Kate Charles on writing

November 1, 2018

It’s officially #NaNoWriMo and we’re chatting with Kate Charles today about books and writing. 

1. If you could have breakfast with the author of your choice, who would it be?

My fellow Marylebone House author Catherine Fox - she must be one of the greatest living repositories of clerical/ecclesiastical gossip, and I would love to tempt her into being indiscreet!

2. How do you stay motivated when writing can be challenging?

Good question! I’m not always very successful at staying motivated. It happens most often at certain points in a book, when I’m so involved with the characters and the unfolding story that I can’t wait to know what happens next. This goes some way towards explaining why I’m not an outliner/planner, but rather a ‘go-with-the-flow’ writer. It seems to me that if I knew in advance what was going to happen, I would be bored to tears by the process of producing a book. And then my readers would be bored by the result.

3. What’s your preferred genre when you choose books for pleasure?

Fiction of various sorts - mainstream literary fiction, historical fiction, classics like Jane Austen, well-written books about people and the lives they live. Interestingly, I no longer enjoy reading crime novels very much, unless they’re outstandingly good. I don’t like violence or gratuitous gore, and I find that - as a practitioner of the genre myself - I’m able to figure out the solution to the crime more often than not.

4. What do you love about writing?

I love mentally inhabiting a world of my own creation, seeing it develop under my fingers into something very real - for me, and for my readers - which didn’t exist before. And I love words. Finding just the right word gives me enormous pleasure.