Inspirational landscape

This past couple of days I have been on my travels, seeing the Olympic women's football final at Wembley with my friend Ollie, then spending a pleasant day back home in West Sussex with my parents.

A short way into the train journey back up to London and thence Norwich this morning, we passed one of my favourite sights - the chapel of Lancing College. I worked it, and my feelings about it, into a section of the novel I am currently submitting to agents and publishers, The Wicket in the Rec. So I thought, as I hadn't so far posted any of my actual writing on the blog to any great degree, I'd post the excerpt in which Lancing College features.

After all, if I'm blogging about writing, I ought to actually show you some of my work rather than just talking about it!

Oh, and I took a few photos too, with mixed results - the below is one of the best. Not bad from a moving train, eh?

Anyway...

 

Ken Jordan hoped that he still had a while left on this planet. But he was nothing if not a practical man, and so three years ago he had finally set about making a will, to stipulate what should happen to the small amount of independent wealth he had been fortunate enough to accrue.

In this document, there was a bequest to Lancing College. A small bequest, admittedly, but still not one to be sniffed at. The condition of this was that the money should be used to help with the upkeep of the college’s impressive chapel. An outside observer might have thought this strange, as Ken had never studied there, nor was he in any way religious. The school and its chapel meant nothing to him in and of themselves.

But they represented something. An emotional tug at his soul that, in all his years of staying away, had never quite disappeared.

Anyone who travelled on the railway line between Brighton and Littlehampton would know the place. Going west from Shoreham station, the sound of the wheels on the track changing as the train rattles across the bridge over the Adur. Then, once over the river, past the 1930s control tower of the airport... and there it is, rising up like a great Cathedral of the Downs.

Ken could see it. Not in his mind’s eye, not in some childhood memory, but he could see it on this very day, because for the first time in so many years, decades, he was on a train travelling home.

He had landed at Gatwick early that morning, on the only flight available at such short notice. He had taken the train down to Brighton, and was now travelling along to Angmering, where he hoped he would be able to find a bus, or failing that a taxi, that could take him to the village of his birth. The place he had once sworn never again to visit.

He had not been sure what he would feel as he passed Lancing College on the train. Had not known whether the old twinge would still be there. The feeling that once you saw the chapel you were nearly there. ‘Home is this way,’ it always seemed to be saying to him.

He had peered wistfully at it as a train had taken him away to the war and, although he could never have known it, to five long, hard years of imprisonment. And he had stared at it as he came home after the war’s end. Older, wiser, bitter perhaps, but excited by the thought of home all the same. Indeed, that day, he had nearly wept as the chapel had come into view through a misty, dream-like morning.

There were no tears today. But still he felt his heart beat faster to see it there, unchanged, identical to how it had always been. The dirty old slam-door train he was on may have been cold and draughty, with stained seats and miserable-looking travellers. He may have been heading to the funeral of a man he hated, to a village he hadn’t seen for years.

But for the first time in his journey, as the train lumbered past the college, he felt as if he really was going home. He even craned his neck around to keep on looking at the chapel for as long as he could, before it slid out of view, and the train travelled on.

"Yes, I was there too..."

Not a post about writing, I’m afraid. Sorry about that, but I will try and keep these sorts of posts to a bare minimum on this blog. However, I couldn’t let the chance pass by to write a few words about my trip to London last Friday – to the Olympic Games.

I was still at university, just about, when London won the right to host the Games, on July the 6^th 2005. I think I’d finished my exams but was still going in daily to use the internet, as I didn’t have it at home at the time due to the miserable couple of people with whom I spent a fairly joyless year house-sharing.

I recall very clearly sitting in one of the computer rooms in the Arts block, with my laptop plugged into the network, listening to the announcement being streamed via 5 Live on the BBC website. Looking back at my diary entry for that day I can see that I was already planning to attend some events in the far-off Space Year 2012, although as I put at the end:

“Seven years… I wonder where I’ll be in life and what I’ll be doing then? Doubtless I’ll be coming back to read this entry anyway! Hope you’re doing well there, Paul aged 28.”

Yes, not too badly, thank you.

I never would have expected to still be living in Norwich by the time 2012 finally rolled around, but being here has meant I’ve seen, from a distance, the Olympics grow up and take shape. If you live in Norwich, whenever you have to get the train down to go to or through London, you always pass Stratford on the line into Liverpool Street Station, and many’s the time in recent years I have looked out of a train window to see the Olympic Stadium beginning to take form, and the park around it too.

The Olympic Stadium in Stratford, East London.

Last Friday morning, I got the chance to sit in the stadium as the athletics events of the Games got under way.

I didn’t get anything at all in the first round of ticket sales last year, but in the second round I managed to get tickets to the women’s football final at Wembley this Thursday, and for the princely sum of £150, a ticket to be in the Olympic Stadium itself for the first session of the athletics. I chose the football because I wanted to actually go to an event where a medal would be won, and because it’s a sport I enjoy watching. But I also chose the athletics because... Well, that is the Olympics, isn’t it? For all the other sports, it’s the running, jumping and throwing that are emblematic of the Games.

Seeing the fantastic reaction of most of the people around me to the opening ceremony and the first week of the Games, the feeling of so many people wanting to be a part of it, the sense of a coming together and a shared joy among the nations, certainly convinced me I made the right choice to spend the money on a ticket. I’d been looking forward to it all week, and when the day finally came I’m pleased to say that I was not disappointed.

