A Literary Life

Madrid. Just looking at the name on cheap holiday search engines made me tingle with excitement. South European heat, blue skies, sun pouring down onto warm squares. I booked to fly the very next day. I’d never thought of myself as impulsive: I like to consider things through, work out each possible line of attack before I make a move. It’s part of my training as a novelist: you have to be certain that what you are going to do works before you spend time doing it. Are the through-lines of the plot coherent? Would Character X act in such a downright filthy manner? So to book a flight leaving the very next morning to a city in a country I’d never visited: outrageous! (Okay, it was only Madrid, not Montevideo or Mogadishu, and okay Madrid is probably very safe and familiar to someone familiar with any other European city, but the point still holds, the act was impulsive, somewhat rash and possibly foolhardy.) Madrid though. I landed late. The flig...

An interesting post on Jason Arnopp’s blog today – read it first, then read my response. I love stories like these. I’ve not been to a Cypriot bar like the one he describes, but I could smell its drink-stained walls, hear the familiar hubbub of patrons, and see my way into his dingy, unsafe but much loved flat. I read a story like that, and I have a whole world bubble up in my mind. I see a short story, a setting, there is so much potential. It makes me think, I would have loved an experience like that – and I think that because it takes distance to realise how much those days truly mean. Living in rural Wales my whole life, there have always been a few pubs I can go in where everybody knows my name, the drink I have, and what I do. The town where I currently live there are three pubs where this is the case. I can go in them just once a month and they remember. I know all the regulars and can have the same drunken conversations again and again. This is why my ...

W. Somerset Maugham wrote ‘The Summing Up’ in 1938. He was sixty-four years old, and his greatest literary achievements – ‘Of Human Bondage’, ‘Cakes and Ales’, ‘The Moon and the Sixpence’ amongst others – were all behind him. The world in which he lived was about to enter into a bloody war, and society as he understood it as a younger man had changed irrevocably. At was at this crossroads in his own life and the life of the world that he felt the need to sum up all that he knew. ‘The Summing Up’ is a blend of material: it is autobiography, writer’s guide, and philosophical treatise. Late on in the book he writes, “The best homage we can pay to the great figures of the past… is to treat them not with reverence, but with the familiarity we should exercise if they were our contemporaries.” Somerset Maugham has become one of the great figures of our literary past, but when one reads his books his world retains familiarity, though the days he describes have long passed. I ...

Okay blog, I admit it, I’m a crap friend. I set you up, fill you with high expectations, only to dash them all. But I’m back. And hopefully for more than just one post! So what’s new? I wrote - and failed to sell –a CBBC pilot – something of which I’m still proud. I’m convinced the BBC Writersroom only rejected it because of a two scene similarity with Back To The Future. Their rejection letter singled those two scenes out more than any other – but beyond those scenes they were full of praise – great characters, cinematic presentation, snappy dialogue. They did feel I hadn’t quite got modern 16 year old speak down perfectly at all times, but that was a more minor quibble. Nevertheless, I still think this pilot has great potential. I’m thinking of adapting it to a YA novel. I wrote – and failed to sell – a CBeebies pilot. I didn’t want to write for CBeebies, but the opportunity was there and so I had to go for it. I think the show I came up with was ...

One Day (2009) David Nicholls David Nicholls first came to my attention through the film adaptation of his first novel, Starter for Ten. I always meant to read that novel, when memories of the film had faded a little. Then I heard, in early 2010, about his new novel, One Day. It seemed everybody was talking about it: book groups, TV shows, bloggers, journalists. I read the blurb. Not for me, I thought: chick-lit, too soapy most likely. I think I was partly envious as well – might I not want to write this sort of thing? I dismissed it as something I would never read. Skip forward to March 2011 and I was sitting in a writing group, talking with a young woman about books we loved. She declared One Day the “best novel I’ve ever read.” I’d been hearing this praise from women a lot. What was it about this novel that hooked readers so quickly and profoundly? I fired it up on my Kindle and set out to discover its secrets. One Day tells the story of Emma M...