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How can you sharpen your craft when the self-critical voice gets louder the more you learn? What kinds of literary devices might enhance your prose? And how do you write an ending that pays off the promise you made to your reader? Amy Jones shares her writing tips after 15 years of teaching storytelling.
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Amy Jones is a writer, lecturer, and researcher who has designed courses and lectured for over a decade on literature, linguistics, and the craft of storytelling. She is the author of multiple books on writing craft, and today we’re talking about The Story Book: Plot, Character, Setting, Genre, Narrative and Literary Devices.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
- Why writing is like being an athlete, and why struggle is a good sign
- The differences between academic writing and writing for a commercial audience
- Endings, killing your darlings, and not underestimating your reader
- Why Dickens could waffle and modern writers can’t
- What Gen Z storytellers on TikTok can teach conventional fiction writers
- Literary devices as a toolkit, and why reading aloud matters in a world of audiobooks
You can find Amy at WoodenBooks.com.
Transcript of the interview with Amy Jones
Jo: Amy Jones is a writer, lecturer, and researcher who has designed courses and lectured for over a decade on literature, linguistics, and the craft of storytelling. She is the author of multiple books on writing craft, and today we’re talking about The Story Book: Plot, Character, Setting, Genre, Narrative and Literary Devices.
So welcome to the show, Amy.
Amy: Hi. Thanks, Jo. Thank you for having me.
Jo: Oh, lots to talk about. First up—
Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.
Amy: Okay. So, I grew up in Somerset, which is where I live again now. There’s a strong literary history here, I think. I went to primary school in Nether Stowey, and was introduced to Samuel Taylor Coleridge very young.
So I think that’s had a strong effect on my interest in writing, which has really always been there.
As soon as I finished my undergraduate degree, I went into teaching, which has now been about 15 years. As you said, I’ve taught across A level and then undergrad. I started a course for undergraduates with a very good friend of mine with the University of Plymouth, and covered literature, linguistics, creative writing.
So I have been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades in the writing world, and loved it. My connection with writing has really been… it’s a lovely opportunity for me to download all of that teaching knowledge that I’ve had over these years.
I was in touch with John Martineau, who is my publisher at Wooden Books, and he was interested in creating a series of storybooks, or story writing books.
I was originally starting that with that friend, my good friend Emma Craigie, who is a writer. But she had other projects in mind, so the six small books and then the large Story Book all came to me, which has just been a delight. So it’s been one a year for the last seven, eight years, and that has culminated in The Story Book now.
Jo: Yes. So we’ll come back to The Story Book in a minute.
In terms of your writing history, has it all been non-fiction, or do you also write fiction?
Amy: I do write fiction, but I don’t tend to put it out there. I find the more that I have expertise in the craft of storytelling, the more I’m self-critical of my own work.
Jo: Oh.
Amy: I’m a really big fan of Horace, and especially the Ars Poetica, and he has a wonderful line in there about how he considers himself to be a whetstone, upon which, largely, fiction writers sharpen their craft. So I use that model for myself.
I spend a lot of time these days—as well as academia, which we’ll talk about—doing consultancy work for scriptwriting, media companies, but also novels and fiction at the same time. So that’s where I’ve found myself.
Jo: I think that’s really interesting, because that whetstone idea, and if people don’t know, that’s W-H-E-T-stone, right? Where you can use it to sharpen a knife. So essentially you’re helping other people sharpen their skills.
I actually really love that metaphor. I guess essentially you’re a teacher, but also a form of editor in that way. That is a role that editors play too, isn’t it?
Amy: Exactly, yes. It is a gorgeous quote, and that text is one that I come back to time and time again if I’m ever in doubt about my feedback.
Horace is my guy. Yes, I especially love that whetstone metaphor.
Jo: That’s great. It’s interesting.
You mention there the self-critical thing, in terms of the more you learn, the more self-critical you become. So how do you balance that for your students then?
Because I know I recognise that, and I’m sure many people listening also recognise that. It’s like you see your flaws more easily.
Amy: Yes, exactly, which is very valuable. I think what a lot of creative writers are looking for, in my experience, is someone to be that kind of critical friend.
