way sms: Guest Author

Today I have the honour and pleasure of interviewing Anna Bell, Author of Don't Tell The Groom.
It seems that I was not the only one with a one-track mind that meant spending a lot of time watching Don't Tell the Bride, Bridezillas etc. :)

Thank you for being guest, Anna

Researching weddings

I thought I’d put weddings to bed when I got married eighteen months ago. I no longer spent my time trawling the internet for unusual, purse-friendly wedding favours and my TV watching appetite changed from endless Four Weddings and Don’t Tell the Bride re-runs. But when the idea for Don’t Tell the Groomstruck, I had to write it, and it didn’t take long before I felt like I was back into wedding planning mode.

At first I didn’t think I’d need to do any research as, after all, I’d planned my wedding so recently. But not long into writing the book, it hit me that Penny, the main character, wasn’t me. For starters we had extremely different opinions on how much should be spent on a wedding.

In Don’t Tell the Groom, Penny has gambled away her wedding budget on online bingo, and she secretly has to plan her wedding on a shoe-string budget. Her dream budget is £21,000 and she ends up with just over £5,000 to spend. The shoe-string budget Penny uses is the same budget I used to plan my own wedding, and not because I’d gambled away my savings I may add!

That meant that when Penny was in her budget planning phase I was in my element, I knew just how Penny could squeeze her pounds, and more importantly, I knew the type of wedding Penny did have could be achieved on that budget. Where I did struggle was the luxury end of the spectrum, and the grand aspirations that Penny had. From weddings at Four Seasons hotels to Vera Wang trunk shows, it was all a bit alien to me. I did have a lot of fun though researching that, thanks to virtual internet tours, YouTube videos and a whole lot of Googling.

I was also really fortunate that I used to work at a museum that used to hold weddings, and over the years I saw a lot of wedding set-ups, from the budget end to the horse drawn carriage fancy ones, and I could draw from those experiences.

The biggest challenge for me when writing about weddings, rather than planning one, was that I had to remember how personal weddings are. I felt a bit uneasy using details from people’s weddings I’d been to incase they were offended that about how I presented them in the book. I also didn’t want to offend any readers either by being nasty or ridiculing a wedding idea that one of them might have had.

I hope in the end I planned Penny a perfect wedding (both her aspirational and actual). And whilst I might have liked this to be the last time I’m going to have to research a wedding, I’ve got a cracker of an idea for a new wedding related book that I want to write one day. I just think I need a break first!