Natasha Lester shares her writing secrets

Perth author Natasha Lester has just released her latest historical novel called The Paris Seamstress. She studied creative writing and now teaches aspiring authors through her workshops with the Australian Writers Centre and other local groups. In this interview, Natasha will share her tips and writing strategies.

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Transcript

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write with Love. I’m Sarah Williams, best-selling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published, some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do.

Sarah Williams:            Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            G’day, I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publisher. Today I’m chatting to Natasha Lester. Thanks for joining me today, Natasha.

Natasha Lester:            It’s my pleasure, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Williams:            So, you’ve been a very busy lady of recent, so, can you just introduce yourself and tell us about your writing journey?

Natasha Lester:            Sure. My writing journey started somewhat later in life. I actually worked in marketing for 10 or 12 years, that was my degree that I first did at uni when I left high school, and I had lots of great jobs. I worked for L’Oréal Paris as marketing manager for Maybelline, and I had lots of lipsticks, which was great. But through that whole time and since I had been a child, I had had a dream about being a writer in the back of my mind, and that was just something that I had always wanted to do but didn’t really know kind of how to do that.

Natasha Lester:            So, we were emailed when I was working for L’Oréal, my husband had come to Melbourne with me, and then he had to go back to Perth for his job. So, I kind of had to quit my fabulous job and sort of start all over again, I guess. And I thought, well that’s kind of one of those moments where you can choose a different pathway. I could’ve got another marketing job or I could do something different. So I decided I would go back to uni and explore this writing idea that I still had in my mind and hadn’t been able to let go of.

Natasha Lester:            So, I enrolled in a master of creative arts, and I wrote a book as part of my master thesis. And that was my very, very first novel. It was sort of contemporary literary fiction. It was called “What Is Left Over After” and it won the T.A.G. Hungerford Award which is like prize for an unpublished manuscript prize. And I think [inaudible 00:02:39] had something quite similar. And, so, winning that meant I got a publishing contract, with Freemantle Press, which is a small independent publisher here in WA, and published my second book two years later in 2012 and then I changed in direction, I guess. I’ve always loved historical fiction and just I suddenly had this story idea which is what came out in “A Kiss From Mr. Fitzgerald” and I sat down to write that with a lot of doubt, not really knowing what I was doing. I hadn’t written a historical before.

Natasha Lester:            It wasn’t my background. I knew I had to change publishers and agents because the paperwork presenting me at that time didn’t publish that kind of fiction. But I wrote it anyway, cause I just loved the story, and I loved the writings, so much. And was just really lucky that I was able to get an agent and then Hachette picked it up. And since then I’ve been so blessed with Hachette, they’re amazing and so they published all three of my historicals, “A Kiss From Mr. Fitzgerald,” “Her Mother’s Secret,” and now “The Paris Seamstress.”

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, and you studied creative writing, so did you get a lot out of that? Would you recommend that’s something people do?

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, for me it was really good because I didn’t know how to write a book. Having a supervisor, who could just tell me to keep writing because I see it that everyone who write a book, knew what they were writing about and they had a plan and a chapter by chapter outline and they just kind of worked through that. Where as when I sat down to write my book, I had this tiny state of an idea and nothing else. And my supervisor was the one who said “That’s okay, you still can write a book that way. You just have to work on it page by page, and trust the process,” and that was probably the most important thing she said to me, because I had never done it before. I didn’t know to just trust the universe, that it would all work out.

Natasha Lester:            And so because she kept saying that idea that I just kept writing, it was quite stressful because I’m so planned and organized in every other aspect in my life but not when it comes to writing. And I still write in exactly the same way. I start with the state of an idea of an idea and literally it’s just a page by page kind of process. So, yes, for me it was useful because I didn’t know how to write a book and my supervisor helped me work that out. And she made me keep going when I probably would have stopped because I felt like I wasn’t doing it the right way. But she was the kind of person who said “There isn’t a right way, the only thing you can do is just to keep writing.” So to have her continually saying that to me got me through the end of that first book, and made me understand that stressful as it is, that’s my process and I just have to work with it all the time.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, oh wow, so your latest book has just come out in March, and that was “The Paris Seamstress”. Tell us about that, it’s such a beautiful cover.