You never want to rip somebody to pieces, but if you can put your finger on the one particular element which is bringing their story down, or which they haven’t recognised as an integral part which they need to blow up a little bit more, it’s a wonderful symbiotic relationship between that role and the writer themselves.
Jo: How do you encourage writers who want to publish more of their work? How do you encourage them past that point? Because let’s face it, the manuscript is never finished, just abandoned, right? Whoever said that. I mean, that’s true of so much of art.
How do you help other people get over that critical voice?
Amy: Mm, yes, the self-critical voice. I think to say, “Just get it down. Get it down.” It’s your idea, it’s your baby, and then use the critical friend.
I think it’s hard to entirely do that on your own, because we know that old adage of the need to kill your darlings, and a big part of my job is building that relationship with writers or creatives, to the point where it’s very easy to be defensive of elements of your story that you feel are integral or you’re really attached to.
If you have an outside voice which says, “I understand, and these are your great strengths, but this one thing just isn’t working,” that can be really valuable to the final piece.
I know the critical voice is always there when you’re creating, but—I’ve just said I’m a victim of it myself—as much as possible to ignore it, I think, and push through.
I think a lot of the time I find myself saying… people often think that writing should be easy, but it’s not. It’s like being an athlete.
You may be, I don’t know, naturally flexible and therefore a good gymnast, but if you don’t train, and you don’t know that mistakes are a really positive thing that will eventually lead to you improving your performance, then it’s not going to get there.
So I always say struggle is good. If you find you’re struggling and you’re wrestling with that critical element, that’s a good sign. Just push through it, keep doing it. Let the mistake be there, and then you can come back and revisit it, or someone will help you to address it. That’s my take.
Jo: I’m glad you said that. I mean, this whole “think it should be easy” thing. I feel like some people, as you say, they think it should be easy, and if it’s not easy, then they think they’re doing it wrong. Whereas what we’re basically saying is—
Writing is hard. Writing a book is really, really hard.
It’s hard work, and people are like, “Oh, well, if it’s not easy, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.” I’m like, yes, it’s good work, but it is work. I mean, there’s these moments of happy flow or whatever, but to be honest, they’re quite few and far between in my experience.
Amy: Yes, exactly. There’s a lot of walking and thinking on your own, which is part of that training. Again, it’s that athlete metaphor, with the very best writers making writing look easy.
I’ve written in the introduction to this book that there is that common trick that Truman Capote used to say a lot, which was that he just started. He didn’t train.
Jo: Mm-hmm.
Amy: Which is part of an illusion that perhaps writers like to build around themselves. Truman Capote definitely did train, partly through reading a lot, and getting things wrong.
We see the best athletes at the Olympics, and they look fantastic. We see the best writers in their final products, and we don’t see the struggle, and that’s part of the skill. The struggle is there. It’s just silent.
Jo: Yes, and we’re comparing our first draft to somebody’s finished, edited, complete book. So it is really hard.
Then I also wanted to talk to you about the academic side. So you’re working in academia. You’re working on a PhD in English. I recently finished a master’s, and I was like, oh, my goodness, this wrestling with academic writing, it’s very, very different to commercial mainstream writing.
Now, I would say that The Story Book and your books on craft are pretty, well, literary and verging on academic, but still are commercial, right? There aren’t footnotes on every page and all of that kind of thing.
What do you find are the main differences between academic writing and writing in a more commercial way?
Amy: Hmm. In some ways, the similarities, I think, are stronger than the differences, but the differences are where we hit a wall sometimes.
I think academic writing is still storytelling. I think academic writing does suffer a lot from people feeling like they have to sound very clever. I think it shouldn’t be inaccessible. I’m a big fan of the plain English society, in that sense.
So, yes. I have got two excellent supervisors who are always telling me to be clearer, to be more concise, which is just how you want to be in storytelling. I think the two big differences for me when I’m doing academic writing is I have to slightly dial down the… I love playing with language, as I’m sure we’ll discuss later.