It was a very early start on Friday morning, getting the 5.30am train down from Norwich, but already there was a touch of Olympic Spirit about place. There were pink-jacketed railway staff – soon to become a familiar site at stations all over the capital – handing out free maps of the venue areas and amended train timetables, and in my carriage there were certainly other Olympic travellers, some happily with Union Flags painted on their cheeks and eagerly chatting about what they were off to go and see.

Finally, after all these years of glancing at the Olympic Park as I went through Stratford, I was getting off the train there to actually go and visit the place.

It was an incredible feeling walking down from the station to the park. Everyone was very effectively shepherded, with volunteers brandishing big pink foam hands labelled ‘London 2012’ with a pointing finger standing every few feet along the way, ensuring you couldn’t possibly get lost. Every so often one of these volunteers would be seated in a high chair and armed with a loud hailer, to encourage you that it wasn’t far to go now, telling us they hoped we all had a good day and occasionally asking whether we were all from the UK or what countries we’d come from and who we were there to support.

The walk from Stratford Station to the Olympic Park.

I have to say that the volunteers all around the Olympic Park, in their fetching orange-and-purple colour schemes, were an absolute credit to the Games and indeed the country. Unfailingly helpful, polite, cheerful and almost all of them clearly absolutely delighted to be there and be a part of it all. They must have to put up with a lot, but I never saw any of them looking angry or stressed, and they all seemed happy to help out with the constant requests to “please take my photo with the stadium in the background!” from all around.

“Please can you take a photo of me...?”

There was a real sense of crackling anticipation and excitement in the crowd as we shuffled along to the Olympic Park – shuffling being a main feature of the day, actually. Wherever there were long queues in the Park, they never stayed static for long. For the megastore, for the toilets, for food... They may have been long, but they always kept moving, which quite impressed me.

Getting in was actually a doddle, and only took a couple of minutes. When I had to turn out my pockets into a plastic tray, the soldier checking my things noticed by BBC pass (I wasn’t working and was there purely as a spectator, but I like to carry my pass around with me when I go on trips like this, just in case I should need to get into any outpost of the BBC somewhere) and joked with me whether I was there to do an undercover exposé of Olympic Park security!

And then I was in. The Olympics!

Being there so early in the morning was actually a great bonus, although I didn’t realise that until later on when it became much busier. Although it was very busy in the morning, it wasn’t as jam-packed as it would later become, and it was fairly easy to walk around the Park, exploring, looking at all the venues without getting caught up in big crowds.

Being there before the crowds got too deep meant the chance to pose for pictures like this one.

One of my favourite moments of morning came as I was wandering around, taking it all in. I saw a Frenchman, brandishing a large flag of his country, very excitedly running up to two police officers and asking if he could have his photo taken with them – real British policemen with their funny helmets. The constables, of course, duly obliged!

I spent over an hour just walking around, taking pictures, and then queued up to get into the ‘London 2012 Megastore’ to buy some souvenirs. I also managed to accidentally purchase what I would say was a deceptively-packaged Australian flag, but it was all right – once inside the stadium I managed to get a UK flag from one of the smaller merchandise outposts, to wave in support!

The stadium itself is, I would say, incredibly well-designed. I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert on stadia, but compared to the last stadium I was in, Carrow Road, it didn’t feel many times bigger, and didn’t lose any sense of the ability to follow what was going on – even though it seats 80,000 compared to the 20-odd thousand of Carrow Road.

However, the noise and the colour of the crowd was really something else – as soon as I walked through into the stand, and looked from left to right at the chattering, waving, excited mass of people, I could feel the scale of the thing. The sheer joy to be there. This was the Olympics, and we were there!

Not a bad view, eh?

I had a pretty bloody good seat, too – on the back straight, pretty much bang in the middle, and not too many rows back. The long jump / triple jump pits were directly in front, and there was a decent view of the hammer and shot-put circles, although the high-jump area and of course the start/finish straight for most of the races were right over on the other side. But with the big screens and scoreboards at either end and rather simplistic but nonetheless cheerful stadium announcers, it was always reasonably easy to follow everything that was happening, except perhaps when there were races and field events going on at the same time.

The announcers, it does have to be said, weren’t the greatest or most insightful of characters – a British chap sounding like an encouraging holiday camp redcoat, and an American who sounds like a computerised voice reading out lists of athletes. The British chap, in particular, clearly struggled with French pronunciation, as whenever he had a French athlete to name, a recording of said name by someone else would be played in while he left a gap in his speech!

Having seen morning sessions from Olympics and world championships on TV before, they had sometimes seemed a little flat in terms of crowd atmosphere, and I was a touch worried this would be like that. No fear of that, however: the crowd was not only at capacity, as far as I could tell, but also full of noise and anticipation, throughout the whole four hours or so I was in there.

So, what do I remember the most?

The way the crowd would always go wild over one of two things – a British athlete being announced, or someone who was plumb last in one of the races by quite a long way, who would always be cheered home to the rafters.

Yes, it was nice to have a lot of British interest, and to be a part of that happy, generous, flag-waving crowd screaming and shouting in support of them. I saw Dai Greene in his 400m hurdles heat, Christine Ohuruogu in her 400m flat heat, and various others – including the first two events of the heptathlon, with Jessica Ennis. Yes, for the start of it at least, I can say “I was there” for her gold medal-winning performance. I was part of that noise she credited with inspiring her as she walked out into the stadium on that first morning.

