Writer in residence's blog

Not everyone's the same. Some people can write anywhere; on a laptop on the train, for example. I have always been finicky about where I work. With children at home, I wrote on the table in the dining room when the family were watching television. It meant moving my typewriter around and I found it most unsatisfactory and difficult to concentrate. When I wrote my play When Adam Delved and Eve Span, this involved a...

I am often asked this question. My usual answer is that I don't really know. I can remember one distinct idea that came to me when I was riding on the top deck of a London bus more than forty years ago. It was a dull, summer's day, and through an upstairs window I glimpsed what looked like a room full of Christmas decorations and a tree. It probably wasn't anything like that at all,...

Many, many years ago, I had a story published in the magazine 'Storyteller' called 'The Lady and the Char'. It was about the very snobby wife of the lord mayor of a northern town who comes face to face with a cleaner in the town hall. Once upon a time, they had both lived in the same mean street and the cleaner cheerfully embarrasses the wife in public by recalling her rather bad habits when...

My latest novel, 'After The War is Over', has gone to my agent, Juliet, to read. She will let me know if I’ve made any obvious errors. She has already noticed I have Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in the same week, entirely skipping Lent. I will make most of the alterations she suggests, possibly not all. Some might be plot changes that I do not agree with. Nowadays, it is such a simple matter...

I know it sounds daft, but I am pretty sure the first proper book I read was when I was seven and it was called 'The Man They Could Not Hang'. I sat underneath my grandmother’s table in Bootle, hidden behind the chenille tablecloth, and read it from cover to cover while people wondered where I had gone. I can remember the incident, remember the book (the platform on the scaffold kept getting stuck so...