I really like, especially, sounds within language. So I do run away with the occasional whimsical sentence, which I have to then come back and edit. I’m just a real sucker for alliteration, and that doesn’t necessarily have a place there. Also, like you say, it’s the footnoting, it’s the referencing.
The Story Book is academic in that it draws on an awful lot of sources, but I’m not engaging in critical argument in the same way that academia requires. Which is a joy in many ways when you’re writing like that, actually.
Jo: I think the other thing I found sort of annoying, as someone who writes primarily commercially, for being read, is that these essays that I spent so long on have an audience of one. Well, I was one, I suppose, and then my professor was the other one.
Obviously academics aim to get published in some way, but the readership is so much smaller, whereas obviously with The Story Book it’s going to be read by far more people.
So how do you deal with that in your head, around who’s the audience?
Amy: Yes, that’s a really good question. The academia, mine is very niche. My PhD is on, how do I explain it? The Welsh March, the English-Welsh borders in the medieval period, and how the myths surrounding that went from marvels and wonders to more chivalric acts.
So that is a very niche audience of medieval Celtic scholars, essentially. So I can rely on the fact that some of the references I make, they’re going to be very, very familiar with.
Whereas with The Story Book, because I’m trying to cater to scriptwriters, even social media creators, there’s a page in there, and poets with the different literary devices, it is broad.
It also means that I can draw on far more variety. There’s quite a lot of classical scholarship in there, but there’s also Back to the Future, and that’s alongside Jane Eyre. I have a page on chiasmus, and that has a quote from Macbeth, and then a quote from Snoop Dogg in it.
So the range is far wider, and I’ve tried to go for a lot of popular culture alongside the classical. Obviously academia, especially my particular field, is not… I couldn’t bring Snoop Dogg into my medieval essay.
Jo: I’ll try. Well, I guess there’s…
Amy: I’m not sure how that will go.
Jo: Yes, I guess on the commercial side also, there’s the kind of permissions that you need for a commercial project, versus when you’re quoting things for an academic essay that’s not necessarily being published anywhere. It’s quite different.
The other thing I found was that I never really found a moment of flow when I was writing essays.
I was always questioning what I was claiming or what I was trying to say, and then trying to support that with other things.
So it was very stoppy-starty, versus when I’m writing, say, a nonfiction book, even on topics I know really well, I can crank through thousands of words, whereas the academic writing, it’s so dense. That’s really interesting.
Amy: Yes, and especially with master’s and PhDs, you’re almost formulating your ideas as you go, because they are these extended pieces of writing. So whereas if you have a plot in mind as you’re writing and you know you need to get from A to B, you can get into the flow.
Although I have found that the approach in the academic writing that has really worked for me has been to know my next step, and then to just dump every single piece of information I could possibly need, every reference, every person, onto a Word document, and then I can just pull from it and write as I go.
Although it’s not for the whole piece. I get temporary flow from, yes, a big vat of research before I start. That does help.
Jo: Yes, whereas I also love the research. I feel like the research… You must love research, because The Story Book is just packed with amazing stuff.
So does your research process differ between your PhD and this book, for example?
Amy: Yes. I mean, in that I know how many page spreads I have with the Wooden Books and with The Story Book. So I know broadly what my limits are, and then I do love research. I will just go down into a lovely big hole of research for a couple of days, and put in all the potential quotes I could use.
I do have, from that teaching and across those different fields, quite a large bank of things in my head. But discovering new things is a huge joy. So yes, it’s been a lovely thing to put together, actually.
It’s really brought me into more texts that aren’t necessarily my genre. I have always been a big fan of Gothic literature, but never too heavily into sci-fi, but I’ve dabbled in that for some of this research too. So yes, it’s gorgeous.
Jo: So much fun. Right. Well, The Story Book itself goes into every element of the writing craft. It is such a compendium, I guess, and you also teach these things with students. So we can’t get into everything, but I wondered—
What are the elements that you find are common issues with new writers, and any sort of tips for them?
Amy: Yes. Again, that’s a really lovely question, because it depends on the individual, but there are a few things that I find are my hills to die on, I suppose. One is endings.
