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- November 2006

NOVELIST FREDA LIGHTFOOT

A NATURAL STORYTELLER

By Catherine Elelman

Freda Lightfoot is a talented writer, but more than that, she’s also a natural storyteller. And that’s why Bédar-based Freda is a member of that very elite circle of successful, published authors.  Freda took time out from working on her latest novel to talk about her best-selling historical sagas, the path she took to becoming a writer, and offers essential advice for anyone with aspirations to see their own words in print.

You are currently working on your 21^st novel for the same publishers, and have a contract to write two books a year. Is it difficult to consistently come up with original ideas?

I won’t live long enough to use all my ideas.  People always ask me where I get my ideas from, but I get them from life, which will always turn up new problems and ideas. Certainly I dip into my family life.

All your novels to date for Hodder & Stoughton are based in north-west England in the first half of the 20^th century, the storylines set against a slice of the region’s social history. Is this period a particular interest of yours?

Yes, and because you write about what you know. I was born and brought up in Oswaldtwistle, a small town in north-east Lancashire, which when I was a girl in the 1950s was full of mills. My father was a shoe repairer and my mother was a weaver; the family were all weavers, back generation after generation, and I was the first one to go to college.

But also this is what the publishers want, because they assume that’s what the readers want. With genre fiction you produce a similar kind of book; people know what to expect from a Freda Lightfoot book, but of course each one has got to be different and fresh.

But I also have at the back of my mind a desire to write about a different time period, and I have now persuaded my editor to let me write about the 1950s.

Another common characteristic of your books is a strong, feisty lead female character, whose life is never a bed of roses.

My heroines have always got to suffer. That’s part of the ‘against all odds’ genre: you’re pitting them against the times in which they live, and they must solve their own problems.

It’s ordinary people in extraordinary situations. All people’s lives have drama in them, and they deal with it because they have no choice, and that’s what this kind of fiction is about.

You’ve got to have conflict and drama, but your characters have got to have fun too. It can’t all be unrelieved gloom.

What other factors influence you when developing your characters?

You have to bear in mind when your characters were living, and you can’t have them doing things out of context. You have to get the social mores, the codes of behaviour and the etiquette absolutely right.

I’m currently writing a series of six books set around a market in Manchester in the 1950s, so I have to remember what girls had to deal with then. If they had an illegitimate child that was a shocking thing, even divorce was shocking.

The characters must never be cliched or obvious, but must be rounded: your good characters have to have flaws, and your villains need a saving grace. The reader has to care about the characters; you can tell a good book if you can remember the characters after you finish it.

And you’ve got to understand the psychology of a person, why people behave the way they do, and their relationships. You’ve got to understand jealousy, people aspiring to be better than they are, or people who take risks or chances.

In selling property it’s location, location, location; in writing novels it’s motivation, motivation, motivation. What moves these characters to behave the way they do.

Your books include a great deal of detail about a particular way of life at a certain time. 

What  sort of research do you do?

If the characters go to see a film in the cinema, I have to make sure it was showing then, not only in London, but in Manchester, or I may have to find out which tunes people were dancing to But you can’t get all the everyday details about life in the first half of the 20^th century simply from books. I always do interviews whenever I go back to England. Libraries help me to find fascinating people. They always start off by saying “Eeh, I don’t think I’ve got owt to tell you”, and four hours later I’m still there. But it’s not their story I tell, it’s the kind of life they led.

How do you start when you begin a new novel?

You start with a problem.  What a lot of aspiring authors do is fill the first chapter with back story, and that’s the wrong thing to do. You don’t start with the baggage, you start with the here and now, with the problem and how the main protagonist deal’s with it. Your reader will be interested because something’s happening, and then you gradually unfold the back story.

Do you have the plot mapped out before you start a book?

No, they’re very character led, although I have to control them within the main plan. I can’t have them going off and doing something totally out of character, or something which doesn’t fit in with the story.

There’s always a point in the middle of a book when I have trouble sleeping, when I’ve got all these plot ideas in my head. I call it the “middle muddle.” It’s like having all these loose balls in the air which I’m juggling and they’ve all got to fit together and I can’t lose any.

