# Lucy Ashe, author of 'The Model Patient', reveals how writing helps unpack THERAPY

**Channel:** Writer's Routine Podcast
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu4-TyZLsxY
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/Wu4-TyZLsxY

## Chapters

- 0:08 — Introduction and Guest Overview
- 4:41 — Writing Spaces, Planning, and Editing
- 13:08 — Writing Tools, Locations, and Publishing Pressure
- 18:14 — Daily Routine and Juggling Parenthood
- 30:11 — Research Inspiration and Show Support
- 33:09 — Originating a Therapy-Based Novel Idea
- 39:13 — Plot Development, Research, and Transformation

## Transcript

**[0:08] Speaker A:** Hello, welcome along to a brand new episode of Writer's Routine. This week we're chatting to Lucy Ashe. Her debut, Clara and Olivia, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Prize back in 2024. Her new novel, the Model Patient, is a slight departure of genre. It's a blend of historical fiction and psychological thr gorilla. We talk about why her new book was inspired by her confused experiences of therapy.

**[0:39] Speaker B:** I was finding it so difficult. I was really struggling with why I didn't know what the therapist was. Was thinking. I felt like I wanted to know what he was thinking. He was very silent, very withholding and I guess I was having what you would say is very strong transference reaction to the therapist where you kind of transfer lots of past patterns of relationships or emotions, like unresolved emotions from the past onto them. But I didn't understand any of it and I found it so confusing and

**[1:10] Speaker A:** unsettling and also why writing it helped her find control during that time.

**[1:15] Speaker B:** It was almost a compulsion to write the book. I felt that I didn't have any choice in the matter when I was writing it.

**[1:23] Speaker B:** I really lived it in many ways and it did give me, I think, a lot of, a lot of help and support for myself to have this creative project that was sort of linked to my own experience, but where I had a lot more control over it. I mean, I had complete control over this because it's a novel where I decide what all the characters do and perhaps in some ways that ability to write something where I could control the outcomes and it felt empowering for me at the time.

**[1:56] Speaker A:** It's all on the way with Lucy Ash in a brand new episode of Writer's Routine.

**[2:07] Speaker A:** Hello, welcome along to the show. My name is Dan Simpson and this is Writers Routine. We take a look through an author's working day. We see what they do, how they do it, where they do it, how do they give themselves the best chance of getting words down on the page? Now today there is a new substack newsletter dropping absolutely free newsletter might be too grand a term really just things that are happening in our world in this universe. The writers routine one just lifting the lid a little with a few thoughts on the conversation that you'll hear with Lucy. It's absolutely free. If you would like to read one of them you can follow on our substack page. Use the link in the episode notes wherever you're listening. Just launching off points for your own work.

**[2:57] Speaker A:** So that's happening this week in the show we are with Lucy Ash. Lucy was A ballerina and a good one, too. Trained at the Royal Ballet School in London. Now she's an English and drama teacher in Brooklyn and a successful writer. She's absorbing that electric charged energy over in New York to get stuff done.

**[3:19] Speaker A:** Her debut, Clara and Olivia, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Prize. Her next one, the Sleeping Beauties, they were both set in the world of ballet. Her new one is a slight change. It's the Model Patient. It's still historical fiction, but with an edge of psychological thriller in there. It's an exploration of obsession and betrayal. And we're in 1960s London right before quite seismic societal changes. In the quiet hush of her therapist's office. Joining Evelyn Westbrook, who finds herself revealing secrets that she would prefer stayed hidden. The work, the writing, helped Lucy overcome and understand the traumatic fallout of her own relationship with a therapist.

**[4:07] Speaker A:** Also, Lucy has recently had her first child. So we explore, because Lucy was open and very keen to talk about it, how that's changed her own time to write and maybe how it differed with how much time she expected she would have to write. Now, if you learn anything in this episode that really helps the way you work, you can support the show on Patreon and Ko Fi. There are links in the episode notes, wherever you're listening. And let's jump right into it with Lucy Ash.

**[4:34] Speaker A:** And we start, as we always do, with what she sees around her in the place where she sits down to write.

**[4:41] Speaker B:** Well, when I sit down to write, it's actually a whole range of places that I can be. I certainly don't just write in one environment. Environment. I love to go to libraries. And actually, in Brooklyn, where I live, there's a fantastic place which is actually more of a bookshop than a library called the Centre for Fiction. And it's this beautiful space with books around you. They've got a great coffee shop. So I love to go there when I'm in my apartment in Brooklyn. That's also wonderful. But I had a baby recently, so it's not always as easy to work at home.

**[5:15] Speaker A:** So when you are working at home, is there a space that you go to? I mean, having a fairly newborn, I know that takes up most space, but is there like a little nook, a cranny that is your own, so you can just tell your story there?

**[5:30] Speaker B:** Yeah, there is that. I have a desk, this little wooden desk that has got usually masses of books on it piled up, because I love research as part of my writing.