That is a real point of fixation for me, because especially these days—and I see it not just in written fiction, but also in a lot of modern media and film—people tend to fall in love with a pitch or an idea or a concept, and then begin writing it, and then slightly panic and not know where the ending is.
The ending is, to me, almost the promise that you make to your reader or to your audience, that which pays for their commitment. You are going to give them a payoff. So I am always saying, “Okay, how are we going to wrap this up in a way that feels like it’s a whole cohesive piece, so that we’re not falling down at the ending?”
So for new writers, I think really thinking about your ending. Of course, come up with a lovely concept and do fall in love with your idea, but think about how you’re going to actually wrap that up in a satisfying way. I have a whole section on great endings in here, too.
As I mentioned earlier, killing your darlings, I think, is a common issue for new writers. Just getting attached to certain characters, or even certain lengthy descriptions, and having to accept that they need to be cut.
I think sometimes just underestimating the reader is a common mistake. I’m interested in the idea of the death of the author, and the idea that once you’ve written something, it doesn’t actually belong to you anymore, and people are going to make of it what they will, and you have to accept that.
That’s part of why people love reading so much. It’s a subjective experience. So not trying to spoon-feed your own agenda too heavily, but just weaving the story and telling it as best you possibly can. I think those are my top three. So endings, killing your darlings, and not to underestimate your reader.
Jo: Yes, I feel like readers are much more sophisticated now. I love James Michener. I used to read a lot of James Michener when I was younger, as a teenager, back in the ’80s and ’90s, and I went back to read one more recently, The Source, which was one of my favourite ones, about Israel.
I was quite shocked by the writing and some of the references. I just had not remembered a lot of that style that obviously he’d been writing decades before, and so it was quite dated, and it was quite different.So that happens, doesn’t it?
The way readers have changed and the way modern readers are, I think we do have to be aware of that.
For example, if you’re writing for people who love detective fiction, you have to be blooming good to stop them just being bored.
Amy: Yes. Yes, exactly. I think keeping people’s attention is undoubtedly much, much more challenging these days.
There’s an exercise I used to do with students, which was to give them a sentence from a Dickens novel and to try and make it a sentence which would be applicable today.
Dickens had the luxury of people who weren’t distracted by televisions and mobile phones and this fast-paced world that we live in, so he could have a good old waffle in his sentences.
So yes, I think recognising that is really important. I’m a big fan of more minimalist writers, like Cormac McCarthy. I really love how pared back a lot of his writing is. And yes, for crime, Raymond Chandler is a big influence for me, I think. He’s really good at keeping things minimal and writing really good dialogue, too.
Jo: Yes, just on Dickens, didn’t Dickens write a lot of serials for newspapers and was paid by word count?
Amy: Yes. Yes, exactly.
Jo: So…
Amy: That is very convenient, isn’t it?
Jo: That explains it. I mean, people are like, “Why is it so long?” And it’s like, well, it wasn’t so long. It was in the paper every week or whatever, and then put together into books later.
When people use older comparison titles for more modern books, it just doesn’t make sense, right?
Because it’s just a very different scenario.
Amy: Exactly, yes. I mean, Dickens was very canny in that sense.
Jo: Yes, he’s like, “Make more money by really long sentences.”
Amy: Yes, but as you say, it’s not going to work in this kind of market, unfortunately. I think he was arguably the first writer to go viral, right? I’m trying to remember which one it was.
I think The Old Curiosity Shop was one of the first novels which caused fights when the next serial came out. I think that’s the right one.
When the next episode, as it were, came out, and it was transported over to America, there were fights at the port to access the next one. So there are common links in terms of going viral, I suppose. But, yes, he had the luxury of much more time.
Jo: Yes, much more. Less competition as well.
Amy: Exactly.
Jo: No, it’s crazy. I mean, serial fiction is a thing again. Certainly in Asia, obviously the serial fiction on people’s phones is huge, and starting to come into the West, I think.
Just then coming back to tips, you’ve done a few for new writers, but then a lot of people listening have a lot of books. I have nearly 50 books, and there’s people listening who have a lot more than that.
