LIVE! #67
2 February 2025
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics training
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Meet today's author: Dolly Alderton
- Born Hannah Alderton in 1988 to English and Canadian parents in London.
- Changed her name to Dolly in her early teens.
- Degrees in drama, English, and journalism.
- Wrote a dating column for The Sunday Times from 2015-17.
- In 2020 began writing 'agony aunt' column in same paper as Dear Dolly.
- Has written two memoirs, first in 2018 Everything I Know About Love which became a serial drama on BBC.
- Second memoir Dear Dolly published in 2022 and based on her column.
- First novel, Ghosts, published in 2020.
- Good Material is Alderton's second novel.
- Wrote and co-directed two films: The Confluence (2014) & Anna Island (2015).
- Former co-host and co-creator of the podcast The High Low.
- Her podcast Love Stories ran in conjunction with her first memoir.
- Well-known cultural presence in the UK: articles, radio, TV.
- In 2020 appeared on BBC Radio 4's Great Lives, nominating actress Doris Day.
- In 2024 wrote a screenplay of Pride and Prejudice for Netflix.
"The way that I like making people feel things is often not with an
extremity of emotion or emotional language. It’s about a subtle stacking up of truths about being human, and that
is something that accumulates to something that makes you feel something, rather than people saying a huge
overblown emotional thing that feels operatic."
— Dolly Alderton
What do I feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Voice
- • Character development
- • Horizontal structure
- • Pacing
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
Writing Good Material
- "What inspired Good Material was I went through a heartbreak a few years ago, where I just became a stranger to myself. I just went so utterly insane. So it was that feeling that was the springboard rather than any events or any people."
- Wrote a male protagonist to "challenge myself as a novelist and a human."
- Wanted Andy to feel like everyone’s friend.
- Interviewed a dozen men to shape Andy--and a bald man for the bald stuff.
- Jane exists to be "a good hinge back to Jen, and I wanted to make it as un-engineered as possible.”
- The boat scene happened to a friend of Dolly’s. She felt it was the perfect expression of a failed attempt to move on from a relationship.
- The only autobiographical feature is Andy's wise and loving mum.
- The movie Marriage Story (2019) is in the book and inspired the sad scene when Jen and Andy sleep together.
- Always planned to have Jen’s POV at the end, to answer Andy’s questions.
- “I wanted to see people being brave and feeling really empowered by that.”
- “I don’t really believe in a lot of rules about storytelling, but one of the things that I do think is really
useful is that penultimate false ending, where that you’ve got to the end and there’s this like prologue of story
that often reverses what you thought was going to happen.”
-- Dolly Alderton
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Humorous Literary Fiction, General Humorous Fiction, Humorous Fiction, Contemporary Women Fiction, Literary Fiction, Friendship Fiction, Humorous Fiction & Satire
- Genre: Present-Day Realistic Long-Form Archplot
- Print Pages: 345; Word count: 98,106
Reading Grade: 7th; Avg. wds/sent.: 12.26
Lexical Density: 45.53; Flesch Reading Ease: 78.96 - POV: Andy (final 15%: Jen); Person: 1st; Tense: Present (Andy) Past (Jen)
- Publish date: January 30, 2024
- Publisher: Knopf
- Audio book length: (9 hours, 54 mins)
- Narrators: Arthur Darvill, Vanessa Kirby
- Recognition: NY Times 10 best books of 2024, NY Times bestseller, ReadWithJenna book club pick
- The mark of a good novel:
"After finishing [Curtis Sittenfeld’s] Romantic Comedy, I immediately Googled the characters’ names, wanting to know more about them."
— Dolly Alderton
WritersWhoRead.com/LIVE
March 2: James - Percival Everett (USA, 2024)
April 6: Burma Sahib - Paul Theroux (USA, 2024)
May 4: Butcher - Joyce Carol Oates (USA, 2024)
June 1: Margo's Got Money Troubles - Rufi Thorpe (USA, 2024)