**[5:41] Speaker B:** I have two jam jars which are full of pens and My laptop and I'm on. Our apartment is on the 30th floor, so we're really high up and it looks out of the window over onto to Brooklyn. So it's actually a pretty amazing view. And I can get quite distracted looking out the window. Particularly this winter when we had some really intense snowstorms and I realized I hadn't been writing for ages. I had just been watching the snow come down.

**[6:11] Speaker A:** Aside from inspirational books and wonderful snowy views, is there anything that pertains more to whatever you're writing around you? So post it. Notes with plot points, anything like that?

**[6:23] Speaker B:** There is mostly in terms of notebooks. I have a lot of notebooks that I use for my writing. I start each novel with a fresh notebook, but it obviously spills into multiple notebooks. I've got those with me and a lot of the books I'm using for my research. So it's a pretty cluttered desk. I like to make my notes physically handwriting them rather than doing my research notes on the laptop, because the laptop word document is for writing the book and then I do handwritten notes for the planning and the research.

**[7:03] Speaker A:** Is there like a middle ground? I know some authors might write notes fairly furiously, but in no particular order in a notebook, and then kind of transfer it to like a planning document on the computer so that they can get it into some form before then going on the writing.

**[7:21] Speaker B:** Yeah, that is the same for me as well, actually. I do have like a synopsis, chapter by chapter document that is the organizing of my thoughts of all the research and the random ideas that are coming to me. I find it difficult to start writing a chapter without having an outline of that chapter.

**[7:42] Speaker B:** So I do have a word document that is pretty much every chapter that's going to be in the book. It will change a lot. So I'll start writing the book with the whole book planned out. But I might get to chapter 10 and be like, oh, well, that's not quite working. So I need to redo the remaining 20 chapters in the planning document.

**[8:04] Speaker B:** So, yeah, thinking about it, there are quite a lot of. Quite a big variety of ways in which I'm drawing my ideas together.

**[8:13] Speaker A:** Talk to me about the. Those synopsis that you write chapter by chapter. Like, how thorough are we talking? How much will it very specifically outline what's happening?

**[8:25] Speaker B:** It will say quite a bit. It's usually only a few sentences for each chapter, but it will say like, where we are? What is the central conflict of that chapter? What is really what is driving that chapter?

**[8:41] Speaker B:** Whose voice Is it? My latest book, the Model Patient, is all through one character's voice, so that's quite straightforward. I know that it's her voice in the second half. We do have a few. Actually, that's not true at all.

**[8:54] Speaker B:** We have several characters. We have Julia. No, we have Evelyn. And then we also have the. The kind of doctor character coming in.

**[9:05] Speaker B:** But on the whole, I will focus mostly on what's actually happening, where they are, who's speaking, and that will keep me focused. I think if you start a chapter, or personally, if I start writing a chapter without a sense of where I want it to go, I worry that it would lose energy and drive, and then I'd probably need to delete half of it and start again. So maybe it's a comfort for me to have that chapter outlined before I start.

**[9:39] Speaker A:** How much of a way is the knowledge, though, that you might plan chapter by chapter, have all these very thorough synopsis, but as you say, something might happen here which then needs to change everything that you're thinking could happen moving forward. Like, I feel like that could be quite a forbidding presence.

**[10:01] Speaker B:** I think I probably felt that for maybe my first book that, you know, this was the plan. I wanted it to be the plan. But then for my second book, I was writing the Sleeping Beauties. I had written about 30,000 words of it, and then I realized I wanted to completely change the structure of it. I'd been doing it chronologically.

**[10:26] Speaker B:** The novel starts, like, all the way back in 1919 and ends in 1946. And I realized that that kind of. That chronology just didn't work. So I redid the whole structure. And, yes, it feels daunting initially.

**[10:44] Speaker B:** And that first day of doing it, you just think, oh, my goodness, there's so much that I have to do here. But actually, it's not. It just. It. It's fine. It happens, and it's just part of the process. I don't mind editing. I quite like the editing process. So editing as I go feels totally fine as well. For the model patients, one that's just been published, it.

**[11:11] Speaker B:** It, yeah, things did have to change quite a bit. But I didn't feel too daunted by it because I knew that when I eventually sent my. The manuscript to my editor, two editors, one in the us, one in the uk, that there, of course, there'd be so many things that they'd want to suggest that I'd end up having to do so much again. Anyway. I think the more you write, the more you get used to the fact that they're going to be big rewrites. There's going to be a lot of

**[11:40] Speaker A:** editing, getting used to it. Is that something that you try to deal with before it gets that far, or can you ever really know? Like, you have an idea of a story of where you think it's going to go, and you really have no clue whether halfway through you are going to want to completely change the time frame and the chronology of it. Is that something you can plan for and you deal with now? You're a few books down the line.

**[12:06] Speaker B:** I think I expect it. I think I expect that there will be big changes. And almost if I read through my first draft of my book and didn't have anything that I wanted to change, I'd be quite worried. I'd be like, maybe I'm not really fully connected to this.

