London Writers' Salon

#200: Louise Dean — How to Finish a Novel, Why Most Writers Stall at 30,000 Words, and Why Storytelling Beats Beautiful Sentences, plus founding Novelry

Episode Summary

Award-winning novelist and founder of The Novelry Louise Dean on what separates storytelling from beautiful prose, planning a novel without killing the joy, and how to edit your own first draft.

Episode Notes

Award-winning novelist and founder of The Novelry Louise Dean on what separates storytelling from beautiful prose, planning a novel without killing the joy, and how to edit your own first draft.

We discuss

• Why learning to craft perfect sentences can quietly delay your path to publication.
• How a single shift from style to storytelling turns a promising writer into a published one.
• What treating each chapter like a short story does to the terror of a blank novel.
• The reason every novel is a moral journey (and why you have to throw rocks at your hero).
• A one-page planning method that steers a draft without smothering the joy of writing it.
• The one question every writer should be able to answer about their reader.
• Why your main character should never be a thinly veiled version of yourself.
• When you can’t afford an editor, how to run a developmental edit on your own work.
• What to do in the month after finishing a first draft
• A five-part structure built for the long moral journey of a novel, and why three acts fall short.

Resources & Links

• 📄 Interview Transcript
• The Great Gatsby
• The Novelry
• The Novelry Blog
• Louise’s books
• The Novelry Contact — hello@thenovelry.com

About Louise Dean

Louise Dean is a British author, born in Hastings, who read History at Cambridge University. An award-winning novelist, she is the winner of the Betty Trask Prize and Le Prince Maurice Prize, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her novels have been published internationally. The Wall Street Journal described Louise Dean as one of the world’s top five most under-rated authors. Louise is the founder of the creative writing school The Novelry.

About The Novelry

Founded by award-winning author Louise Dean, The Novelry is the only writing school where bestselling authors and Big Five editors guide you every step of the way.