But it was another British athlete who sticks most in the memory of the home efforts for me. Katarina Johnson-Thompson, of whom I doubt many people in the stadium had heard before Friday (I certainly hadn’t, anyway), only 19 years old and also competing in the heptathlon. Towards the end of the session, with no more races on the track, the full attention of the crowd was on the heptathlon high jump.

Jessica Ennis in the high jump.

Ennis had been the focus, being cheered to the rafters as she cleared 1 metre 86, but it was Johnson-Thompson who actually stayed in the contest for longer. She got up to 1.89, and as she got ready to do her jump at this height, everyone was watching her. The stadium PA was pumping out I Love Rock and Roll by Joan Jett, everyone was clapping in rhythm, and I caught a glimpse of a close-up of Johnson-Thompson on the big screen. She was focusing ready for her jump, but as she glanced around her at the crowd – cheering, clapping, roaring for her, an unknown 19-year-old at her home Olympics – she broke into a small, slightly stunned smile. A sort of “I cannot believe this is happening to me.”

It was endearing and infectious, and she cleared the height and we all roared in delight.

As I say, though, it was those finishing last who also caught my attention. In the men’s 3000m steeplechase heats, poor old Stuart Stokes, who if athletes were powered by cheers alone would surely have won his heat. But he ran around in last position, despite the frantic shouts of the small child in front of me to “Come on STOKES!!!” every time he plodded along the back straight.

In the women’s 400m heats, two of the runners who’d had the honour and the pride of being their countries’ flag bearers at the opening ceremony – Zamzam Mohamed Farah of Somalia, and Maziah Mahusin of Brunei – finished miles behind their competitors. Seconds in a sport of tenths. Mahusin even managed to set a national record while finishing some seven seconds behind her nearest rival, and when it was announced as a record for her country she got another loud cheer from an approving audience.

They were the best their countries had, and they had come and done their best.

It ought to have felt patronising, I suppose, and written down like that I fear it does, but it never felt like that in the stadium. It never felt like we were taking the piss, and I genuinely don’t believe anybody in those stands intended to be doing that. We wanted to cheer them because they had come and they had tried. They had done the best they can do.

Bang! A steeplechase heat starts on the back straight.

There was another such runner in the steeplechase heats, an Ethiopian called Birhan Getahun, who I think must have been injured as he was so far behind. Nonetheless, he tried to complete the course, and was being similarly roared on into the final straight, before there was a collective gasp from the crowd as he collapsed at the final hurdle. He staggered to his feet, was cheered again by a crowd clearly hoping for a Derek Redmond moment, but then fell again and had to be carried from the track.

It was, as I say, a wonderful morning, and I am so pleased I was there. Even the (heavy!) rain shower didn’t put anyone off, and I did rather enjoy the stadium PA putting out Rihanna’s Umbrella while that was happening, quickly followed by Sun is Shining by Bob Marley when the clouds passed. I thought it was rather good thinking on behalf of whoever chose the music, but it turns out of course that they have very carefully-programmed playlists for all eventualities.

When I came out, a little after two, it was clear that the Olympic Park was so much busier, and it wasn’t quite as pleasant to be in as before now that it was thronged with people. I headed off into the centre of London to be a bit of a tourist for the afternoon. This caused my only real upset of the day when I dutifully obeyed the constantly-tannoyed instructions to please used West Ham tube station instead of Stratford to help ease congestion. This I dutifully did, but what they don’t tell you is that West Ham station is half a bloody hour’s walk away!

I got cross about this – purely internally – as I thought this unexpectedly-long walk would mean I’d lost my booked slot on the London Eye, which I’d decided to go on having never done so before. I got into that mood and manner those who know me will be familiar with when my carefully-laid plans go awry – silent, stompy and with a thunderous frown on my face. However, as it turned out the fast track ticket I’d booked for the Eye was fully flexible, so I could go on any time I wanted.

An attempt at an arty shot of the London Eye, after my ride on it.

Then it was back across London for a ride on the new cable car that goes across the river from the Royal Docks to the O2 (or the “North Greenwich Arena” was it is for the Olympics), which I’d first read about on the BBC News website a couple of months ago and been quite intrigued by. You get great views, but it is slightly nerve-wracking to be gently swaying high above the Thames, especially if – like me – you start thinking about what would happen if the cable broke and you went plummeting down into the water!

The O2, and Canary Wharf, from the cable car.

Such concerns aside, I had a fine old time in London, and am so, so glad I bought a ticket last year. I don’t usually enjoy going to the capital – I find it too crowded, grimy, miserable and generally soulless. It’s like being in some science-fiction dystopia, a bleak world full of bleak lives.

But on Friday I enjoyed it. On Friday, it felt like a happy, welcoming city. It won’t last, of course, but it was nice to be a part of it.

"The bravery of idiots..."

An interesting thing has happened in the brief history of this blog. Two people who’ve read it – one who I know very well, the other I’ve never actually met – have described my decision to blog about my writing as “brave”.

Now, on the face of it, this is a ridiculous comment. Blogging is not a brave thing to do, unless you’re fighting for freedom of speech in an oppressive society, or something along those lines. (Which I, obviously, am not doing!). Bravery is running into a burning building or leaping into a raging river to rescue somebody when you could easily stay outside or on the bank.