**[12:26] Speaker B:** What's going on that's stopping me from seeing where I could be improving this, particularly in terms of the structure or how the pacing of the second half perhaps can be a big thing that I know for me, I am often working on from the first draft into the second. So I think going in with that expectation that there will be big rewrites and edits is helpful for me because otherwise, yeah, I guess you put down the metaphorical pen and hope that that's going to be the book and then suddenly you realize you have to work on it for many, many months. I guess that would feel quite daunting if you didn't have that expectation.

**[13:08] Speaker A:** And you writing on your laptop, taking that wherever you are to write, we get quite like technical, a bit nerdy. Like, what software are you writing with? Have you got any font preferences?

**[13:21] Speaker B:** Yeah, so I just write on a Microsoft Word document. I guess I always have. Sometimes I'll make notes on Google Docs. I don't really. Maybe I find Google Docs it's easier to move between different documents. So if I've just got a few little notes on something, I might use that or more. I use Google Docs for when I'm preparing articles that I'm writing about the books that I'm doing and writing. But yeah, I use Word Document. I use Garamond size 12 font and I. Yeah, I love to keep things quite organized in that document.

**[14:05] Speaker B:** So, like, I won't be. I won't have sort of paragraphs that have things like finish this later. I can't deal with that. It has to be, you know, written as fully as possible, knowing that I will go through and edit it and change it. But I write it in like one in chronological order, you know, chapter one through to the final chapter.

**[14:29] Speaker A:** Without jumping around too much, what dictates where you'll write? You said that you've got this space at home, but quite often you're writing here, there and everywhere. Where does that feeling to move come from?

**[14:41] Speaker B:** Well, I don't know if it's a personal choice. I think it comes from the way in which my life has been for the last few years.

**[14:50] Speaker B:** I was living in London for a long time, but then we moved to New York. But I was still kind of living in, in London during. I was a school teacher. So I was living in London during the school term and then flying to New York where my husband lives during my school holidays. So I was kind of back and forth, back and forth. So I was getting quite used to writing on the plane. Writing. Yeah, in the airport. And then we were. When we were settling into New York, it took a while to find the apartment we were going to live in. So I was finding all these different places in the city that I wanted to write as well. I think that's the nice thing about moving to a new city when you're in the middle of writing a novel. And it was actually when I was writing my second novel, the Sleeping Beauties, that we moved to New York.

**[15:39] Speaker B:** I wanted to explore the city so I found different libraries that I could work in and get to know the place. So yeah, I'm happy writing anywhere.

**[15:51] Speaker B:** I like to have some headphones in to block out the noise. But apart from that, I'm. I can focus anywhere now.

**[15:57] Speaker A:** I love London, I live here. But like there is an energy to New York there. There is the feeling of a hustle. I know you're in. That's particularly in Manhattan. I know that you're in Brooklyn, but with, I guess this feels a bit like woo, woo. But like, how different has it been writing there than it was when you were writing here in London? Is that something that you can almost tangibly feel?

**[16:25] Speaker B:** Yeah, that's such an interesting question. I think when I was writing my first novel, Clara and Olivia, I was in London. I was living in Harrow on the hill. I was a teacher at a boarding school there. So I actually lived in a school apartment, this beautiful, beautiful apartment there. And I would write often, like in my dining room. And it felt quite like a small, quiet, intimate space. I wasn't really going that much to different cafes or libraries to do that. So I felt, I guess this was just me on my own writing. And also for your first Book, you don't know if it's going to be published. At that point, I didn't have an agent, didn't have a book deal. I was just writing this book and hoping. So I guess that was a very personal process. But then writing my next books and like Model Patient, I wrote that or pretty much all of that.

**[17:20] Speaker B:** In New York, there is a different feeling, and especially when you're surrounded by other people who are also writing, I think it is hard to say exactly what that is, but it is like part of. Like being part of a community of other writers. Particularly when I went to go and write, like in the center for Fiction in Brooklyn, you knew that a lot of those other people were writers. And I'm always quite nosy and curious about what other people are doing, doing. But of course, you never know. No one talks about what they're writing at that stage. But yeah, it does have a different feeling. And I wonder whether part of that also came from the fact that I was writing my second and third book. It's a different experience to writing your first book because you probably. Well, I did have a book deal for it.

**[18:08] Speaker B:** So you know that unless it's really bad, it's probably going to get published.

**[18:14] Speaker A:** The knowledge that you have the book deal, does that give you a comfort? Is there also a pressure that while someone is actually waiting for this now, but you have the confidence that while someone believes in what you have to say?

**[18:26] Speaker B:** Yeah, it's such a mix of the two. It is a comfort knowing that, you know, I pitched the idea. It's not like I'm just sitting there with a blank piece of paper being like, oh, I wonder what I'll write. You know, the idea that synopsis has been approved, I suppose, but that. So that's a. That is a comfort. And knowing that all the many, many hours that you're spending on it is going to result in a book, physical book is a great feeling.

