← The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
How Withholding Backstory and Context Can Actually Elevate A Story
00:30:00
Author Interview Aisling Rawle
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- [00:00]
Bianca Murray
Foreign. Hi there and welcome to our show, the shit no one tells you about writing. I'm Bianca Murray and I'm joined by Carly Waters and cece Lira from PS Literary Agency. Hi, everyone. Today's guest was born in 1998. I know some of you are going to be very triggered by that. Take some deep breaths. Was raised in the very small village of Leitrim in the west of Ireland. She now lives in Dublin where she is an English teacher in a secondary school. The Compound is her first book. It's my pleasure to welcome Aisling Rawle. Aisling, welcome to the show.
- [00:44]
Aisling Rawle
Thank you for having me.
- [00:46]
Bianca Murray
It is wonderful, wonderful having you. This book, man. Those of you watching on YouTube, I'm holding the galley up. It's quite battered, which is a good sign with me. The more battered the book, more I've enjoyed it. It's called the Compound and I'm just going to read you the flap copy. So everyone kind of has context for what we're talking about. Lily, a bored, beautiful 20 something, wakes up on a remote desert compound alongside 19 other contestants on a popular reality TV show. To win, she must outlast her housemates while competing in challenges for luxury rewards such as champagne and lipstick and communal necessities to outfit their new home, such as food, appliances and a front door. The cameras are catching all of her angles, good and bad. But Lily has no desire to leave. Why would she when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she'll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams. But what will she have to do to win now? Aisling, I'm beginning with the note from the editors to the reader, just to give some context so we can chat about that. Dear reader, when we received this book on submission, the pitch had only the most scant author information. Ashling Rural was 25. Okay, we were already a little bit impressed, slash horrified. She'd worked as a bookseller. Always intriguing. We started reading. Neither of us looked up for hours. We immediately shared it with colleagues and they all had some version of the same reaction. I could not put it down. We gathered in the office to talk about it and basically haven't stopped talking since. We've since learned that Aisling wrote the first draft of the Compound in six weeks with no formal training. And then found a literary agent without any, any industry connections by flipping through the acknowledgments in a favorite book and cold emailing the agent she found there. The speed, energy and directness of that writing process is infused in this remarkable read. Like the show at the center of this novel, the book has a rare bingeable quality. It's fun, dark and smart. I must read fiction of summer 2025. Holy hell, Aisling, there is a lot to unpack. Okay, the fact that they got this finished book from you after it already been agented and at that point you were 25. Can you just take us through this fever writing of the book, which book you looked in for the agent? Take us through everything because I have so many goosebumps that my goosebumps have goosebumps.
- [03:38]
Aisling Rawle
Okay. I will say there was a lot of luck involved. It sounds very cool and glamorous when you read a note like that. But I will hold my hands up and say that I was very lucky. I wrote this story after my first year of my first sort of grown up job after college, which was teaching. And it wasn't the best year. It was very tricky, it was very difficult, and I wasn't terribly happy in the role. This is not a testament to the job of teaching, which I love at my whole heart. I think any teacher will tell you that the first year is hard, but that first year was particularly hard. And when the year ended, I decided not to renew my contract. And I would in September, you know, start in a new school and have the background. Best year ever. Just an absolutely perfect situation. But I kind of was in this limbo of summer where I wasn't really working. I was working a little bit part time teaching. But it was a little bit scary being once again unemployed and not really knowing what was going to happen. But I actually felt just really free and sort of liberated. And the first day of my summer holidays, I woke up with this image in my head of two beautiful girls walking around a house and finding the body. Bodies of other beautiful girls littered around. And I didn't know what that was, what the context was or where it would go, but I was curious. And so I wrote it. And it was a sort of fever dream. And it was the most sort of deliciously cathartic experience in that during that year I wasn't, you know, terribly happy in the work that I was doing. Whereas now this was just heaven to kind of have the time and space to be able to sit with my thoughts and say what was on My mind. And very sort of brazenly, as soon as it was done, I got in touch with an agent who I kind of liked the sound of. And I had been reading at the time, Penance by Eliza Clark. And I really admire her work. I think she's an incredible writer. And so I just went to the back and saw that her agent was Rachel Mann. And I sent it out to Rachel, hoping and praying that she'd take me on. Now, I did. Even though I was fairly rushed in all of this, I did take a minute to see what the querying process involved. And I knew that you're really not supposed to pin your hopes on one agent, so I sent it out to Rachel first and really praying that she would take me on. But I did send it out to other agents and I very luckily got full requests and I got an offer of representation. And I was really unsure as to whether to accept the offer of representation, which I felt so lucky to get, or to sort of hold out hope for Rachel. So again, what amazing community like this podcast tell you is that, you know, there's so many great pieces of advice from other querying authors which I find so helpful in sort of guiding me through it, that you were supposed to nudge the other agents, like, who you had queried. So I nudged Rachel and she requested the full. She read it, she offered representation, which to this day, even though I like I said there's been so much luck in this process. I do think the sort of biggest success for me was the fact that she agreed to take me on. She's absolutely, absolutely wonderful. And I'm sure that, you know, you'd agree and a lot of people would say that having a good agent by your side is like having, you know, it's having a friend and advisor and support, and it's made this whole process so much more bearable and fun and enjoyable. So, yeah, that's. That's me.
