This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
INTERVIEW BY AMANDA KEATS
Have you always enjoyed writing?
Yes. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing stories. English was definitely my best (and favourite) subject at school. I still have some of the diaries I had to write in class from when I was about six, and I can see I had a very vivid imagination then. Either that or I was just a compulsive liar. But writing something and then showing it to someone else is a whole different thing. It took me years to get confident enough to do that.
What was your journey into getting published like?
I was incredibly lucky that it was a comparatively easy one. After I had begun writing Getting Rid of Matthew I sent the idea and the first three chapters to Jonny Gellar at Curtis Brown and he took me on. I knew that having a good agent was essential to give me a fighting chance of finding a publisher. Most publishers won’t read submissions unless they’re sent in by an agent. Jonny advised me to write the first 30,000 words and then he would start to send it out (the book was about 110,000 words in the end) so I did. Miraculously Penguin picked it up at that point which really gave me the massive boost I needed to keep going and finish.
What advice would you give an aspiring author?
Write all the time. You only find your own style by writing regularly. Most of what you write you’ll think is rubbish but it doesn’t matter. Eventually you’ll find what’s unique about the way you write. And don’t give up. Thankfully writing isn’t a job that has an upper age limit. No one is going to turn down your first book because you’re over 40.
Where did the idea for The Ugly Sister come from?
I had been wanting to write a book about sisters, because I think family relationships can be incredibly complex and affect people in a way no other kind of relationships do. I started thinking about how, if there were only two of you, it was inevitable that you would feel you were in direct competition with your sibling all the time. If someone called your sister the clever one that must mean you were the most stupid. And then I thought it might be fun to take that to an extreme and write a story where one sister has been singled out as extraordinary all her life and how that would affect the other.
How much are your characters based on people you know?
Not directly but, of course, there are elements of people I know in there. I really did work with someone who measured her floor space to check it wasn’t smaller than mine, just like Lorna measures her desk against Rebecca’s in Foursome! And with a man whose explicit emails to and from his mistress went via his assistant, and the whole office used to read them, like Alan in Getting Rid of Matthew. But their characters were very different to my fictional ones in other ways. Most of my characters are amalgamations of people I’ve met or seen somewhere.
What is your average writing day like? Do you have a structure or just see what happens…?
Mmmm…structure is something that eludes me these days. I used to when I was writing Getting Rid of Matthew. I would sit in front of my computer from 9 till 2 regardless of whether I felt inspired or not. I can’t seem to make myself do that these days. I write at all sorts of odd times, usually sitting on the sofa with my laptop on my lap. I am constantly distracted by everything; doing the washing, the internet, the cat, watering the garden. Then sometimes I’ll have an amazing period when I’m so into what I’m doing that I’ll write all day and think about it all night.
What do you like to read?
I read all the time and I like quite a wide range of fiction and a fair amount of non-fiction too. I’ve always got a couple of novels on the go. At the moment it’s The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and The Postmistress by Sarah Blake. Generally though I’m not a fan of historical novels. I can never quite believe that a writer writing in 2011 has got the nuances of 12th century speech right. But I read a lot of historical non-fiction. I love books about Georgian and Victorian life.
Who is your favourite women's fiction author of all time?
That’s a hard one. I’d probably have to go for the obvious Austen and Brontes. But, as far as contemporary authors go I have always said Fay Weldon was a big inspiration on me and I think Jennifer Weiner, Adele Parks and Fiona Neill write great women’s fiction.
What is next for you after The Ugly Sister… are you working on anything else already?
I’m just starting on my next book but it’s still in the fluid ideas stage so not much to report there yet! And for some reason I’m working on a sitcom idea I had, and pitching to write a pilot episode in the US.