**[18:54] Speaker B:** But yeah, there is, I suppose, a pressure to that and worrying partway through, like, if this doesn't work, I've got to start again and there's going to be a deadline that I need to reach. But I think there's a. I just wouldn't take it for granted. It's such a luxury to have a book deal. It's such a privilege that if I think back to the days when in my 20s, for example, I wrote two novels that I couldn't get an agent for, book deal for those two novels will never be published. And that's okay, you know, they're my practice, as it were.

**[19:30] Speaker B:** But if I think back to those moments, I wouldn't swap my writing experience now, knowing I've got a book deal, for those, you know, moments in my 20s when I was just really, really hoping, but getting a lot of silence in return. With many writers, I also have other things that I do, like I'm a teacher, I do tutoring, that sort of thing. But on my dedicated writing days, I like to start with some exercise. I love running, so I usually go for a run around Prospect park or around the Brooklyn piers. And that is very helpful to know that I've kind of almost got my physical energy out the way and then allows me to feel more comfortable that I'm just going to be sat down for the rest of the day.

**[20:17] Speaker B:** And it's also just a bit of a reset, going for a run. I think it gets all the other things that I do, my teaching, my tutoring, parenting, all of that sort of out the way. And then I can focus on the writing when I get home. And, yeah, then I'll make breakfast and settle down into writing, either at home or going down to the workspace. I tend to write.

**[20:42] Speaker B:** There's a workspace now building that I like to use as well. Or go to a library and I'll write for probably about like three hours.

**[20:56] Speaker B:** Time goes incredibly quickly when I'm writing, so I usually realise that it's gone lunchtime and need to go and make something to eat, which for some reason on writing days always feels like a very frustrating burden to have to do it. I don't want to stop and take the time, so it's usually something pretty quick that I'm making for lunch and then get back to writing for the afternoon. And, yeah, time just drifts away so fast. Sometimes I'll be dedicated to writing a chapter on a day, or sometimes it'll be. I'll be giving myself a few hours of reading and research because I don't only do my research before I start writing, I do it as the book goes along as well, just to develop some of the themes or directions that I'm taking.

**[21:50] Speaker B:** So I will write for another few hours and then finishing in the evening is. Well, I don't usually want to do it. I don't usually want to stop because I think that some of the best writing happens in the last kind of hour or so of the time I have for writing, unfortunately. And then time is up and I need to get back to my. My life at the moment. It's. It's just is all a bit different because I've. I had a baby recently and I only really have one day a week that I can do solid writing because I have help on that, that day. So I'll very quickly shift into making some kind of puree for my baby and do her evening meal and put her to bed and then the evening. It used to be that I'd sometimes get back to writing, but the last few months that's.

**[22:44] Speaker B:** I'm usually quite tired and also know that I'm going to be up a couple of times in the night with my baby. So maybe I'll read something or watch something and just unwind for the rest of the day.

**[22:57] Speaker A:** Is there an aim for what you get done in those specified writing days? I know that you have the three hours and a bit here and there. If you finish without getting done, I don't know, a thousand, two thousand words. Are you angry?

**[23:13] Speaker B:** I think I used to have quite high expectations of what I would fit into a day and I'd be quite specific about what I wanted to complete. But now I think I'm a bit more gentle with myself about it. And it's not really about the amount that I've done, but whether I feel like I have made some kind of progress with it. So, for example, sometimes progress looks like writing a whole chapter, like 3,000 words or something, which would be amazing.

**[23:50] Speaker B:** Sometimes progress is actually just fixing something that I was struggling with and maybe a moment in the chapter that I've been writing that it's just feeling isn't quite right. And that might only be 300 words, but it's progress for the story. So I think I can. I think it used to be that everything was by numbers. I was like, I've done a thousand words or 1,500 words. That's success. But I don't measure success in my day to day writing through words anymore, which is actually a real relief on

**[24:25] Speaker A:** the other days of the week where you've still got teaching to do, looking after a one year old to do. How able are you to just dip in and out to get a sentence or so done when you have a moment. Or is that not something that's important to you?

**[24:44] Speaker B:** I. I think I tried to do that a little bit, but it's. It's very difficult when writing a first draft of a novel. That's. That doesn't really work for me. I think I need to be more like focused for a first draft. But there are many other things that I can do in those Small bits of time. Like for example, when on a day that I am looking after my baby and she's taking a nap, I can, I've got like an hour here and there. I can do things. Or when I get home from teaching, I might have an hour or two. But yeah, I can do little things.

**[25:17] Speaker B:** Like I can finish reading a chapter of a book that's been, I'm using for research. I can do a bit of a deep dive into a topic that I'm interested in and make notes on it or in the build up to the publication of a book. Like for example, with the model Patient. I've been writing quite a few articles for different media outlets, that sort of thing. And that I find that I can do in those shorter spaces of time because I'm really drawing on the ideas and the creativity that I've already been through. I'm just bringing out in, bringing it out in new ways so it doesn't require quite the same really dedicated time.