Writing is painful because you’ve got to solve all those problems. All these threads have got to be dealt with in a logical fashion, and yet surprise the reader. You have to go through all the obvious levels of what might happen, until you’ve dug deep into your subconscious, or you work it out through flow charts and going through the layers and layers of thought. It’s got to be plausible, but at the same time it’s got to be dramatic, and you can be a little larger than life on the page.

Does writing ever feel like a chore?

I never sit down at a computer now knowing what I’m going to write – that’s absolutely fatal.

At the end of each working day I’ll stop in the middle of a scene, even in the middle of a paragraph, so I have a rough idea of what I’m going to be doing the next day, and every morning when I turn to my computer I revise what I wrote the day before.

There is a notion inspiration happens while you’re actually writing, and I think it does. You have to write, even if you’re writing rubbish, until it comes. And when you’re writing to a deadline you have to write whether you feel like writing or not. If there are problems in your own life, you’ve still got to write.

There was a time of course when I couldn’t write at all, when we lost our daughter. I thought writing books was such trivia, that it just wasn’t important anymore.  But friends told me I must write because Anna would expect me to, and also because it’s escapism for everybody in their lives, and it’s true. I get people emailing me who say they’ve been ill, and my books really take them out of themselves.

When I did manage to get writing again through that painful period, it totally saved my sanity. And now I feel we are not the only people in the world who have lost a child who we dearly loved. People have illnesses, they have problems, and what do they do – they pick up a book and they escape into a story. And that’s not a bad legacy.

How did you start out as a published writer?

I cut my teeth on articles and short stories, but then I wrote five historical romances for Mills & Boon. I learnt a lot, but I gave up writing for them because they were trying to confine me to telling them everything before I’d actually written it. You have to fit in with the Mills & Boon formula, and they wanted me to do a synopsis with every ‘t’ crossed and every ‘i’ dotted and I couldn’t do that.

But you actually began your working life as a junior school teacher.

I always wanted to write; I remember I wanted to leave school at 16 and be a reporter on the Blackburn Evening Telegraph. My parents were very keen for me to go as far as I wanted and were just concerned I didn’t go into the mill, but I was talked out of journalism by the teachers at school, who said I should stay on and get my A-levels, which I did. I went to Edge Hill Teacher Training College and taught for about nine years, and then I ran a children’s bookshop in Kendal when my children were small. I thought I could run the bookshop and mind the children and knock off the odd novel in between!  The Book shop grew, the children grew, but I’m afraid the writing slipped away onto the back burner. I would sometimes be found scribbling away in the dark of the night, but for some time I didn’t send anything out or show it to anybody.

When did you begin to focus more seriously on writing?

I sold about 20 articles to magazines and a few children’s stories to annuals when the children were still quite young. Then I started doing features on being a mum and funny articles for She magazine, and historical features to county magazines – those kinds of things.

But I had a period of ill health, and in the end my husband David and I moved to a rather derelict cottage in the country and began a smallholding. I started writing ferociously: short stories, longer stories, serials for women’s magazines and two Mills & Boons. The object was to write faster than they came back, which wasn’t easy.

How did you manage to keep motivated when you were receiving more rejections than acceptances?

Rejections you have to deal with. You have got to be very determined, very hungry and very stubborn. And I am a stubborn person.  So you wipe the tears away, find out what you did wrong, and do it better the next time.

What did you learn from the rejections?

That you have to hone your writing skills, learn about characterisation and structure. I eventually broke into Mills & Boon because if they see that storytelling spark and the writing skills there then they will write you a long letter telling you what is wrong, and you have to rewrite the whole thing using that advice, and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.

And you have to read the magazines or books you’re trying to ‘emulate’. You have to perhaps read a little better than you’re going to write, but you still have to study your genre, to read within your market.

What other advice would you give to aspiring authors?

I wish I had a fiver for everyone who’s said to me I’m going to write a novel when I have time. If you really have to write, you will make time. When I was running my bookshop in Cornwall I was writing my Mills & Boon novels by hand behind the counter between customers, taking notes and revising what I’d written when I walked the dogs and while I was cooking the evening meal.

Also it’s much easier to write a synopsis when you’ve written the book. So write your first novel, then send the first three chapters with the synopsis to a publisher.

Do you believe writing is a skill anyone can learn?

