Julia Crouch is the author of ten internationally published crime novels, including Cuckoo, Tarnished, The Long Fall, and Her Husband’s Lover. Unable to find a sub-genre of crime writing that neatly described her work, she came up with the term Domestic Noir, which is now widely accepted as the label for one of the most popular crime genres today.

Julia has been a Visiting Fellow on the UEA MA Creative Writing Crime Fiction and teaches online for Faber Academy and the National Centre for Writing. She co-runs the Brighton Crime Wave, a bi-monthly crime fiction night.

Holly

Welcome to The Writing Life, Julia Crouch.

Julia

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Holly

We’re recording on a very chilly morning, right on the cusp of a new year, a time when lots of us start looking ahead, resetting goals, or craving a general refresh.

So today we’re going to talk about how writers might harness that sense of impetus, but also about the more ongoing ways in which the writing life constantly offers flexibility, opportunities to experiment, and room to evolve.

To start, what does your writing life look like at the moment? Are you working towards a particular goal?

Julia

That’s a great question. I am. I’ve got a novel on the go, its working title is Is Wild, and I’m about a third of the way in. I know where I’m heading, and I’m aiming to finish the first draft by the end of March.

That’s quite a bracing deadline, but what keeps me going is the system I use. I work out how many words I want, around 80,000 is my ideal length, and then divide that across the working days I have. I write Monday to Friday, so that gives me a daily word count. I try to meet it every day and often exceed it, which gives me some leeway for either extra words later or occasional days off.

I also do a lot of teaching, and I take that seriously, so sometimes a whole day goes on preparation or marking. I’ve learned to be kind to myself. I used to beat myself up if I didn’t write every day. Stephen King famously said he wrote every day except Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving and his birthday, then admitted he was lying, because he wrote on those days too. I’m more lenient. Life has to encompass more. If you’re the person who holds your own support systems together, you have to be kind.

Holly

Absolutely. And it’s a great place to start, because there’s no single ‘right’ way to be a writer. A writing life is so much more than the physical act of writing. Some days it’s about being open-minded or inquisitive, or it’s about reading, or finding your community. There are so many ways to be a writer.

Julia

Exactly. I think it’s really important to get out and live. I call it feeding my beast. I’ll happily spend a day in an art gallery or a week travelling and just absorbing experiences.

If you stay in your room writing and only experience the world through a screen, you miss the things that truly feed your work, meeting people, seeing new places, feeling the frost under your feet. Being out in the world and letting unexpected things happen is incredibly important.

Holly

Yes, and then that’s what you bring back to your desk. You talked about your routine: has it always been like that? Have you always been very structured, or do you allow for spontaneity and short bursts of writing too?

Julia

Oh yes, you cut your cloth according to your life. I’ve been writing professionally for 15 years, and when I started, before I was published, I wrote in the corners of time. I had a full-time job, three school-aged children, and I was visiting an elderly friend in a nursing home every day. I was very busy.

I remember taking my youngest to band practice and sitting in the next room while they banged out songs, trying to finish my edits. You work around your life.

If I’m working on a draft, a deadline helps enormously. If you don’t have an external deadline, as I don’t at the moment, because I’m between publishers, giving yourself an internal one, maybe promising your agent something by a certain date, is really helpful.

Be realistic, though. If you don’t have time to write 2,000 words a day, which is what I aim for, then 500 is fine. Two hours is fine. Bursts are fine. Every little bit helps. The Great Wall of China was built brick by brick.

Holly

Right, and like any resolution, a writing goal is only useful if it doesn’t create unrealistic pressure. The minute you miss a day, it shouldn’t make you want to give up.

Julia

Exactly.

Holly

You’re also an experienced tutor, including on our beginners’ crime fiction course here at the National Centre for Writing. Is there a particular piece of advice you find yourself giving your students?

Julia

The main one is: be kind to yourself. But also, especially early on, cultivate a daily writing habit. It helps you believe in yourself as a writer, and that’s one of the hardest things when you’re beginning, although even now, ten novels in, I still struggle with it. I still sometimes think my writing time should fit around everything else. But it’s important, to me, to my characters, to my words, to devote time to it.

For beginners, I suggest trying morning pages or daily pages: fifteen minutes a day of writing anything, without worrying about quality. If mornings don’t work because you have children or a job that starts early, find another slot, lunch, late evening, whenever you can. Almost anyone can find fifteen minutes. And once you’ve done that, protect that time. Make it a hot date in your diary.

Dorothea Brande, whose book Becoming a Writer inspired The Artist’s Way, was very strict about this, she said if you can’t find fifteen minutes a day, give up. I think that’s harsh, but the principle of carving out a small, regular space is valuable.

Holly

Such good advice. And for people starting out, your own story is really inspiring. Many people thinking of trying something new wonder: is it too late? Am I any good? Is this for me?

Julia

First of all, it’s never too late. The older you are, the more you have to write about. I’ve just become a grandmother, and that opens up a whole new set of relationships to explore.

I started writing prose in my mid-40s. I hadn’t written prose since school, though I’d been a playwright and a devising theatre director in my twenties. But life changes, you adapt and survive. I retrained as a graphic designer, ran my business from home for ten years, then did a master’s in sequential illustration, which is essentially telling stories through images.

For that course I wrote and illustrated two children’s books, too dark to be published at the time, and realised I found the words easier than the pictures. That surprised me. So I signed up for Open University creative writing courses. I loved them. I wrote short stories, read at open-mic nights with my knees knocking, and eventually wondered if I could write a novel. It seemed impossible. I didn’t know any published writers. When I finally got a book deal, I was the first published writer I knew.