**[26:00] Speaker A:** Does that mean you always need to be ready to go just to do a little bit of something? Whether it's fixing or researching or just getting something off whenever you've got the chance, you need to always be prepped to, oh, okay, she's having a nap. I just, I've got one hour. I need to use this wisely.

**[26:18] Speaker B:** Yeah. And actually that is a bit of a pressure. I have found that especially with, you know, having this, it's quite young baby and leading up to a book publication is just not, not really feeling that I can have much downtime because I have to use each, each nap wisely. And I, yeah, I guess I've almost planned out in advance what I'm going to do in each moment. And I have this thing as well that I like to. When she's awake, I won't really do anything that well, more the other way around when she's asleep, I won't really do anything that I could do when she's awake. So for example, she loves coming around the flat with me and helping me do all the household chores. She finds that really fun. I'll just put her in the baby carrier. But she would obviously not be happy if I was sat there on my laptop.

**[27:12] Speaker B:** I can give myself that some dedicated time. But yeah, it is a bit of a pressure. Like, okay, right, nap has started. I have a unspecified amount of time before she wakes up. How much can I get done in that time?

**[27:29] Speaker A:** And was there like a moment of acclimatization? So when you have a newborn

**[27:37] Speaker B:** and

**[27:37] Speaker A:** I don't know, maybe there's an expectation of, oh, I might be able to get this much done, I might be able to figure this out. When she's having an app, I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll do this. And I know everything changes. How was that process of kind of being a contracted author and having to figure it out as you go with still a pressure that there needs to be a book?

**[28:03] Speaker B:** Yeah, it is quite challenging because you don't really know in advance having a baby, what it's going to be like. Well, I certainly didn't. I don't think I had any expectations that I needed to like write a whole book in my first year of being a mum or something. But I did know that I had quite a lot of work that I needed to do. For example, four weeks after she was born, my publisher sent me the page proofs for the model patient.

**[28:34] Speaker B:** And yes, they also do hire a professional proofreader. Well, they have an in house proofreader probably. But it is also my responsibility to go through and check the book and see if there are any errors. And I was obviously completely sleep deprived at this point. This is four weeks after giving birth and that was quite challenging to be like, okay, I really need to do this carefully because I don't want to miss anything.

**[29:01] Speaker B:** But she was very tiny at that stage and sleeping a lot. So I remember one, I've got this photograph that I took of me. I had her wrapped up in the baby carrier, fast asleep and I was at my desk with a red pen just going through the manuscript looking for any errors and hopefully between me and the proofreader we found them all. But I'm not sure how successful I would have been at that, at that stage. So I think I didn't really know what it was going to be like.

**[29:32] Speaker B:** But I was also very fortunate that I had quite a lot of family come to stay. All the grandparents came in the first couple of months and my husband had a really long paternity leave. He had two months at the start and now he's got two months right now as well. So that's obviously been really helpful to be able to share out quite a lot of the parenting. So I've had a bit of time to be able to work on things.

**[30:02] Speaker B:** But yeah, I don't know how anyone could actually write a whole book, which I certainly didn't do. In these first eight months when things

**[30:11] Speaker A:** are a bit tricky for you, have you learned anything along the way that helps you out? That maybe greases the wheel just to get the words coming.

**[30:20] Speaker B:** Yeah, I think because I'm so.

**[30:24] Speaker B:** I feel very fortunate that I write novels that are set at particular time periods. My first two novels were historical novels. The Model Patient is set in the 60s, so it depends on who you ask as to whether that's historical or not. But it certainly still required research and going to things outside of my own knowledge and imagination, and that tends to be what I turn to when I feel a bit stuck. I.

**[30:50] Speaker B:** Well, the inspiration is not coming. I'm going to go and look at some artwork from the 1960s. I'm going to go and listen to the Beatles or Cliff Richard or I'm going to explore a menu, a typical recipe book or menu from the 1960s. And I might not even end up using any of that in the chapter that I'm writing. But it just really gets me back on track and refocuses me.

**[31:18] Speaker B:** And it's. Yeah, it's just. It does work really effectively as a little tool to reinspire, I would say.

**[31:27] Speaker A:** Back with more from Lucy in just a second. Very quickly popping by to say that if you're enjoying the show, we've brought you over 400 episodes. Now, if in any of those you've learned something which really helps the way that you do things, any tips or tweaks that you've made to your working day, well, you can support us for that in a couple of ways. And they all go such a long way. There's Patreon, that's for a rolling monthly pledge. You can stay as little, as long as you like for as much as you'd like over there. There is bonus content, there is merch, and there is even a way for your book to sponsor the show.

