Medusa Rising

There’s less than a fortnight to go before the publication of Killing Eve: Medusa, and I’m really excited about this one. It’s peak Villaneve, and it takes us to some very new and different places.

A year ago I signed up to a new publisher, Boldwood Books (the first three KE titles were published by John Murray, a Hachette imprint). Boldwood are an indy publisher, very fast on their feet, and their request was for six Killing Eve books to be published over three years. Reader, I said yes! Medusa will be the third of the six; meanwhile I’m well into the fourth, whose working title is Blueblood. It’s a lot of writing, but I like a challenge, and you’ll be happy to know that our heroines have many adventures waiting for them.

So that’s where we are. If you’ll keep the faith, so will I. I love writing these books, and I love the way that Oxana and Eve practically dictate their words and actions to me. I was on a discussion panel a couple of weeks ago, and afterwards a young guy came up to chat. He had a self-published novel that he’d produced himself, cover-design and all, and he wanted to know if I had a single piece of advice that I could share with him. I said I did, and I promise you what I promised him: that if he took my advice, and stuck with it, it would improve his writing beyond recognition.

So here’s what I said:

You have five senses with which you experience the world around you. Always know, when writing, what your character can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Ground yourself in their physical experience. Ask yourself, when something happens to that character, how do they experience it in the body? It comes back to ‘show don’t tell’, but it’s a heightened version of that. Don’t tell us that your character is terrified, ask yourself how that terror manifests physically - breathlessness, rapid heartbeat, shaking knees - and show us that.

Look at Lady Macbeth, planning murder:

‘Is this a dagger I see before me / the handle towards my hand. Come, let me clutch thee.’

Shakespeare makes us feel Lady M’s ghastly temptation not by telling us what she feels in her mind, but in her body. We can feel her moving from uncertainty to certainty. We can feel creeping ambition overtake any last vestige of decency. And all this is accomplished through her physical experience. We can see that dagger. We know precisely what it would feel like to reach out and take it.

Fear manifests in very specific ways in the body. So does desire; we’re all familiar with the things that lust does to us. But what about love? That’s a question I ask myself constantly when I’m writing Killing Eve. What are the physical manifestations of love? When Eve looks at Oxana (or vice-versa), what are her five senses telling her? It’s easy enough to describe what’s in her mind - love, tenderness, concern, frustration, anger - but for all their intensity, those are abstractions, and abstractions are distancing. How does her love manifest physically? If I’m going to trip an immediate, authentic response in the reader, I have to ask, and answer, that question.

So that’s what I said to the guy. Whenever you can, bring it back to the body. And he said that no-one had ever told him that, that it was a revelation. And it is, but it’s also so simple. We all have bodies, and we all interact with the world through them. It’s the most important thing that we have in common. Use it!