The art of writing a novel - Penny Vincenzi at the Henley Literary Festival

After snapping up tickets for loads of literary festivals in quick succession, I’d resolved not to blog about them for a while. But then I went to a talk by Penny Vincenzi at the Henley Literary Festival and she came up with such good advice for would-be novelists that I’m reneging on my promise.

Vincenzi is a big hitter in the novel-writing stakes. A former journalist who cut her writing teeth on the Daily Mirror (her great mentor was the legendary agony aunt and columnist Marje Proops), she writes massive tomes about love and loss, hope and despair. Her first novel, Old Sins, was published in 1989 and since then she has written 14 cracking bestsellers and sold more than seven million books. Whether she’s writing about the aftermath of a terrible motorway pile-up, as she did in The Best of Times, or about a child caught in the middle of a harrowing divorce, as she does in her latest, The Decision, her books are heartrending (they often make me cry) and utterly compelling.

A tiny figure with hair cut in a chic blonde bob and wearing an elegant cream jacket, Vincenzi charmed the audience who’d assembled in the echoey hall at Henley Town Hall on Saturday.

The Decision runs to 757 pages and took her 18 months to write, but she admitted that it had originally been 70,000 words longer. “I write too much and I talk too much – it’s all the same thing,” she said self-deprecatingly. Down-to-earth and highly disciplined, she works at her desk – either at her home in Wimbledon or her cottage on the Gower Peninsula – seven days a week and writes from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon. After lunch and perhaps some additional research, she returns to her laptop and doesn’t break off again till The Archers starts on Radio 4. When she finally gets to the end of a novel she pours herself a very large whisky – “whatever time it is” – even though she never drinks whisky at any other time.

The best bit of the talk came when interviewer Philippa Kennedy asked what advice she’d give to budding novelists. Quick as a flash, Vincenzi offered the following three suggestions:

1. “Characters are all. If you get your characters right they will sort out the plot.”

2. "Every book has an Act Three, a turning point when something happens that means nothing can ever be the same again.”

3. "The monster in the cupboard” - a secret that the readers are in on but the characters have no idea about – until, of course, the monster springs out of the cupboard, often with devastating repercussions.

PS: Vincenzi doesn’t read other people’s novels when she’s immersed in writing but her favourites are Maeve Binchy, Jilly Cooper, Joanna Trollope, PD James, Ruth Rendell and Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. The book she first read as a teenager (and which inspired her to write) was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.

The Decision by Penny Vincenzi (Headline Review, £19.99)

Kay Burley and Bella Pollen at the Henley Literary Festival

I bet the organisers of the Henley Literary Festival could scarcely believe their luck. Of all the weeks to host their five-day event, they’d chosen the glorious last days of summer, when the sun shone, temperatures soared and we all bared our legs again.

Sitting on the terrace at Bix Manor, a pretty country hotel two miles up the road from Henley (above), everything seemed right with the world. I sipped afternoon tea, gazed out across the fields and listened to a journalist I vaguely recognised relating why she’d written a piece about her sex life in one of the morning papers.

I’d booked a ticket to hear Sky TV presenter Kay Burley and writer Bella Pollen discuss their new books. They’re both highly successful in their fields but I was mystified as to why they’d been teamed up. Burley’s first novel is a bonkbuster about a lothario prime minister and the women in his life, while The Summer of the Bear, Pollen’s latest, is set in the Outer Hebrides and tells of three siblings struggling to cope with the loss of their father. The women’s totally different styles were evident by the outfits they’d chosen - Burley wearing a sleeveless silk dress and heels, Pollen clad in jeans and Converse.

But despite the incongruity, it worked a treat. Burley has spent years interviewing the best known politicians and showbiz names in the world on live TV, yet was surprisingly nervous. She admitted that her hands were shaking and that she’s “a novice on the literary circuit.” Not only that, when it came to reading an excerpt from her book, First Ladies, she suddenly panicked that she’d left her glasses outside. Pollen immediately leaned over to offer hers – and Burley’s face lit up with gratitude. In a way the gesture seemed to bond them and after that the event whizzed by in a flash (brilliantly chaired by journalist Philippa Kennedy).