I am not a brave person, and have never done anything brave.

However, I suspect that’s not what they meant. I rather think they were using “brave” in the same sense that they use “courageous” in Yes, Minister. “A courageous decision, Minister...”

And I can see what they mean, in that respect. Imagine if an agent or publisher who’s received a submission from me Googles my name, finds this blog, and reads all about what a complete failure my writing career has been so far. I can imagine how that might not look good.

But on the other hand, I think this blog is a good advert for my writing career – certainly good enough to outweigh any drawbacks. I think it shows my passion for what I do, my commitment to it, and that I haven’t just decided overnight to scribble a lazy submission for some novel I am never going to come near finishing.

So I’ll carry on blogging. Because I enjoy it, and even if nobody’s reading it’s good fun to put together these little reflections and missives. I don’t think there’s any danger in it. No confidences are being betrayed, and no secrets revealed. A lot of writing failure talked about, yes, but I think failure is something the vast majority of writers experience for a long time before they finally succeed, so this blog doesn’t reveal anything stunningly unusual.

I’d prefer to have a successful novel to tell you all about some day though, of course!

Treasure Quest: The Book

Today, I’ve decided to carry on my recently-adopted and doubtless soon-to-be-abandoned practice of writing a post about something I mentioned during the previous one. Most of the pieces on here so far have concerned failure in one way or another – projects that were never published, and my writing career to date in general. So I thought I’d cheer things up a bit by telling the story of the one book I have so far had released into the wider world – Treasure Quest: The Book.

All right, so it’s not a novel. It’s quite small. And I wasn’t actually paid for it, given that it was done for charity. But it’s a book that was properly published and was written for the BBC, no less, which I think is something of which to be proud.

When not working on trying to become a professional novelist, I am lucky enough to have a day job working for BBC Radio Norfolk, based in Norwich. Among other roles, since May 2008 I have been the producer of a Sunday morning programme called Treasure Quest. Those of you who remember the 1980s Channel 4 television programme Treasure Hunt with Anneka Rice will find the format familiar – we have a radio car presenter and driver who have to travel around Norfolk solving four or five cryptic clues, with each clue leading to where the next one is located. The listeners at home phone, text, e-mail and Facebook in with their suggestions for how to solve the clues and where the radio car should head next, and the team have a little under three hours to crack all the clues and find the treasure envelope.

Some of the Treasure Quest team in November 2011. Studio presenter and station Managing Editor David Clayton, me, presenter Becky Betts and broadcast assistants Alexajain Wills-Bradfield and Lauren Tyson.

I plan the route each week, set-up the locations, write the clues, produce the programme in the studio every Sunday morning and have an on-air role as ‘the Questmaster’, explaining how each clue worked after they’ve solved it and occasionally going on to give them extra hints and supplementary clues if they’re lagging behind! The show is tremendous fun to produce, and very popular with the audience. We frequently beat every other station in the county in the slot, including the national ones, and we’re one of the station’s most popular shows of the week. We have something of a cult audience too, with a popular Facebook page and even a fan website set up by some enthusiastic followers of the show.

The fact that we have this popularity has allowed us to use it to help raise money for the BBC’s Children in Need Appeal every November. Since 2009 we’ve held an annual Treasure Quest Live! stage show at the Norwich Playhouse, with all the team engaging in various games and features. Being both a writerly type and also something of an anorak who likes to have the history of things written down, when we came to do the second stage show in 2010, I pitched the idea of us producing a printed programme people could purchase at the show. It would have a history of the programme, profiles of the team, photos, etc, and we could sell it in aid of Children in Need.

I wrote a few bits for this to pitch the idea to my boss – and Treasure Quest studio presenter – David Clayton. However, I found out that he had already started the ball rolling on a Treasure Quest 2011 calendar, for people to buy not just at the show but also online and in the shop next to the BBC Radio Norfolk studios in The Forum. Obviously it would be a bit beyond our resources to produce two pieces of merchandise – BBC Local Radio stations not really being set-up to produce tie-ins for the shows, and most of this being done in our spare time – so my printed programme idea went on the back burner, although David did say he liked the bits I’d written for it.

The calendar went well and managed to raise a fair bit of money for Children in Need. So early on the following year, sometime around March or April, we started thinking about what we could possibly do as a piece or merchandise to sell at the 2011 show. David and I had a chat where we discussed various possibilities, and the idea emerged that we should do a book. He knew that I was keen to do it, and I knew that I could write it and write it well. We left it open as a possibility, and I decided I was going to grab this opportunity – possibly the only one I will ever have – to get a book published. I decided to write it, print some copies and show them to David as a template for the sort of thing we could do.

It’s arrogant, perhaps, but I never had any doubt I could do it well. I knew it had to be quite a short book, no more than twenty or thirty thousand words. I knew the history of the show inside out, and had all the old programmes and my notes available to me to check any details. We had hundreds, possibly thousands, of photos taken along the way each week. And I knew that I was a good writer of non-fiction. I can write prose that, while not sparkling, can be clear, concise and engaging.

