Last month, I had the pleasure of sitting down and interviewing romance author, Heidi Swain, who is the author of 18 books.
If you know me I love to read and I love to write stories, so it's no surprise that I would jump at the chance of interviewing one of my favourite authors.
And last month I did just that.
Having met Heidi Swain in person at an afternoon tea with herself and Cressida McLaughlin, I was delighted to have the chance of offering to interview her.
So far, she has published 18 novels, two of which are standalones. Her 19th book is being released this Christmas, following her latest release of The Holiday Escape in April this year.
I sat down with Heidi to discuss all things writing-related and Heidi Swain-related too. If you've read some of Heidi's books before, I hope you enjoy the interview below and can get an insight into what her life is like as an author. Alternatively, if you haven't read any of Heidi's books, what are you waiting for?
I'm only joking, it's absolutely fine, but I hope this interview below inspires you to pick one of her stories up because they are just so good.
My interview with Heidi Swain
WriteWatchWork: How did you get into writing? Was becoming an author something you'd always wanted to achieve?
Heidi: It was something I always wanted to do, right from when I was teeny tiny. In fact, I was at my dad's yesterday, celebrating his birthday with him, and we had a walk around the paddock out the back of the house. I said I could remember when I was really really tiny, I had an exercise book with the words The Cherry Tree Club on the front. It was only me in The Cherry Tree Club, an only child, and it was a nature club that I'd started up and I'd got this exercise book so that I could write down all my notes; I'd drag my dad and my step mum around the perimeter of the field, looking for wildlife, flora and fauna.
So that connection with words has always been something I've had forever, but it took me decades to get around to doing anything with it. I studied literature at university, I worked on a newspaper for a year, I had various blogs about things like my chickens, and I wrote for a parish magazine.
I was doing all these things to do with words, and it wasn't until, I think my 40th coming up, that I thought, 'If I don't get a wriggle on, I'm not going to actually do what I really want to do,' which was to see a copy of my book on supermarkets shelves. Once I'd made that decision, it was head down and get on with it.
WriteWatchWork: And how did it feel then to have your first book published and out in the world?
Heidi: It was amazing. The first two books in my first deal were The Cherry Tree Café and Summer at Skylark Farm. They were a digital-first deal, so they were only going to come out as eBooks. The Cherry Tree Café came out and did phenomenally well – thank you Wynbridge.
When Summer at Skylark Farm came out, that was the one that went to paperback first. I remember going to Sainsbury's with my daughter on the day that it came out and it was on the shelf next to J.K. Rowling’s The Cursed Child.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; I’d already held the book because I’d had my author copy, but to see it on the shelf in a supermarket, where someone could actually pick it up and put it in their trolley was just phenomenal.
It was absolutely phenomenal. However, even though we now have 18-19 books, I still get that same buzz when I see it anywhere. I still can’t believe that’s my name and my words sitting on that shelf, or that table. It’s very exciting.
WriteWatchWork: That's good you still get the buzz because it keeps you going and keeps you motivated, I suppose, to write more books and tell more stories.
Heidi: And it keeps giving you fear because you want every book to be better than the last one. It’s really really scary, especially recently branching out into standalones. How are people going to take the standalones when they’re so used to me being a series author? But I think you need a bit of that fear because otherwise you might get a bit complacent and it would get samey. It wouldn’t feel fresh or challenging. So I’ll have the fear but just a little bit.
WriteWatchWork: Exactly. When you had published your first two books, did you notice any changes in the way you approach writing a book?
Heidi: Well, The Cherry Tree Café, which I suppose is the same as anybody's debut, you've got all the time in the world to write it, edit it and sort it out before you decide what you're going to do with it. If you're fortunate enough to secure a contract, you are under a very specific deadline schedule at that point.
I guess that's what changed the most for me; how I approach the write and how much time I had for the write. I always put in a really tidy first draft; I don't tend to put in a first draft and then do a re-write and then do another draft.
The first draft will go in, which will be tweaked, and then hopefully that's immediately ready for the copy editor if I've done my job properly and I've got it right. So it was a case of tightening everything up, but I think the more you do, the more you learn to do that. In that respect, things have changed.
I'm still a planner. I always was a planner. That's me. Very tidy-minded, very list-orientated, and that hasn't changed so much, but I guess I've just had to speed it up a bit.
WriteWatchWork: Following on from that, how long on average does it take you to go from a book idea to having the published product?
Heidi: That is an impossible question to answer really because it varies so much. For example, Underneath the Christmas Tree, which was the second book set at Wynmouth, is set around a potted Christmas Tree plantation, and I had had that idea in my head for at least two years before I could actually start to write it.
I’d read an article in Country Living about somewhere that delivered potted Christmas Trees on a bike in this town – you couldn’t be doing that in Wynmouth, it’s too remote. But I carried that idea for a couple of years in the hope that I would be able to put that in a Christmas book somewhere, so that took a really long time whereas something like The Holiday Escape, which came out in April, that was a much quicker process.