Burley reckoned that her thirty-year TV career was down to “ninety per cent hard work and ten per cent luck.” A single mum, she revealed that her teenage son was starting university that very day – he’s studying politics at the LSE – and that she’d often had to drop everything at the last minute to rush off on stories. She decided to write her novel after being approached to do her autobiography and said she’s “in advanced discussions with Hollywood” about a movie of First Ladies. She's already delivered her second novel, Betrayal, to her publisher. In fact she wrote much of it in the back of a van on the front line in Libya (how impressive is that?) and it’s due out in 2012.

I hadn’t read First Ladies before the talk so when I got home I downloaded it. Hmmm. I don’t want to be mean but it’s not a masterpiece. The plot seems old-hat and the prose surprisingly wooden. During the talk, Burley had talked movingly about her beloved late parents falling in love when they both worked in a cardboard box factory and her “humble beginnings” in Wigan. If she could write a novel based on all that, then I reckon she’d be on to a winner.

FRIDAY BOOK REVIEW: The Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen

The first of my regular Friday book reviews. There'll be a mix of paperbacks and hardbacks, old and new, grown-ups and children's reads - so watch this space every Friday.

Back in the 1980s Bella Pollen was one of Princess Diana’s favourite designers, famed for her sharply-cut jackets in jewel-bright colours.

Then she decided fashion wasn’t for her and switched to writing novels instead. Over the years she’s written about everything from aristocrats to the Arizona desert, but her fifth novel is the compelling story of a family rocked by loss and bereavement during the Cold War.

The Summer of the Bear begins in the summer of 1979, when diplomat Nicky Fleming falls to his death from the roof of the British embassy in Bonn. Struggling to come to terms with her loss and unable to believe whispers that he killed himself after betraying his country, his widow Letty takes their three children back to the desolate Hebridean island where she grew up.

But as Letty seeks to unravel the secrets behind Nicky’s death she’s oblivious to her children’s anguish. At one point she observes that they don’t seem like a family any more – “more like a collection of damaged souls.”

Pollen is brilliant at portraying the bewilderment of the Fleming children. First they have to cope with losing their father, then they’re uprooted to a windswept isle where locals serve up a delicacy of seaweed and boiled milk (ugh) and electricity is considered “a mysterious foreign game recently adopted as the island’s national sport.”

Bookish 17-year-old Georgie is preoccupied with trying to uncover the truth behind her father’s puzzling last trip to East Berlin while her younger sister Alba has become a prickly 14-year-old who’s shockingly spiteful to her siblings.

But it’s eight-year-old Jamie who’s the emotional heart of the book. An adorable little boy who takes everything literally, he believes the father he worshipped is “lost,” not dead, and will eventually return. On the day he died his father had promised to take him to the circus so when a tame grizzly bear escapes from his wrestler owner on the island, Jamie is inextricably drawn to the beast – with calamitous results.

The novel shifts back and forth between East and West Germany and the Outer Hebrides, where Pollen spent her childhood summers. Narrated by each character in turn, including the bear himself, it’s a gentle, haunting tale and highly recommended.

The Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen (Pan, £7.99)

PS: I’ve just got back from a great talk by Bella Pollen and Kay Burley at the Henley Literary Festival so will blog all about it soon.

Pining for France – and worrying about the dormouse in the attic

Six weeks after leaving the House With No Name in friends' capable hands, I’m pining for my tumbledown farmhouse in the middle of rural France.

I’m worried about the fate of the loir, the sweet-looking dormouse that kept us awake scratching in the attic all night. Will it have outwitted Monsieur Noel, the charming pest man, or will it have departed this world once and for all? I’m anxious that our neighbours might have taken offence because I dropped a canapé they gave me in a plant pot when they weren’t looking and I'm fretting that the dodgy roof of the adjoining barn might have collapsed.

But most of all I’m missing the way of life in the Drôme, the unspoiled region between the Rhône Valley and the foothills of the Alps I fell in love with six years ago. It isn’t half as famous as Provence, its southern neighbour, but the countryside is far greener and more lush, with majestic crags and limestone cliffs that tower over the landscape.

If I was there now I'd be looking forward to the bustling Friday morning market at Dieulefit, where we buy freshly-baked bread, fruit and vegetables. The name Dieulefit comes from the saying Dieu l’a fait (God made it) and the area's known for its clean air and artistic connections. Artists and ceramicists flock to sell their work at the market – from pretty watercolours to hand-thrown plates the Conran Shop would give its eye-teeth for.

My other favourite places are the village of Saou (above), with its shady square and restaurant under the trees, and the ski resort of Col de Rousset. Not because I like skiing, mind you, but because in the summer months you can take the chairlift to the top, hire mini-scooters and helmets and whiz down the mountainside. Typically, my daredevil teenage son loves zooming down the red run at breakneck speed so much that he does it four times on the trot.

