LifeOfWriters.com feel lucky to have had the opportunity to interview Lynne Shelby. She is the authors of French Kissing. She will let us know about her writing process, her typical writing day and her best advice for writers.

In 2015 you won the Accent Press & Woman Magazine Writing Competition with the book French Kissing. Congratulations. Can you tell about the writing process for this book? and what do you feel was the hardest part?

When I started writing ‘French Kissing,’ I knew a lot about my characters, and I knew the beginning and the ending of their story, but I had little idea of what was going to happen in between. I jotted down a vague outline of a plot, and then began writing, throwing my hero, Alexandre who lives in Paris, and my heroine, Anna who lives in London, together, and seeing what happened as they interacted. There seemed to be a moment when the characters I’d created took over and almost started telling their own story, making me realise that the story arc I’d thought I was writing didn’t work for the people my characters had become on the page, and I’d have to change it. A minor character in ‘French Kissing’ ended up in a romantic sub-plot, although I had no idea that this was going to happen when I first put her in the book – she was only supposed to be my heroine’s confidante. When I was about three-quarters of the way through my story, I read all of it again from the beginning, making notes as to which characters were introduced in each chapter, and the timescale over which the action took place. By then, I did have a clear idea of my plot’s twists and turns, and it was at this stage that I planned future chapters to keep the action on track. The hardest part of the writing process for me was editing that first draft, recognising that some passages of writing that I liked weren’t right for this story, usually because they didn’t advance the plot in any way, and that I had to delete them – or save them in another file, as a scene that is wrong for one story can work much better in another.

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