- [07:19]
Bianca Murray
That is. Wow. Okay, so did you take any time to revise this novel after the six week fever dream? Or was it like, okay, I've written this in a fever dream, I'm sending it to an agent. Like, what did that part of it look like? And then after that, did you have to do work with Rachel before she then went out on submission?
- [07:36]
Aisling Rawle
Yes. So as you would expect, it was not in perfect condition after six weeks. I did do a little bit of editing. I will say it didn't really change hugely from conception to where it is now story wise. Now, obviously there was a lot of refining to do on line level and teasing things out. But the story didn't change a whole lot. But I edited myself a little bit. I was entirely unskilled in the art of editing, which I now know more about. So it was a rough and ready draft, I will say. And then Rachel did very kindly help me edit it over the next couple of months. She actually moved agencies not long after I signed with her. So there was a kind of a stall of about a month or so. But yeah, we edited it for a couple of months before we went out on sub in January.
- [08:29]
Bianca Murray
Wow. This is just the most incredible journey to publication. And for our listeners, you know, we always say it's so difficult and it requires so much hard work and many manuscripts by the wayside and. And so much tenacity. But then you will have a case like Aisling's that it's just amazing where it's the fever dream of six weeks of writing. It's getting the agent you want. And then I'm sure more than one publisher offered on this Aisling. When you guys went out, I'm sure there was like, was there a bidding war? What was the interest there?
- [09:01]
Aisling Rawle
Like, yeah, yeah. Again, I'll credit that to the amazing work of the agents. Yeah, there was an auction in the uk in the us which is really amazing and was very overwhelming. I really wasn't really sure that anyone would be interested. So that was really just incredible. And again, I'll credit the agents to that. That was their great work.
- [09:23]
Bianca Murray
I think it's amazing that you keep crediting your agents and luck and everything else, because those are all important factors. But here is the thing. You wrote a kick ass, incredible book. And without having written a kick ass, incredible book, no amount of luck or nice agents wouldn't, would have gotten you to where you are now. So I think it's also important to own the talent that went into this. So for our listeners, I need you to read this book. For those of you who never believe us when we say we don't need that much backstory about characters, we don't need to know about their childhoods and what happened three months ago. And we don't need a lot of exposition and context to just be in a story. These characters wake up, they're in this house that's in this desert compound, and they just get up and they go on from there. And there's no, like, how did I get here? And, oh, this. I was so worried about this yesterday. And the reason I wanted to join is because of this, the story Just happens. Was that always going to be the case, Aisling, as you followed through the vision of these women lying around a compound, or was it a really super smart way of just being like, I can't be bothered with backstory. Next position, so I'm just going to write it this way?
- [10:43]
Aisling Rawle
That's a good question. No, I suppose, because it is in some ways a show about finding love, really, in very small part, but probably to audiences, that's how it's marketed. I wanted to kind of explore that feeling of when you're getting to know someone new romantically. Maybe it's a first date and you don't know that person, and it's equal parts enthralling and exciting as it is terrifying and frightening that you're sort of in an intimate position, maybe with someone who you know so little about. And so I wanted to keep that both for the sort of romantic possibility of it and also the threatening possibility. And as well as that, I think that in the structure of the compound, the way that it's set up, who you are isn't as important as how desirable you present yourself as. And that we don't know the characters second names or ages, we don't know their jobs for a very long time or. But we know almost immediately how attractive they are. You know, we understand who is perceived as the most attractive. And so kind of keeping their details to an absolute minimum felt to me a way that the reader could maybe project their own assumptions onto them, particularly for Lily, but also to kind of highlight the fact that in this sort of lay capitalist nightmare, who you are isn't as important as sort of. Of what you can offer, what sort of desires you're projecting and you can fulfill. I think, yeah.