But I would have been planning it for a couple of months before that, so it can kind of range from anything like eight months to a couple of years really, depending on what that spark of inspiration has been and where you can fit it into the publishing timeline.
WriteWatchWork: That's fascinating how it depends on the spark of inspiration as you say. But a lot of your books are very character-focused and community-based as well, so are the characters the first thing you think of when it comes to writing a book or is it the idea first, then the characters?
Heidi: That’s really interesting you should ask that because the planning for The Holiday Escape, all this number of books in and I completely got it wrong. What I tried to do was think about the characters and what their story is first.
No. I can’t do that. I have to imagine it’s like being in the theatre, I have to dress the set, and I’ve got to have the setting secure in my mind, so for The Holiday Escape that’s Kittiwake Cove and then Hollyhock Cottage and the town of Shellcombe. For Nightingale Square, it was obviously the square and the garden at Prosperous Place and Prosperous Place itself.
I have to have the stage set and then I think about who’s going to walk in and why they’re there and what they’re going to do when they get there. So for the last Nightingale Square book, which was That Festive Feeling, I had to look at the houses around Nightingale Square and think, 'I don’t want anybody to leave, so what can I do to get a couple of people away from the square, which will give me the opportunity to bring somebody in?' So I had Mark and Neil going off to Barcelona for Christmas and the New Year, which meant they needed a house sitter so that just worked really really well.
For me, characters come later than the setting itself and then I think I get more of an idea of what I want the story to be about before I decide what the character is going to look like or anything like that. That all actually comes quite late.
WriteWatchWork: I love the analogy of using the theatre there and getting the environment of the books before inserting the people who live there.
Heidi: Yeah. I think I tried to do that differently with The Holiday Escape, because with The Book Lovers' Retreat, that’s where a group of friends go and stay on holiday in a location that’s been used for the film of their favourite book, that idea for that first standalone landed pretty much fully formed.
My daughter and I were watching Sex Education on Netflix, you know that beautiful house, I kept on and on about it and my daughter said to me, 'You can rent it, but it costs a fortune and it’s booked up for the next two or three years.' And that just put the idea in my head that you could actually go and stay somewhere where your favourite book had been filmed.
Because that first standalone idea landed in such a complete, lovely, little package, I thought I’d try something different with The Holiday Escape because I didn’t have an idea for that fly in, I had to sit and think where are we going, what are we doing, and I thought I’ll start by trying to think of whose story I’m telling and what their story’s going to be. I wasted weeks because I just couldn’t get it. I couldn’t get it and then as soon as I could imagine the cove and the house, everything else just started to come in, so lesson learned.
WriteWatchWork: As you just mentioned, it was more challenging writing The Holiday Escape, so do you have any tools to help you get into the writing zone, and subsequently, out of writer's block?
Heidi: I haven’t had writer’s block and to be honest, I haven’t got time for it. Planning, you can sometimes get into a bit of a panic with the planning if the ideas aren’t coming, and the best thing you can do then is to back off. Go for a walk, do something completely different. That frees your mind up and then hopefully things will start to come in and settle.
In terms of actual writing, if I’m writing my first draft, I will never end one day’s work without knowing where I’m picking up the next. I might finish within the middle of a scene, but not very often. I like to finish the day at the end of a chapter, so if I finish the end of that chapter, I will then set up a new page and write the first paragraph so that when I sit down the next day, I will read that and I’m back in the zone, rather than sitting down and looking at chapter 23, and going, What am I doing?
By keeping it in my head that way, for the rest of the day, I’ll still be thinking about what I’m going to write the next day and picturing it all in my head. It’s that whole stage setting thing again so that hopefully when I sit down to write, I’ve got that first paragraph there, I can see it in my head and off we go.
WriteWatchWork: I will have to use that tip because I sometimes do struggle remembering exactly what I wrote the day before, but writing that paragraph in preparation will help refresh your mind and can only be useful.
Heidi: Absolutely, and also, it’s a real temptation, even for me now, I tend to faff and fiddle about the first few chapters, go back to the beginning, read it again. Don’t. You shouldn’t do that. You’ve got to just keep going and I know that, but I feel as if something is not quite working, I want to change it before I move on.
So the most important thing you can do, Abby, is trust your process and find what works for you. It doesn’t matter what anybody else says or what anybody else does. It’s having a go at all these different things and choosing the ones that work best for you.
I know lots of authors who jigsaw write. They’ll have the whole book planned out, but they can’t write Chapter 13 so they’ll write Chapter 27. I couldn’t do that because what I write in Chapter 14 might change what’s going to happen in Chapter 27, so that process doesn’t work for me but it works for other people. Find your way.