Most importantly, like many Doctor Who fans, I’d grown up reading behind-the-scenes and ‘making of’ books, and I knew exactly what the tone of the thing had to be, and what had to go in it. I was immensely pleased at the idea of being a part of something that could have its own ‘making of’ tome, and of celebrating all of the achievements of my friends and colleagues on the show. So I wrote a first draft in about a week in April 2011, and used the self-publishing site Lulu to create five dummy copies, to show David what the finished thing might look like.

My dummy copy of the Treasure Quest book idea, which ended up impressing people enough for us to go with it as a real project.

I have to admit I was pretty pleased with it, and David also seemed quite impressed. He quickly agreed that a book would be a good thing to do, and brought on board a wonderful lady called Elsje Stocker. Elsje used to work at the BBC in Norwich and sometimes comes back to manage special projects for us – she stage-manages the stage show, and ran the production of the Treasure Quest calendar. Elsje was able to find all the right people to talk to higher up at the BBC and at Children in Need to enable us to do the book, and also found the equally-wonderful Norman Macintosh and his company Charity Goods to publish it for us.

Norman’s been putting out merchandise to raise money for Children in Need for many years, usually in partnership with BBC Radio 2, and he was absolutely brilliant. Without him and Elsje and their tireless efforts the book would never have happened, but one thing that quickly became apparent was that we’d need to hand over the book to Norman for publishing as ready-to-go PDF files. Meaning whatever we sent him would be what was printed – we’d have to do all of the design and layout in-house ourselves.

I hadn’t expected this at all, and was a little daunted given that I have absolutely no design experience. On the plus side, however, I was rather pleased that it gave me almost complete control over the project, in terms of being able to constantly tinker with it over the summer months of 2011, refining it and fixing it and getting it right, and checking over and over again for mistakes and typos. I spent many, many hours poring over it, before by September it was finally ready to go to print.

(Incidentally, my not being in any way a designer meant that the interior of the book was all laid-out in Microsoft Word, and the cover in Microsoft Publisher. Not tools a professional would ever use, and if a proper publisher ever reads this I can imagine them wincing at the very idea. But I flatter myself to think I managed, with Norman’s help, to get both cover and interior looking, if not great, then more than good enough to pass muster).

One little coup I was able to pull off during all this was to get BBC Radio 1 DJ Greg James to write an afterword for the book. Greg did work experience at Radio Norfolk during his time in Norwich at the UEA, and in August 2011 he played – for the third time! – on his “Best Bit of the Radio” slot a famous clip from Treasure Quest of our clue hunter Becky Betts having to go up in a helicopter. Taking advantage of his cheekiness in having used the clip yet again, I dropped him an e-mail asking if he’d like to write a piece for the end of the book, and he said yes!

That nice Greg James from BBC Radio 1 wrote us an afterword for the book.

The book came out in October 2011, and I couldn’t have been more proud. When I got my hands on a copy, I couldn’t stop looking at it, holding it in my hands and flicking back and forth through the pages. A real, proper, actual book with “by Paul Hayes” on the front. (This, incidentally, was down to David – I’d assumed we’d put it out without a name, but he said I should have the proper credit for writing it). I was so enthralled by having a proper book out that I even memorised the ISBN number, rather pathetically! (9780956077714, since you asked).

When the shop next to our studios put out their large display of the books, I was so taken with it that I took one of the online team’s cameras down to take a photo. In reception I bumped into my colleague Jacqui Burgoyne and waylaid her to take a photo of me posing with the books – fortunately she’s also an aspiring scribbler, so she well understood my excitement!

 Me, shamelessly posing with the copies of the book on display in The Forum shop in October 2011!

Our news online team did a piece on it, there was an article in the local paper and even our TV colleagues at Look East gave us a quick mention. We did a book signing in the BBC Radio Norfolk reception in early November, which was extraordinary, especially seeing so many people queuing up to meet us. They were there to see Becky and David, of course, but I was there too and actually signing copies of my own book. Extraordinary.

“Sorry, who are you again...?” A bemused member of the public gets her book scribbled in by me, after she'd got the signatures she really wanted from David and Becky!

At last year’s Treasure Quest Live!, which I produced, they brought me down from the theatre’s production gallery at the end of the show to present me with a framed copy of the book’s cover on stage, which was very flattering and touching. And then earlier this year, a group of listeners were invited in by David to surprise me during an edition of the spin-off show Treasure Quest: Extra Time (which I present), to give me a copy of the book they’d all written in, in celebration of the 200^th Treasure Quest.

I know I’ve gone on a bit about this, but I am very proud of Treasure Quest: The Book. I think it’s a good behind-the-scenes book, and I’m very glad it’s there as a record and celebration of the programme and those who have worked on it. We sold out all the copies we had printed, 2000 of them, and raised over nine thousand pounds for Children in Need.

Being presented with a framed copy of the cover at Treasure Quest Live! in November 2011.

And on a personal level, I will always know that, come what may in my efforts at a writing career, I at least had a taste of publication, once. I did it. I had a book out, with my name on it, and people bought it and liked it. There are many people who want to write just as desperately as I do, even more desperately perhaps, and never get that opportunity. Everything fell into place and I took the opportunity, and I’ll always feel fortunate at having been able to.

But that said, I would still prefer it not to be the only book I ever have published!

My book!

City of Literature

In my previous post, I mentioned how I wrote my rather forgettable third novel, Local News, in the summer between finishing my A-Levels and heading off to Norwich to start my degree at the University of East Anglia. Which got me thinking about my time there, and the writers I knew, particularly as a member of the university’s Creative Writing Society.