**[32:03] Speaker A:** That's happening over on our Patreon page, where you can join our community there. You can also make it a one and done over at Ko Fi. Just a one off. It comes through to me and it really helps me bring you these chats as often as I can. Also, if you'd like to support this show and your local independent bookshop, you can do that by getting a copy of any book that you like, including Lucy's new one, the Model Patient, over on our bookshop.org page.

**[32:30] Speaker A:** That's a really good way that you can get whatever you're reading without the big online monopolies taking most of the cash. For links for all of those, check the episode notes wherever you are. All right, let's get back into it then, with Lucy Ashe chatting about her new novel, the Model Patient. You can hear all about how it helped her understand her own confusing relationship with a therapist. We're diving back to 1960s London. What a joy that must have been to research. Also, we run through how much she reflected on what needed to be in a psychological thriller when she's slightly switching genre.

**[33:09] Speaker A:** And we get back to it with that very first idea. What was the seed that would become the Model Patient.

**[33:17] Speaker B:** It's quite a personal moment because I was going. I was in this very intense therapy relationship. I'd never done therapy before, and I didn't really know what to expect from it. And I started this therapy, which I realized was psychodynamic therapy. That's how the therapist explained it. But I didn't really know what that was.

**[33:42] Speaker B:** And I was finding it so difficult. I was really struggling with why I didn't know what the therapist was thinking. I felt like I wanted to know what he was thinking. He was very silent, very withholding. And I guess I was having what you would say is very strong transference reaction to the therapist, where you kind of transfer lots of past patterns of relationships or emotions, like unresolved emotions from the past onto them.

**[34:12] Speaker B:** But I didn't understand any of it. And I found it so confusing and unsettling. And I eventually found the courage to kind of tell him about this. But I felt that the response, his response to it really took me deeper and deeper into the transference and into the confusion of it. And the sort of.

**[34:30] Speaker B:** I sort of became, I would say, obsessed with it in a very unhealthy way that I didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't really know why this was therapy, to be honest. So the more bewildered I became, the more I felt that I needed to find a way to help contain the chaos of my emotions. So I was reading a lot about psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as a way to just try and get some sort of almost theoretical understanding that could. Could help me understand what the method was. Because every time I asked the therapist, what is the method? How does this work? Why is exploring the transference helpful? He wouldn't answer me. It was, you know, my questions were interpreted as a symptom of my, I guess, my.

**[35:20] Speaker B:** My issues, I suppose. So I found this so bewildering. And I turned to all this reading and research. And while I was doing that, I just felt that this was driving me towards a creative project. I think because I had become so immersed in the research about psychotherapy and this idea of obsession and transference felt to Me like really rich material for a novel.

**[35:46] Speaker B:** So the idea for the Model Patient started to emerge. And at first I think I wasn't quite sure where to go with it because I didn't want it to be a replica of my experience because that just wouldn't be very interesting. So I decided to make it a psychological thriller. I wanted to set it in the 60s again, perhaps to give a bit of distance from my own experience, but also because the 60s felt like a time of so much transition and change, which. Which was interesting for a character who, in therapy who's also going through a lot of transition and change.

**[36:23] Speaker B:** So, yeah, it was out of that. That need for a way to contain my own experience that I came up with the idea.

**[36:36] Speaker A:** So when you decide this is something that you'd like to explore, the. That's quite a deep what if. Like, you make the decision that you'll.

**[36:48] Speaker A:** You'll set it in the 60s because there is a distance there and you write a form of historical fiction.

**[36:57] Speaker A:** How wary were you setting out on that? So you need a what if for any good story. But when the what if is you and like, mining your own trauma, how did it take you a little while just to almost be ready to explore that?

**[37:16] Speaker B:** Yeah, it did. In terms of post writing the novel, thinking, how am I going to talk about this novel?

**[37:25] Speaker B:** Am I going to be able, when talking about this novel, to completely separate it from the inspiration behind the book? Is it going to be possible for me to be like, yes, I wrote this book, the Model Patient, and it's about a character from the 60s who has a intense sort of psychological experience with the therapist. You know, am I going to be able to do that and keep it completely separate from myself? And I realized that I just. I just couldn't. Actually. So much of the book did come from that. My own. Well, so much of the. The initial idea for the book came from my own experience.

**[38:02] Speaker B:** But I think while I was writing the book, I was. I was actually writing it. I guess during that period of the therapy being so difficult that it was almost a compulsion to write the book, I felt that I didn't have any choice in the matter when I was writing it. I really lived it in many ways, and it did give me, I think, a lot of help and support for myself to have this creative project that was linked to my own experience, but where I had a lot more control over it. I mean, I had complete control over this because it's a novel where I decide what all the characters do.

**[38:44] Speaker B:** And perhaps in Some ways that ability to write something where I could control the outcomes and it felt empowering for me at the time. But of course the book is a psychological thriller and none of the things that happen to Evelyn Westbrook in the book happened to me. You know, it's not an account of my therapy at all.

