The secret to writing a novel? Do it with your other half

Always wanted to write a book but daunted by the enormity of the task? Collette Lyons and her husband Paul Vlitos came up with an innovative way of getting it done in half the time – writing together, one chapter at a time. Here, they explain how they did it, without getting divorced...

Collette: ‘Don’t wait for the muses to whisper in your ear; simply sit down and write’

“We can’t write a shopping list without an argument – if we tried to write a whole book, it would end in divorce!” I can’t tell you how many times Paul and I heard this when we finally confessed to friends that we had written a novel à deux.

Keeping the fact you’re working on a book under wraps until you’ve typed the final full stop, or even – as we did with all but a handful of people – staying schtum until the deal is done (in our case, astonishingly, with multi-way auctions, a flurry of foreign rights and film and TV option sold to Hollywood) is pretty standard.

What was different with us was that we weren’t even sure until we got close to finishing it that a two-hander – especially the intricately-plotted thriller that ended up being our debut, People Like Her, which we wrote under the pseudonym Ellery Lloyd – was even logistically possible.

But there are things we learnt along the way, which have streamlined the writing process for the next novel – useful, as we’ve had to pen it in a pandemic.

First, you just need a small seed of an idea to begin the thing: the who, where, why – any one of these will do. We started with the who. I’d spent pretty much our whole relationship (we’ve been married for a decade) talking Paul though ideas for thrillers that I’d give up on well before I started writing, convinced I needed wall charts and chapter plans and character bibles before I typed a single word. Not so.

The kernel of People Like Her came from something a friend said when I was pregnant and stressing about how hard other mums made looking after a newborn sound. “Don’t worry, you have to complain – if you said it was easy, your NCT group would hate you.”

That, coupled with the way that, as a new mother, I had started using Instagram – mindlessly scrolling through other mum feeds, taking their advice and guiltily buying their must-haves – gave us our main character: Emmy, aka Mamabare, a wildly popular Insta-mummy who has worked out that she has to take the shine off her comfortable life to feel more relatable to her followers.

We then added Dan, her disgruntled novelist husband living off her earnings while working on his difficult second novel. And a third, unnamed stalker intent on revenge against the family to drive the story forward. Three distinct voices – with me taking one and Paul two – made writing as a pair manageable. We then needed to work out what they were all going to do, of course, but in the meantime, with these three people in our heads, we began.

Which brings me to the second thing I soon realised was vital: regularly applying bums to seats. That’s it. Don’t wait for the muses to whisper in your ear; simply sit down and write, and then do it again and again, over and over. In my case, I knew I could manage 750 words in two hours, so I did just that five nights a week.

For me, it also stemmed the rising panic about finding work – I was made redundant at eight months pregnant, and did not have a job to go back to. At least I felt like I was doing something (it didn’t even occur to me at that stage we might be published – which, importantly, meant that it felt enjoyable and unpressured).

I didn’t feel my evenings spent writing robbed me of my social life because, with a baby, I didn’t have one – plus it gave us something to talk about other than nappies and sleep training. Writing book two in a pandemic has felt similar in a way – something productive to replace doom-scrolling, something to talk about that isn’t death rates and vaccines. One former colleague has just started writing a romcom with her housemate because “we’ve completed Netflix”.

A few people have asked us for advice on what they should do with their half-finished novel, whether they should send it to publishers or agents. Afraid not: you have to keep going until The End. There is no short cut. That’s not to say we didn’t give up – we did, halfway through, the stage at which we lost our way with it.

We put it down for a while, doubtful we’d ever go back to it. But my brain must have continued working on the plot while I wasn’t looking – because one night, I sat bolt upright and spent an hour at 3am furiously writing down a re-worked plot. We quickly realised we needed a watertight, chapter-by-chapter plan to get that down on paper, which we did in a three-week flurry. We had a book.

But that book needed a polished final draft before sending it out, first to a couple of trusted friends, then to potential agents. At this editing stage, it became a free for all, deliberately so. We were no longer just writing our own characters, because we both needed to be immersed in the whole thing or it would have read like a game of literary Consequences.

Perhaps this would be the bit where some people would break up the band, citing creative differences. But we are both used to editing (I am a former journalist and Paul is a creative writing lecturer) and being edited – it’s hard to be ego-free, but it is vital.

It was at that point I did a deep dive into the influencer life – it’s best not to get bogged down with detail in a first draft as it’s distracting. I had chats with fashion and beauty influencer friends I’d worked with in magazines and an agent (yes, the big players have agents).

The scandals that hit the news around then – from Anna Delvey, the fake heiress, to Belle Gibson, the Australian Instagrammer who faked her cancer – were useful in terms of understanding the potential fallout when things do go wrong. Of course, there have been more furores since we finished writing, with a well-known Instamum caught trolling her friends, others obviously flouting lockdown rules or ignoring quarantine after a holiday to Dubai. I’ll admit to kicking myself that we hadn’t come up with some of those storylines ourselves…

Paul: ‘Your book gets longer (and often better) when you are not working on it’

When I look back at how Collette and I ended up writing a novel together, what surprises me is how long it took to occur to either of us that we could team up. Perhaps it’s because the idea of an author as one individual with a vision to impart is still such a powerful part of how and why we read a book.

Of course, anyone who has ever had anything published will know how untrue that actually is – every novel on your shelf might have the author’s name on the cover, but it was shaped by their inner circle of first readers, their agent, their editors.

One of the big advantages of writing together is obvious: your book gets longer (and often better) when you are not working on it. I am not being entirely facetious here: one of the main reasons why people don’t finish their first novels is that they start enthusiastically, then get bogged down in other things, lose the thread, then re-read what they have written and get dispirited. One of the great things about writing as a partnership is that you are pulling together, keeping the momentum up, getting that first draft finished.

There’s also a genuine excitement in knowing that there is definitely someone who is going to read what you have written – so you’re trying to write something that is just that bit smarter or funnier or more thrilling than what they are expecting.

It’s a lot nicer than the position a lot of writers find themselves in, sitting there with all sorts of vague imagined readers hovering over their shoulders, never sure if anyone is actually going to read and like what you are writing.

In a way, I suppose, it is a bit like having a personal trainer – you have someone there to encourage you to try just that little bit harder, to push for just that little bit more than you thought you were capable of – or to find the extra twist, the sharper way of putting things, the line that is really going to stick in someone’s mind.

People Like Her (Mantle) is out now. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0844 851 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop

Read more: How to write a novel: Chocolat author Joanne Harris’s masterclass