There are stories and history everywhere in London.
— Sarah Pinborough
I just always lived in stories in my head. I believed I was a Martian princess until I was 10. I believed I was never going to die, and I'd been adopted and put on Earth because there was a war... and still sometimes, as I get older, I hope for my immortal life on Mars.
We can never see who someone really is underneath the skin.
Oh, there's a teenage girl inside all women. It comes out mainly when we walk into a room filled with other women and immediately feel self-conscious. I do, anyway. I'm always convinced I'm going to fall flat on my face or something.
I have written in a lot of genres, that's true, and I'm not sure it's always served my career well.
I hate it when it is all about the twist and when the ending comes out of nowhere. I think you should be surprised and shocked, but you should also think, 'Damn, I should have seen it,' because there are clues all the way through.
Anyone who has to have the word 'charming' in their name probably isn't - just take a look at any dating site where men use 'prince charming' in their description.
Never trust a narrator whose opening gambit is to insist he's not mad.
The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.
Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.
I've seen a range of children's personalities, so it's easier to write about them without patronising them, I think.
I think in some ways, you end up with more interesting storytelling with series, because if you've written yourself into a corner with something in book 1, you have to be cleverer to get out of it.
With TV, your first draft just doesn't matter. It's a skeleton, and then there's draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It's just a whole different kind of storytelling.
On a normal novel, I would like to get 2,000 to 2,500 words done in a day; I average 10,000 words a week, and then there's a day for planning. With the historical ones, it's a lot harder because you have to stop and double-check facts.
Anybody's life is probably a mess of secrets and lies when you boil it right down.
It would appear that I just love writing many different stories.
Adults lie to themselves all the time about what is acceptable, but kids know what is right and wrong.
I would quite like to become a mainstream thriller writer, obviously, because I enjoy writing those stories, and it is the best way to secure your career.
Maybe even at six or seven, I knew that, sweet as they were on the surface, all fairy tales needed a feminist shake up.
I don't mind a narrator who's self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see.
The Thames Torso murders almost fell into my lap. After deciding to use a real historical crime as the focus for the book, I went to Google and searched for unsolved murders in Victorian London, and they basically popped out at me about halfway down the first results page.
My first six books were horror, I think because when I was young I loved Stephen King. John Wyndham, Daphne Du Maurier, and it's natural to try and emulate the books you first loved.
I wrote my first five horror novels while I was teaching.
I never had a moment of wanting to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress, but writing was just a thing I always did. And then I started to really enjoy it.
It's easier to get into controlling relationships when you're young because you're much more eager to please, and controlling men pick up on that. If they like to make decisions for you at the start of a relationship, it can be a warning sign.
I'm very much, like, 'We've all got to help each other.' If there's a new female writer, I'm much more likely to read her book than if it's by a new male writer.
The strange thing about living somewhere for a couple of years and then moving on and not returning is that those locations become ghosts of themselves in your mind.
I know it's dangerous to say you want to do something different with a genre because people always take that as an insult to the genre.
We all love a bit of 'true love conquers all,' and when I started on 'Poison,' 'Charm' and 'Beauty,' that was one rule of the fairy tale formula that I didn't want to break.
I always found the witches and wicked stepmothers far more interesting than the 'heroines' - at least they actually did something.
The only rule I have in how I let characters tell stories is that they must always tell the reader their version of the truth. No one likes being outright lied to, even in fiction.
Monsters don't scare me at all; I think creepy is scarier than gore. I tend to read more thrillers and mysteries than horror, though. I like a good whodunnit. If I want scary, I tend to reach for a movie. I think it's a great medium for horror.
I'm a lot less travelled as an adult than I was as a child, but I think living in far flung places gives you a perspective on the world and people that adds flavour to your writing.
I'm not a natural researcher, and I don't get bogged down in it, but I think if you get it right in the first half, people will forgive you, and then you can move on with the story.