**[39:13] Speaker B:** It's just that spark of an idea of like what happens when a therapy relationship kind of spirals out of control or the therapy frame, which is a really important thing in therapy to help kind of contain it. Because of course that you're exploring such vulnerable and intimate things that if you don't have a secure boundaries that are established around the therapy, it can be very chaotic, very traumatic. I thought that that was just a really interesting place to go to with this, this work of fiction. So yeah, I think it's, it's been a real process for me. Like the writing was so helpful, but I'm glad that, that this book is on based, is being published kind of quite a few years on from the actual experience because it's given me time to really process it and move on from it. So now I'm talking about it.

**[40:08] Speaker B:** I don't have, you know, it doesn't feel like a really difficult thing to talk about anymore because it was in the past.

**[40:15] Speaker A:** How much did it change the structure of things? When you usually have an idea for a novel, whether it's about ballerinas or whatever it is, you kind of, you have that elevator pitch to yourself and then you can plan out the forms of A to B to C to D. And you write your synopsis with something like this when it is so personal and as you, as you said, like you need to write it. Is there ever a time and how, how much, how do you stop it becoming almost like a stream of consciousness of something that you're, you're exploring like that and actually bring it back to a plot driven novel.

**[40:56] Speaker B:** Well, I think having having it as a plot driven novel was what made it so helpful. It was, you know, I really needed to create some, some, some barriers and some boundaries around my experience. And one of the ways I did that was by having a novel that is, is very tightly structured and every word, every sentence took a very long time to write. There was no stream of consciousness in this novel.

**[41:26] Speaker B:** It was, I mean, I wrote the first draft quite quickly actually, but then the editing took another year and a half.

**[41:33] Speaker B:** It was a long editing process where I was going back in and out and really very carefully crafting it. But I think perhaps that contrast between the therapy that I was doing, which actually is stream of consciousness in the sense that the style that I was doing is where you're supposed to say whatever you're thinking, like literally what comes to you in that moment, no matter what it is, even if it's awkward, uncomfortable, you're supposed to just try and say it. And actually that's a very difficult thing to do. And I did struggle with that quite a lot. But I suppose that was what I was doing in the therapy. And the book was a contrast to that. It was tightly structured, plotted out. I had that same plotting document with every chapter planned. I was doing all this historical research into it. So two, I would say, parallel but contrasting experiences of the chaos of the therapy and the structure of the writing.

**[42:34] Speaker A:** So just take us back again to you decide you want to write about this experience.

**[42:43] Speaker A:** What are the thought processes that lead you to write that synopsis? How are you deciding where it's going to be set? What questions are you asking yourself that let you know where it's starting, what the midpoint is and how it might end?

**[43:00] Speaker B:** Yeah, I, I think I fell upon the 60s quite quickly. I was quite drawn to the 60s and the fact that it was this transitional time between the conservative values of the 1950s, that post war era, into the swinging 60s, and the book is set in 1963.

**[43:23] Speaker B:** So it's that, that transition point between the two. And so I thought about the 60s and then I was doing research into it and I, I saw that, that the contraceptive pill was newly available on the national health service in 1961. And the more I researched into that, the more I found how fascinating it was that this pill, this, this birth control pill was so revolutionary for a woman at the time, and yet it was also very stigmatized and, and taboo. And there were lots of. Yeah, there were, there were lots of articles at the time that suggested that actually people shouldn't be taking it. And there was lots of fear that it was going to lead to a promiscuous society. And it was at the doctor's discretion, for example, about whether they could, whether women could be prescribed it. So I felt that this became a kind of symbol for me to represent some of the conflicts that my character, Evelyn Westbrook, who is taking this pill, but her husband wants her to stop taking the pill.

**[44:31] Speaker B:** It became a way to root some of the time period and some important things that were happening in that time period into the plot itself. So I think as I was gradually, as I was preparing and researching for this book, I was finding other layers to the story that were different to my own experience in therapy. Because I knew I did not want to write a book that was about my experience in therapy that would not be an interesting novel. And I was layering in the time period, women's rights at the time, the contraceptive pillar, you know, music, fashion changes at the time. So I think that that really helped in terms of that initial research. But I did struggle a little bit to come up with what all the sort of twists and turns of the plot would be. And I think my initial first planning document for this, I remember showing it to my agent and he said, you know, it sounds like a fascinating premise, this is really interesting, but it's just not very satisfying the way you've decided to end it.

**[45:42] Speaker B:** And he was completely right. I think I'd got. I hadn't decided where I wanted the characters to get to. So you end. My initial plan was that the novel ends and you don't really know whether Evelyn, who is the kind of the patient, the model patient, whether she was being manipulated or whether she was actually just quite mad.