So there’s lots of us who’ve been doing this for decades, but we still want to get better. We’re always looking to improve our craft. I was quite delighted going through your book and going, “Oh my goodness, I just haven’t even heard of that,” which is crazy.
So how can more mature writers improve, or even figure out where to improve?
Amy: Mm. Yes. I think the key is knowing what you’re good at, and also maybe recognising your own tropes as well.
I have a friend who writes screenplays, and she was saying to me the other day, “I just can’t stop writing about old ladies. They’re always the central character, and I need to break out of that habit.” So maybe experimenting in that sense.
I think just read, read, read, watch, watch, watch. Some of this book has little exercises at the back to help with playing with new things and experimenting, and, again, knowing that they’re not always going to work. But just trying it on, I guess, like trying on a different outfit.
Some things are going to work with your personal style, and some aren’t.
I’m very annoying to, for example, watch films with, because I will apply all of this literary analysis, and my poor partner sits next to me while I’m saying, “Oh, well, they haven’t done this inciting incident very quickly,” or, “That wasn’t a very convincingly developed character, far too static.”
So I think allowing yourself to read not just things which are notoriously good, but perhaps things which are not so good, and practising that evaluation, which then leads to the self-evaluation, is a really good exercise.
I think also reading classics again. Horace is my big one, but there is so much classical writing on writing.
Also, in some of the consultancy work I’ve been doing recently, I’ve been working with a lot of people who are interested in storytelling online, for example. I’ve been really gratified to see that there’s a big swing back towards storytelling in that medium.
There’s also a lot of criticism, or kind of snobbery, about it. But the younger generation, these Gen Zers, are telling stories in some quite interesting and innovative ways. In a lot of ways, they’re more multimodal, almost right back to the very origins of storytelling.
So I think even just keeping an eye on how the younger generation are modifying storytelling for their own usage is also really interesting. It’s something I’d avoided for years, but I’ve increasingly found myself, A, giving feedback in that world, and B, appreciating it a little bit more too.
Jo: Do you mean TikTok, for example?
Amy: Yes. Which is odd, because I really don’t use social media myself. I’m not a big poster of things, but I haunt the internet.
I think watching a TikTok video or an Instagram post, or even YouTube Shorts, is really interesting, because I can apply a lot of classical literary ideas to these things, but you can also see how they’re developing and moving storytelling forward.
So yes, reading backwards, but also looking at the next generation. They are doing some interesting things. It’s a mixed bag, obviously.
Jo: Yes. Well, I almost feel like… I went to a reunion back at Oxford earlier this year, and there were a load of us 50-year-olds.
We went to one of the clubs that we used to go to back in the day, and we were there in one of these clubs, and all the students had just come back from one of the terms, whatever it was. We just had this moment of looking over and going, “This is not our place anymore. What are we doing here?”
Just that feeling of “this is not my place”, that is how I feel about TikTok. Maybe we all just have our own space as well. So you’re kind of outside looking in, and you’re an academic and a researcher.
I feel like for myself, as a commercial writer, I just cannot do that. I just can’t be on it. I can’t speak the language, and I can’t seem to use it myself.
Amy: No, I’m exactly the same. And I’m not saying that everyone should be hopping on and getting a TikTok account. I don’t think that’s the way forward.
Jo: Excellent.
Amy: But I do think just watching them, and almost understanding that younger generation, is really interesting to me. Again, I certainly wouldn’t advocate for that being necessary.
Jo: Oh, good. Yes, everyone’s relaxing now.
Amy: Goodness me. I mean, I don’t do it myself, as I say, but just watching how they’re creating things. I think they’re getting quite good at telling stories in a very concise way, and almost, yes, going beyond the word.
I have this interesting theory, as I mentioned, which is that it’s taking us back to the very origins of storytelling, sitting around a campfire. Much more sound, much more visual. Ad I think that can pull through into some more conventional fiction. Writers could perhaps pull through some of those examples.
We’re not trying to emulate it, but it’s just as valuable, I think, as looking backwards.
