Rebecca de Winter 'I realised that it was okay to take writing seriously, and to have a crack at this childhood dream of mine.'
BY Emily Powter-Robinson
18th Jul 2023
Rebecca de Winter took our Starting to Write Your Novel course in 2017. Her debut novel Best Friends is being published as a Kindle e-book on 18 Jul 2023 by Storm Publishing and it is already out in paperback. We spoke to Rebecca about her time studying with us, the inspiration behind her protagonist, and #WriteCBC.
You took our six-week Starting to Write Your Novel course in 2017. How did your time studying with us impact your writing journey?
To be very very honest, if I hadn’t won a session with an agent at the end of the course, I probably wouldn’t have carried on writing the novel that became Best Friends. Which shows that clearly, one of the biggest skills I needed to learn - and have since learned - was resilience and to carry on in the face of rejection!!
Having said that though, there were lots of things during the course that impacted my journey. I realised that it was okay to take writing seriously, and to have a crack at this childhood dream of mine. I really enjoyed being with like-minded people, and seeing how we all interpreted the tasks differently, and learned in different ways.
I also found the structure that you’re taught on the course, immensely useful. One of the reasons I never really tried to write, before doing the course, was that I struggled to gather my thoughts into a coherent plot. I’ve since discovered that I have ADHD, which explains a lot - and the basic plotting structure that the course taught me, I’ve used pretty much ever since, when I’ve re-written and re-plotted my novel - but also for book 2 and other book ideas I have.
To date in fact, the CBC course remains the only creative writing course I’ve ever taken. It’s like I just needed that little push.
Many of our students find lifelong writing friends on our courses. Are you still in touch with anyone you met during the course?
Yes I am! As it’s been a few years now, we don’t speak as much as we used to, but I definitely keep in touch with 3-4 people from the course. Many of us have gone on to find representation with agents and are in the process of completing or submitting novels - so it’s been great to be on the same journey and share the highs and lows together.
Your debut novel Best Friends is being published as a Kindle e-book on 18 Jul 2023 by Storm Publishing and it is already out in paperback. It is a psychological thriller about friendship, love, betrayal, and revenge, full of twist after brilliant twist. Can you tell us a bit more about the book and the inspiration behind it?
So the novel starts with the main character, Evie, seeing her childhood best friend Alice at a conference - but their friendship ended for reasons that she doesn’t specify. Evie is very unhappy in her life, she’s struggling to get pregnant, feeling overlooked at work, her marriage has grown stale. Alice, by contrast, seems to have it all - amazing career, three children, husband, and she looks incredible too. The novel is about what happens when Evie decides to get back in touch with Alice after all this time - and why they fell out originally.
The idea for the novel came from two places. Firstly, I found myself reading a lot of thrillers where women were these helpless victims, always running around, looking over their shoulders, petrified - and it annoyed me. Many of the women I know -despite facing sexism and misogyny - are incredibly autonomous, driven women. I didn’t recognise these terrified, feeble creatures I was reading about. So I wanted to change that. In addition, one of my favourite novels is American Psycho - but there’s no female version. I longed to read a book about women who were bad, sociopathic, who didn’t do what they were told. So I wrote one!
The other part came from when I became a mother, and the intense expectations on women, even before you become pregnant, how you almost are perceived as subservient to this being growing inside you. And even since I’ve written the book, with the legislation changing in the US, this feeling of pressure to be this perfect mother, isn’t going away.
But for me, and for other mothers I spoke to, there was this real sense of loss for the identities we had before we became mothers, where did those go? I didn’t suddenly stop liking heavy metal, or horror movies, as soon as I conceived, and yet it felt like these weren’t acceptable interests for a mother.
Originally the two characters in Best Friends were two sides of a split personality - reflecting that separation of self - but eventually they evolved into two separate people - the “mother” and the “non-mother”, and what someone might do, to achieve what they thought they should have.
You’ve spoken before about how you’re obsessed with dark, messy, complex, female protagonists. What first inspired your protagonist, Evie?
Do you know, Evie came to me fully formed in my head in spring 2016, when I first had the idea for Best Friends. She was almost the antithesis of everything I felt women were pressured to be. She liked to drink, to have sex, to take drugs, she wasn’t very nice, she was hugely driven and competitive. She was angry too, fed up with the ineptness of people around her.
I think a lot of her personality comes from my own feelings of frustration with injustice in the world and the expectations of women in society. How suffocating the little box that denotes being female can be. I really don’t deal well with being told what to do or how to be. So Evie was like an outlet for that!
I took inspiration from women who inspire me, who despite what society says, force society to accept them as they are - even when they are described as uncompromising or difficult, which is so negative. People like Madonna, Bjork - and one of my earliest inspirations is Shirley Manson, the lead singer of a band called Garbage.
I wanted to describe someone who was entirely her own person, on her own terms. Perfectly imperfect, awful but human. An anti-hero.
In the past you were an avid participant in our monthly #WriteCBC Twitter competition. Did anything you wrote as part of this ever help inspire a scene in your book?
No one scene specifically, but I found the exercises really helpful, to keep flexing that creative muscle. Writing a novel is of course, hugely creative, but equally it’s restrictive, you need to conform to norms around structure, genre, content, market and audience. But short pieces of writing - and I love flash fiction too - allow me to try new things in a safe, fun way - and often help me think of new ways to describe and write parts of my novels.
Did you connect with a lot of other writers on Twitter through taking part in #WriteCBC?
I have, although I stopped taking part once I gained my agent in 2018 and was properly knuckling down with the novel, prior to going on submission. But there were many people I initially connected with and I’ve loved seeing so many of them go on to have huge success!
What is your writing routine and where do you like to write?
I get asked this a lot, especially as I work full time and have kids. I don’t have a routine and I don’t believe you need to write everyday or even every week. I find routines immensely hard to follow because of my ADHD.
Having said that, I am an avid plotter for my novels, and use a lot of spreadsheets. This means that when I do have time to write, I know exactly what scene I need to write and what needs to happen and how many words I need to write. I don’t waste time thinking about that stuff, because I’ve planned it all, I can just sit down and get on with it.
However because I only get writing time 2-3 times a week, that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about my novel. I think there’s a lot to be said for thinking time. Usually any spare time I have - commuting, on the school run, doing chores, I will be thinking about my novel ,my characters, particular scenes - and almost pre-writing them in my head. Sometimes lines or phrases will come to me and I will jot them down on the notes app on my phone. In fact just last week I had an idea on how to end book 2, as I was taking the sausages out of the oven. My brain works in very weird ways and often in the most mundane places, I’ll solve a knotty plot problem.
What books are on your summer reading list?
Lots!! I read and review a lot of books, but I’ve just started Penance by Eliza Clark, who wrote Boy Parts which is easily one of the best books I’ve ever read, so I’m very excited to have my hands on her new one! I’m also looking forward to The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey which is out in 2024, and I’ve seen lots of amazing reviews for. Finally, I’m excited to read The Whispers by Ashley Audrain - author of The Push which I also loved.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
So I’m working on my second novel for Storm, which is due out in early 2024 and covers themes of Me Too, and coercive control, and what happens when a woman who believes her most prized commodity are her looks, finds they aren’t enough anymore.
Best Friends is out now in both paperback and e-book. Buy your copy here.
Find out more about our Starting to Write Your Novel course and enrol here.