**[46:04] Speaker B:** And. And my agent was like, that's just not very satisfying. And I agreed with him. And I think I just hadn't quite worked out where I wanted the characters to get to. So I decided to make it much more of a psychological thriller. There are lots of like sub, like background stories that become revealed partway through and connections between characters and twists and that sort of thing. And that actually just became a lot more fun. I was just so felt like it was a great relief to decide to make this novel, this thriller and to make it empowering and satisfying. This kind of, I guess, is like a really great, hopefully sort of empowering feminist feeling to it. And yeah, there's, there's a lot in it about who is who should we believe, can we trust our instincts, like the unreliable narrator, that sort of thing.

**[47:00] Speaker B:** But I think once I. Once I'd found the more of the thriller type plot that I was after, that really helped me to settle into this writing and also to remove it further and further from my own experience.

**[47:16] Speaker A:** When you decide it's going to be a psychological thriller, which is a little departure from what you've written previously, what were you like, what are you reflecting that needs to be in a psychological thriller? Like, what were the key tent poles that you say? Right, every psychological dinner, they need these things to keep people reading. This is what a fan of that genre might expect.

**[47:40] Speaker B:** Yeah, I mean that is. It's such a difficult question. Because I don't know that when I'm writing I'm thinking, oh, every psychological thriller has this, this and this. I'm.

**[47:52] Speaker B:** I think I'm more writing like an atmosphere that is quite foreboding, quite unsettling. That idea of like trying to keep the reader feeling like they don't quite know who to trust. The Model Patient is definitely like a slow burn thriller. It's building, building, building and then towards the end there are some quite big revelations and twists. But for me, I think what I love in thrillers is not that the twist is like the biggest surprise. I actually personally quite like it when I already had worked it out or I could sense it coming. I think it's more about the atmosphere for me of just feeling like, okay, I just don't know, I don't know what reality is here. That's what I really tried to capture in the Model Patient.

**[48:48] Speaker A:** Setting something in the 60s as you imagine that the swinging 60s, it must be quite easy to really stereotype that era. And it's 10 years and a lot changes.

**[49:00] Speaker A:** And you mentioned doing thorough research, I guess. What steps did you take to make sure that you weren't just showing this as flower power and the Beatles trying to crack America?

**[49:13] Speaker B:** Yeah, and I think setting it in 1963 helped with that because the 1963 is not the swinging 60s. That has not happened yet. So I really, I think a lot of my research was really more rooted in what was going on towards the end of the 50s and how there was the generational differences.

**[49:32] Speaker B:** So in the novel, Evelyn really clashes with her parents in law who have very traditional expectations of, of what a wife should be doing and how they should run their home, that sort of thing. So that was what for Evelyn, what she was experiencing and the tensions within her. She wasn't aware of the fact that in a few years time there's going to be flower power and a sexual revolution. That's just what we have and that's what we know in hindsight. So I think by keeping on looking at what, what type of environment did the characters grow up in was more, almost more important than what was happening in 1963 itself.

**[50:19] Speaker A:** You said that. Well, this idea initially came to you because of your own experiences and you were very unsure about how you would be able to talk to it when it was done, talk about it when it was done. Has it helped, has writing this helped you figure out what was happening?

**[50:36] Speaker B:** Yeah, completely. This novel has I think transformed me and also my ability to do the work of the therapy My relationship with my therapist changed.

**[50:53] Speaker B:** I developed an understanding of what we were doing. I was able to stand up for myself a bit more and say, actually, I don't think that this approach that you're taking is helping me. Can we change it? Can we do something different? And just. Yeah, I think it gave me a lot of confidence that I wasn't in the dark about it all. I did understand the concepts, the therapy concepts that, that we were working with. So, yeah, really helpful. I think it also just allowed me to make sense of something that I couldn't make sense of at the time. And there is, I guess it's an, it's an age old tradition, isn't it, of using something creative, whether that's artwork, writing, you know, creating something as a way of turning something that's very painful into something that is very purposeful.

**[51:52] Speaker B:** And to see the Model Patient now in print with its beautiful cover and to hear what people think of it, that is actually a very special thing for me. And the fact that actually I can now talk to my therapist about it and say this book came from this time when we couldn't find a way of working together that was helpful. In fact, it was deeply traumatic. But look how things have changed. Look how I have changed in being able to.

**[52:29] Speaker B:** Yeah, being able to make sense of it all. So, yeah, I think that it's been one of the most transformative experiences of my life to write this book.

**[52:39] Speaker A:** And that is it for this week's episode of Writers Routine. Thank you so much for listening. You can get a copy of Lucy's new book, the Model Patient. Use the link for our bookshop.org page. That way it really supports this show and your local independent bookshop. If you don't get there as often as you'd like, you could also support the show on our Patreon and Ko Fi pages. More. Make sure you sign up for free to our substack newsletter. Dropping a brand new post today. Just some leaping off points and expanding on some of the things that Lucy and I chatted about.

**[53:08] Speaker A:** There are links for everything in the episode notes and you can get in contact with the show at Writers Routine and I will see you next week with a brand new guest on the podcast. Until then, thank you for listening.