Paul Campbell – he writes EastEnders!

I’ve only met Paul once, and then exchanged a couple of workshop reviews with him, but that counts as friendship, in the arms-distance world of writing. And, despite my Archers addiction, I don’t watch TV soaps – but when it’s one of your own it’s different.

Paul Campbell wrote tonight’s East Enders. I watched from the opening credits to the closing ones where it said ‘Written by Paul Campbell’ in big white letters. And it was very very good. I could definitely see myself sitting down to watch again tomorrow … and that’s purely down to the merit of the script, as apart from Babs being Babs, I had no idea who any of the characters were, or why I should care about them.

I’m not going to spoil things for omnibus watchers (see how quickly I slip into the jargon?) but believe me, in the world of TV script-writing, Paul is going to be somebody who shines, really shines.

I'm so very chuffed that I don't quite know where to put myself. Isn't it great when one of your own does something really spiffing? Answer, yes it is.

The insatiable desire to peer through windows …

Over the past five years, I’ve come to pride myself on my instinct about fiction writers. I can’t tell who’s going to be a best seller or a dud, but what I can tell, with a reasonable degree of certainty, is which writers will be around in a year or two’s time, and which will already have given up. In other words, I can spot those who will have a long writing life and those who will be a brief, brilliant flash in the pan.

And the key determinant is watching other writers when something interesting happens: if you’re sitting in a pub or a café and a fight starts in the street outside, or wandering along the seafront and pass a particularly well or badly dressed person, or see a mother trying to cope with a child having a tantrum … Writers with staying power tend to lose the thread of the conversation. Their eyes and ears turn to whatever is happening and they focus intensely on the drama in front of them.

When they finally return to ‘reality’ it’s almost always with some thoughts on what they’ve seen, and it’s not usually a straightforward comment like, ‘Did you see that?’ but a much more tangential approach such as, ‘I wonder why she chose that hat’ or ‘Do you think he’s really angry, or is he playing to the audience?’ In other words, they are already shaping narrative out of an unexpected incident and this ability to absorb, transform and re-present the quotidian as fiction is a key marker of a long writing career. For those who aren’t endlessly fascinated by (okay, nosy about) the world around them, the only route to fiction is to plumb their internal resources, and sooner or later, unless they’ve led a particularly fascinating life, they will begin to bore themselves, or bore their readers.

And what have windows got to do with it? Well, my husband points out that whenever I go on a long journey by train, I take my camera and come back with loads of pictures. The first two or three will be glorious scenery: the Kendal countryside or Highland lochs, but after that all the pictures will be blurry images of peoples’ back windows as seen from the train.

“What’s this supposed to be?” He’ll point at a blurred, beige image.

“Oh, that was a woman who was ironing a shirt and talking on her mobile at the same time. I couldn’t help wondering if she was flirting with her lover while pressing her husband’s clothes.”

“And this?”

“A child’s bedroom, with no child in it. The curtains were open and the light was on, but the bed was neatly made. Don’t you think that’s odd, at ten o’clock at night? Perhaps there is no child to come back, perhaps it ran away and the parents have kept the room just as it was …”

And that’s one of my particular addictions, making stories out of what I see from train or bus windows. Glimpses of other people’s lives are endlessly fascinating and feed my desire to write – in fact, if I ever get stuck, I get on the bus and simply sit on the top deck with my moleskine, noting down all the things that interest me. One round trip to somewhere remote can provide a dozen stories, for less than the cost of a cup of good coffee …

Reading worries

Yes, I’ve gone very quiet. No, I haven’t died, nor won the lottery. Actually I’ve had migraine. For some reason as yet unclear, I get sequential migraine – three in a row, a day or a day and a half apart, which wipes me out for a week or so. Weird.

Anyway, apart from swallowing medication, seeing black floaters like giant tadpoles and throwing up, I’ve been wondering how much of my story ‘The Price of Freedom’ to read at the Brighton Burlesque reading. For those who didn’t know, this is the one and only time I will read as the erotica-writing componenent of my tripartite personality, Carmel Lockyer, because it’s for charity: Burlesque Against Breast Cancer Fundraiser at Waterstones, North Street, Brighton, 30th October from 7pm.

So what should I read? Just enough to warm the blood, or the whole sex scene … Whaddya think, dear reader?


Geishaboy500 kindly supplied the perfect photograph, called Burlesque Funk!

What a weekend!

I love it when days become wholly writerly – and that can be days when I have the house to myself and nothing happens but total immersion in the current novel or short story so that I drift around, leaving cups of tea to get cold in unlikely places as I scribble down dialogue or fit together to events that have to take place for my story to develop.

Or it can be days like Saturday, when I taught a frenetic masterclass on Writing Fiction to get Published in a single hour, to the combined talents of The Hatchery and Comedy of Errors, the two writing groups that meet at Hove Library, and then went on a couple of hours later to meet Shaun Levin, who’d been teaching a more leisurely session on Literary Voice at the Jubilee Library.

Shaun is mate, a fantastic writer, and an editor to die for. He publishes Chroma - a magazine I recommend to anybody who loves good fiction and great pictures. And, although he’s often eaten take-away food from Bill’s over the years, he’s never actually been there, so it was my privilege to introduce him to Brighton’s finest eatery.

We talked without stopping for a couple of hours: Shaun had an insight into South African literature which he’s going away to ponder (and I’m not sharing it with you, even though I think he’s come up with something very interesting about what shapes the writing of South Africans) and I got a glimpse of something about the relative density of landscapes (Europe – porous, Australia – dense) that is something like a metaphor for the novel I’m working on, and is going to be fantastically useful in exploring the two locations in which the novel is set. Shaun had the lemon tart topped with figs and I had the berry pavlova with nuggets of white chocolate in its base, and – as usual – I forget to take any pictures of the food! However, I did prevail on the lady sitting next to us to take this picture, so Shaun and the newly-shorn can be seen together (that’s a play on words that I’m not quite ashamed enough of making to edit out) for the first time!

Friends who write are a gift greater than rubies ...