There’s no set career path to being a writer. You can’t just leave school and head down the job centre and say “Hello – I’d like to be a novelist please.” There are no interviews, no formal qualifications you particularly need, and no positions as writers of fictional prose advertised in the situations vacant columns of the local paper. You’re pretty much on your own, and have to make up how you go about doing it as you go along.

However, there is Norwich. And there is a certain type of person – let’s face it, a predominantly white, English, rather bookish, usually male sort of a person – to whom Norwich in general and the University of East Anglia in particular is a writing Mecca. The UEA’s creative writing minor and MA are legendary for producing authors of great renown. It’s the university of Bradbury, McEwan, Ishiguro, etc... If you want to follow in their footsteps, head for Norwich. Earlier this year, this reputation saw Norwich named by UNESCO as England’s first ever “City of Literature”, and one of only six in the world to have been bestowed the title.

So, as I say, for a certain type of person, if you wish to be a writer, this is where you come, for better or for worse.

I am not sure when and where exactly I first became aware of Norwich’s reputation as a great literary city. I have a dim recollection of an afterword to Paul Magrs’s Doctor Who novel The Scarlet Empress, wherein he talked about his life and his work lecturing in creative writing in the city. When I arrived at the UEA in the autumn of 2002, I recall having a lecture from him on Angela Carter. Carter was a central plank of the UEA’s English Literature degree at the time – indeed, doing said degree almost at times felt like doing a degree in her work alone.

(Magrs, incidentally, later buggered off from the UEA moaning about it being too middle-class, seemingly on the basis that someone had once turned up to one of his seminars wearing a beret).

Wherever it was I first heard of Norwich’s literary background, certainly by the age of seventeen I was convinced that this was the place for me to go to university, and I never seriously considered going anywhere else. I applied to study English Literature with Creative Writing, but to my disappointment didn’t get on the creative writing minor. You had to send in a sample of your work, and the short story I selected – a rather gruesome piece called Fight From the Inside (yes, named after the Queen song – I was a fanatical fan of theirs as a teenager) about a baby killing its mother from within the womb – obviously didn’t impress them very much. This was an early indication that I was perhaps not quite as good a writer as I thought I was...

I later heard the statistic being bandied about that 300 people applied for the 15 places on that year’s creative writing minor. I have no idea of the accuracy of that, but in the end decided to accept the offer they did make me, which was to study plain English Literature. This was on the basis that studying how other people did it would surely help to make me a better writer, and just the act of being in Norwich and soaking up its authorly ethos still seemed a better bet than heading anywhere else to study anything else.

In the event, I did end up doing a couple of the creative writing units as part of my degree, including the prose fiction unit under Doug Cowie. But what really sticks in my mind from my time at the UEA, and indeed formed some of my most enjoyable experiences of the place, was my membership of the Creative Writing Society, who would meet twice a week in one of the large rooms upstairs in Union House to engage in writing workshops and share their work for feedback from their peers.

When I was at the UEA from 2002 until 2005, it was the era when the self-described “poetry boyband” Aisle 16 were in their pomp, and their members were among the leading lights of the CWS. I have never harboured any ambitions to be a poet, but I greatly admired and envied the Aisle 16 members for their linguistic skills and the enormous self-confidence they seemed to have about their writing.

 You can still find traces of Aisle 16’s guerrilla advertising around and about in Norwich. I took this photo yesterday, opposite the Catholic Cathedral, where Earlham and Unthank Roads meet.

I don’t think it’s an uncommon experience for people to go away to university and find they’re not actually as good at something as they thought they were. You’re used to being among the best and brightest in your sixth form or college, and then you find you’re actually bang average when put alongside the best and brightest from all the other places across the country. That’s certainly how it felt for me when I started going to CWS meetings at the UEA. At school I’d been pretty sure I was one of the best writers I knew among my peers. When I sat in CWS feedback meetings, I rapidly realised that compared to these people, I was average-to-poor.

It was always the feedback meetings I used to attend, rather than the workshop ones, because in my experience the latter tended to always revolve around poetry and improvisation, things I am not blessed with any talents for. I did always enjoy the feedback sessions, however, and even on one memorable occasion got a rather pleasing round of applause from my assembled fellow scribblers after reading out a short horror story called Cake, about a young girl who accidentally kills her mother.

That latter story was included in a small anthology put out by the society in 2004, which I sadly don’t have a copy of to hand. In my parents’ attic, I think. I also wrote three chapters of the collaborative novel organised by Andrea Tallarita. I did not, though, appear on the society’s naked calendar, thank goodness...

The UEA Creative Writing Society on the beach at Great Yarmouth in November 2002. The number of these people who have since been published is frankly sickening.

I did however, in a rare display of socialising, go on the society’s jolly to Great Yarmouth in the autumn of 2002, from which I find I have a few photos of some of my peers who have already gone on to be published writers, the talented bastards. I have kept an eye on how some of my fellow CWS members have done down the years – I know I shouldn’t, it only makes me feel worse about not having had a novel published yet, and these people were always better and much more talented writers than I was. But I can’t help it – and can’t help but feel jealous of their success.

