London Writers' Salon

#210: Lily King — Emotional Arc, Women and Literary Ambition, Silencing the Inner Critic, and Why Patience Is a Writer's Real Craft

Episode Summary

Award-winning novelist Lily King on finding the emotional arc of a novel, writing the scene you keep avoiding, and making peace with ambition, self-criticism and the long road to a first book.

Episode Notes

Award-winning novelist Lily King on finding the emotional arc of a novel, writing the scene you keep avoiding, and making peace with ambition, self-criticism and the long road to a first book.

You'll learn

• Why the scene you most want to avoid is usually the one your book needs.
• How a small change in the final pages of one section can rebuild an entire novel.
• What it means to think in emotional arc rather than theme.
• The difference between being hard on yourself about writing and being hard on yourself while you write.
• Why giving yourself permission to write about your own life can unlock everything that follows.
• When a middle section goes flat, and how to find the engine it's missing.
• How ambition shows up differently for women writers, and the shame that can come with it.
• A notebook method built on margins, timelines, and a daily writing log.
• Why a bad review can be more useful than praise.
• What nine years on a first novel teaches you about patience.

Resources & Links

• 📄 Interview Transcript
• It's Not The End of the World by Judy Blume
• The Pleasing Hour by Lily King
• The English Teacher by Lily King
• Euphoria by Lily King
• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
• Heart the Lover by Lily King
• Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell
• @lilykingbooks - Lily's Instagram
• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

About Lily King

Lily King is the award-winning author of six novels. Her most recent novel, Heart the Lover, was published on September 30th, 2025. She has also published a collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her 2020 novel, Writers & Lovers, won the New England Society Book Awards and was a New York Times Notable Book and chosen as a top-ten best book of 2020 by The Washington Post, NPR, People Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon's Best Books of 2014.