Jo: Yes, and then coming to the part of the book on literary devices, I feel like… when I was reading that section, I was like, “Oh, yes, I know what that is. I just didn’t know that I would call it a literary device.”
So can you go through a few things that you like in terms of literary devices?
Amy: Yes. They’re so fun. I think the wonderful thing about storytelling in all forms is it’s half science and half art, and the literary devices are the really lovely, playful, artistic stuff where you can really show your true self.
There’s a quote I think I use from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a letter to Wordsworth, where he says that writing is about the truth of nature, but it’s also the power of giving the interest of novelty by modifying the colours of the imagination.
So literary devices allow you to give everyday objects a new, novel twist.
I think being playful with things like syntax. So that chiasmus example I gave earlier is the Snoop Dogg, with your mind on your money and your money on your mind. But also “fair is foul and foul is fair” in Macbeth.
So yes, playing with syntax, using things like anastrophe, where you change the word order in a sentence, or playing with sound.
As I mentioned, that’s something I’m really interested in. I sometimes do workshops where I encourage people to try and tell a well-known story just through sounds, and get people re-enacting the Titanic, for example, just through sound effects, and then people have to guess them.
I think, like you mentioned, a large part of the literary devices is they’re things that you may quite happily use regularly, or you come across and appreciate, and it’s quite nice to give them that little label and to understand the history of them and the effect they can have.
So again, I would certainly not suggest that everyone tries to jam in as many literary devices as they possibly can in their writing. It’s more about realising what you already know, and hopefully then putting that within your toolkit as a writer, to deploy as and when you think you want to add that little bit of novelty.
Modifying the colours of imagination, again, to come back to Coleridge.
Jo: Yes, it’s interesting. That sound thing, I feel, has changed a lot over the last, I guess, 10 years, but more so the last five years. A lot of books have moved into audio, and I certainly have re-edited some books, and now I do a lot more of my own audiobooks.
Sometimes when you’re reading in your head, you don’t notice the sounds. You almost don’t notice repeated sounds on a page. While you might notice repeated words, you don’t notice repeated sounds until you say them aloud. So when a book is an audiobook, some things really stand out that they don’t on the page.
Like the word “said”. We’re always told, “Oh, just use said. You don’t use a whole load of other words.” But in an audiobook, it sounds awful to just say “said” all the time, because it’s a repeated word. So have you noticed things changing? I guess you mentioned the multimodal, but—
Have you noticed things changing for the audio space?
Amy: Yes. And again, that is to come back to that advice for new writers. Reading aloud is a piece of advice we always give people. It’s not one that I necessarily always do myself, though it’s a really good way of working out the sound of your piece.
We live in a world of audiobooks where people might be listening while they’re pottering around, doing something else. That’s the thing that can really catch people’s attention. So yes, I think people are slightly modifying for that.
I just listened to the new Rachel Cusk book, actually, while I was trying to work on something else. I was distracting myself, and she certainly seems to have modified some of that.
She’s read it herself as well. I think when it’s your own work and you’re reading it aloud, as you mentioned, you notice these things a lot more. I’m noticing it a little bit, but not a huge amount. I wonder if that’s something that we need to pay a little bit more attention to as writers, actually.
It’s an interesting point. A little bit, I guess, is my answer, but not as much as perhaps we can. I’m racking my brains for any other contemporary examples which do it really well.
Jo: I think there’s a contemporary example of an audiobook that’s done really well. It’s zombie. World War Zed, or World War Z, by Max Brooks, which is an oral history of the zombie war. People might have seen the movie with Brad Pitt, but the book is excellent.
I saw the movie, then I read the book, read it in my head on a Kindle, and then I listened to the audiobook. The audiobook is, I think, the perfect way, because it’s an oral history, and every chapter is a different character from a different country.
So a Japanese survivor, and then, say, a British survivor or whatever. To me it’s meant to be an audiobook. It’s one of those kinds of experiences. So to have these ideas that the book is presented in different forms for different experiences, I think is quite wonderful.
Amy: Mm. You’ve just reminded me, there is a really gorgeous BBC, I think it’s 1960s, adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, which is an incredible dystopian short story.