- [12:22]
Bianca Murray
So for our listeners, just here at the back, there was a blurb that was given. It said, Love island meets Lord of the Flies. Dark, thrilling, and delightfully twisted. Because you come into it thinking, okay, it's gonna, you know, be a book about a reality TV show where people want to find love. But from the outset, there is this underlying tension because something is just a bit of off. The whole time, things are just a bit off compared to what you expect them to be. It keeps you on the edge of your seat because you're like, okay, this isn't just a normal sort of contest, and they're not allowed to speak about their past or ask particularly personal questions unless the game tells them that they're allowed to do that. So if somebody says something about last week or when I was a child, you hear this disembodied voice who's like, you're not allowed to speak about that. You may be punished. Which was incredible. What did you comp it to when you queried, like, did you give those same comps or did you give different comparative titles?
- [13:24]
Aisling Rawle
Yeah, that was actually the same. That was my pitch as well, which I thought was really interesting. I also said Love island meets Lord of the Flies, which I'm happy me and Louise o' Neill were on the same page. The comps that I had included when I was querying was Leave the World behind by Ruma Nalam and the Guest by Emma Cline, which I think kind of felt that they had that similar sense of eeriness and sort of isolation, which I really enjoyed. And Alam and Klein are so adept at the sort of social commentary that doesn't really feel that it's forced upon the narrative. It feels that it's sort of sewn very organically in.
- [14:06]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, that's what I loved about this. I don't watch a ton of reality tv. I think I watch Traitors, which I love, and I watch Survivor. And in Survivor, yes, there are women who really care about how they look, but they're not putting on makeup every day. It's not about ball gowns and, you know, who's the most attractive. It's wits and skill and all kinds of things that it takes to win that game. But when I was watching Traitors recently, they had what they called the Bravo girls on, and it drove me nuts that they kept referring to women who were like in their 40s, 50s, and 60s as girls. Where are the girls? And the Bravo girls. And they would talk about grown ass men as the boys. And then you do this straight out. And I was already like, muttering darkly. I was like, what is it with this kind of thing? And I feel like you had a lot of social commentary that was very cleverly hidden behind such an excellent plot and an excellent story.
- [15:04]
Aisling Rawle
Yeah, I don't know. I think that, like you were saying about, you know, traitors and Survivor, I think that the social commentary seems, you know, implicit in those reality TV shows and we are socially commenting on them as we watch them. And I think that reality television is interesting as a sort of genre of entertainment in that for a lot of reasons. But for one, and particularly what I was thinking about with the compound is that we often call reality television sort of escapist entertainment in that we, you know, we want something, you know, mind numbing or we want something diverting, but often like In Survivor, I haven't seen it myself. I will say we're watching people in very difficult situations or struggling or situations that we ourselves would not want to be in. And that when we're looking at escapism, we're looking at people who are struggling just in a different way to us. And maybe it's a little bit more glamorized. But I think as well as that, in a reality television show, the sort of sexual politics and the maybe biases that, you know, exist in the exterior world maybe seem a little bit more acute or poignant when displayed to people and when they know that they're being viewed. And when I have watched reality television, and particularly Love island, which is sort of a base for this, I'm always amazed at how despite the fact that they know that they're being recorded, they'll still do horrible things and say horrible things. And that whether you're being watched or not, you know, this sort of darkness of human nature does come out in a really, I don't know, in a really sort of moving way whether it's manufactured or not. So, yeah, I did sort of feel that the sort of social commentary around it did just feel that it was affixed to the genre itself.
- [17:11]
Bianca Murray
Yeah. And I mean, so firstly the women arrive and then the whole focus is on when will the boys arrive? I mean, the girls arrive and then it's like, when will the boys arrive? And everything they do is around the boys arriving and making sure the compound is good for when the boys arrive. And it was just like the social commentary there. And also that they. They immediately have to take a vote on who's the most attractive, down to who's the least attractive and how they form hierarchies based on that. And like, one woman is pretty much gets told she has no personality, she. But she's good looking, so it's fine. So it was just like, oh, my God, this is everything I hate about the world. But it's so true. It was so reflected there. So can we talk about the world building for you? Because you had to come up with the rules of the game. You had to decide what was allowed, what was allowed, when the setting as well, which we just know is a desert compound, we don't know exactly where it's going to be. But also there's things happening in the, the outside the compound, in the wider world. So with these things that you figured out on a need to know basis, you got to a point and you were like, oh, character needs a brush. So let's have them compete in a challenge? Or was it that you sat down first, figured out how the world would be structured, its rules, how the compound worked, and then you wrote from there?
