All I ever wanted to do was make a living from writing books. I can still hardly believe that dream has come true.
Three Little Lies
Until I did the Curtis Brown Creative writing course in 2015, I knew nothing about publishing and no one who worked in it. Of course I was lucky to be able to do the course at all, but I have since met lots of published authors who were picked up via agents’ “slushpiles”. It is absolutely possible to get published without connections (or expensive courses!), so if this is your dream, don’t give up.
I had the idea for Friend Request kicking around in my head for about two years before I started to write it. I knew it began with a woman receiving a friend request from a girl she bullied at school, a girl who was supposed to be dead, but that was all I had. Once I got going, I wrote the first draft in about five months.
The seed of the idea for my second novel, Three Little Lies, came from the stories my husband tells about a bohemian, musical family he knew as a teenager. Happily, they were nowhere near as dysfunctional as the family in my book, and none of them ever went missing without a trace.
I am currently writing my third novel (eek!) and I have planned this one out much more thoroughly than I did the first two. It’s about a young woman whose life has been defined by a tragic event she witnessed as a child; when she moves back to her home town, she starts to find out that everything she thought she knew about that day is wrong.
I have been a huge fan of psychological thrillers since I read The Memory Game by Nicci French in the late 1990s. That there is now a quote from me on that book’s Amazon page is a huge source of wonder and delight to me.
However much I try, and I can absolutely see the many benefits, I cannot get on with reading on a kindle. I read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life on kindle, then found myself stroking the cover wistfully in a bookshop.
The first boy I ever kissed, who I haven’t seen for probably twenty-five years, is also a writer and is represented by the same literary agency as me.
I absolutely hate slugs (am shuddering just typing the word).
I can move my second and third toes independently from the others.
Three Little Lies by Laura Marshall is published by Sphere on 28th June, price £12.99