A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a radio producer who I'd sent some work to - the same producer who commissioned Kellie Jackson's story last year, which Kellie guest-blogged about here. This producer is commissioning a series of three stories from writers new to radio, and would I be interested in writing one of them? As so often, the timing was quite tight, with the recording due at the end of June, for transmission in early August. And as it's part of a set of three the location and theme were set. Was I interested? It was Wednesday: perhaps I could have a think over the weekend about what I might like to write, and we could meet on the Monday and discuss it.

Interested? I was thrilled. But not so thrilled that I forgot to check that by the end of that meeting I'd know whether the story was commissioned or not, before I did the Provisionally Happy Author Dance round the kitchen. One of the realities of the professional writing life is that you often can't afford to take work on spec, even in pursuit of something which will pay, if it means putting paid work on hold, or under so much pressure you do it badly. Indeed, you have to think quite hard about how much work you're prepared to put in at all, before you know the contract's on its way: even the petrol and subsistence for a research trip is money coming straight out of your existing income. However, the answer was yes, she wouldn't dream of asking me to write the story on spec. Then I did the Definitely Happy Author Dance.

On Saturday the sun came out, and the writing work I needed to do to clear the decks for the story, wasn't compatible with domestic things which needed doing anyway. But research was. So I drove down to Brighton.

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Sometimes it's the sheer inventiveness of an idea that generates a great piece of writing. A case in point is The Man, brilliantly presented at a tiny theatre above a pub near Earl's Court.

Ben has to fill in his tax form and is in a panic. He's kept all the receipts over the past year, but isn't sure what he can claim as expenses.

As you file into the theatre to to take a place on tiers of padded benches you're handed a worn till receipt and told you'll be asked for it at some point in the performance.

And that's what happens. At some point in the show when you feel like it, you offer the receipt to Ben, the single actor. Sometimes it's a ticket to a show, or a CD purchase receipt, and Ben will play an extract on his ipod connected to speakers. But every slip of paper reminds him of an event. As he says, 'We are what we buy'.


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Watch enough ER and you can convince yourself you’d be a bit handy in a real hospital ward. I’ve always been quite interested in medicine and have an occasional urge to see myself in those fetching blue scrubs.

Unfortunately, none of this second hand knowledge has prepared me for having to perform real life surgery. No, don’t worry, I’m not planning on giving my husband a DIY vasectomy or anything. I’m talking about the bloodless – but certainly NOT pain free – business of having to take a metaphorical scalpel to my novel.


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Back in the Pleistocene era, fresh off my Drama degree, I worked for a couple of years in academic publishing. It was the late eighties: in the wake of AIDS, and the Equal Opportunities and Equal Pay Acts, career-building had, briefly, been brought in to replace sex as Cosmopolitan's chief preoccupation, and I knew that I was supposed to network in my industry. The book trade ought to be a pleasant place to do that: indeed, I'd decided to go into publishing because when I was writing my Finals dissertation on play publishing, everyone I approached was so nice and friendly, as well as interesting to interview. So every few months or so I trotted along to the Society of Young Publishers, bought my Groucho-Club-priced drink, and wondered what to do next. The talks were interesting, and some were the basis of things I still find myself explaining on the aspiring-writer forums today. But after the speaker had finished, everyone else seemed to leap back to their feet and start making connections. They were doing and receiving favours, recognising friends, and even, for all I knew, doing deals. I used to leave, and walk through a Soho which was full of pubs overspilling with non-publishers doing the same, and get on a train home.

For years after that, I was convinced that I was socially inept when it came to work. I'd got enough conversations going between ill-assorted tablefuls of wedding guests that I didn't think I was a total disaster, socially speaking. But about work, I knew, I was useless. It helped a bit when I read an article which talked about how networking only works if you have something to offer: networks are built on reciprocity. So I forgave myself because of course I'd had nothing to offer: all I had was the desire to receive, and I wasn't even very sure what I was supposed to be receiving.

Still, when I found myself at the opposite end of the book trade - author not publisher, fiction not academic - I was disheartened to hear that, these days, Networking Is All, because publishers can't and won't spend money on promoting anything below the mega-names on their list.

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I'm thrilled to announce that Bugged, the brainchild of Jo Bell (poet, director of National Poetry Day) and David Calcutt (playwright and superb novelist for young people) has gone live!


Bugged is an online writing flash-mob, based on over-hearing things, happening on July 1st and resulting in a blog and POD anthology, which will be launched at the Manchester and Birmingham Book Festivals in October. I’m one of the core writers who will contribute to the anthology, along with Jo, David, Jenn Ashworth, Stuart Maconie, Daljit Nagra, and others.