- [18:32]
Aisling Rawle
I sort of figured it out on a page by page basis. And I knew that I wanted them to do challenges for things and that the things that they acquired were not always meaningful or desire or going to improve their lives, but they would nevertheless do the challenges and that there would be things that they would need very desperately that would require something of them that they didn't want to do, and they would all sort of draw lines for themselves and decide whether or not they wanted to cross them. I suppose when I was going into it, I really had no plan whatsoever. But what I did want to draw upon was this kind of feeling that I'd had during that first year of having, you know, my first grown up job, as I keep saying, and more importantly, my first proper paycheck, which was that I found that I was sort of unhappy each day in working, but I thought that this was the sort of payoff of adult life and having a job which is, sure, you're miserable and, you know, you come home crying, but then you get to buy moisturizer and it's all worth it. You know, this is the silent agreement that we all have when we're clocking in and clocking out. And when I was sort of deciding how the compound was going to be structured, I wanted to draw upon that feeling that I had of trying to find meaning in material things and that they will sort of justify their actions because they're acquiring more things that will supposedly make their lives better. And while, again, going into it, the particular rules weren't finally drawn in my mind, what I did know is I wanted to take what I kind of thought as the three, like, tenets of young adult life, which were find a partner, get a house, and acquire nice things. And those were the sort of driving forces of the compound. And, yeah, so I suppose something that I changed in the edits was that the fewer contestants there are, the better the reward is. Which would sort of make the selfishness, I think, come out in the contestants and that, you know, their desire for companionship or a sort of community was belittled by their need for nicer things.
- [20:59]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, you know, something else that you did so well. And on the podcast, we're always saying we need interiority, we need to be enmeshed in a character's thinking, we need emotionality, we need to know how they're feeling, but we Come in. And we get very little of that from Lily as it goes on. We get more and more. And you said earlier that you wanted readers to project themselves onto her. So this was an excellent way of very intentionally limiting emotionality and interiority for a very specific reason, so that the reader could imprint or project, project on to her. I can imagine that must have been very difficult to do, Aisling, because you withholding so much of who this character is, because so much of their value is perceived through other people in terms of their attractiveness. But she's had a whole life up until she got to this point, and yet you cannot give us access to that as the writer, because you're withholding that on purpose. So can you speak a bit about. About how you can get a reader to attach to a character while withhold so much of the character from the reader?
- [22:09]
Aisling Rawle
Yeah, I think that there's something about Lily's aloofness which is almost obliging, like she kind of feels maybe that she's doing you almost a favor and not talking about herself, but also that Lily is very much committed to leaving her past self behind. And that life that she lived, you know, that died when she entered the compound. She can be whoever she wants to be now. She is still very much herself, but for her, this is a sort of a new opportunity, a rebirth. And she doesn't really want to dwell on the past. And indeed, the longer she's there, she dwells maybe less on the past and more about previous contestants. So it feels that sort of tapestry of her life is the show. And even people who she's never met, like past contestants, maybe feel more familiar to her than her family does or her friends, who we hear very little about. But I think keeping Lily at a distance does allow you a certain amount of voyeuristic pleasure, I think, in that you can hopefully feel, because you are in the first person, that you're experiencing what she's going through. Love and lust and loss. But also that you can sort of cast your own judgments as people love to do with reality television shows. I think that that is one of the draws. And so kind of being able to hand both at the same time, where you feel that you understand her, but you also feel that there's room for you to sort of raise your eyebrows and go, really, Lily? That's. That's the choice that you're making.