You can learn to write, you can’t learn to tell stories.  The art of being a fiction writer is that you’re a storyteller.  You’ve got to have people talking in your head who are telling you stories, and you’ve got to want to write about these characters.  If you can spin a yarn then you must  learn the craft: how to get that on paper, and how to make it commercial. And that’s the important thing: fitting it into a genre and making it commercial so that people will buy your book and want your next one.

You’ve had a publishing deal with Hodder & Stoughton since 1993. How did that come about?

I met an agent at a writers’ conference, and I got a 10-minute appointment with him on a Sunday morning to do my pitch. I was writing a Victorian saga at home, and on the Saturday evening he gave his talk, and almost the first thing he said was what publishers don’t want is another 19^th century saga!  There I was with a book he definitely wasn’t going to be interested in, so I sat up in my hotel room and thought what if it’s World War II and my heroine longs to run a sheep farm and this very Victorian father doesn’t think it’s women’s work. So I began to plan what became Luckpenny Land that night.

The agent listened, and told me to write it, and when you’ve written it, write and remind me about this conversation and then I’ll read it.

I went back to Cumbria and spent a fortnight interviewing farmers, and after nine months I sent the agent the first three chapters and a synopsis. Two days later he rang me up, said he loved it, and would I send him the rest.  He sent out copies to five different publishers and got four offers for it. He sold it on a three book deal to Hodder & Stoughton.

How did you feel once the publishing deal was actually in the bag?

That was so frightening, because I then had to write book two, and they’d paid the money.

And that fear never really leaves you, that whatever it is that helps you won’t be there.

You don’t want to keep writing the same book, and you want to keep the same standard, if not better. You’ve got to challenge yourself and your readers.

Tell me about the book you are working on now.

It’s called Candy Kisses, and is number four in the Champion Street Market series. It’s about sweets and chocolates, but also about adoption and child abuse.

This series is like writing my own soap because it involves the same characters who work around the market. In each book I take a leading character - a stallholder, or a new arrival - and each story has a different theme. 

Have you already got ideas for future books?

Writing five and six of the Champion Street Market series will take me to the end of next year, and then I’ve already got ideas backing up for after that.

Are there any downsides to having a two book a year contract?

Yes: I have to be more organised and I don’t have as much time to experiment. I can’t digress too much and then throw a couple of thousand words away, or put it in a file and save it for another book.  But it’s not just the writing, it’s the rewriting. You’ve got to keep going over it because you put in ‘teasers’, and you might not follow the teasers up, or something occurs to you, and you have to go back and change a chapter. The first draft is always painful, but I love revising, because the book exists. It’s something I can work with, something I can mould and can perfect. And I will revise it dozens and dozens of times until it’s as good as I can make it.

Your books are enduringly popular – you are currently ranked in the top 100 of the most borrowed writers in British libraries. But what about competition from new writers?

You can never rest on your laurels. It’s a tough market, and it is getting tougher as books are now in competition with iPods, the Internet and so on. And because there’s more call on the ‘leisure purse’, books get a smaller slice of the pie.

If you’re going into the book market now, you have to be good because fewer people are published, and publishers have dropped a lot of writers. The assumption that once you get published you’re safe is a falsehood: you’re only as good as your last book.

Is it important for you to receive feedback from readers?

It is, and of course unlike a playwright or an actor, authors don’t see their audience’s reaction. An author is producing something which is on a one-to-one basis; your mind is meeting someone else’s in a way, so it’s a very intimate media.  But I do a lot of library events in England, and give talks, which I enjoy because I actually meet the people who read my books.

Of course the Internet has helped. I do a newsletter on my website, and people email me from the UK, Australia, Canada, wherever, about my books and what they enjoyed about them, and demand sequels to some of them.

You always refer to your readers as “she”. Do chaps read your books too?

I don’t have as many men readers as women, but men still love a good yarn. And even though my books are called romantic fiction, they’re quite gritty, not lovey dovey.

Finally, do you have any complaints about your lot as an author?

The one thing about writing is it’s not a healthy job: I spend hours a day sitting at the computer. The hardest thing is to start writing and the hardest thing when you’ve started is to finish: it’s addictive, and I love writing stories.

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