Lexie Elliott, author of 'How to Kill Your Best Friend' - When the title comes before the plot, how lockdown changes writing spaces, and finding the story's voice

Lexie Elliott accomplishes things. She graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in theoretical physics (?!) became a championship-winning swimmer, and even swam the English Channel.


She's just published her third novel, 'How to Kill Your Best Friend'. It tells the story of 3 friends who met on the college swim team. Years later, one is found dead in the ocean near a remote island. Can an elite swimmer really have drowned, or is something else going on?


We talk about why she wanted to make the location of the story one of the central characters, also how she's had to be much better with deadlines after becoming a full-tiime writer, and how lockdown has changed where she writes.


You can hear why she's pushed to be a writer in amongst everything else she's achieved, when she got a hold on her writing voice, and how quite rarely... the title came before the plot.


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