My process has evolved substantially over the past ten years. When I started out, I was very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pantser, though I soon learned the hard way that zero plotting = savage edits. My second novel fell apart structurally and much of it had to be rewritten, so I vowed after that to study the craft of pre-planning and I’ve done that ever since. It can feel like an uphill struggle at times, wrangling a plot into shape, but it helps ease my anxiety to know the direction I’m heading. There are still moments where characters surprise me, so it’s not all set in stone, but I do make a point of knowing what my book is about, what the pivotal plot points are going to be and what that all-important final scene will look like.
Writing every day is something I try to do, but as a busy freelancer, it’s unfortunately not always possible. I do find that once I’m past the first 25k words or so, it flows more easily and I get into a good habit of early morning writing stints, but it’s a constant juggle. I dream of winning the lottery so I can fully immerse myself in a purely bookish lifestyle!
I know you travel a lot, and it sounds like you’ve been traveling since you were a child. Other than Greece, do you have a favorite place to visit? How often do these locations show up in your novels?
Do you have an audience in mind when you write, or do you mostly just write the books you personally would like to read?
Do you let anyone read early drafts of your work, or your novels in progress, or do you wait until you consider a book mostly done to show it to someone? I know a lot of authors are a part of a writing group, or have some other type of support. How about you? Who’s your support crew?
My teenage years were where it all began. I was invited to Spain with a friend and her family, to a small place on the mainland called Mojacar (not to be confused with Majorca!) and caught the travel bug. On a gap year between high school and university, I donned a backpack and headed off on a solo tour around Europe, which was so much fun. I visited places such as Rome, Paris, Pisa, Barcelona, Prague, Amsterdam, Berlin and many, many more – some of which became settings for later novels.
When I’m travelling, I feel more awake to the world. All my senses seem to switch on in a new place. I notice the light differently, the sounds of a street, the smell of food drifting out from a kitchen, the rhythm of how people live their lives. It reminds me how vast and varied the world is. Travel changes me in small, quiet ways. I always come home from a trip having learnt something about myself. I think that’s because being away from a normal routine strips away expectation. Suddenly, I can see everything with fresh eyes. Since becoming an author, I’ve been to all sort of places in the pursuit of stories and done all kinds of things to broaden my own lived experience, be it scaling a mountain in Sri Lanka at dawn, leaping from a plane in New Zealand, getting lost in a snowy Canadian woodland or chopping fruit for rescued elephants in Thailand – and all of them have taught me something.
As for favourites, after Greece, it has to be Scotland. If you’ve yet to visit, I strongly advise adding it to your list. The scope of the place, the history, the sheer natural beauty… it’s captivating. And fun! There’s nothing I crave more after a sundowner on a Greek beach than a knees-up to some live music in a Scottish Highlands pub!
Wow, you are so brave and adventurous! I didn’t leave my home state until the age of 36, and have rarely even been on an airplane. I’m truly envious of you.
How about the people you’ve met? Have any of the folks you’ve met while on your travels shown up in your books?
This is a bit like asking a parent to name their favorite child, but which of your books are you the most proud of? Was one of them more of a struggle than the others?
You mention book tours. How much traveling have you done to promote your novels? Do you have any favorite stories from the road you can share?
I do feel as if the British have it easier. We’re so close to all those big European cities here. You can hop on a flight after work on Friday and be dining in sight of the Acropolis a few hours later. I never take it for granted and try to get away as often as work allows.
When it comes to people, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t borrowed elements of a few for character inspiration. Once in Athens with a friend, a beautiful German man stopped us in the street just so he could say hello. He was quite taken with my friend, but she was too shy to offer her number. Later that same night, we’d been wandering around for ages trying to decide where to eat, eventually settling on a small taverna tucked away along a side street. She was expressing regret at not having been braver and given this gorgeous man her details when he appeared! Turned out he was staying at the hostel above the taverna. They did then exchange numbers and he invited her to visit him in Germany. I was convinced they would end up together, but instead she chickened out again. Aargh! I never forgot the way he looked at her that night and used the exact moment in my seventh novel, Hello, Again.
I do believe the latter is a great starting point. There always has to be something personal in the story, a theme or character or setting you feel passionately about, or you’d struggle to sit at your desk for all those long hours, weeks and months writing. My only real rule is to leave the reader with hope in their heart – that’s the feeling I want people to take from all the books I write. I find if I keep that rule in mind, I don’t stray too far away from where my readers expect me to be.