- [23:51]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, I was back and forth between, is she really vapid? Is she just insecure? Is she one of those people that's just so formed by everyone else's opinions of her. And so she doesn't have their opinions of her yet, so she hasn't quite figured out who she is. It was a mixture of everything. But like, like, like you said, I want to read for our listeners judgments that she makes about other characters. So she goes. There was something about Seb that was easy to dislike. He was tall, yet seemed to make an effort to take up more space than was necessary, slouching insolently as he sat, legs spread wide, arms draped behind him. As well as that, he had an annoying, moneyed accent and smirked when other people spoke. It's such a brilliant character portrayal. It's just a paragraph, but it gives us so much. I want to also read these moments of tension that get created throughout the story that we constantly feel that things are a little bit off. So it says. When we had finished the tour, we all sat in the grass. It wasn't uncomfortable anymore. I was already getting used to it. Candace sat beside Marcus and Susie sat beside Sam. I sat next to Jacinta. Everyone was relaxed except for Tom, who was looking around restlessly. The fence around the perimeter, he said, that's new, right? We couldn't say that it was likely put up in the last couple of weeks by the previous residents, so Candace only said, brand new. That's good, he said, his eyes following the boundary line. And there's the barbed wire too. It's safe then. I mean, you felt. Felt safe here in the last few days. So just little things like that. A paragraph here, a paragraph there, that really just have us thinking, what the hell have these people got themselves into? What is actually coming for them? What don't, what don't they know, etc. At the beginning of the book, you used a quote from Animal Farm, which I thought was so brilliant. So I'm just going to read it again for our listeners. Here we go. The stupidest questions of all were asked by Molly, the white Mare. The very first question she asked was, will there be sugar after the rebellion? No, said Snowball firmly. We have no means of making sugar on this farm. Besides, you do not need sugar. You will have all the oats and hay you want. And I shall still be allowed to wear ribbons in my mane? Asked Molly. Comrade, said Snowball, those ribbons that you are so devoted to are the badge of slavery. Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than ribbons? Molly agreed, but she did not sound very combat convinced. How influenced were you by Animal Farm in terms of the writing of this?
- [26:28]
Aisling Rawle
Yeah, I mean, Orwell was such a genius of social satire. You know, he really. He is his own sort of genre, I feel. But I. I loved that particular exchange between Molly and Snowball. I just thought it was so brilliant. And, you know, liberty being worth more than ribbons is a sort of.
- [26:50]
Bianca Murray
That.
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Aisling Rawle
It's a question that needs to be asked. And I feel now more ever that that is a question that needs to be asked. And this sort of rampant consumerism, you know, that definitely is a force that kind of overtakes the compound. But as well as that, in the compound and sort of, as with Animal Farm, they had the opportunity, and indeed each sort of batch of contestants has the opportunity to build a community as they want it. And there are two types of tasks, personal tasks and communal tasks. And the communal tasks are for the good of the community. And these are not luxury items. These are things that they need, like food and water in the front door. And the personal tasks are solely, you know, superficial things like a hairbrush or makeup or, you know, a pretty lamp or something like that. And yet, you know, this batch of contestants, and surely every batch of contestants that came before them sort of became more interested in personal rewards and gratification rather than the communal good. And you can see that there are contestants there who are interested in building a community that is, you know, supportive of the people there and sort of self sustaining. But this is not a thought that's shared by everyone. And that eventually, you know, the greed sort of manifests more and more day by day, and eventually the kind of question is whether they should be punished for this greed or whether they should be celebrated for it.
- [28:31]
Bianca Murray
I think one of the things that I find most fascinating about Traitors is to watch the different countries versions. And in the American one, when they're supposed to be doing a group task, they can run off and get individual immunity. And the Americans don't even pretend to do the group task. They all immediately run off and fight for themselves, for their individual immunity. But if you look at other shows like New Zealand or Australia, people do the group thing as opposed to the individual thing. And if anybody on the American show decides to do the group thing rather than the individual thing, if they sacrifice themselves for the greater good, everyone is highly suspicious of that. And they're like, what's wrong with that person? There's clearly something wrong with them because they can't fathom somebody sacrificing themselves for the greater good good. So, yeah, this book gave me so much to think about, Aisling. It was wildly entertaining. It was simmering There was so much tension throughout. Just such a brilliant book. I know it's going to be a big book of the summer for our listeners. Go get it. If you get it from our bookshop.org affiliate page, you support the podcast and you support an independent bookstore at the same time. We're going to be seeing this book all over the place and we're going to be cheering you on. Aisling, thanks so much for joining us on the show. Show.
- [29:45]
Aisling Rawle
Thank you so much for having me.
- [29:47]
Bianca Murray
And that's it for today's episode. I hope you'll join us for next week's show. In the meantime, keep at it. Remember, it just takes one. Yes.