Freya North opens up about terrible writer's block: "I was so embarrassed"

Virgin Radio

31 Jan 2022, 14:04

The best-selling author is back with a new book, but Freya North told the Graham Norton Radio Show with Waitrose that it wasn't the easiest to write.

Freya's debut novel, 'Sally' came out in 1996. Since then she has written 14 books, and her latest, 'Little Wing' came out this month.

Freya told Graham that her previous success meant she felt "guilt" while writing: "I felt really guilty, but thank goodness for social media.

"I could just keep dipping in every now and then and you know, waving at people and saying 'sorry, it will come'. The weird thing is when the book does come out, I'm then completely crippled with anxiety about will they like it?"

Freya was up against writer's block trying to get the book done, "for five years".

"Writer's block is a really interesting thing," she said. "I didn't believe it existed, I thought it was just an excuse by lazy authors who wanted to go shopping, watch daytime TV until it happened to me."

Freya said her style of writing meant it came as a surprise: "I like to feel that all stories pre-exist, and my job is like a secretary taking dictation from the characters and being able to then act as a conduit between the story and reader.

"However, when I have writer's block, what happened was I couldn't hear a word that the characters were saying at all, they could have been talking gobbledygook in a whisper," she exclaimed.

"So it was very difficult for me to access the story at all. I'm rubbing my fingertips because it was like, if I put my fingertips on the keyboard, it was gonna hurt. It was like a real physical manifestation of extreme anxiety."

She admits she hid what was going on and told friends and family that everything was "great" when she hadn't written a word.

Freya said the breakthrough came with a change of scenery.

"In the end, the magic formula was to frogmarch myself to the library, and sit there."

She joked: "If I was at home, I'd even wash the inside of the dishwasher. Whereas if I went to the library, I had to sit there and haul it out word after word."

Fortunately it worked, and the book is out now.

It was an earlier trip to the Outer Hebrides that provided inspiration.

"I was researching a completely different story, and whilst I was there, a little voice in my head said, what if you sent a character here? What if that character is a 16-year-old girl in the late 1960s? She's pregnant, she's banished here.

"How would she fare, and what if 35 years later finally people are looking for her?" she added.

Freya continued: "That was enough of a springboard, but it took me three years of sort of regrowing my self-confidence as a writer and it actually took lockdown to release it, and then it literally flew out. In about five months!"

Listen to The Graham Norton Radio Show every Saturday AND Sunday from 9:30 am on Virgin Radio or catch up on-demand here.