London Writers' Salon #193: Rebecca Fallon — Juggling Motherhood and Creative Ambition, Crafting Dual Timelines, Inhabiting Multiple Points of View
May 8, 2026
55:06
Debut novelist Rebecca Fallon on ambition, motherhood, crafting dual timelines, and writing a novel built around the person who isn't there.
We discuss
- Why quitting a stable job to write a novel can be framed as a calculated bet rather than a leap of faith.
- How to prototype the writer's life before fully committing to it.
- What genre fiction can teach a literary novelist about plotting and structure.
- How a single late-stage scene revealed who the actual protagonist of the book had been all along.
- The unsexy spreadsheet work behind a novel that moves between timelines.
- A method for getting inside a child's consciousness on the page.
- Why each character has to serve a distinct function—and what happens to the ones that don't.
- How music, photographs, and even PowerPoint can become tools for holding a character's voice.
- The difference between flow-state writing and the surgical work that comes after.
- What changes when you stop drafting airy scenes and start asking what each scene needs to earn its place.
About Rebecca Fallon
Rebecca Fallon is a New England-born Londoner and a graduate of Williams College and the University of Oxford. Family Drama is her debut novel.
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