Fi Phillips

How did you come to be writing your book? What inspired your story? I was speaking to a friend recently, someone I've known since I was a child, and although our paths have parted, we've always held faith with one truth in our lives - we are writers. Recently, she started to write a novel. We've discussed its development over the phone and one thing became clear the more we talked - the inspiration for her novel is linked back to the loss of a well loved individual in her life, not necessarily the loss itself but the place in her mind and her younger life that the experience has led her to remember. The result is that she has an inspiring story to tell to an agent or a publisher about how her novel came about when she decides to seek publication, with a defined theme too. That got me thinking about my own novel and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I don't have that same inspirational clarity. I honesty can't tell you what inspired me t...

Last week, I had a wonderful excuse to escape the mountain of unpacked boxes still filling my new home, dress up and head into Chester. On Monday last, as part of the Chester Literature Festival  held at the Storyhouse , I met with Curtis Brown literary agent Lucy Morris to go over the opening chapter of my novel and the accompanying synopsis. The feedback on my chapter was brilliant but what proved to be the most helpful was the discussion of my synopsis.  I had always played a bit of a guessing game when it came to writing my synopsis, pulling from the information offered by literary agent websites and online writing advice. Talking to Lucy cleared all of that up for me.  The definition of a synopsis that I grew up with was a break down of a novel's chapters. I knew that this wasn't the case anymore and that an overview of the storyline was preferable but that was as far as my idea of a synopsis went. Lucy began by asking me to tell her what ...