Joel Stickley was the president of the society in the first year I was there, and although we were not close friends or anything and I didn’t know him well, he was a writer I greatly admired. A member of the Aisle 16 gang, it wasn’t just that he seemed a nice chap – which he did – but to me he felt like a grown-up (complete with impressive beard), and wrote fantastically well in poetry or prose, and when I was eighteen I thought he was the finest writer I had ever personally met. The internet tells me he has since gone on to hold such positions as Writer in Residence for the Town of Corby and Poet Laureate of Lincolnshire, which sounds like nice work if you can get it.

Luke Wright and Joel Stickley on a dancing machine in Great Yarmouth back in 2002. A few short years later they’d be asking “Who Writes This Crap?”, something they may well ask of this blog if they ever come across it.

Joel was the first person I noticed from the society getting a book out, Who Writes This Crap?, co-written with fellow society member and poet Luke Wright. Luke is still in Norwich and makes semi-regular appearances on our afternoon show at work – I went down and said hello to him one day when he was in, although he didn’t remember me, which isn’t surprising as we didn’t know each other outside of the society meetings.

Someone who rather surprisingly did remember me when I encountered him at work was Tim Clare, another nice chap who I chiefly remember from the society’s feedback sessions reading out sections from a children’s novel he was writing about a couple of characters called Pally and Sanskrit. He came in for an interview on an edition of the drivetime show I was producing earlier this year to talk about a poetry event in Norwich, and I was taken aback to note that he did remember me from the UEA days.

 Tim Clare celebrates a well-skimmed stone on the beach at Great Yarmouth. He too has subsequently gone on to enjoy the greater joys of publication.

There are plenty of others – my BBC colleague and fellow aspiring author Jacqui Burgoyne was at the UEA at the same time as me, was a society member for a while, and when she first started at the BBC we did wonder where we had seen one another before... And Beth Settle, who works in the library in Norwich next door to the BBC, who I regularly bump into when coming or going to and from work, and meet up with for literary discussions over hot chocolate once in a blue moon. Fellow happy inhabitants of Norwich’s velvet coffin – like the fictional Royston Vasey, “you’ll never leave...”

The Creative Writing Society at the UEA was a very positive experience for me, I think. It taught me some humility and realism about the extent of my writing talents. It gave me the chance to meet and interact with some very fine writers. And it was possibly the most enjoyable part of three years at university which, while not a waste, weren’t the great formative or enlightening experience that other people seem to have.

 Chris Farnell was president of the Creative Writing Society during my final year there, 2004-05. His first novel came out just a year later, and I remember being very jealous to hear him interviewed about it on Chris and Kirsteen’s afternoon show during my first week of work experience at BBC Radio Norfolk in the summer of 2006.

Chris, as I recall, got everyone on the Great Yarmouth trip to sign a wooden chip fork. I wonder if he still has it? It might be worth something some day, at the rate this lot are going...

Joe Dunthorne consults with Noddy in Great Yarmouth in 2002. Possibly getting tips for his acclaimed novel...

Probably the most important thing about coming to the UEA, though, was that it brought me to the city of Norwich. And if I hadn’t come to Norwich, I would almost certainly never have ended up working for the BBC, and in turn would never have had published the one book which I do so far have to my name.

But that’s another story.

 Me on the beach at Great Yarmouth in 2002. And look, it’s a book, all right? It counts!

My Novels: Local News

Title:

Local News

Word count:

81,070

Written:

July to September 2002

Story:

I find that back in 2002 I actually wrote a blurb for this novel, presumably just for my own amusement. I’d forgotten all about having done it, but fortunately it says more about the story than I am able to remember ten years later! It goes thusly...

Leaving his job in London with a top broadsheet newspaper after his career takes a dramatic nose dive, journalist Sebastian Cook arrives in the sleepy town of Amford to take what he believes will be a relaxed job as Chief Staff Reporter on the small-time local newspaper, a chance to keep his head down while he works to rebuild his reputation.

However, Cook soon discovers that life on the Provincial Weekly is not all that it seems. What is the secret of the bizarre Stylus family, who pass the paper down from generation to generation like a family heirloom? What is the reason for the employment of the apparently superfluous Mrs Egg? And most importantly of all, what happened to Cook’s vanished predecessor, Chris Marshall?

As Cook starts to dig deeper into this series of strangely connected mysteries, he uncovers a sinister conspiracy that spans the decades…

Opening:

“Of course, all of the best writing comes from the heart.”

The statement took me by surprise. I had only just entered the room and sat down for the interview and was hardly expecting this as an opening line. Some form of introduction or welcome perhaps. Maybe an enquiry about how my journey had been, or why I wanted the job. But not this sudden and unprovoked theory on the nature of good writing.

“Um… excuse me?” was all I could muster in reply.

“I said, all of the best writing comes from the heart,” he repeated. The writing on his door and the sign on his desk both identified him as ‘John Stylus – Editor’, but I knew that already. He was a little older than I had anticipated – perhaps around fifty? – and he had the look of an ageing hippy, his light brown hair cut in what resembled a mullet now streaked with grey, and a kind of dazed yet wise look to his face. He was dressed in brown trousers and a blue shirt, with a purple tie very loosely hanging around his neck. It was his footwear that really interested me though – large, brown buccaneer boots that looked like something a pirate captain might wear in some great swashbuckling adventure movie of the nineteen-fifties. They seemed quite incongruous at the bottoms of the legs of the editor of a small English local newspaper.

