#193: Rebecca Fallon — Juggling Motherhood and Creative Ambition, Crafting Dual Timelines, Inhabiting Multiple Points of View

Debut novelist Rebecca Fallon on ambition, motherhood, crafting dual timelines, and writing a novel built around the person who isn't there.

We discuss

• Why quitting a stable job to write a novel can be framed as a calculated bet rather than a leap of faith.

• How to prototype the writer's life before fully committing to it.

• What genre fiction can teach a literary novelist about plotting and structure.

• How a single late-stage scene revealed who the actual protagonist of the book had been all along.

• The unsexy spreadsheet work behind a novel that moves between timelines.

• A method for getting inside a child's consciousness on the page.

• Why each character has to serve a distinct function—and what happens to the ones that don't.

• How music, photographs, and even PowerPoint can become tools for holding a character's voice.

• The difference between flow-state writing and the surgical work that comes after.

• What changes when you stop drafting airy scenes and start asking what each scene needs to earn its place.

About Rebecca Fallon

Rebecca Fallon is a New England-born Londoner and a graduate of Williams College and the University of Oxford. Family Drama is her debut novel.

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