How to plot a murder with your husband
Collette Lyons, who writes with Paul Vlitos as Ellery Lloyd, and is also married to him, explains how they create their darkly glamorous mysteries together (without getting divorced).
Author of three mystery thrillers, People Like Her, The Club and new novel The Final Act of Juliet Willoughby, Ellery Lloyd is the pseudonym for husband-and-wife writing duo Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. So how does writing in a team actually work? What happens if one of you deviates from the agreed plot? And how does it feel being edited by the person you live with? Collette tells us what it's like being married to your co-author.
The first question people ask when we tell them we write novels together as a married couple is, ‘And you’re still married?’ The truth is though, we have always found two heads are better than one when working through the intricacies of a thriller – shaping the plot and planning the twists. Of course there is the added bonus that the book gets longer when one of us is in the bath, or cooking dinner, or reading our six-year-old daughter a bedtime story, while the other one is tapping away at a laptop.
As it involves numerous deaths and disappearances, weaving together the intertwining mysteries in our new novel, The Final Act of Juliet Willoughby, was perhaps the biggest challenge we’ve given ourselves so far (although we are currently working on a time travel mystery which is a whole other level. . .).
But now we are three published books (and one in the drafting stage) in, we have learned a few things about how to tackle a novel as twosome.
Starting point: choosing our world
Our creative process begins with selecting a setting for our story. We like darkly glamorous worlds, where the reality once you draw back the curtain is something far more sinister. Our first book, People Like Her, is set in the world of Instagram mummy influencers. For our second novel, The Club, we dived into celebrity private members' clubs. And The Final Act of Juliet Willoughby in fact spans three worlds: the Surrealist circle in Paris in the 1930s, academic Cambridge in the 1990s, and the contemporary art scene in Dubai.
We come up with an idea and then spend a significant amount of time researching these settings before plotting, including visiting locations (although sadly it’s impossible to visit 1938, we did spent time in Paris, we both know Cambridge well already and Collette has lived and worked in Dubai – and as part of the plot centres around an English country house, our National Trust membership was well-used). This immersion helps us generate ideas for twists and turns and ensures that our readers learn something new and, we hope, interesting. My favourite fact? In researching the book’s Egyptology element, I discovered that in the nineteenth century there was a widely-used paint colour called Mummy Brown, which used actual ground-up mummies.
Crafting the plot
Plotting a novel together requires careful planning to avoid chaos. We spend considerable time on this phase before getting down to the writing. With two of us, we risk the plot heading in wildly different directions if we don’t coordinate – it would be like a game of consequences.
‘Plotting a novel together requires careful planning to avoid chaos. With two of us, we risk heading in wildly different directions if we don’t coordinate – it would be like a game of consequences.’
Each of our books features multiple voices. For instance, The Club had five narrators, while The Final Act of Juliet Willoughby has three. During the first draft, we each take on one or two voices. This approach allows us to deeply inhabit our characters, understanding their motivations and actions. For Juliet Willoughby, we have Patrick and Caroline, Cambridge art history students who uncover what they believe to be the truth about the mysterious death in a studio fire in 1938 of Juliet Willoughby, a runaway heiress who fled to Paris with her much older married lover. Once we have an idea of where the plot is going, we tend to write maybe 20,000 words so we can really get their voices in our heads. Then we have a firmer idea of how they’ll act, and build their actions and decisions around that.
Writing and collaboration
Once the plot is solidified, we begin writing in earnest, building on those 20,000 words, in two or three drafts. We both work in the same Google Doc, a tip we highly recommend for any co-writing project. Initially, we emailed drafts back and forth, but this became unmanageable. Google Docs allows us to see each other's edits in real-time, which is handy because we never write in the same room (Paul types loudly and laughs at his own jokes!) Writing as a couple means having a constant first reader who is always on your side, and in whose interest it is for the book to be the absolute best it can be. This dynamic allows us to quickly bounce ideas off each other, refine our plots, and inject fresh twists and turns into our narratives.
Editing and refinement
Our backgrounds in editing play a crucial role in ensuring we don’t strop off in a huff when the other has constructive (read: harsh) feedback. I am a former newspaper and magazine editor, while Paul is a professor of creative writing, so we're both comfortable with receiving and giving external input. This is the point when the planning and plotting is most flexible. Sometimes, an idea will strike mid-edit: a twist, a killer line, or a shocking reveal. We roll with that if it feels like the right thing (even if it requires a rewrite).
Interest and authenticity
The Final Act of Juliet Willoughby involved extensive research, reflected in its detailed bibliography (so do delve in if any of the artists or themes piqued your interest). Collette is especially passionate about women artists, and we have woven cameos from real historical figures into the novel. So while our aim was first and foremost to create a thrilling mystery, we hope readers also gain an appreciation for female surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s and consider the broader contributions of female artists to art history.
The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
by Ellery Lloyd
Paris, 1938: Runaway heiress Juliette Willoughby perishes, with her married lover, in an accidental studio fire alongside her Surrealist masterpiece, Self-Portrait as Sphinx.
Cambridge, 1991: Two art history students stumble across proof something sinister was at play in Juliette's death, threatening to expose the long-buried secrets of the artist's aristocratic family.
Dubai, present day: An art dealer is accused of the brutal murder of his oldest friend – the last surviving member of the Willoughby dynasty.
Three suspicious deaths over the course of a century. Is the key to unlocking them all hidden in Juliette Willoughby’s lost painting?
