Hannah Parry (Spoken Label, October 2024)

·53 min·5 clips

A former paediatric nurse, Hannah Parry reveals how working with critically ill children inspired her medical thriller's authentic details.

It opens with a poemlike return. The excerpt moves from flying above clouds into a practical anniversary note for Return to Kemptown and the long-running shape of Spoken Label. Then the room loosens up. The host talks about the show as a one-off conversation that turned into a regular place for writers, poets, artists, singers, songwriters, and other creative people. The main stretch is craft talk. The guest says the book came out of a course as a second book, with support from other writers around her. Useful support, clearly. But the harder work seems to start when she realizes the back story is darker than the first draft can handle. She calls it writing twice. One draft held the front story, and the next brought the material behind the character closer to the surface. The host gets it right away. He puts it more bluntly: sometimes a writer has to write rubbish before getting to the good stuff. That is the line that gives the episode its shape, because it keeps the advice from becoming too tidy. The cover discussion has the same practical feel. Planning to self-publish after a rocky start, the guest studies medical thrillers and spots all that jagged red or yellow writing. She wants something less obvious. The host is plainly taken with the result, saying the cover would have made him pick up the book in Waterstones before turning it over. Instagram comes in naturally too: she searches there for cover designers until one of them makes her feel something.

As heard by us

A grounded craft conversation on rewriting a thriller and finding a cover with real emotional pull.

This Spoken Label conversation tracks a writer through the hard work of shaping a medical thriller, with particular attention to the choice to write the book twice so a darker backstory could sit behind the central character rather than simply announce itself.

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Why you'd press play

Press play when you want a writer to explain why this thriller only revealed its real shape after being written twice.

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