Written by contributor Graceley Knox
Following up the smashing success of her first adult novel, The Binding, bestselling author Bridget Collins is back with the highly-anticipated book, The Betrayals. Releasing in the United States on May 18th, we had the chance to talk with her about her writing, books, and life in general!
Hi Bridget! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today! Let’s kick things off with you telling us a bit about yourself, and your background!
Hello, and thanks so much for having me! I’m thirty-nine, and from Kent, in the UK. I always wanted to be an actor, so I studied English at Cambridge University and then went to drama school in London. I got a little acting work, but not as much as I’d have liked, and while I was ‘resting’ (aka going stir-crazy) I began to write a novel. That was a bit of a revelation, and I couldn’t stop… Now I do some amateur acting, which I love, but I’m a full-time writer – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. These days when I’m not writing or acting I love reading, cooking, watching films and having friends to dinner. Through lockdown I just started to potter about in my garden, too, which mainly involves staring at blank earth and wondering what I should have done differently.
What book sparked your love of reading? And if it’s different, what book made you want to become an author yourself?
Gosh – I’ve loved reading for longer than I can remember, so it’s tricky to know. But I guess the first proper book I remember reading, and loving, was R. L. Stevenson’s The Black Arrow. It was a very weird choice for a six-year-old – I think I might have heard my dad talking about it, and decided I’d try it…? Anyway, it’s Victorian historical fiction, so it’s full of Ye Olde English, and I doubt I understood more than three words in ten – but in some ways that set me up for life, because I didn’t mind that I didn’t understand.
I think the book that inspired me to start writing novels (although I’ve always written poems and short stories, as most kids do, I think) was Going For Stone, by Philip Gross. He’s mainly known as a poet and you can tell, because it’s a beautifully written, incredibly evocative YA thriller about a kid learning to be a ‘living statue’. There are overtones of a cult as well as drama school, and it’s incredibly gripping – but at the same time it has this wonderful metaphor at its heart. It made me feel that I wanted to write a coming-of-age story with the same visceral power. Hmm, you’ve reminded me to reread it!
Do you have any advice for aspiring authors about the publishing process or about writing in general?
Read! Read everything you can. And then try to write the book you want to read and can’t find on the shelves.
This is your second adult novel after seven young-adult novels. What brought about the switch in writing for different age groups?
To be honest, it was a combination of factors. I’d just got to the end of a multi-book contract with my first (YA) publishers, and my editor left to go to another publishing house, and I was having a hard time trying to find a good idea for the next book. I kept sending pitches to my agent, and every time she’d say, ‘Yes, that’s great, but is it commercial?’ And in the end my inspiration gave out, and I started to apply for proper jobs, thinking my career was over. But I couldn’t give up on writing, even if I was happy to give up on being a writer – and so I began to write a book for myself, without second-guessing my agent or my publisher or even my reader… That was The Binding, and when I’d finished the first draft I had no idea what sort of book it was, even whether it was YA or adult – so I sent it to the adult and the YA department at my agency and waited to see if either of them was interested!
So in that way it was utterly unplanned, it happened because I stopped thinking about how or where to publish, and just wrote from the heart. But I think also, when I started writing, YA was the only place where you could write the sort of genre-bending commercial-literary books I loved, and still be taken seriously. In the years since, that changed, and suddenly the adult market opened up. Writing for young adults is great, but I’m revelling in that new freedom – it means I can write for me, and readers like me, without having to think about age at all.
Quick lightning round! Tell us three little known facts about yourself!
- At one point I wanted to be called Cordelia. (Not recently.)
- I love Guinness punch but only warmed up.
- I had to have lots of orthodontic work because I have several adult teeth that never materialised. The orthodontist (presumably trying to make the 14-year-old me feel better) told me it was because I was ‘further evolved than everyone else’.
The first line in the description for The Betrayals inspires all sorts of intrigue so naturally, we’ve got to know… “If your life was based on a lie, would you risk it all to tell the truth?” Why or why not?
Um… I want to wimp out and say, depends on the lie, depends on the truth! I suppose as a Quaker I ought to say yes, because I do profoundly believe that the truth matters – but I’m not the bravest person ever, and if your entire life was resting on a lie that wasn’t that important, would it be worth it? Let’s just say that if I were friends with the character in the novel, I’d probably advise them to keep shtum.
The Betrayals is chock full of secrets and the arcane arts. Can you tell us a bit about your writing and research process? Or how exactly you keep all the details straight in such an intricately crafted world?
When I’m writing, I try to write as if I’m reading, feeling the excitement as the plot develops, so I do as little planning as I can get away with; bearing in mind, of course, that a lot of the story has already germinated in my head before I start. It’s sort of the ‘stepping-stones’ model – I know there are some plot points I have to hit for the whole thing to make sense, but I want to enjoy discovering it as I go. Then, once the first draft is complete, I know what the book is meant to be about, and I can go back for a major edit. (And I mean major – I added and then subtracted a third of the book in the second and third drafts of The Betrayals.) Mostly I can keep track of everything in my head, because if it all makes sense it’s easy to remember, but the details have to be written down – and because The Betrayals has an ambitious structure and lots of interlinking points of view, I had to create an Excel spreadsheet to make sure I knew what was happening when! I think my editor was much, much more excited about seeing that than the MS itself…
If you could only describe The Betrayals in five words or less, what would they be?
A game. Not a game.
What’s next for you? Any hints you can give readers about what you’re working on now?
I’m currently writing my next book, which has a working title of The Silence Factory. It’s about a factory in Victorian England which spins spider silk to produce a fabric that creates silence on one side and crazy-making echoes on the other – it’s about silence, obviously, but also about seduction, moral ambiguity, grief and courage.
And last but not least, do you have any must read recommendations for our readers? What’s the last book that kept you up all night?
The last book I couldn’t put down was Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King. I couldn’t believe I was nearly forty and reading it for the first time – but it’s nice to have some pleasures kept back for middle age… 😊 The books I am recommending to everyone are Conflicted by Ian Leslie, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, Watch Her Fall by Erin Kelly, and Ariadne by Jennifer Saint.