Holly

It shows the power of community too, how important it can be.

Julia

Absolutely. I always encourage students to find their peers, whether online or in person. Many of my former students still go to each other’s book launches and support each other.

I didn’t have that early on. I joined a writers’ group but found I was too hungry to write my own work to spend time critiquing others’. Now, from the teaching end, I see how helpful reading peers’ work can be. And teaching has absolutely improved my own writing, it’s a reciprocal exchange.

The downside is your internal critics get more articulate. They sit on your shoulders saying, ‘Who told you you could write?’ They never go away, but you learn strategies.

Holly

And one of yours was NaNoWriMo.

Julia

Yes, National Novel Writing Month. Back then it was very intense: 50,000 words in November, which is roughly 1,700 words a day. I squeezed it around everything else. I remember once writing my day’s words at 11pm after being at a wedding since late morning. Some of those words even made it into the final novel!

I don’t recommend Hemingway’s ‘write drunk, edit sober’, he’s not the best role model, but his line ‘the first draft of anything is shit’ is hugely liberating. I have it on a postcard above my desk. It means you don’t have to get it right—you just have to get it written.

For me, my first draft is ‘draft zero,’ for my eyes only. That shuts the critics up and lets me write freely.

Holly

That ties into something else I wanted to ask: how much does accountability help? A shared goal, or a course, or a group?

Julia

It helps enormously. That’s one of the real strengths of creative writing courses: the exercises, deadlines, and feedback. It creates an external force. If someone wants something by next Tuesday, you’ll produce it. And once you get into that habit, it becomes easier.

Holly

So for beginners, a goal might simply be to get something down, ‘draft zero’. For those ready to share their work, a course could be the next step.

Julia

Exactly. Courses work for complete beginners too, there’s so much discovery, and useful, encouraging feedback. You learn a lot about yourself as a writer.

Holly

Listening to your story also shows how flexible writing can be, you’ve been a playwright, written for children, now novels. You’ve experimented with genre and form. How do you keep from getting stuck in one place?

Julia

It’s something I’m thinking about a lot. My first published novel, Cuckoo, was labelled crime fiction, which surprised me. But when I saw the sales figures for crime vs. literary fiction, I got over it! But then my publicist and I realised the term ‘psychological thriller’ didn’t fully capture my slower-burn stories that move from order to disorder. I came up with the term ‘domestic noir,’ which then took off and became a whole branch of crime fiction.

That was great, but it also boxed me in. I once wrote something more dystopian and cult-based, and my publisher said, ‘We can’t publish this. It isn’t a Julia Crouch novel.’ And I thought: but I wrote it, and I am Julia Crouch! I had to rewrite it, which was tough but valuable.

I’ve now published ten novels in that domestic-noir territory, each different in its own way, but I’m branching out. At the moment I’m playing with folk horror, inspired by gardening, plants, folklore, forests. It’s exciting.

The key, I think, is to challenge yourself. If you write the same thing over and over, it becomes just a job, or you stagnate.

Holly

For more established writers wanting to reinvent or try something new but feeling overwhelmed, what would you advise?

Julia

Don’t write to market. What’s selling now won’t be selling in two years, which is the minimum time it takes for a book to come out. Write what excites you. If it excites you enough, the energy will reach the reader. And who knows, you might be writing the next big thing, or something solid and genre-busting. But it needs to matter to you.

Holly

That’s great advice.

I’d like to return to the idea of being stuck. Writers find themselves there often. What ideas do you have for someone whose goal is simply to become unstuck?

Julia

Don’t sit at your desk trying to force it. Go out and look for inspiration.

My favourite idea-generator is going for a run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, just get outside. Move your body. Get some air. Put your brain in neutral. Don’t listen to words, music is better. When I’m running with magnificent music, I feel like a superhero, and ideas come.

Mind-mapping is also great, especially for plot-heavy genres like crime. If you’re stuck, map out the possibilities and see what grows.

Keep your eyes open when travelling. Don’t bury yourself in your phone. Look at people, interactions, scenery. I used to carry a notebook; now I use voice notes on my phone.

Read. Always read.

And when I need inspiration, I return to craft books. Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird are my favourites. They always fire me up.

Sometimes I’ll also write ‘field trips’, scenes from my characters’ past that won’t appear in the book but help me understand them. Or I jump ahead to another part of the story. But my biggest tip is: go out into the world and move.

Holly

There’s so much brilliant advice there. I love that story about Ali Smith and how different influences came together to form How to Be Both. It’s about being awake and alive to inspiration.

Another thing we touched on is writing community. For people who aren’t on a course, where might they find or grow that sense of writerly identity?

Julia

Go to writer events, local organisations, bookshops, libraries. Here in Brighton, Kemptown Bookshop runs lots of events, including a 5am writing session once a month with free coffee. I’ve never made it, but I love the idea!

Social media, for all its faults, is great for finding like-minded people. Posting on a local area group asking if anyone wants to form a writers’ group can work surprisingly well.

Festivals are brilliant, too. If you’re into crime fiction, Harrogate’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival is wonderful, everyone mingles, and crime writers are famously friendly. You’ll find your tribe.

Holly

Wonderful. Finally, you’ve told us your writing goals for the next few months, but is there something more holistic or long-term you’re working towards in your writing life?

Julia

Yes, my ‘project of the heart.’ It’s a more literary novel about a midlife woman who has lost her family and is trying to find connection. It’s also a formal experiment. It’s bubbling away in the background, and will probably take a couple of years, but it’s the thing quietly driving me forward.