EP461: Freya Berry — “Be Ambitious.”

Freya Berry’s writing career began as a journalist at Reuters. After a stint in New York reporting on the 2016 US election she left to write her acclaimed first novel, The Dictator’s Wife. With her new novel, The Birdcage Library, Freya has ended up creating a love story and a detective mystery, two things she never planned to write. Freya tells about the challenges of writing two timelines, the importance of a finding a state of half-focus, and digging deeper to make your writing truthful.

And in the extended version for Academy members and podcast Patrons, the Two Marks discuss the three book rule, half focus, writing anti-heroes, and much more!

WE DISCUSS…

Getting to know your characters like friends
Writing about real people from the footnotes of history
And why Freya had to invent her own dictatorship…

PODCAST

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This Week’s Links:

You can discover more about Freya here: https://linktr.ee/freyaberry
Our episode with Piers Torday: https://bestsellerexperiment.com/ep334-piers-torday-what-matters-is-the-book/
Our episode with Stuart Turton and Sarah Moorhead: https://bestsellerexperiment.com/ep319-sarah-moorhead-and-stuart-turton-teacher-student-metempsychosis/
Phil Oddy’s blog on how the 200 words a day challenge means he can call himself a writer: https://philoddy.com/2023/06/29/every-little-helps/

Permalinks…

THE BESTSELLER ACADEMY: https://bestsellerexperiment.com/academy
Sign up to the 200 Word A Day Challenge here: http://200wordchallenge.com
Here’s the 200 Word A Day Word Bank: https://bestsellerexperiment.com/bxp2020-word-count/
Support the podcast and join our exclusive Facebook Group: https://bestsellerexperiment.com/support
Buy Back to Reality: https://bestsellerexperiment.com/backtoreality/
Here from Audible.com (US) http://www.audible.com/pd/B07YB4J1TH
And here from Audible.co.uk (UK) https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B07YB5HNRC
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The Unofficial Bestseller Experiment Book Club… https://www.facebook.com/groups/252973655872910

Find out more at https://bestsellerexperiment.com/backtoreality

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