This April sees the publication of my latest crime novel. By a singular coincidence, it also sees the production of an excerpt of an opera I’ve written the libretto for (at the Linbury Theatre in the Royal Opera House, April 14 and 16). I never consciously set out to be either a crime writer or a librettist, so it’s strange, all of a sudden, to find myself both.

It’s easy enough to retrace the steps that led me to becoming a crime writer. I had a crate full of unpublished manuscripts under my bed – so many in fact that the bed was starting to rise off the floor. My agent told me, more or less, that we were reaching the end of the road. I decided to risk one more throw of the dice on possibly the most ambitious idea for a novel I had yet had...

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Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the BBC made grown-up television dramas that used a scheduling formula which allowed, roughly, an hour per episode. This was because the BBC, unlike all other UK television channels, did not carry advertising.

Now the BBC has long been in the business of selling its dramas overseas, with mixed success. A few years ago, this policy became more aggressive; they got better at it, started making serious money from the sales of rights or - more usually - the formulas for shows like Life on Mars.

Serious money. So much of it that now the BBC appears to be deploying a scheduling formula which specifically accommodates the advert breaks preferred in countries like the USA, where TV dramas live or die by their ability to attract and retain advertising.

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"A perfect character is not engaging. Character transformation can be one of the most powerful effects in any story." Donald Maass


I’ve never written about perfect characters. I'm not sure anyone would want to read about them. But I have written about one who thought she was perfect, for her to discover en route she definitely wasn't. For me as a reader, the draw of the genre I write in (Commercial Women’s Fiction) is the character transformation that unfolds in the telling of an engaging story. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, I’ve tried it twice and though novel two has not bitten the dust – far from it – I’m about to start writing novel three and felt it was time for a change in ‘how’ I approached it.


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My review of this latest collection from Alice Munro is up at Critical Literature Review today. Please, if you've read the collection, shed light on the notes at the end of Wenlock's Edge for me. I'd be very grateful.

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Over the subterranean sea the three men speed, on their raft made of fossilised wood, as St. Elmo’s fire crackles around their masts and an ichthyosaurus battles with a plesiosaurus below. As they finish off the gin, they’re carried on a bed of lava up the chimney of an erupting volcano, to be spat out in a vast geological hiccup, into fame and fortune. What am I on about? Well, there are only two ways of being topical this week, and the men on the raft are – unfortunately - not Clegg, Brown and Cameron.

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First, many thanks to Jen at Writer in the Wilderness, who nominated this blog for a Beautiful Blogger Award. I'll attempt seven interesting facts about myself after sharing the jolly news that my two entries to the Fish One-Page Prize have both been shortlisted. And I almost didn't enter anything for this prize this year! Results on 30 April, yikes, but I'm happy just to have got this far. Now for the interesting facts...

1. Circa 1975, my school was on TV in a children's pop show hosted by Ed "Stewpot" Stewart called 'Give us a song' or something like that. My one and only TV appearance.


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People ask me, now and then, why I write children’s books. It’s not a question I’d ever asked myself – I never thought there had to be a reason – but the obvious answer is: because I think they’re fun, exciting, important and valuable to society. But one could say the same about adult books. Well then, the real reason is: because I love them. So the real question is: why do I love children’s books so much? After much thought, I’ve decided that there is an answer to that. I love children’s books because I happened to be brought up in Libya. Bear with me.

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By way of soothing my guilt and irritation at forgetting a much-needed appointment with my wonderful osteopath (I blame the York Festival of Writing for the amnesia, as well as the malfunctioning vertebrae) I've been thinking about how memory works in writing. You could make a powerful argument that all narrative works by using memory's neural pathways, even when it's fiction - "Fiction is the memories we don't have" - but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean using your memory as part of your process, and not just remembering things, but forgetting them.

Actually, it's York, in another sense, which got me thinking about this: in the workshop I shared with my agent Clare Alexander and another of her authors, Fiona Shaw, I mentioned that The Mathematics of Love was actually the third outing for my Peninsular War soldier Stephen Fairhurst: he first appeared in a twenty minute writing class exercise, then as the author of a set of letters in another novel, and finally got a full narrative - half a novel - to himself, the best part of a decade later. "Yes," said Clare, "the character who won't go away." I'd never really thought of it like that: with hindsight it's obvious that Stephen was important, appealing, full of potential... that he was who I should be writing. But of course it wasn't obvious at all, at the time: he just was always there. Asked by me what I should be working on for the next project, my memory kept offering him up, and forgetting (at least temporarily) all the dozens of other characters that I found/invented/overheard/imagined in that decade; characters who might please an agent or be fashionable to read or easy to write, who might get that deal... "No, write Stephen," said my memory. And sure enough, it's Stephen and Stephen's voice that the majority of readers say they love best about that book.

When it comes to researching a novel, too, I sometimes say that I use my memory as a sieve;

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I probably bought this book before I had anything much to revise or when I was too caught up in writing to pay it much heed. I wish I'd read it before I started.

Now that I'm ready to give fiction another try and have a cache of rejected short stories and novels going nowhere it's just what I'm looking for. I whipped through it, pencil in hand, over a weekend with lots of other stuff going on. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers reads like a well-written cookery book. I can't wait to start applying what the authors recommend.



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