Pip Drysdale on The Paris Affair and how her characters shape her novels

Pip Drysdale is a writer, musician and actor who grew up in Africa and Australia. At 20 she moved to New York to study acting, worked in indie films and off-off Broadway theatre, started writing songs and made four records. After graduating with a BA in English, Pip moved to London where she played shows across Europe. In 2015 she started writing books. Her debut novel, The Sunday Girl, was a bestseller and has been published in the United States, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Strangers We Know was also a bestseller and is being developed for television. The Paris Affair is her third book.

Today, Pip Drysdale is on the blog to tell us a little bit about the protagonist of The Paris Affair, Harper Brown, and how her approach to writing character shapes her novels. Read on …

Pip Drysdale (Photo by Daleya Marohn).

For me, writing a book always feels a bit like magic and so it’s hard for me to dissect the process. It feels a bit like I’m harming Tinkerbell (and she’s my favourite!). But what I can say is this: I start out with a plan and then, very soon, one of the characters does something totally unexpected that leaves me staring at the page thinking: wow I was not expecting this from you. And I then have to readjust my plan accordingly. This happens multiple times while writing a manuscript.

So while I’d say that the characters and plot evolve together, organically, if pushed as to which one leads, I would have to say that for me it is the character. Because everything that happens in the book needs to feel true to her and I would be hesitant to give a character a trait simply because it was ‘useful’ to the plot. It’s far more interesting to me to see what a character can do with what she has at her disposal. In Harper’s case, being the Murderino she is, she has quite an array of skills to hand; she’s just as savvy when it comes to breaking out of duct tape or car boots as she is at avoiding romantic relationships. So that was a lot of fun … But Harper Brown is more than just her skill set.

She is a character who is much like everyone else in a lot of ways – she loves true crime, she has a dodgy ex, she’s driven at work and she hates being patronized. But what makes her different, is she actively, consciously and unapologetically rejects the societal scripts. She sees them, she understands them, but she’s decided that they just aren’t for her. However, she’s not a sociopath (because that would simply be her following the ‘femme fatale’ script instead of one of the others) and so she’s still susceptible to the same emotions as everyone else, she just views them differently and so responds to them differently. These internal aspects of her character were integral to the formation of the plot. Let’s just say: if she had been another character, everything would have turned out très differently.

The plot would also have unravelled differently if I hadn’t spent almost three months living in Paris while researching this book. Much of what I learnt during that time found its way into the text and informed Harper’s expat experience. Similarly, the French legal system is quite different to the British system (which I used in The Sunday Girl and The Strangers We Know). While I didn’t plan on this disparity going in (and had a mini heart attack when I first realised because: now my plan had to change again!), this definitely helped to shape the story. Anyway, Harper Brown got me through 2020, I love her to pieces, and I hope you do too!

Pip xx

—The Paris Affair by Pip Drysdale (Simon & Schuster Australia) is out now.

The Paris Affair

Limited Signed Copies Available!

by Pip Drysdale

Meet Harper Brown …

Occupation: Arts journalist. Dream job: Hard-hitting news reporter. Location: Paris. Loves: True crime podcasts, art galleries, coffee, whiskey. Does not love: fake people, toxic positivity, her narcissistic ex. Special skills: breaking out of car boots, picking locks and escaping relationships. Superpower: She can lose any guy in three minutes flat. Ask her how.

Secret: She’s hot on the trail of a murderer – and the scoop of a lifetime. That’s if the killer doesn’t catch her first...

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