We caught up with Solo author and Faber Academy graduate Caroline Swinburne to hear about her experience on our Writing a Novel course, her journey to getting published – and how her background as a professional musician shaped her novel.

You previously studied on our flagship Writing a Novel course. How valuable was the course to the writing of your novel?

It gave me a big confidence boost to be awarded a place, and the course did not disappoint. As well as sessions on standard topics like characterisation, plot and dialogue, we also learned how to write a good pitch and synopsis, and prepared an excerpt for publication in the final anthology. We each had four opportunities to workshop our writing to the whole group, circulating around 2000 words in advance for people to read; the feedback was always honest, perceptive and kind. The visiting speakers were great – they included one of my all-time heroes David Nicholls, and I also much enjoyed the talk from Trinidadian-born writer Ingrid Persaud.

Did you make writing friends during your Faber Academy course? How important has peer feedback been to your process?

My course was one of the first to be held face-to-face in the aftermath of Covid, and it was wonderful to be able to be in the same room as fifteen other people. I couldn’t have asked for a nicer group – many of us are still in regular contact. Writing is a strange, solitary business and it’s so important to have a few people you trust enough to ask: ‘is this complete gibberish, or is there something in it?’ and know you will get an honest, but kind, answer.

Solo has been described as ‘an emotionally rich, character-driven story that explores the transformative power of music’. Could you tell us a little bit more about the novel? What gave you the inspiration for it?

Solo tells the story of Cate, who’s a fictional French horn player with a top orchestra until a famous solo goes wrong in front of a huge audience. Traumatised, she turns her back on music for many years, until she’s eventually drawn back when she starts to mentor a talented but undereducated teenage musician.

I never rose as high, or fell as low, as my protagonist, but I too am a musician; I teach piano to adults, I’m a trained music therapist, and for much of my life, I was a keen French horn player. Beautiful as it is, the instrument has a well-deserved reputation for being unreliable, and even at a top professional level, there’s always potential for an on-stage disaster.

Solo was born when I started to wonder what would happen next, if things went wrong on an epic scale, for someone for whom the horn was not just a love but a livelihood. Would she lose her job? What would be the effect on her mental health? Even if she was offered more performance opportunities, would she be able to face returning to the concert hall? If not, what would a world without music look like, for someone for whom it’s been her life? What would it take, to persuade her to return to a world which is now associated with trauma?

Can you share your journey to getting published?

Solo is my second novel; the first, Khrushchev’s Piano, was written before I took the Faber course. It was longlisted for the Watson, Little prize, but didn’t end up getting signed, and when I got a place on the course, I decided to start something new.  Solo went through many incarnations, both on the course, and afterwards, when I was fortunate enough to be mentored by the tutor, Shelley Weiner. On two separate occasions, Shelley persuaded me to cut 50,000 words; at the time this was infuriating, but I knew she was right, and the book was much the better for it.

I was delighted when Solo was shortlisted for the Jericho Friday Night Live prize; again, there was interest from agents, but again, it didn’t get signed. At that point, Shelley persuaded me to re-write it in first person instead of third, and I started to research different routes into publication. I sent the manuscript to some smaller publishers which accept direct submissions and was delighted to be signed by The Book Guild.

I’ve heard horror stories from people who’ve worked without the support of an agent, but I can’t recommend The Book Guild more highly. I’m delighted with the end product – they’ve done a great job. I’m also really impressed with the marketing.

How did your own musical background influence your writing?

I couldn’t have written Solo without musical knowledge, and first-hand experience as an orchestral French horn player. The book is being promoted as ‘women’s fiction’ and I’m confident that it will be enjoyed by a general readership, but I’ve always expected it to have a particular appeal for musicians.

Who are your biggest literary influences? Did any of these influence Solo?

I read widely, but have special affinity with authors who bring music into their books. One big influence is Jessica Duchen; she’s a trained musician and well-known music critic who also writes superb music-themed fiction. Rites of Spring interweaves the story of the Stravinsky ballet with a  contemporary story of a young girl hovering on the brink of anorexia, while Alicia’s Gift is about the difficulties of parenting a child prodigy and Immortal is a semi-fictional biography of Beethoven.

I also love the work of Patrick Gale (Take Nothing With You and Pictures at an Exhibition are particular favourites). He’s a musician too – a keen amateur cellist – and as with Duchen, his writing often touches on musical themes.

More generally, I much enjoy the writing of Rachel Joyce (I thought Perfect was fantastic; also the Harold Fry trilogy), Sarah Waters, Ian McKewan, and Laura Pearson. And many, many more!

Could you tell us about your writing routine, and how you balance writing with other aspects of your life?

Solo is dedicated to my husband and two sons ‘for tolerating my obsessions’; a writing habit is bad enough, but I also factor in a daily routine of piano practice. As well as this, I also teach face-to-face for around 18 hours a week, and have family commitments. (My sons are now adults, but my parents are very elderly and need a lot of help.)

I cope by having firm boundaries. I’m lucky enough to be self-employed, so can arrange my own schedule, and split the first three hours of each day between piano practice and writing. There’s a lot of similarities; with both disciplines, I have days when I think I’m making no progress. It’s important to keep going regardless and take comfort from the flickers of hope; improvement is rarely linear.

It helps that I’m a terrible sleeper – I’m at my most creative in the middle of the night so I keep a notebook by the bed. Most mornings I wake with a page of illegible scribbles, but occasionally there are gems.

Do you outline, or just start writing?

I like to have a plan, both for the overall structure and for each chapter, but accept that this may well get changed as the story develops. Shelley is a great advocate of character-driven writing; if you get the characters right, the plot will follow, and this means you need to be flexible.

What was the revision process like?

When I used to make radio features, the first job was to gather the ‘raw material’ (ie. interviews); these were the clay with which you could begin to sculpt. This is still my mindset; when working on a first draft, I aim to get something down even if it’s rubbish, then I edit ruthlessly. I don’t hesitate to ‘kill my babies’ (as we used to say in radio) and make swingeing cuts if something’s not working. My first draft of Solo was well over 100,000 words; the next version was less than 60,000.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Keep going regardless. (‘Keep buggering on,’ said Churchill). Don’t expect every day to be a good day. Enjoy the editing – that’s when you really start to discover what the story is.

And be prepared to be flexible over publishing options – not everyone’s going to get a Big-Five multi-way auction, but there are many other ways to get into print if the book’s worth it.

What are you reading right now?

Jessica Duchen’s biography of legendary pianist Myra Hess. It’s a great story, and also useful research, as one of my characters in Khrushchev’s Piano is loosely based on Myra.

What’s next for your writing?

I am determined that Khrushchev’s Piano will see the light of day soon – my protagonist is now aged ninety and in poor health, so there’s a bit of a clock ticking! The book is a fictional re-telling of the story of the First International Tchaikovsky Competition, held in Soviet Russia in 1958. It interweaves diary entries and newspaper reports from the time of the competition, with present day material showing my fictional protagonist as an old lady attempting to stop her pianist granddaughter from making the same mistakes she made in her younger years. I’m happy with the historical material, but the present day sections need more work; hopefully my experience writing Solo will feed into this.

Writing a Novel is designed to support aspiring fiction writers to develop their craft over six months, with courses in London (at Faber’s HQ in Hatton Garden), Newcastle and online.

A six-month programme of seminars, sessions will cover all the essentials of novel writing – including character, story, structure, plotting, voice, dialogue, conflict and more.

Find out more about the next iterations of Writing a Novel.