WHY I’M NOT WRITING…

WHY I’M NOT WRITING WHAT I THOUGHT I’D BE WRITING

Anyone who knows me probably knows I’ve always wanted to write a novel.

They might have guessed – based on my TV appearances and drinking days (the good time had by all!) that I might write something jolly. I thought I’d write something jolly. Perhaps, I hoped, I could be the next Caitlin Moran or Marian Keyes (even though they’re both younger than me; mind you, these days, everyone’s younger than me.)

To my surprise, when not writing for a TVTimes deadline, I am truly dark & horrible as a writer.

Perhaps it was watching too many soaps.

Perhaps, after being relentlessly perky on TV-am and GMTV for so many years, the dark hollow centre of my psyche had to crawl out of its hidey hole.

What I write shocks me.

I don’t set out to be so vile, it just spills out onto the page. I never knew I had it in me.

I poke and prod at the worst nightmares and impulses and dark sexual feelings and vengeful thoughts. It’s so bad, I’m quite glad my parents aren’t alive to read it.

When I went back to school as an almost pensioner, I tried to transfer from City University’s Literary Novel writing MA course to Thrillers, because some of my bleak ideas seemed a bit more noir than literally literary. They wouldn’t let me and I’m sort of glad that happened because my thrillers don’t seem a classic thriller form. They’re psychological, domestic. (In my 2nd novel, Nasty Little Cuts, the ‘action’ pretty much all happens in the kitchen.) I think of thrillers as James Bond – exotic locations! guns! glamorous sex! But I have little experience of all that.

There is a dark humour in my writing, but it’s coal black gallows humour – the sort you find in newsrooms.

I’m hoping, after people read the pure nastiness, they’ll still speak to me.

But if you do cross the street to avoid me, know that I will find you, I will hunt you down, and I will hold you hostage in my cellar until you agree to buy another book.