I’m lucky enough to have a tight group of author friends, who I’ll turn to for advice and support along the way. We all help each other out, whether it’s a plot problem or a question about publishing, and it’s not uncommon for 10 and even 20-minute voice notes to be firing around between us. On writing days, we’ll often set up a Writing Zoom to keep each other accountable and focused. I enjoy all that, but when it comes to the actual draft, nobody sees it until I feel it’s ready for my agent and editor. Only much later down the line will I allow family members to have a look…and often I make them wait until publication day. I’m a tweaker, constantly finessing descriptions and dialogue with each draft, and nobody should have to see all that mess!
This is an almost impossible question to answer. I guess, in all honestly, I’m proud of every single one. When I look at the finished novels, I see all the work that went into them – not only by me, but my publishing team, the jacket designer, marketing and publicity staff. There is so much passion and grit among those pages. I am particularly proud of Hidden Letters, because it’s my first with an historical thread, while of my earlier works, I’d probably say One Thousand Stars and You. It’s a split-narrative novel that follows Alice, a young woman having one last adventure before settling down with a man she’s not sure she even wants to marry, and Max, the former soldier she meets in Sri Lanka, who’s battling his own demons after losing a limb in combat. To make sure I got his character right, I spent months meeting men who’d been through similar tragedies, learning about their new realities and the psychological impact of such an injury. It was a humbling yet inspiring experience – one that continued once the book was out in the world and I began hearing from readers who’d connected with Max. That book will always be very special to me – and it won me my first award!
That’s the most amazing story about getting published that I think I’ve heard.
What happened after you got your first novel written? Did you work with an agent to get it published? What was the editing process like?
What were you doing when you found out A Thousand Stars and You had won the Contemporary Romance Novel of the Year? I can’t imagine what that had to have been like.
You’ve added historical fiction to your writing repertoire, but do you feel like anything else about your writing has changed in the decade since your first work was published?
It looks like most of your books were published under “Isabelle,” with a switch to “Izzy” for The House of Hidden Letters. I’d love to know more about that!
f there’s one thing that is consistent in publishing, its the inconsistencies! Everyone’s path to securing that initial deal is different. For me, it felt like a whirlwind. I met my first agent by chance at a bookshop, where I was interviewing another author in my guise as a journalist. After the event there was a signing, and she and I got to chatting and I mentioned that I was writing a book. She asked if I’d show it to her, which I did, and less than a week later she offered me representation. We did a short edit together before she sent it out on submission. Ten UK editors read it, three were interested, one attempted to pre-empt (which is where they offer a certain amount to outbid the others early on). We turned that offer down because I wanted every editor to have the chance to pitch. Now that was a fun process! They were all fantastic and I’d have been lucky to work with any one of them, but eventually I settled on Penguin.
That first edit was great. A steep learning curve, but a rewarding one. The resulting book was a thousand times better than it had been at submission by the time we were done.
The slight name tweak was a decision my new UK publisher made. They wanted readers to know it was still me writing, but with a slight difference – in this case, the historical thread. Often when it comes to sales, it can be beneficial to go in with a clean slate, so to speak, and a name change can help that. My team wanted the book to have the absolute best chance it could at securing good retail slots and reaching as many potential readers as possible – and they’ve done a fantastic job! Most of my friends call me Izzy, so in that way, these new books are even more ‘me’ than my first 12.
It was such an amazing and surreal moment! I was actually at the Romantic Novelists Association Awards – a fancy party held in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. There were some big-name authors in my category and I was so convinced I had no chance of winning that I hadn’t even prepared a speech. Cue me stumbling up to the stage, beetroot red in the face, mumbling about how proud I was while the room cheered. For it to be that book, in particular, really meant a lot. The award itself is a star, too! It lives in my writing room now, in pride of place on my bookshelf.
One thing I have done is get braver. I’ve fully peeled back the lid on my own life, emotions and experiences, and explored all those things through my writing. There is so much about being a writer that we can’t control: how much marketing budget our books get, how many copies go into stores, whether or not they’re selected for prize lists etc – but what we can control is how they’re written. It is our job as authors to keep honing our craft, to read widely, challenge ourselves, fiddle with those descriptions until they sing on the page. I love a writing craft book – a Save The Cat or a Story Genius. I love learning about writing and immersing myself in its intricacies. You never get worse at writing – especially if you push yourself to keep doing it better.