Photographed by Philippa Gedge
If you attend enough events as an author, you will find you are asked the same questions many times over. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because with each response, you are able to fine tune your answers.
‘Are you a goat, or a sheep?’
‘Yes, but where did Mrs Creasy really go?’
‘What have you learned since you’ve been published?’
What have I learned since I’ve been published? I will usually answer, ‘the toilets at Euston Station only take ten and twenty pence pieces,’ and ‘Salisbury is a lot further away than you think.’ The truth is, I have learned more in the last twelve months than I could ever have imagined possible, and (in my current state of editing limbo), I thought I’d take a moment to explain why…
I think of writing as a courtship with my characters. I often ask them questions out loud and, usually, after some wrangling, these personas will reveal themselves by page 40. By that point, if I don’t know their deepest desires and what they’ll regret most on their deathbed, I know I am in trouble, that I am missing my mark as a writer…
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