Then there are the villages perchés, the tiny hilltop villages perched high above the surrounding countryside. Le Poët-Laval, where an order of 12th Century knights kept watch from their fortified keep, is one of the most beautiful. After climbing to the top to admire the view across sunlit fields of lavender we stop for tea and homemade lemon cake at La Bouquinnerie, the charming café and second-hand bookshop halfway down.

I need to go back...

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Forget happiness lessons - five things that make me happy

The news that children are being taught how to be happy made me unutterably depressed. Lots of schools across the country (Wellington College in Berkshire for one) are already giving happiness lessons – to help pupils banish pessimistic thoughts and cope with whatever life throws at them.

I know the summer's nearly over (apart from the current mini heatwave) and the economy's a mess – but surely things aren’t so dire that we need happiness lessons? At the risk of sounding like Pollyanna, the little girl in the children’s story who melted the heart of her embittered old aunt by finding a silver lining in every cloud, I’ve come up with a list of five things that have made me smile recently:

1. My daughter’s face when the publicists at Lauren Kate’s book launch asked her to pose with two bare-chested waiters wearing bow-ties and wings.

2. My son’s face when I promised to take him biking again in Gloucestershire at the weekend. The downside is that while he leaps off sky-high ramps, I’ll sit in the car and try not to look.

3. Nails Inc's divine Porchester Square nail polish. It's a sort of beigy grey and makes even my nails look good. Which after a lifetime of typing is quite a feat.

4. The prospect of reading The Affair, Lee Child’s new Jack Reacher book. It’s out tomorrow (Thursday September 29) and I can’t wait... By the way, can you believe that Tom Cruise is going to be playing the maverick ex-army cop in One Shot, the forthcoming movie of the ninth Jack Reacher novel? No, me neither.

5. The news that House With No Name has been nominated for the Cosmo Blog Awards 2011. There’s still time to vote here – and I’d be thrilled if you would. Enter your email address and then select the Lifestyle Blog with Handpicked Media category. Click on House With No Name, then on Vote. Thank you so so much.

A party to celebrate novelist Lauren Kate's mega-selling Fallen series

Lauren Kate with two winged waiters. Image by Emma Davies.

The party to celebrate the success of Lauren Kate’s mega-selling Fallen series was never going to be just any old Monday night bash. Hosted at Proud in Camden (my teenage daughter says it's one of the coolest clubs in London) – it boasted winged waiters, scarlet petals strewn across the floor and a mannequin adorned in a gothic floor-length black satin gown.

With sales of Fallen, Torment and Passion, the first three books in the series, approaching a million copies in the UK, Australia and New Zealand alone, the mood was upbeat. Lauren Kate, a tall, slender American in a short strapless dress, made the evening even more memorable by reading an extract from the prologue of the fourth and final book, Rapture, which is due out in June next year (2012). Lauren has just finished the first draft and the contents are so top secret that all the guests – bloggers, hacks and publishers alike – were sworn to secrecy.

If you’re one of the few who haven’t discovered the Fallen series yet, they make a refreshing change in a genre dominated by Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books. Aimed at teenagers but read by loads of older readers too, the darkly compelling series follows the passionate love story of Luce and her fallen angel boyfriend Daniel back and forth across five thousand years of history.

When I got the chance to talk to Lauren I asked if she’d been surprised by the books’ massive success. “It’s insane,” she smiled. “I’m surprised every day. I really wasn’t expecting it. But pretty quickly after they were published I was getting emails from people all around the world saying how much they were loving the books.”

After her current UK tour, Lauren will fly home to Los Angeles to put the final touches to Rapture. Then in January she will start a brand-new trilogy – again top secret, but which she revealed will have “no angels and no vampires.”

“The first chapter is always hard to do,” she admitted. “But I sit down and write half a chapter a day and don’t worry about it or let myself revise it all until the end.”

Like millions of fans across the world, I can't wait.

STOP PRESS: Random House Children's Books have just announced that an additional new novel set in the world of the Fallen series will be published on February 2 next year (2012), just in time for Valentine's Day. Titled Fallen in Love, it is described as "a riveting collection of four intertwined love stories featuring the Fallen characters that fans have grown to know and love - Miles, Shelby, Roland, Arriane and Luce and Daniel."