Character Study

Novelist Jem Calder reads from I Want You to Be Happy in this passage episode of Character Study, a scene about a hundred pages in, as his two characters go on early dates and feel each other out across a pub table by the river.

Jem and Freya talk about writing romance that feels real without being neat, the transactional and inexplicable pulls that draw two mismatched people together, and why a "situationship" can carry the weight of a love story even when you know it won't last. They get into the small, specific power of complimenting a stranger who's dressed a little braver than usual, and then into the harder subject underneath the whole book: attention. Jem and Freya make the case for stepping back from social media to protect your writing: the compounding minutes, the shrinking attention span, the excuse that posting is somehow part of the work.

📚 Further reading mentioned in this episode:

– Liadan Ní Chuinn, Every One Still Here (short story collection)

– Zadie Smith on living without a phone

🎥 WATCH the full episode here

📘 Buy Jem Calder's I Want You to Be Happy and Reward System, plus Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

00:00:00 Introduction — and last night's karaoke reading

00:00:56 Jem reads from I Want You to Be Happy

00:02:12 The power of complimenting a stranger

00:02:53 Writing an unironic love story

00:05:02 Being reverent about the relationships that don't last

00:06:33 The intimacy of two people who really listen

00:08:19 Sharing your writing with a partner

00:09:50 Sensitivity as a superpower

00:11:28 Why he gave himself a pass to write about writers

00:12:43 Bring back emailing someone a poem

00:13:34 The decision to quit social media

00:15:14 "You'll get your attention back" — advice for writers

00:16:20 Liadan Ní Chuinn and the myth that you need a platform

00:18:54 Zadie Smith on living without a phone

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Novelist Jem Calder joins Freya to talk about I Want You to Be Happy, his debut novel about two people trying to fall in love while everything around them is engineered to distract them. Jem’s writing career started with Sally Rooney emailing him about the first story he’d ever finished and now his debut is on the tote bag of every literary it girl this summer. He tells Freya why he’d rather write a novel than a memoir (he’s a self-described cagey person who doesn’t like giving too much of himself away) and why he thinks of fiction as a gift, something a reader can reach for in their worst moments. They chat about how quickly a good line about phones curdles into cliché, why he keeps thousands of words of notes he’ll almost never use and why writing within the constraints of a genre is a form of respect for the writers who came before.

A funny, honest conversation between two writers about connection, cringe and what fiction is for.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:44 Book tour vs writing — the "spiritual maths" of promotion

00:04:24 Why Reward System reads like a novel, not a story collection

00:05:17 The novel-in-stories form and Tulathimutte's Rejection

00:06:04 "Limbic capitalism" and the little treats of modern life

00:09:26 Writing a love story when everything conspires against connection

00:10:29 Writing cringe, and the brutal comedy of small humiliations

00:12:08 Turning real life into fiction — the notes process

00:13:41 The anxiety of being judged forever on your first book

00:16:44 When readers over-read symbolism into your work

00:18:15 Cringe as comedy, and fiction that makes you feel understood

00:19:36 Why fiction, not memoir or autofiction

00:22:38 The Cazalet Chronicles and reverence for the family saga

00:26:32 Chuck as a version of Jem who took the other path

00:27:41 Comedy as inspiration, and the sauna theatre reading

00:30:25 Writing an unlikable character you still feel empathy for

00:32:40 The likability question and his Financial Times essay

00:39:30 Why he wouldn't want to adapt his own novel

00:42:09 Annie Baker, plays vs screenplays

00:44:41 Favourite live performers — and a clowning night gone wrong

⚠️ Contains spoilers for the ending of I Want You to Be Happy — skip forward when you reach that section if you'd rather go in fresh.

Links to further reading:

This Substack on writing by Naoise Dolan

Liadan Ní Chuinn – Every One Still Here

Tony Tulathimutte — Rejection

Philip Roth – On writing and re-writing a novel

Elizabeth Jane Howard — The Cazalet Chronicles, including the announcement of the reissue of The Light Years with a foreword by Jia Tollentino

Elizabeth Taylor (novelist)

Ella Hickson – The Writer

Annie Baker – Infinite Life

🎥 WATCH the full episode

📘 Buy Jem Calder's 'Reward System', and I Want You to Be Happy

📘 Buy Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poet Will Harris reads Speakee Stonehenge, an exclusive sneak peek into the collection of poems he is currently working on, Speakee.