Natasha Lester:            It is beautiful, I know. Yes, that’s my third historical, and it’s set in the 1940s and it begins with Estella, the main character and she working at an atelier in Paris with her mother and she has a dream that one day she might own her own atelier, be able to make her own designs, but it’s June 1940 and the Germans are sweeping in to ground. And so she knows that given that set of circumstances, her dreams are likely to ever come true. Then she gets caught one night helping a resistance worker smuggle some maps and that puts her life in danger, so she’s forced to flee to France and she goes to New York, and she realizes that there is no fashion industry. That basically the rest of the world copies Parisian designs but now that Paris has been shut down by the Germans, that can’t happen. So she wonders whether maybe New York is the place where her dream of designing her own clothes might finally come true.

Natasha Lester:            It also picks up with her granddaughter Fabienne in contemporary times, so it’s a joint narrative, historical and contemporary, and Fabienne is trying to work out exactly what her grandmother Estella got up to during the second World War and why it’s had such a lasting impact on her, and why she’s never told Fabienne about it. So yeah, it’s really interesting to write that joint narrative for the first time.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant. So, I’ve listened to your other two books. I loved the audio versions of your first two. So I’ve been waiting for this one to come out, and I love that you use really empowered, strong females that really, in all of the books that I’ve read so far, they definitely have that, so yay! Yay. And of course, your “A Kiss From Mr. Fitzgerald” dealt with an obstetrician. Yeah, how was that to write about? I mean, that’s something that most people don’t know about.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, and I think that’s why I sort of naturally gravitate to those kind of stories, cause I think that there were so many women who did so many remarkable things throughout history, and because they did those things, I have all the opportunities now, as a woman today, that they didn’t have. And if they hadn’t done those things, then I wouldn’t have the opportunities that I do have, but that lots of their stories haven’t been told and have been forgotten, and I think obviously, because history has primarily been written by male historians. And that is a shame, because it means a lot of those women’s stories have been lost and they did do really extraordinary things.

Natasha Lester:            I mean, I couldn’t write about the exact person who was trying to become the first female obstetrician in New York City, in “A Kiss From Mr. Fitzgerald.” Cause I couldn’t find the record of who she was, so her story is lost to history, and so my creation of Evie, and making her that woman, was an attempt to resurrect that woman’s story and say, “Look, what she did was absolutely remarkable because there was so much bullying and so much backlash against those early female medical students.” And so here’s her story that’s worth telling, even though I’ve had to kind of make it up based on other accounts from other female medical students of the time.

Natasha Lester:            But if she hadn’t’ve fought like that, then medicine as an opportunity for women mightn’t be as clear a path as it is these days, so I think that’s why I’m drawn to those kind of stories. Lots of women did do some very extraordinary and unusual things throughout history and here are some different examples. I like those kind of stories, and the research, I find it very inspiring to see how hard these women fought, and that they did not give up, and thank God they didn’t because it has given us the opportunities we have today.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, exactly, and I remember thinking in your second one, where she was making the lipstick, and all of these people saying, “You’re not allowed to wear makeup,” and all those [crosstalk 00:09:18].

Natasha Lester:            So crazy, isn’t it? And you’re exactly right, we do take it for granted, something like putting on rouge and not being fired because of it, or called a whore or something like that, which is what happened to those women who were the first ones to start wearing makeup out and about. So we are lucky, in way, that we have more freedom, but we only have that because of women like the ones that I write about.

Sarah Williams:            That’s it, and it was only a hundred years ago when this sort of stuff was happening. It’s so recent.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, it is.  And also, the other really tragic thing that I found, particularly in relation to “A Kiss for Mr. Fitzgerald,” when I was talking to readers about that book, is so many current female medical students or practicing GPs or specialists, would come up to me at the end of my talks and say to me, “That bullying that you’ve described, it’s still really prevalent today. It’s much more subtle, obviously, than what it was in Evie’s time, when it was very blatant and overt and very obvious, but it’s still just as hard for women as it was back then, and it’s still a very patriarchal system, and we still have to fight constantly.”

