'We're fairly full-up, but I think we can just about squeeze in an extra tent. You won't want a hook-up, will you?'

After trawling Internet campsite pages I was savvy with the lingo, so I knew the kindly site owner was talking about electricity. My kettle-boiler and lantern run on calor-gas, but in any case I didn't want to push my luck. With forecasters predicting a fine Summer and the harsh economic climate, it took some time to find even a 'squeezed in' vacancy.


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I’ve just had a bit of an epiphany.

Yesterday I took out my Submissions File. I haven’t looked at it for a long, long time, because I haven’t submitted for months. Yet its contents have cast a pall over my thinking, and my attitude to writing, for even longer. In it, I’ve carefully listed every agent, every competition I’ve subbed my novel to, together with all the agents I intend to sub to in future. Each agent has been researched through the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and – if they have one – through their website, with a note of what kind of submission each prefers. Beside each agent I’ve submitted to, a tick - which later becomes a cross as the novel is rejected.




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It's my turn, and pleasure, to be the host of today's leg of Tim Atkinson's virtual tour.

So, Writing Therapy, who’s it for and what’s it about?

Writing Therapy explores the use of language and the way it helps to shape both memory and experience. There’s something in it for almost everyone – authors, teenagers, readers looking for something just a little bit different – the lot. It explores the relationship between fiction and reality, and the extent to which we’re all the authors of our destiny.

On a narrative level it’s about a girl who’s read so many novels she becomes convinced that she’s a character in one. So it’s a book within a book, two books for the price of one! And that’s part of the fun. Because – just as many writing courses refer to great works of literature, so does the central character. She takes her cue from the books she’s read and – in taking them apart – constructs a novel of her own.

But Frances Nolan is a patient in a psychiatric hospital, too. So writing a book is her therapy as well. Her nurse takes the role of tutor, I suppose: feeding her exercises, getting her creative juices flowing and developing her writing.





Why did you write it?

Two things got me started: one, teenage mental illness and the stigma attached. A book in with a protagonist who struggles with depression and triumphs (writing a novel) might help someone, somewhere (so I thought). 10% of the book’s royalties are going to the charity Young Minds (www.youngminds.org.uk) though, so someone’s benefitting. Second, the way we all (especially bloggers, twitterers and so on) make fiction of our lives, if only in the editing. Where does fact end and fiction begin? That’s the central question in Writing Therapy.

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When my friend Kellie Jackson started telling me how she came to write a story for BBC Radio 4, and what she learnt from it, I found it so fascinating that I asked her to do a guest blog for me. So here it is. The story itself, The Indian Hospital, is broadcast tomorrow, Wednesday 19th August, as part of a series of three Pavilion Pieces stories (the first is this afternoon, the third on Thursday), and when there's a Listen Again link on BBC iPlayer, I'll post it here.

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After completing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmith’s College, I’ve been blundering along trying to complete my first novel. The trouble is as a reader and a writer, I’m drawn to short fiction. Then, by chance, I was asked to submit a sample of my writing for the opportunity to be commissioned to write a short story for Radio 4. If commissioned it would mean writing one of three stories, all by new writers, set around Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. To my utter astonishment, weeks later the producer emailed to say they liked my writing and so, I made a foray to Brighton, soaked up the inspirational Pavilion vibe, did some preliminary research in the Brighton Museum Library, and was ready to meet the producer armed with an idea. My imagination had been snagged by the transformation of the Pavilion into a Hospital for Indian soldiers at the beginning of the First World War.

Writing short fiction for radio is different from writing for print.

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It occurs to me that only women have Guilty Pleasures. Men have Appetites (to the extent of that being a legal defence from time to time). Not only must we feel guilty, as a sex, about our pleasures but there is a clear hierarchy of guilt. We are encouraged to indulge our loveably weak natures when it comes to chocolate, shoes, shopping and so on. You can see how Chick Lit took off, can't you? Sex, qua sex, is not generally encouraged unless one has the ditzy ineptitude of a Bridget Jones, who is surely the prime example of how a woman might 'fall pregnant' (presumably she slipped and landed on his appendage).

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Over the course of the last few weeks the tension has been building in the Black household.
A hungry anticipation coupled with uncharacteristic optimism has taken over.
Yes, my friends, the start of the football season has arrived. Those barren weeks of outlandish rumour are over.
Last season's disappointments are consigned to history. This year will be the one. There is everything to play for.

Those of us who follow a football team will recognise the wonderful feeling of the clean sheet. And those of us who write must surely understand that they are brothers in arms. It seems to me that writing and following the footie are so similar I'm suprised Stevie G hasn't won the Booker.

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My philosophy for signings is to expect nothing whatsoever from the bookshop. I take my own refreshments and promotional material – even down to the Blu-Tack to put up posters. I am always completely prepared to walk in and find that no one remembered I was going to be there that day...

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You may remember from a few posts ago that I was waiting to hear back from two independent publishers who had requested the full manuscript of my novel.
Months and months later I have finally heard back from one of them (we'll call them Turtle Publishers).

Unfortunately we don't feel that we can publish the book. Your opening chapter was great and your writing style was fine. However, we felt disappointed with the story... The ideas that you talk about having in the book are great - mental health, issues over the pursuit of money, dystopian society., however, we felt that they didn't come over as well as they might have done.

Ouch.

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His writing style made his work particularly suitable for adapting to the 'film noir' genre popular in US cinemas of the 40s and early 50s. When much younger I attended an 'all-night Humphrey Bogart ' programme at the NFT - ironically enough, sleeping through the Chandler-based The Big Sleep, in which Bogart made the perfect Marlowe. At a later date, though , I was wide awake to watch Robert Mitchum as the hardboiled detective hero, typically wreathed in cigarette smoke, in Farewell, My Lovely.


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