It's a piece that keeps circling back on itself, returning to the same small moment in a room full of people, and each time it comes back it has picked something up: a piece of research, an overheard shout, a memory of a stranger's grief. Nothing is explained, and by the end a single ordinary word has quietly turned inside out. It's about who gets to belong somewhere, and how language decides that for us before we've noticed.

Will and Freya talk about writing people as names and voices rather than fully fleshed-out characters, why the most poignant moments are when someone stutters or says the wrong thing, and the danger of editing: that in smoothing out the clunky words, you can flatten everything interesting about a sentence. Plus, whether the internet and MFA culture have quietly made all our sentences sound the same.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:00:11 Speakee — the book Will is working on

00:00:32 Will reads Speakee Stonehenge

00:03:11 "Is it a poem? I don't know"

00:03:56 Writing people as names and voices

00:05:28 Why the poignant moments are the stutters

00:05:43 The exercise of transcribing overheard speech

00:07:15 Repetition, word choice and editing

00:07:58 The danger of smoothing out the difficulty

00:08:24 Has the internet made all our sentences the same?

🎥 WATCH the full episode

📘 Buy Brother Poem, RENDANG and Mixed-Race Superman by Will Harris and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poet Will Harris joins Freya to talk about writing a whole collection around a brother he never had. Will, who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, tells Freya where that idea came from: a hunch that people with siblings remember their childhoods better. They chat about why the most exciting phase of a writer's life is the one before you’ve published anything, how the copious notes he kept travelling across America by bus ended up weighing his writing down as much as helping it and why poets are always arguing that the ‘I’ on the page isn’t them. They also get into the novel about feeding the ducks he abandoned, the white jumper he dreamt about that became an elegy for his grandmother and why a poem doesn’t need to be solved.

A warm, thoughtful conversation between two writers about invention, memory and what gets lost the moment your first book comes out.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:28 Being young and wanting to write

00:02:46 Greyhound buses across America

00:06:14 When notes give you too much information

00:07:56 How you can tell when someone writes from a photograph

00:12:12 Publishing a first collection

00:13:32 RENDANG, identity and being marketed

00:14:54 "Am I British? Am I mixed?"

00:16:30 Invented worlds and invented selves

00:18:58 Poetry as a form of truth telling

00:21:41 The one big lie behind Brother Poem

00:24:14 The family stories that shape us

00:27:46 Children arrive already formed

00:30:43 The fiction project that became a poem

00:35:55 The White Jumper

00:40:39 Poems that change form when read aloud

🎥 WATCH the full episode

📘 Buy Brother Poem, RENDANG and Mixed-Race Superman by Will Harris and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Screenwriter, artist and Murky Book Prize-winning novelist Sufiyaan Salam reads the opening chapters of Wimmy Road Boyz: three young men in a BMW, cruising towards Manchester's Curry Mile at the start of a night that none of them yet know might be their last together.

Sufiyaan and Freya talk about writing as a kind of method acting, how he inhabits his characters so completely that when they're in trouble, he is too, and the film-set principle of "method dressing" that shapes his approach to prose: build the parts of the room the camera will never see, because the reality bleeds through anyway. They discuss the histories buried in the text, from Tipu Sultan to Manto's Toba Tek Singh to Islamic Spain and Partition, and why he likes leaving them there as either a treasure trove or simply texture that feels real. And they talk about the pressure of being one of very few British Pakistani male literary novelists — and why he'd rather write questions than be anyone's spokesman.

This is a conversation about the last night of being young, the work behind effortlessness, and why novels ask rather than answer.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:00:08 Wimmy Road Boyz Passage Reading Chapter 1: three boys drive towards the Curry Mile

00:04:40 Wimmy Road Boyz Passage Reading Chapter 2: the homeless man

00:09:28 The first chapter that barely changed

00:12:06 "Method dressing": building what the camera won't see, and Martin Scorsese

00:13:43 Writing as method acting

00:14:09 Hidden histories: Tipu Sultan, Manto and Partition

00:16:06 The last night of being young

00:17:18 Can you come of age at any age?