Natasha Lester:            And I found that so disappointing, and I think that’s what I really love about historical fiction. In some ways, it’s “Look how far we’ve come.” The birthing practices, for instance, that Evie was forced to use are obviously very different to the birthing practices that we have today, which are much more about letting the mother decide what happened to her body. But historical fiction is also about, “Look how far we still have to go,” because well, yes, the bullying is of a different nature, but it’s still there. We’ve still got so much work to do in those respects, so yes, I love historical fiction cause it has that kind of looking back at the past and going, “Yay, we’ve done quite a lot,” but then looking forward at the future and saying, “No, we still have more work to do.”

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, we’re only halfway through, really.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.

Sarah Williams:            So writing historical fiction, do you have any advice, or I mean, a lot of people watching this maybe only read or write in contemporary times cause it’s easier with quotation marks. So yeah, tell us how is it writing historical? Is there anything that we really need to think about?

Natasha Lester:            Well, first of all you have to choose exotic locations like Paris to set your books in so that you can travel there. No, I’m being facetious, but no. I think one of the big things for me is the research, and for me it’s really important to go to the places where my books are set, specifically for research, and I know not everybody can do that, but I really feel like that makes such a big difference. I mean, I’ve been to Paris lots of times, but I still went there specifically to research “The Paris Seamstress” because there were things that I wanted to experience that I hadn’t done as just a tourist.

Natasha Lester:            So I spent time in a Parisian atelier where they make the official flower decorations for haute couture gowns, which is what Estella does in the book. So I could see the women actually working on those, the process, and the camaraderie between the women in the atelier. I spent lots of time walking through the Marais area of Paris, which is where the book is set, and you see features of the district that, if you don’t write about those features and include those, then you wouldn’t be representing the Marais properly.

Natasha Lester:            And also, there were so many things, like the street that Estella lives on, which is called the passage St Paul. I found that street in the Marais and I used that, because when I walked past it, it looks like a dark, kind of dingy alleyway, and it has an apartment building kind of vaulting across the street. But then you can see this little pinpoint of light down the end, and I thought, what is that? I wanna go down there and see.

Natasha Lester:            And so I did, and you walk down to the end, and it’s actually a back entrance to this very spectacular church called the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis. And you walk into this church and it’s completely amazing, and you would have no idea that it was at the end of this alley. And I was like, oh my God, my character has to live on this street. This street’s so amazing.

Natasha Lester:            So without having gone there I would’ve just had to pick a street off a map that I could’ve looked at on Google Maps. But it’s not quite the same as having that experience of discovery, which I think really helps make historical fiction authentic. And you want the reader to be so immersed in the world, and I think you can only do that by having walked the street and using the details that you see when you’re walking the street. So I think that’s really important.

Natasha Lester:            In some way, you can spend a lot of time on the research. It makes a big difference. But at the same time, I always write a first draft of my novels before I do the main bulk of the research, and for me, to find out what the story is so that it doesn’t get laden down with research. Because I think that can be a danger with historical fiction. And so then I do my research after that first draft. And so I’m researching to fill in the gaps that are in that first draft, like it’s the first draft, it’s like a research blueprint in a way. Whereas if I researched first, cause I wouldn’t really know what the story is, I would do too much research and I wouldn’t have a focused kind of scope, I guess.

Natasha Lester:            Also, I find that researching too early means that you write to the research [inaudible 00:14:25], whereas you open that first draft to let your imagination run wild and imagine what the story could be. And then use the research to support that, rather than overwhelm that. And so I think that’s another really important bit of [inaudible 00:14:40] in writing historical fiction, too.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, well, that’s really interesting, and yeah, I totally agree. You should, if you can, go to those places and research. I write contemporary and I still do that, still been out there.

Natasha Lester:            Exactly. For any kind of fiction, to go to the place and where you’re setting it.

Sarah Williams:            Exactly. And of course, you’ve got not just the physical places, but how did they speak, and what did they wear, and what did they eat, those sorts of things, too.

Natasha Lester:            Absolutely, yes. So I have a shelf full of books of things like just daily life in the 1920s, for instance, when I was writing “A Kiss for Mr. Fitzgerald,” which is all about those kinds of things. Like, when were automobiles primarily in use? But you don’t wanna have your character, their family owning a car that wasn’t quite right for 1922, for instance. So you just need to find out those kind of things and apply them. They had an iron, for instance. So, that’s really important, to have those details right, and language, too.

