Charlotte Runcie: 'You have to get all the way to the end of the story before you have any idea what you’re doing'
BY Maya Fernandes
3rd Jun 2025
Charlotte Runcie was a student on our online Writing Your Novel – Three Months course in 2023. We caught up to discuss her debut novel, Bring the House Down – out now from The Borough Press.
Read on to discover the inspiration behind Charlotte's debut, her recent literary recommendations and her advice on choosing the right narrative voice for your story.
Charlotte, you studied on our online Writing Your Novel – Three Months course in 2023. How did your time with us shape your approach to writing?
The most influential thing was probably the experience of giving detailed written feedback to other writers. It was a privilege to engage with early drafts by the other writers on the course, and it was fascinating to get under the bonnet of other writing styles, and to consider how different writers could develop their very diverse novels in various possible directions.
Many of our students find lifelong writing friends on our courses. Are you still in touch with anyone you met on the course?
Absolutely! We have a WhatsApp group where we share updates on our writing, and we’ve continued to read each other’s work and share our progress. I’m excited to see the other novels published, and I’ll be their biggest champion when they are.
Bring the House Down feels like a real love letter to the arts, but it also explores the darker side of the spotlight, touching on power imbalances, misogyny, toxic criticism and the big question of who actually gets to decide what counts as ‘good art.’ What drew you to these themes?
Those themes are definitely there, but I didn’t ever start out writing the novel thinking, ‘I want to write a novel about big themes.’ The characters of Sophie, Hayley and Alex came first, and the story of their collision became almost like a chemical reaction which caused the themes to emerge. From them, and their clashing personalities, everything flowed. I think we probably all have certain themes and concerns that flavour our lives, about which we’re mostly unaware, but if someone else was writing about them, those themes would be clear to everyone except us. That’s how I feel about my characters.
The novel is set during the Edinburgh Fringe, which gives it such a buzzing, creative energy. How did you decide upon that setting for the story?
I’ve been at the Edinburgh Fringe every August for most of my life, and I lived in Edinburgh for a number of years, so it’s a setting I know and love. The Fringe is a unique and intoxicating atmosphere: this beautiful city suddenly overflows with people from all over the world, all there to engage with art and culture, and to have a party. It’s a great place to meet new people, as well as to bump into people you’d rather avoid. It’s a place where ambitious people are on the make, trying new things, risking their money and their reputations in pursuit of a runaway hit, and the stakes and the emotions run high. And, inevitably, people have dramatic romantic episodes there all the time. It’s just such a fertile ground for triumph, disaster, betrayal and stories of all kinds. How could I not set a novel there?
The story is told through Sophie’s perspective, rather than Alex’s or Hayley’s. What made you choose to centre the narrative on her, and how did you approach presenting all sides of the story without appearing to take one in particular?
This was something I found it very helpful to discuss with the other people on the CBC course as I was writing, actually, because I found the narrative perspective difficult to decide on. I tried out telling parts of the story from different perspectives – from Alex’s and from Hayley’s as well as Sophie’s – but I decided in the end that this story, which takes place in such a short, concentrated period of time, needed to be told through one immersive voice to give it a claustrophobic sense of events spiralling out of control.
And then it just had to be Sophie’s perspective, because it’s the most analogous to the perspective of the reader: she sees herself as an outsider to what’s happening between Hayley and Alex, almost as an impartial observer, but actually she becomes increasingly complicit, and her involvement in what’s going on forces her to examine aspects of her own life that she would rather ignore.
It really helped to speak to the other CBC writers about this because they asked difficult questions of Sophie, and of me, that I had to address. Confronting those questions really deepened the novel.
Your writing has been compared to authors like Caroline O’Donoghue and Coco Mellors. Which writers are you loving at the moment?
I love both of those authors, and any comparison with them is flattering in the extreme! I also loved reading Rebecca F Kuang and Taffy Brodesser-Akner when I was writing this story, as well as some classics: Janet Malcolm, Margaret Drabble, Evelyn Waugh and Truman Capote. Recently I’ve loved new novels by Nussaibah Younis, Silvia Saunders, Emilia Hart, Celia Silvani and Emma van Straaten, among others, as well as my wonderful CBC coursemate, Jennie Godfrey.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone writing their first novel?
Finish it! You have to get all the way to the end of the story before you have any idea what you’re doing, in my experience.
And finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
Well, I’m about to have my third baby at the same time as trying to write my second novel. So, we’ll see how that goes.
Get your hands on a copy of Bring the House Down.
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