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I posted yesterday’s blog on the Red Room website and got an interesting response from the author Rosy Cole. Rosy took me to task over my use of the term ‘homogenisation of culture’. In her comment, she drew attention to the diversity that in fact exists in Britain today:

“Scratch the surface and you uncover any number of disparate realities. The Hindu, African, Caribbean, Muslim, Christian experience, the Catholic v Protestant experience. The rich v poor experience. Have we really abolished the class system, or has it re-configured itself? The disabled v able-bodied experience. Just the Polish experience by itself. They are hardworking, good-natured, courteous and don’t bang on about rights. But they have antagonised a fair chunk of jobless Britons who prefer not to undertake what they consider menial tasks, yet who are not prepared to try and create their own work, or avenue of service to society.“

She’s right, of course. And the righter she is, the harder it is to encapsulate that diversity in a work of fiction.

In my defence, I think it’s true that there is a commercial homogenisation of the mainstream, and the mainstream has a strong pull that sucks a lot of us in, some of the time at least. But it does not represent the totality of experience available, and lived, today in Britain.

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The prices put attendance out of the question, but I was interested to see a list of competitions. I have a lot of writing that could do with a polish and an outing.

I sent off for a booklet with winning entries for last year's competitions first, half afraid I might be put off by the quality of entries. I was at first, but the booklet itself was good value. Apart from the entries, there was a transcript of the plenary address by John Bowen and a concluding article by Vincent McInery. Both very inspirational.


I've settled for entering a short story competition, partly because the prize is a week's writing course in Mallorca. I've chosen one I wrote in 2005 which has gone through many a polishing. Right up to the posting I was finding words to change. Even the entry fee was steep, I thought, at £9, so I restricted myself to just the one.


Well, at least I suppose there's not long to wait, unlike when I used to send stories to women's magazines and wondered for weeks and months what might have happened to them


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It’s the same every time. Blank screen. Blank mind. Blank except for one thought: I don’t know how to do this.

But the feeling is particularly strong this time. I’m starting something completely new. Not just a new book in an existing series.

It’s going to be a completely different kind of book, too, from anything I’ve previously written. Different is good. But scary, too.

This is going to be a contemporary novel, unlike the last four books I’ve written, which were all set in the nineteenth century. It’s also going to be set in England, not Russia, as they were.

It’s true that I have written a contemporary novel before. But the project I’m about to start work on is going to be very different from that. It will be a crime novel with a strong police procedural element. That’s something new for me, though obviously I’m not the first writer to attempt it.

In some ways, its present day setting, in my home country, should make it easier to write. That’s what people tell me. But somehow, I don’t think so. For one thing, I’ll be without the emotional comfort blanket of my research. All those books of background history to read, the memoirs, biographies, nineteenth century Russian novels: how will I manage without them?

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These are my new boots. They are also my sale bargain of the year and they are a thing of beauty...Don’t you agree? I stalked them until they came down to half price in the sale, then I marched in with my credit card and like a certain Disney princess’s ugly sister, was determined to make them fit. The thing is, they don’t really. Fit, that is. Well, they sort of do but I have to zip them all up at ankle level, then haul them up over my lardy calves.

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One of the things which is being really interesting about teaching Creative Writing for the Open University is that, in the nature of things, how work is assessed and discussed on such a course can't be completely free-form: it must be fair across all kinds of writing and students, and it must make it easy to be consistent from student to student, tutor to tutor, and year to year. And it must also be useful to the student: they need to be able to look at the criteria, and understand why they got the mark they did, and what they could do to get a better one. I'm extremely used to giving detailed comments on what's working and not working in a piece of writing, but I'm sure I couldn't have distilled that into general descriptors which fit all genres (the course studies short fiction, sections of long fiction, free verse, formal verse, life writing in prose or poetry), all subjects and all kinds of writing. But some very clever people have come up with 30 or 40 word descriptors which mean I really can put a piece into one of eight bands, and then probably say whether it's in the lower, middle or upper part of the band. In combination with my comments on the script itself, and the longish (several hundred words) remarks that go on the form along with the grades, it seems to me that it really is possible to accommodate the tension between the subjective and the objective.

And then on a forum, the subject of editorial reports came up. Someone had had their novel critiqued, and the editor suggested pretty major changes, on the grounds that X and Y and Z are what this kind of book has to do, to sell into its market.

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