Natasha Lester:            I mean, there’s a fantastic online etymology dictionary which I used all the time, which tells you the first known usage of every word and also when it was in common usage. So often there are little phrases and words that I just want to check, and I’ll use that to make sure that it is right for the time period, because there’s nothing worse than reading something and jolting out of the story because you think, aw, nobody would’ve said that back then. I spend a lot of time on that kind of stuff, too.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, and I suppose if you do say something wrong in the book, someone’s gonna tell you about it.

Natasha Lester:            Absolutely, absolutely. I don’t want that.

Sarah Williams:            So I mentioned that I’ve listened to your stories on audio. Have they been translated at all yet?

Natasha Lester:            I have a translation of “A Kiss for Mr. Fitzgerald” coming out this year into Greek, which will be very exciting. Cause obviously Greek is a different kind of script, even, to English, so I can’t even imagine what that’s going to look like, and the cover and everything. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to that, cause obviously my UK and US ones are all just basically the same, apart from changing some spelling for the US version. Yeah, but the Greek one will be really exciting to see. It’s so hard to imagine, for me, readers on the other side of the world reading my books. Like I can’t quite get my head around that, and I don’t think I will until like, someone sends me a photo of Evie in a bookshop or grocer in the UK, or in the US, then I’ll go, “Right, now I believe it.”

Sarah Williams:            That’s awesome. So you do a lot of workshops and mentoring, and I know when I was in Townsville, we got you up to do the workshop “How to Write a Bestseller” with the Australian Writer’s Center, and that was just absolutely fantastic. I’ve used your information a lot from that. So tell us about workshops and mentoring and how often you do that and stuff.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, I love teaching, it’s one of my… Next to writing, one of my favorite things to do, and I think it’s for a couple of reasons. I had some really great teachers when I was learning, so if I can help writers in any way, then I’d love to be able to do that. And also, I get really inspired and motivated by teaching because you’re in a room full of people who are so enthusiastic and want to be there, and so keen to have their books published and to have readers reading them, that it reminds me of how lucky I really am. So I really love that.

Natasha Lester:            Unfortunately, because the books are kind of doing so well and I’m going out in the UK and US this year, I’ve got less time to do teaching, so I’m doing less this year for the first time. But I’m still doing, I’ve got a great program which I’m gonna see if I can maybe roll out online next year so that I can do it with people other than people in Perth, which is a six month sort of intensive, where we meet once a month for six months and we spend a couple of hours together. And it’s only a small group of seven people, so you can really get into the nitty gritty of their particular issues and relation to their manuscript.

Natasha Lester:            And hopefully, I’m hoping that by the end of the six months, the first session we’ll set some goals, which might be to finish first drafts, or sort of redraft, or something like that, and I’m hoping that with that kind of monthly commitment, they will be able to reach that goal by the end of the six months. So that would be a really great thing to do face to face, here in person in Perth this year, and then maybe online next year if I can see a way of that working. I wonder whether you’d get the same rapport with an online kind of group like that. I don’t know, so I’ll have to see. Maybe people can tell me if they think that’s a good idea.

Sarah Williams:            I think it’s a great idea, so.

Natasha Lester:            And yeah, I was just in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, teaching “How to Write a Bestseller” in Sydney, which I love teaching that course, that’s one of my favorite courses and that’s always lots of fun. And then I always do a plotting master class and an introduction to novel writing each year. And they’re coming up in August and November, so there are two things going on but I’m not doing any one on one mentoring this year, which is a shame. Which I have done in the past, just kind of doing what I can fit in.

Natasha Lester:            But always thinking about, for next year, what else can I do to help people with the queries that I often get, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            And you’re a big advocate of Scrivener.

Natasha Lester:            Yes.

Sarah Williams:            So you’ve got an online course with Australian Writer’s Center for that one, don’t you?

Natasha Lester:            Yes, I do. So that’s called “2 Hours to Scrivener Power,” and it basically takes you through all the things that I think are the really important things for writers to use in the program to be able to write their novel in a more efficient kind of way. I started using Scrivener when I was writing “A Kiss from Mr. Fitzgerald,” and it literally changed my writing life, because I am quite a chaotic writer. I do write a bit all over the place, so the way in which Scrivener works, where you just write it in scenes and you can move things around so easily, and have that beautiful color-coded binder so you can see at a glance.