00:19:55 Why he doesn't want to be a British-Asian spokesman

🎥 WATCH the full episode

📘 Buy Sufiyaan's novel Wimmy Road Boyz and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Screenwriter and novelist Sufiyaan Salam won the #Merky Books New Writers' Prize for his debut Wimmy Road Boyz. He joins Freya to talk about his novel that follows three young British-Pakistani men across one chaotic night on Manchester's Curry Mile. Sufiyaan, who’s also a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter and animator, tells Freya where the book came from: a real night out where he wanted to tell his friends what he was going through but couldn’t, and wondered if they were holding something back too. They chat about why the novel is built to feel like a rap album rather than a novel, how screenwriting taught him to chase specificity and what it was like to take his dad to the BAFTAs. They also get into whether film audiences really are ruder than book audiences and why saying the dumb idea out loud is worth it if one in ten turns out to be brilliant.

A funny, honest conversation between two writers about masculinity, specificity and throwing everything at the wall to tell a story.

🎥 WATCH the full episode

📘 Buy Sufiyaan's novel Wimmy Road Boyz and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, a special bonus episode: the prologue of Freya's debut novel, A Real Piece of Work, read by actor Ellie Kendrick. OUT NOW

A Real Piece of Work follows Nola, whose memoir about her late sister Darina has become a hit — critics love it, producers want the film rights, and everyone in her family hates it. When an anonymous complaint about the book lands with her publisher, Nola is certain the culprit is one of her own relatives. As the family gathers on the remote island of Lundy to mark the fifth anniversary of Darina's death, Nola sets out to discover who made it before it does irreparable damage. It's a sparkling, spiky story about complicated families, who owns grief, and who gets to tell the story of those who are gone and those left behind.

Want to know how Ellie brought Nola to life? Read Freya's interview with her in the Behind the Book series on Substack

📖 Buy A Real Piece of Work

🎧 Listen to the full audiobook

📸 Instagram: @freybromley

✉️ Substack: freyabromley.substack.com

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

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Novelist Sarvat Hasin reads from the second chapter of her novel Strange Girls — the beginning of Alia's story.

Sarvat and Freya talk about how the two narrators of Strange Girls arrived in different voices and tenses: Ava, bold and certain, who could only ever be written in first person, and Alia, quieter, rendered in a storybook third-person past. They discuss the novels woven through the book — Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence — and why an ambiguous relationship that's never named or declared can still change a person completely. Along the way, a conversation about what it means for writing to feel alive: raw, uncertain, and true to life, even when only a few stories have ever really been told.

This is a conversation about voice, ambiguity, and the books that live inside the books we write.

🎥 WATCH the full episode HERE

📘 Buy Sarvat Hasin's Strange Girls and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Novelist Sarvat Hasin, author of This Wide Night, You Can't Go Home Again and The Giant Dark , joins Freya to talk about her latest novel Strange Girls a novel that explores the relationship of two former friends forced to reunite at a hen party after a decade apart. She’s written many other award-winning books and is also in a workshop group with Freya, sharing early drafts with one another, which they talk about in this episode. They also discuss why friendship breakups are so much harder to talk about than romantic ones, what theatre taught Sarvat about structure and why she romanticises the mundane moments of her own life (and how that feeds directly into her writing).

A funny, honest conversation between two friends about the creative process and everything it touches.

🎥 WATCH the full episode

📘 Buy Sarvat Hasin's Strange Girls and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Author and Boys Book Club co-founder Lucas Oakeley answers listener questions in this Q&A episode of Character Study.

Listeners ask Lucas where his creative spark comes from, whether he has a way of dealing with people who interrupt his energy (he doesn't, he thinks friction is good for you), and how he gets back into his novel each time he sits down to write. His tip: never stop writing when you have nothing left to say, stop when you know what comes next, so you always sit down with momentum. He also shares his niche Wikipedia rabbit hole hack for kickstarting creativity, and tells the story of spending a day visiting four London bookshops trying to find his own debut novel on the shelves, and not finding it in a single one.

This is a conversation about the writing life and why, by bookshop four, he was absolutely fuming.

🎥 Watch on YouTube

📘 Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley

📘 Buy Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work

💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions

📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts

🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.