The Plot Thickens: Lucy Foley’s Literary Journey

Author Lucy Foley ‘talks’ to her characters while writing them, literally. As her latest murder mystery releases, Foley reveals the process of finding what excites her, creating locations through writing, and what it takes to make up an airtight storyline.

GRAZIA: Before delving into the thrillers, you wrote historical novels. What inspired the change in genre?
LUCY FOLEY: I’ve always just tried to write a book that excites me and not to worry too much about genre. I was meant to be writing another historical book when I travelled up to a remote spot in the Scottish Highlands for a holiday and it struck me – as the snow began to fall – that it would be the perfect spot to set a modern take on a golden-age murder mystery. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I started writing.
G: This is your fourth thriller. How much of a role do real people, locations, and instances play in formulating your fiction?
LF: Real places are very important in terms of inspiration and research, but I prefer to write fictionalised places that borrow from several real locales. As for people, my characters aren’t based on anyone I’ve met, and building them ‘from scratch’ is one of of the things I most enjoy about writing, though I wonder if they might, at the start, be inspired tenuously by a gesture or a line of dialogue or a figure I’ve glimpsed.
G: What goes into prepping to write a thriller?
LF: I don’t plot in particular detail but I do a lot of preparatory work all the same – sitting with and getting a sense of my characters before committing them to the page, plenty of research in terms of setting and theme.
G: How does modern wellness play into the theme of this book? It’s a very smart layer to the centre of the story.
LF: Thank you. I don’t have anything against wellness practises – I’m a fan of anything that makes someone feel better. But the cynical side of me wants to ask questions of an industry that seems pretty unregulated and makes a great deal of money from unverified claims. I think there are some bad actors out there. And I was fascinated by someone trying to rebrand themselves as a wellness icon as a way of masking a certain soul sickness.
G: An airtight storyline is the essence of a story, especially a thriller. How do you define your track to ensure that your book has that airtight plot?
LF: As I say, I don’t plot particularly thoroughly from the outset – that, for me, is a surefire way to kill the creative part of the storytelling, because it feels too constraining. However, I think a great deal about structure retrospectively, in the editing process, and work hard to make sure the beats of tension and twists and dramatic climaxes are all happening at the right time.
G: What is your process when you develop characters?
LF: Sitting with them, almost “talking” to them in my head and also, crucially, writing my way into them. This means I probably end up with a lot that doesn’t make it into the final book but those scenes that hit the cutting room floor are never wasted as they have taught me about the people I’m creating.
G: With a female character at the centre of your story, what’s your take on how women are written today, especially in mysteries/ thrillers?
LF: I think for a long time we saw a great deal of the ‘beautiful female corpse’, and that was the main role a woman played in a thriller. I think that’s changing, though. The Midnight Feast is very much about strong women – both on the side of good and evil and somewhere in between. I like to see a compellingly, complexly villainess female character as much as I like to see a heroic one.
G: How do your personal experiences and changes inspire your writing style and change it over time?
LF: Well, in the most practical sense having children recently has changed my writing patterns – I have to be more proactive about carving out the time to do it. But in terms of the writing itself, I definitely feel I’ve grown in confidence and there are certain aspects to what I suppose you’d call the “craft” of it that I now feel much more comfortable with.
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