Natasha Lester:            Particularly for “Paris Seamstress,” I guess, being a joint narrative, the color-coding was so good for me to be able to see how much time I’d been spending in the historical narrative versus the contemporary narrative, and also to track subplots. I mean, there’s always a love story kind of subplot in my books, so tracking where that’s coming into play and have there be too many gaps where those things haven’t come into the story at all. Yeah, so it’s really, absolutely changed the way I write, and I couldn’t write in anything else. I hate it when I get to the end of the structural era and I have to output it into Word. I’m like, “No, no!”

Natasha Lester:            So yeah, the thing with Scrivener is there’s so much in the program that it can be overwhelming when you sit down to work with it, and that’s why I do the course, because it was to say, “Okay, yes, there’s lots and lots of stuff in Scrivener, but if you just do these things that I teach in the two hours, then you can get so much out of it and it can really transform your writing process, and don’t worry about the other stuff until you’re more proficient at everything that we cover in that two hours.” So hopefully that makes life a bit easier for people with Scrivener, cause it does have a bit of a learning curve.

Sarah Williams:            It does, yeah, and a lot of people have said that they think it’s too organized, and then they start doing it and they’re like, “No, I’m a plotter, I’m not a plotter, I’m a painter, and I just wanna do this bit there,” and that’s exactly why it’s good. Like, I’m a complete plotter and I have very, very, very well sorted out before I start writing. So it’s great for me but it is great for those people who like to just wing it as well.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re a plotter you can use the binder to write your outline, basically, before you start writing, and it’s got the outline function in there as well, so that’s, again, why I love it. No matter if you’re a plotter or a pantser, it works for both kinds of ways of writing. So yeah, it’s very flexible and very brilliant.

Sarah Williams:            Yes, yes, the number one program for writing.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Wonderful. So what are you working on now, Natasha?

Natasha Lester:            So really, sort of, I’m juggling three books at the moment, because I’ve got lots of publicity stuff for “The Paris Seamstress” to do, which is really fun. I’ve just been in Sydney. I’m going to Brisbane at the end of May. Just doing events, all that kind of thing, which I love, it’s so nice to get out from behind the desk and go and talk to readers and have a kind of a dialogue rather than just a monologue with you and your computer. So there’s that.

Natasha Lester:            Plus I’ve just finished the structural era for “The French Photographer,” which is the working title for next year’s book. So that’ll be out this time March, late March, early April next year, and the copy edit for that is due in about a month or so. So quite a long way ahead, which is nice. And I’ve also got seventy-five thousand words into a manuscript that I hope will be my 2020 book, so that’s a first draft, so it’s very rough and very all over the place, but yeah, so I’m juggling those three, which is always fun.

Sarah Williams:            [crosstalk 00:23:29] So, “The French Photographer,” I’m presuming, is French, so where’s your 2020 going to be set?

Natasha Lester:            So it’s set in England, largely. Cornwall, in fact, is a big, important city in that book. But it’s also set a little bit in France and in Germany and in Sydney, so it’s kind of moving all around the place.

Sarah Williams:            So another international trip is getting planned.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, that’s right. Well, in fact, I’ve already done. We had to go to Europe late last year, so I did some of the research for that then. Spent lots of time in Cornwall. I was like, “I have to set my book here!”

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic. Well, I’m really looking forward to the audio being available so I can get the latest one, “The Paris Seamstress,” which just sounds immaculate. I can’t wait. So where can we find you online?

Natasha Lester:            So I’m pretty much everywhere online. So my website is just www.natashalester.com.au, but I also love hanging out on Facebook, so you can find me there as Natasha Lester author, and of course, Twitter and Instagram, too, so pretty much, if it exists online, I am there.

Sarah Williams:            That’s set. Well, thank you so much for that today. That was great.

Natasha Lester:            Thank you so much for having me Sarah, it was so lovely to chat to you.

Sarah Williams:            Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com, and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my books and lots of inspiration. If you like the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to find out more. And remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye.