes literary novels and crime novels.
[9:48]And I just, I can get immersed in her books and sort of make me feel better.
[9:52]and then reinvigorate my desire to write.
[9:56]But yes, I think being out in nature is really helpful.
[10:00]the long walks, being beautiful, surrounding those that kind of thing, not in London clearly.
[10:04]But, you know, if you get away, I've been spending a lot of time in Scotland over the past year or so.
[10:08]So, that's been very inspirational for me too, yeah.
[10:12]Wow. And our idea, are you already at work on your next novel?
[10:15]No, not really. I mean, I've got, there are characters.
[10:17]There are people marching around in my head who will hopefully come to the page at some point.
[10:23]Well, soon, hopefully soon. I mean, I've got a lot of interviewing to do at the moment,
[10:27]but I'm hoping very soon to get back to it. I've left it a bit too long.
[10:33]So, okay, you'll get there. It's fine, don't worry.
[10:37]And is this going to be a movie also? There's nothing concrete announced yet, but I'm, yeah, I think it's crossed.
[10:44]I'd love to see it on screen now.
[10:46]So, are you, if you could go back to yourself in college, for instance,
[10:50]like, would you be surprised where you are today, or is this like,
[10:54]totally like, what were you like then? Like, what were you studying and would this have been a natural extension of that?
[11:00]Well, no, I wanted to be a journalist, which I was for, for a while.
[11:02]So, I studied politics philosophy and economics, and I, I went into journalism,
[11:07]and I was a financial journalist. I was on the business desk at the times for a long time.
[11:12]I would never have imagined myself. I would have been very happy,
[11:15]but I wouldn't have imagined myself as a, as a fiction writer.
[11:19]I just, I don't know. I never even can, I mean, I love writing stories,
[11:22]but I didn't really think of it as a practical career part,
[11:25]and I'm quite a practical person. So, it just, yeah, it didn't,
[11:29]I didn't know anyone who wrote fiction.
[11:31]I'd never met anyone who wrote fiction.
[11:33]I didn't mix in those kind of circles, I guess.
[11:35]So it was, yeah, it, I would be very pleased with myself, I think.
[11:40]Although I think why don't you go, why don't you write your serious books?
[11:43]Oh, please. Oh, I was very serious. You have more.
[11:45]Okay.
[11:47]So then, if you were in this sort of headspace,
[11:50]then what, like, what made you try it?
[11:53]Did you take a class? Like, how did you get so good at it?
[11:56]I didn't take a class. I was, so I wrote a nonfiction book,
[12:00]just a money book, a financial guide.
[12:02]And as a result, I had an agent and my agent.
[12:04]We've talked about the possibility of new writing fiction.
[12:07]I said that I like doing it, but I, you know,
[12:09]she was always like, well, show me some of your stuff,
[12:11]and I was always like, oh, no, I don't have anything ready.
[12:13]And then she said, she approached me because a publisher had come to her
[12:18]and said they weren't, they sort of had an idea,
[12:20]but they didn't have someone who went to write it.
[12:21]So it was kind of a weird situation where I almost kind of ghost wrote something.
[12:25]It was a romantic comedy thing that I wrote under a pseudonym.
[12:29]And so it was quite interesting because it was,
[12:32]it didn't come from me. The idea wasn't mine.
[12:34]The character wasn't mine.
[12:35]So I had this distance between me and it,
[12:38]and I didn't feel, it didn't feel so exposing because,
[12:42]so it was kind of like a journalistic commission.
[12:44]They just said, go away and write this thing and I did.
[12:47]And I mean, I wrote four novels like this under a pseudonym.
[12:51]And none of them did particularly well, some of them did okay.
[12:55]But they were great in terms that they gave me a chance to like try out
[13:00]character, you know, different ways of character development and structuring an novel
[13:04]and how I like to, you know, to how I like to actually tell a story.
[13:08]And yet with this distance, I'm not putting my heart and soul on the page.
[13:11]It was a weird kind of convoluted,
[13:13]it's a cue, it's just rude. But for me, it really worked.
[13:17]I wonder if there's some way to, you know, give everybody an assignment, right?
[13:21]Like, go straight this, here's your job.
[13:23]Yeah, instead of just waiting for inspiration, maybe the writing goes.
[13:27]I think the sign.
[13:28]I think sometimes you should maybe then try writing something that,
[13:34]I mean, obviously you want to stay true to your character and your stories and things.
[13:39]But I think for people who are very nervous,
[13:42]it might be helpful to try to sort of flex your fiction muscles by doing something a bit
[13:47]different, do something that you don't necessarily feel as strongly about.
[13:51]I don't recommend writing a whole novel that way.
[13:52]But, you know, some short stories, some, just some scenes even where
[13:57]there's some, you have a bit more distance and you don't, it doesn't make,
[14:00]if it does, if you're one of those people feel feels very nervous about it.
[14:03]And I did.
[14:05]I don't know, that might be terrible advice, bro.
[14:07]But whatever.
[14:11]That's great.
[14:12]So what do you want to happen now?
[14:14]Like, you've achieved all this success.
[14:16]Like, do you feel good?
[14:17]Do you like, what's next?
[14:19]Like, keep writing books or, and I don't just mean in like the here and now.
[14:22]Like, you have your life is spreading out.
[14:25]Like, do you have a bucket list?
[14:26]Like, what's on your, not to ask a cliche question.
[14:29]But just, I don't know.
[14:30]What do you want to travel?
[14:31]Like, what's on your to-do list?
[14:34]I would love to travel right now, but obviously,
[14:36]it's so difficult at the moment because of the pandemic.
[14:39]But yeah.
[14:40]So I would love to continue to write novels.
[14:43]I have a, I would like one day to maybe try writing for the screen.
[14:48]So I've done like an online course, but I think I probably need to do a more rigorous course
[14:53]to, to teach me how to write for, for film or for television.
[14:57]I think it would be really fun to do something that's a bit more collaborative
[15:00]because obviously writing fiction is very, it's fairly,
[15:04]solitary and that suits me most of the time, but I quite like the idea of writing for the screen.
[15:09]Yeah. As soon as, well, if ever we are allowed to travel again,
[15:13]I would like to hand me to the States for years.
[15:15]I'd like to go back to South America.
[15:18]I haven't seen my parents in two years.
[15:19]They live in Africa and I've not been able to see them.
[15:22]So that would, that's going to be like first up when I get to travel.
[15:25]So yeah, lots of things to look forward to.
[15:28]How did they end up in Africa?
[15:29]Oh, they've always lived there.
[15:30]So I grew up in Zimbabwe.
[15:32]Well, they've always lived there.
[15:33]My dad was born in England, but he was taken out there as a child.
[15:37]His father was an engineer working on a railway.
[15:40]So yeah, they've always lived there.
[15:41]Oh, very cool.
[15:43]All right, tune up.
[15:44]Excellent.
[15:45]Well, I know you've already included some advice for aspiring authors,
[15:48]just as we've been chatting, but I always ask it at the end, sorry.
[15:50]So do you have any sort of parting advice for aspiring authors?
[15:54]Well, I do think that what I did, I wasted a lot of time
[15:59]being locked in my own head because I never showed my work to anyone.
[16:02]I never shared my work and got feedback.
[16:04]And it is terrifying.
[16:05]I understand a lot of people, it's very no backing,
[16:08]but you've just got to get out there.
[16:10]Otherwise, I think you'll spend years locked up here and not and all you could do
[16:16]and not getting out there and sharing your work and realising it.
[16:19]People think to tell you, well, that doesn't work with this does.
[16:21]Oh, I love that character.
[16:22]Oh, yes, you know, that character's amazing.
[16:24]I love them.
[16:25]And you won't know that until you've actually got a reader.
[16:27]So doing a writer's group or, you know, what have you shared your work with it,
[16:31]with a light-minded writer, pal.
[16:34]And I think that's it's incredibly helpful to do that and do it early, not later.
[16:38]I just finished writing something and I don't want to show anybody because I do it.
[16:41]I'm like, I think I'd rather just show my editor and like, if everybody else hates it,
[16:45]like, that's okay.
[16:46]Because other people have to change it.
[16:49]If you have an editor, that's wonderful because that person is like,
[16:52]you know, that's a professional person who can give their opinion that that's wonderful.
[16:56]But if you don't, you know, a friend will have to do.
[16:59]Sounds good.
[17:01]All right.
[17:01]Well, it was lovely meeting you.
[17:03]I love you so too.
[17:04]Thank you.
[17:04]So you're next to walk and I hope you get to travel soon.
[17:08]Thank you.
[17:09]All right.
[17:09]Take care.
[17:10]Bye-bye.
[17:12]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[17:16]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[17:20]Books.
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[17:25]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[17:28]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact,
[17:29]texture sound for the sound editing.
[17:32]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.