Similarly, it’s naturally designed for sound effects, and especially the fact that it’s a 1960s recording really adds to it. Sorry, I can’t remember what your original question was. I was really excited to talk about Ray Bradbury.
Jo: No, it’s all good. Well, then—
Is The Story Book in audio?
Amy: No, it’s not, but that’s a really good question, because it would work very well for that format, I think. Although, because The Story Book is designed to be concise, there are a lot of quite complex ideas which are represented in diagrams instead, which allows you to get that idea across in a really lovely visual format.
So an audiobook would require some kind of little description of those diagrams. But, yes, especially those literary devices would work. That’s a good idea. Thanks, Jo. I’m writing that down.
Jo: Yes. Write that down. Well, I think any audiobook can also be some kind of adaptation, so adapted for audio. Also, I’m sure you’ve seen this on any of the audio apps, you can usually attach a PDF for any things that you refer to in the text.
I think, obviously we’re all listeners here on this show, there’s a lot of people listening, and it is one of the things that many of us audio-first people do. We want to listen to books, and then we might buy it in other formats as well.
There’s evidence to show that a lot of audio listeners also buy another format. So I think it’s definitely something to suggest.
Amy: Mm. Yes. I’ll be emailing my publisher after this.
Jo: About that. I might mention it too.
Amy: Thanks, Jo. That would be great.
Jo: Well, just coming back to those highly illustrated visual elements, and you mentioned earlier that you had page spreads that made it clear what your word count would be.
So how much were you involved in the book design as the writer? Did you have to write differently in order to allow for those visual elements?
Amy: Yes. John Martineau and Steven Parsons—so John is my publisher and Steven is the editor—are really very good at involving you in those kinds of decisions, and also really good at turning things into diagrams.
So every now and again, they would turn something I’ve written into a diagram and then bounce it back to me to double check, just to make sure it’s conveying what I needed it to, and yes, they largely do.
As I say, in my PhD I’m doing a lot of work with maps, to try and visualise some of the detailed patterns that I’m seeing, which is helping me to convey those ideas more clearly. It’s the same kind of thing, really.
Especially in the later books, we got quite into… there are some lovely linoprints and hand sketches in there, which I’m a big fan of. So the design of it has been a group project, and it’s come together really nicely, actually.
Jo: So did that make it a much longer experience?
If you were writing a chapter and then iterating with the diagrams, how long was that sort of process?
Amy: These guys are relatively pacey, actually. And of course I overwrite tremendously, and then we go through an editing process to make it as concise as possible, because, as you say, there is an awful lot in there, because it’s trying to cater for a lot of audiences with a lot of exercises.
So yes, I think it was a book a year for the smaller books, and then The Story Book meant that we reviewed all of those smaller books. I have put in some new material as well, and taken out some things which maybe I felt weren’t as relevant anymore. So it’s been a relatively quick process.
I know in total I think we’ve been about eight years, but it’s felt fast.
Jo: Well, that’s great. It’s good you also have that ongoing relationship, because I feel like a lot of people have different relationships with their publishers. Sometimes it’s fantastic, and sometimes people are in massive publishing houses, whereas you’re with a small publishing house, right?
Amy: Yes. Yes, exactly, which is nice, because it’s been a consistent relationship all the way through, and quite an easy dialogue. That is a real privilege.
Jo: Mm. Yes. Just so people know, I’m going to have John hopefully on the show to talk about the publishing side, because I have a small publishing press, and other people listening also, many of us run our own publishing company, so we’re interested in that side as well.
So, for listeners, that will come along at some point. But in the meantime—
Where can people find you and your books online?
Amy: Well, having advocated looking at modern storytelling, I’m very anonymous online. The easiest way to find me is through my publisher, so that’s Wooden Books.
I think it’s just woodenbooks.com, and they will pass any kind of direct contact or requests on to me. The books are available in all good bookstores, online and on the high street.
Jo: Brilliant. So thanks so much for your time, Amy. That was great.
Amy: Thank you so much, Jo. It’s been a pleasure.