Photo credit: Lauren Pinhorn Photography
Sarah Jost was born and grew up in Switzerland, against the backdrop of Lake Geneva and the Alps. She moved to the UK in 2008 to learn English for a year and somehow didn’t manage to leave. She now works as a French teacher and pastoral manager in a girls’ school, which she considers an immersive course in character study. Her debut novel One Last Chance (UK)/Five First Chances (US) is debuted April 2023. Her latest novel, The Estate, releases November 19, 2024 (US).
In The Estate, you’ve crafted another intriguing and emotional story. Can you share a bit about the inspiration behind the novel and how it differs from your debut?
My debut Five First Chances was a time-loop love story, but The Estate is an art mystery/suspense. Genre-wise, they are very different! However, I always gravitate toward stories where our human emotional experience is exacerbated into magical abilities. Lou, the protagonist of Five First Chances, is so anxious and full of regrets that she ends up stuck on a time loop. So what if an art expert was able to ‘tap into’ sculptures in a magical way? The starting point for The Estate was Camille Leray’s supernatural power – she can swim into artworks, walk around in the landscape of the artist’s memories and inspiration for it.
I always wanted to write a book about art, having studied History of Art as part of my degree; I love that every painting/sculpture is a window into an artist’s mind. I decided quite early on to loosely base the artist my expert is obsessed with on Camille Claudel, a French sculptor known for her doomed love story with Rodin and her tragic end in an asylum. I discovered Claudel in my teens and fell in love with her sculptures, which I visit in the Rodin Museum whenever I’m in Paris.
The fact that there can be so much doubt when authenticating artworks, the detective-like nature of it quickly steered me towards a mystery-based plot: after a professional downfall at her auction house, Camille is invited by the man of her dreams to authenticate some re-discovered sculptures in an ancient French castle… This seems like her dream, but she will soon realize there is more going on than meets the eye.
When I decided to set D’Arvor Castle in Brittany, I re-discovered all the local Arthurian legends I used to read: a world of knights and fairies at the edge of the supernatural. This fed into the gothic and unsettling atmosphere I initially didn’t plan for, but then chose to lean into. So all those elements fed into my inspiration and finally came together in The Estate.
Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
What does your typical writing day look like? Do you have any rituals or routines that help you get into the creative mindset?
I work four days a week as a teacher, so most of my writing does happen around that. But on my weekly ‘writing day’, I try to use the best of my brain (a few hours from about 7am) to write new words. Then I go swimming before lunch, and do a bit more writing or related admin in the afternoon. I break the day with some dog walks in the beautiful hilly countryside where I live! I find that building some exercise and fresh air in around the writing really helps. I’m also slowly learning to accept that I only have a few good hours in me on any given day for writing, and there is no point in me trying to push beyond that limit – the risk of creative burn out is only too real. This makes for fairly slow work, but when I’m cracking on with a first or second draft, especially when I’m on a deadline, I’ll write for an hour or so after work and aim for 1000 words a day. Getting to know how you work best as a writer is really useful, but it can be humbling when you hear others can write 10k words in a single day or get a whole draft done in a month! However we all have different processes and respecting what works for you will help you get the best out of yourself.
What was the biggest challenge you faced when transitioning from writing Five First Chances to The Estate? Did you feel more confident the second time around, or did new challenges arise?
The Estate was so much harder to write than Five First Chances. There was more pressure, as I had to deliver the novel by a certain date, and the story was much more layered and ambitious; I had to deal not only with my main character reckoning with her power, her past and personal growth, but also create the whole, complicated life of the artist she was studying, then convey this clue-by-clue through works of art accessed via magical abilities. I honestly got lost more than once, wondered whether I should just give up, before eventually re-writing the whole novel from scratch in a few months rather late in the process! But thanks to the guidance from my agent and editors, I managed to make sense of the story. Despite being really organized and in control in other aspects of my life (to my detriment sometimes), throughout writing The Estate I discovered I’m a ‘figure things out as you write’ kind of writer, which means I’ll have to write hundreds of thousands of words that will end up not being used. Ah well – we’ll deal with that uncomfortable realization later, with the next novel! For now, I’m really proud of The Estate and I hope it finds readers that are, like me, obsessed with art and manipulation and echoey stories.
Buy Five First Chances now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
What advice would you give to aspiring writers about dealing with rejection, especially in the early stages of querying agents or publishers?
Rejection is an integral part of being a writer. You have to accept it – it will come for you at every stage of the way, in particular because writing is so subjective. Go and have a look at reviews for your favorite novels: there are always people who hated them! (I mean, the amount of people complaining that ‘nothing happens’ in Pride and Prejudice is staggering.) So dealing with rejection in the early stages is just useful practice. Think of it as online dating: it’s a numbers game, when you have to remind yourself it’s not about random people validating you, but you setting out to find the right match for your writing. You want to stick at it until the right person says yes: the more your agent and publisher believe in you as a writer, the stronger your career will be too. That said, I know rejections are really painful. They can feel very personal when you’ve worked so hard on something and poured your heart and soul into it, and it is met with a ‘meh, not for me’. My advice is to allow yourself to feel dejected for 24 hours, treat it like a break-up, get a tub of ice cream or go scream in the woods, then pick yourself up and keep going. If you let rejections get to you and you stop, that’s the only way you’ll be sure never to make it as a writer.