WriteWatchWork: Touching on other authors' methods, do you find when you're reading other books that you have an analytical eye, looking at each writer's style, or can you simply enjoy the read?
Heidi: For the most part, I’m in the book. I’m enjoying it. Sometimes, if something trips me up, if I think, 'Oh I wouldn’t have written that sentence that way, I think it would have flowed better that way,' that can trip me up and it can take me a little while to get back into the book.
But generally speaking, that’s a rarity and I will be in it and really enjoying it. And I’m really grateful for that because reading is one of my greatest pastimes and I would hate to be so conscious of analysing everything that I couldn’t enjoy fiction anymore, that would be a real shame.
WriteWatchWork: Would you ever be tempted to write in another genre, or have you previously tried your hand at a different genre?
Heidi: Do you know what, I haven’t. I don’t think I would but then I’ve learnt in this business really you should never say never because sometimes you end up doing things that you never thought you’d do. I didn’t know when I started writing that I’d write one series, let alone three. It wasn’t part of the plan at all. So never say never, but I don’t think I would ever write a different genre. I read a bit of crime, I read a bit of historical, and I’ve got friends who write dual timelines and I really enjoy those. I’ve got another friend who’s a saga writer.
But I’m happy where I am. If I got to the point where I wasn’t happy, then perhaps I would look elsewhere because there’s no point doing it if you’re not enjoying it, so it’s 10 years next year since The Cherry Tree Café came out, it’s unbelievable. But I’m happy where I am, so that’s what I’m going to stick to.
WriteWatchWork: You mentioned earlier that a lot of readers know you as a series writer, but you've now ventured into writing standalones. What was it like making the jump to standalones?
Heidi: It was terrifying, to be honest. I think the first scary thing I did as an author, having had really good success with the Wynbridge series, then my editor said to me, I’d like you to write about somewhere else, so when Sunshine and Sweat Peas came out, the first Nightingale Square book, that was terrifying because everybody loved Wynbridge and I was like, what are they going to think because we’ve gone country to city, urban community, how is that going to work?
It did pretty well, it did alright, haha. But writing standalones was something completely different. My editor asked me to do that, so that was two years ago, and all on the same day, I moved home, I had a big deadline and it was my 50th birthday. It was mad. But everything went really really well, so I was kind of feeling a bit on a high, a bit invincible, so when she said to me, do you fancy writing a standalone, giving that a go – and I’d already got this idea of the whole house thing – I was like, Yeah, go on, why not?
It was scary because you always want to keep the readers you’ve got happy, because my Swain-net squad, they’re amazing. People have read every single book and quite a lot of them have kept all of the books, which is phenomenal. So you want to please those readers but you also want to offer something fresh and a bit different for someone who doesn’t want to get stuck into a series.
That’s how it came about and it was again, just like when I started another new series, it was a really scary thing to do. You just want everyone to love everything you’re doing and I’m a bit of a people-pleaser, so if someone says they don’t like it, that’s horrible, but if someone then explains why, I can take that because you understand why a series might suit them and a standalone didn’t. The standalones, as someone pointed out, have a bit more sauce, was how they put it. There’s a bit more sauce in the standalones than in the series. A little bit.
WriteWatchWork: How do you deal with mixed reviews? Do you read the reviews of your books at all?
Heidi: I always read reviews. The negative ones, sometimes you might find you get an Amazon review that’s one star, 'Parcel was left out in the rain.' Okay, you know that that can go. Nothing to do with me. It’s brought down my review average, which is really frustrating but gotta move on.
But then you also read the other ones about why someone might not have liked something, and you take that on board. There was a review that went on Amazon quite recently for The Holiday Escape and the reader didn’t enjoy it because it was different to the series, she didn’t like a couple of the threads in there, and she didn’t like the sauce I don’t think, and that’s because she was used to the more door-closed of the series.
I read that and think well that’s something I have to expect because the series and the standalones are so different. What I’m trying to say is, unless it’s something really crazy, you can always learn something from it and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to change the way you work or the way you write to please one reader, but it’s always interesting to see if you think there’s something valid there that you can change going forward or something you might need to take onboard.
I think the most important thing is if you came across a few reviews that were all saying the same thing. That’s the point where you want to sit up and properly take notice. It doesn’t happen very often, but like you say, you can’t please everybody, but you’d love to be able to.
If you enjoyed reading the first part of my interview with romance author, Heidi Swain, come back tomorrow to read part two, where we delve deeper into her books as well as completing a fun game of Would You Rather.
Until tomorrow...
I’m loving this interview! Summer at Skylark Farm is my favourite! It made me cry so hard! I’m looking forward to reading Heidi’s latest book (even though it’s a standalone)!
Brilliant!!! She’s such a lovey lady and funny. I need to read more of her books. I’ve read quite a few but not sure I’ve finished a complete series - oops! My bad! Looking forward to part 2. So well written!