Background:

I didn’t write any novels at all during my two years at sixth form – or rather, I didn’t finish any. I wrote Coming Apart at the Dreams during the summer beforehand, and Local News in the summer afterwards. I must have written it pretty quickly – my notes from the time tell me I started it on the 11^th of July and finished it on the 11^th of September, but for two weeks of that I was away in Gran Canaria with some friends, as we holidayed to celebrate the end of our A-Levels and our emergence into the world after school before we went our separate ways.

I still considered myself to be an aspiring novelist while I was at sixth form, but I had a lot else going on. I became a little bit more of a social creature, mixing and making friends with a larger circle of people than I had done before, and of course there was a lot of reading and studying to be done for the A-Levels themselves. I did write quite a few short stories during this time, and also started work on a few novels that were never finished – although many years later the lead character from one of these abandoned projects, as well as some of the setting and atmosphere, did end up in The Wicket in the Rec.

Basically, I was busy pretty much having a good time and enjoying one of the best periods of my life. When it was all over, in the long summer between finishing my A-Levels and heading to Norwich to start university (such was my arrogance the possibility of not getting the grades I needed frankly never entered my thinking), I decided to have another bash at a novel.

I can’t tell you where the storyline or the ideas came from, save that I do remember it was originally intended to be a bit... odder than it turned out. I had some notion of what literature students might call a “magical realism” sort of a plot, but it ended up being set very much in the real world, and probably all the duller for it.

Looking back:

Of all the novels I have written, this is the most forgettable – I wrote the thing, and ten years later I can barely remember anything about it. I do recall forcing myself into a regime of writing for a little while, having a routine every night of trying to squeeze out three or four thousand words and then treating myself to re-watching another episode of Our Friends in the North (one of my favourite things ever) on DVD.

Reading the description of the character of John Stylus in that opening section reproduced above, I suspect I was probably somewhat basing him on my A-Level English Literature teacher, Jon Harley, a legend to many students of The Angmering School over the past thirty-odd years.

This is the first novel I wrote in the first person. I have always, I think, been a better writer in the first person as it helps get into the character and the feel of the piece and means you need less of the omniscient description which I’m perhaps not so good at. The problem with first person is it limits what you can do with the scope of the plot, so I haven’t always played to my strengths by using it.

I’m not sure whether Local News was appallingly bad, but I do think it was fairly anonymous and forgettable. But I would soon be off and onto other things – I was on my way to Norwich, to the University of East Anglia, where you went if you wanted to be a writer.

Submissions:

I think I did send this to a few agents and / or publishers, but nothing came of it – just form letters back, no personal notes.

What I'm up to

It occurs to me that I have mostly used this blog so far to talk generally about writing, why I write and the history of my writing, rather than giving any actual updates as to what I’m up to at the moment. I’m not sure whether you’re actually interested in such details, but in an effort to convince both you and myself that I am not completely lazy and inactive, I thought I’d give a little update as to how things currently stand.

Earlier this month I finished the first draft of a 60,000-word short novel called Forced Feeling, set in the year 1912 and concerning the relationship that develops between a suffragette and the doctor who is supervising her forced feeding in prison. This was written in a very great rush, only started in late May, as a private project, a birthday present for a close friend of mine. However, said friend has given a positive response and encouraged me to try and do it properly, so we’ll see... I may give it a proper go, although it would need a lot of work to bring it up to scratch.

Aside from that, my most recent completed novel is a 97,000-word piece called The Wicket in the Rec, which tells the story of a cricket match suspended on the day the Second World War broke out finally being played to a finish fifty years later, on Christmas Day in 1989. I completed the first draft of that in November last year and have been working on improving it ever since, and since the start of this year have also been submitting synopses and sample chapters to various agents and, for a change, publishers.

I haven’t tried publishers directly for a while, but after having no joy with agents I decided to have a go at submitting it to a company called Myriad Editions, based in Brighton. I chose them as they seemed the only Sussex-based published of novels that fitted, with an interest in putting out locally-related works (Wicket is set in West Sussex, in fact in my home village of Clapham).

Myriad turned the novel down, but very nicely – I had the below rejection letter from them, one of the most encouraging I’ve had for a while. I take heart from it as I’ve learned enough over the years to know that agents and publishers aren’t going to waste their time saying nice things to you if they think you’re entirely useless – it only encourages further submissions from the hopeless, and they have enough of those to be getting through as it is.

“Polished and engaging” isn’t bad, don’t you think...?

So Wicket has been turned down by everyone so far, but I’m not losing heart just yet. Today I’ve sent off my latest submission for it, to an American publisher called Atticus Books, who were recommended to me by my friend Tim. Having read a couple of their novels I think Wicket would actually be a good fit for them – despite its cricketing theme, you don’t actually need to know anything about the game to enjoy the story, it’s simply the catalyst which sets events in motion and brings the characters together.

So I shall wait and see what happens with that, while looking through the latest Yearbook to choose further agents and publishers to submit Wicket to in the event of a rejection. I also have two other possible novels brewing in my head – one a serious, contemporary fiction piece, the other a science-fiction effort called Time Engine which is sort of a cross between Doctor Who and Sharpe and I suspect might be good fun to write. Both of these are projects I have previously started and then abandoned, but I do make a habit of recycling ideas, mainly because I have so few half-decent ones that I can’t afford to waste them when they come along!