What was your biggest breakthrough moment as a writer? Was there a turning point where you felt you had truly found your voice or direction?
I’m still learning and growing as a writer, and I’d like to keep it that way forever, please. I read or heard somewhere (unfortunately, can’t remember where) that due to the cult of the Big Debut, writing is one of the only professions where you’re expected to be great from the start, whereas in any other job it is accepted that you need practice and experience to get better. This can be really hard, especially when you are expected to immediately find your style, your ‘niche’ and stick to it. That’s when support from your agent and publisher is essential, and I’m very lucky to have both.
However, I do remember ‘the’ moment when I thought ‘maybe I can do this’… as a non-native English speaker, I really wasn’t sure whether I’d ever be able to write creatively in English or if my language would always be a little broken in a way I couldn’t fix… In 2019, I was selected for a well-known writing course in London, the Curtis Brown three-month course. The first time the opening of Five First Chances was workshopped by my course mates, their response was so enthusiastic that I still remember the high I felt when going home on the tube that night. I knew then that I had to keep going with my writing, and with that novel.
Tell us a little bit about your publishing journey. When did you know you wanted to be a writer and what did those early drafting days look like?
I decided I wanted to be a writer at age ten, when a school mate told me she had written a book and her dad was going to get it published. I remembered jealousy burning through me and telling myself: ‘Well, I want to write books too!’ Throughout my teens, I filled school exercise books with novels, then I won some prizes in writing competitions for young French-speaking writers. I made lots of friends throughout Europe – it was a rather glamorous existence for a 17-year-old shy Swiss girl.
Then I decided to move to the UK in my mid-twenties and immerse myself in a brand new language, which I fell in love with. It took me a few years until the idea that I could start writing again, this time in English, started to take hold. Discovering more commercial genres was eye opening, and freeing. I wrote one very awful ‘practice’ novel about a mermaid, failed at every single writing competition I entered, wrote another novel about a selkie, then found the Curtis Brown course that took me on for the opening of Five First Chances. This was the moment that I gave myself permission to take myself seriously as a writer. After the course, I continued working on the book with Charlotte Mendelson as my mentor, then submitted to agents. After a few months and about twenty rejections, I had three offers and I signed with the wonderful Olivia Maidment at Madeleine Milburn, who got me my French, UK and US first book deals.
How do you manage the emotional toll of writing about deep, sometimes difficult themes? Do you find it therapeutic, or does it weigh on you at times?
I think I do find it therapeutic. For my day job, working in teaching and pastoral care, I have learnt to deal with difficult situations and to support young people going through emotional distress. I have had to harden myself to some of it, and some of my own challenges, but writing is a safe way to explore emotions and re-connect with them in a more distilled kind of way. I am utterly fascinated with human emotions and experiences, but sometimes find it difficult to face my own head-on, as I tend to intellectualize everything. Writing main characters that have bits of me (Lou’s anxiety and awkwardness, Camille’s burn out and ambition) help me explore and enrich my life emotionally rather than push everything away and carry on. It makes everything richer and can be really cathartic.
What role does revision play in your process? How do you approach the editing phase, and do you have any tips for writers who struggle to “let go” of certain parts of their drafts?
I know it’s different for everyone: I personally am always really comfortable writing a first draft and bashing out words, enjoying seeing where the story is going and what crops up along the way. The difficulty starts in editing, for me, and the feeling that things need to become final. Perhaps it’s my perfectionistic tendencies that come at play here: I hate having to make final decisions and stick to them, and know that whatever I end up with won’t ever be quite as good as what I imagined. However, thanks to the same perfectionism I can also be quite ruthless, which you need to be. There are so many sentences, paragraphs, even chapters that I loved that I have cut from my work. My tip would be to keep an eye on your story and what serves the plot and your characters. If it helps, do what I do and paste everything you cut into another document, or start a whole new document when starting your edits, keeping the older version intact. That way, you feel like you’re not really getting rid of anything. When you then find out that you’ve forgotten everything in the old document, you realize that it didn’t really have a place in your story and it feels better to let go of it.
What’s next for you? Can you give us a hint about any new projects you’re currently working on?
I’m experimenting with a few ideas at the moment, but they all revolve around the theme of memory and how it affects our identity and family/romantic relationships. Given my process, I probably can’t say more, because I don’t know myself where this is going to go yet. But I’m playing with writing a love story again, a little bit more in the vein of Five First Chances, and this time I would like the male protagonist to get his own chapters. I’m excited for that and to see where my two characters are going to end up.
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