Sabine Durrant: On Taking Her Writing Somewhere New
Sabine Durrant is a former assistant editor of The Guardian and a former literary editor of the Sunday Times whose feature writing has appeared in numerous British national newspapers and magazines. She has been a magazine profile writer for the Sunday Telegraph and a contributor to The Guardian’s family section. She is the author of several books, including Under Your Skin, Lie With Me, and Finders, Keepers.
She lives in south London with her husband, the writer Giles Smith, and their three children. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Sabine Durrant
In this post, Sabine shares what inspired her novel Sun Damage, why it set off a bidding war, and how she manages to get distance from her own writing during the revision process.
Name: Sabine Durrant
Literary agent: Grainnè Fox at UTA
Book title: Sun Damage
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release date: August 1, 2023
Genre/category: Psychological Thriller
Previous titles: Having it and Eating It; The Great Indoors; Under Your Skin; Remember Me This Way; Lie With Me; Take Me In; Finders, Keepers
Elevator pitch for the book: A grifter set loose among rich holiday-makers in the south of France. A serpent in paradise.
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What prompted you to write this book?
I’ve been fascinated by con artists ever since I saw that brilliant Stephen Frears film The Grifters with John Cusack, Anjelica Houston, and Annette Benning (based on the Jim Thompson novel), in which you don’t know who’s going to out-con who. I love an unreliable narrator and seeing how far you can stretch a reader’s sympathy and I’ve aways thought a scam-artist provided the perfect voice, a criminal who’s also a magician, whose exploits are also intellectually satisfying to watch.
After that, it was really a matter of timing. A novel is often I think a reaction to the one the writer has written before. My previous book was about a hoarder and was largely set in the crammed, confined setting of her home. I was already keen to do something different when we were thrown into lockdown and I was stuck physically in my own house.
Instinctively, I was drawn to a character who had no home of her own, no daily routines, who lived on the fly, who wasn’t restricted by anything, let alone Covid rules. I might have been seeing my own vacation plans recede before my eyes, but I could spend a lot of time on Google maps and on holiday house websites. I could live vicariously through her. So the book came out of a long term interest in the subject, plus two prompts: claustrophobia and wish-fulfilment.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The first draft came quickly. I started in March 2020 and was finished by the end of the summer. But the second and third drafts were much slower. I’d started with a simple plot, the bare bones of the main scam; and it was only in later edits that I weaved in backstory and deepened the characterization.
I’d had the idea for a twist before I even started writing, but in previous drafts it was demoted to a subsidiary twist. I also added an epilogue which opened the narrative up and changed the perspective. Working that all in, while maintaining the pace of the original story, took me until the middle of the following year.
And then there were line edits with my UK publisher—nothing major because we’ve worked together long enough to be in synch, and then it was finally published in the UK in July 2022. It’s now coming out in the US a whole year later.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Sun Damage is my sixth thriller, and all but one of my previous books have been set in the London suburbs. I’ve been surprised by how much interest there has been in the foreign setting. I’ve sold film rights before, but this is the first novel for which I’ve been involved in a bidding war.
I think having a love story as well as a thriller arc helped, but one producer described the Provençal setting as being ‘like cat mint’ and I wondered why I’d never realized that before—I’d have binned south London long ago!
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I knew that it was a challenge to write in the voice of a morally dubious character, to work in enough of Ali’s background and emotional life to make her sympathetic to the reader. But I set out with the clear intention to make her ‘marks,’ the rich holiday-makers she dupes, as spoiled and privileged as could be; the more unattractive they were, I thought, the easier it would be to bring the reader round to Ali’s side.
A big surprise for me was how interesting I would find it to layer their backstories, to provide them with hinterland, and that in fact that that would be something Ali would find too, that it would be part of her ‘journey.’
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope they will be thrilled and excited, that they will find their moral compass swing around a bit, and that they’ll feel as if they have watched a good magician at work; they’ll know how it was done, but they’ll still marvel at the mastery of the trick. Also that they’ll make sure next time they’re travelling to hide the address label on their luggage the moment they leave the airport!
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Writing is such an intense business; you are so absorbed with your own story and thoughts as you go along, that it can be so hard to have perspective. That for me is always the battle; to read what I’ve written objectively. Stephen King in On Writing suggests putting it aside for as long as you can after finishing a draft, but it’s hard if you are on a deadline, or, like me, too impatient.
I’ve tried printing it out or changing the typeface, but the most effective method in my experience is sending passages as an email and reading it on your phone. Like the best cons, it’s simple, but very effective.
While there’s no shortage of writing advice, it’s often scattered around—a piece of advice here, words of wisdom there. And in the moments when you most need writing advice, what you find might not resonate with you or speak to the issue you’re dealing with. In A Year of Writing Advice, the editors of Writer’s Digest have gathered thoughts, musings, and yes, advice from 365 authors in dozens of genres to help you on your writing journey.