Beth O’Leary is a bestselling author whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her debut, The Flatshare, sold over a million copies and is now a major TV series. Her latest novel, Swept Away, is set to be published in April 2025.

Giving a Great Idea Room to Grow

The concept for my new novel, Swept Away, was so tempting I couldn’t let it go when I thought of it – but it was also so ambitious I couldn’t actually write it.

This is how I felt about the idea for years. Just… stuck. I hit upon the set-up of two strangers lost at sea on a houseboat together after a one-night stand back in 2019, and I loved it. But it would mean writing a) only two characters in b) only one location. And that sounded really hard.

My agent loved the idea too, and suggested I include flashbacks to make it a little easier to tell the story, but my instincts were that that wasn’t the right way to go. I sensed that if I was going to write this novel, I needed to do it justice: the appeal of the idea was partly about how ambitious and difficult it was, so I didn’t want to water it down. I wanted it to genuinely be a book about two people in a houseboat, without anything to soften the intensity of that. So I parked the idea in the back of my mind, moved on to other books, and let it sit.

Sometimes, with writing, it really can be a case of “right person, wrong time”—or rather, right story, wrong time. I wasn’t ready to write Swept Away when I first thought of the concept. But then I wrote The Road Trip and The No-Show, both books in which I explored more complicated plots with twists and turns, as well as darker subject matter alongside the humor and romance. I lived through a pandemic, and suddenly, the idea of two people stuck together in an isolated world didn’t seem quite so absurd or unrelatable—many of us were living that way. I felt like I had things to say about it. (Quite a lot to say about it, actually—didn’t we all? What a crazy time.)

Doing Hard Things

And I had a baby. That made a lot more difference than I would have expected. Swept Away was such a big concept—it had to be an adventure story as well as a romance, and I knew there would need to be peril, suspense, epic moments and nail-biting near-misses. It intimidated me, if I’m honest. And so did motherhood.

I have a tendency to believe that I’m no good at, well, most things, really—my assumption is always that I won’t be able to cope with a challenge as well as everybody else can. Looking after a tiny, helpless baby forced me to tackle that assumption head on. Here I was, day and night, exhausted and full of hormones and managing. Not all the time, of course—one particularly bleak moment after upending a bowl of cereal on my sleeping newborn’s head springs to mind. But overall, I was rising to the challenge so unrelentingly that I had to face the fact that actually, I can do a hell of a lot more than I think I can.

This shift in my confidence definitely affected me creatively too. I found my mind turning back to that idea I’d had all those years ago, of two people lost at sea together. Suddenly the epicness, the scale of it… it didn’t seem overwhelming, it seemed exciting. I wanted that challenge. I felt ready for it. I was braver, less easily intimidated, more trusting of my own ability to tackle something ambitious. I was ready.

Even so, I was right: it was really hard to write.

I have never deleted so many words—hundreds of thousands of words—and never cried so many frustrated tears over a novel. (Though, if I’m honest, the aforementioned hormones probably didn’t help.) I even paused midway through writing it and wrote a whole other book, The Wake-Up Call, a delicious enemies-to-lovers rom-com that came to me so easily in comparison, all zing and spiciness, a book that seemed to require entirely different mental muscles.

The Pressure to Deliver on an Idea

But I could not let Swept Away go. I knew it could be my best book, and that was part of the problem—I loved the idea so wholeheartedly that I wanted to make it extraordinary, and that pressure was a lot on top of an already challenging concept. So I worked, and I worked. I deleted, rewrote, tried again. I came up with different approaches, scrapped them, discovered new ones, and eventually found the one—the missing link in the book that I can’t reveal without spoiling the novel, but that finally helped everything fall into place.

The interesting thing about working in this (excruciating) way was that by the time I came to write the story that now lies within the pages of Swept Away, I knew my two characters–Lexi and Zeke–absolutely inside-out. I had written several books’ worth of words with them; they had been with me for three years. They drove me mad, but I knew them like family. When their story finally came right, it was such a joy to give them the narrative they needed at last.

There is always a slightly tragic gap between the novel you first imagine and the novel that you end up writing, I find. It is so hard to live up to the sparkling ideal that you create in your mind. But I think I have come closer with Swept Away than any book I’ve ever written before. For all the creative struggles, in the end, the epic love story I dreamed of in night feeds and nappy changes is right there on the page, and I’m so very proud of it.

Swept Away

Swept Away by Beth O’Leary

Zeke and Lexi intended to have a simple, no strings attached one-night stand. Unfortunately, the string that most needed to be attached was the one holding the houseboat to the dock. Now they adrift at sea battling survival and feelings.

Order the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Photo credit: Holly Bobbins Photography