The short story vs. the novel
SOME WRITERS BELIEVE short stories are harder to write than novels. They may put this down to every word having to count in a short story, while in the novel the narrative is allowed to meander. Although this is true to an extent, it would be foolish to think the novel is the easy option,...
The Hill-Country Music Contest
HE HAD PULLED INTO SUTTON shortly after sundown, rocking and bouncing down the deserted main drag. His eyes were bloodshot and he was in need of a shave. The girl on the desk at the Bedford hotel glanced up from her ledger. “You the recording fellow from New York?” she said. “John Coughlin, that’s right.”...
Catskills karma
In 1973 my family spent a summer in the Catskills, upstate New York. One afternoon I peeped through the fence of our front yard as a woman with long yellow hair lay down in the middle of the road. My mother said there was a house near the river where the hippies lived. They did...
Island stories and other fictions
When Rishi Sunak recently tried shamelessly to turn the Rochdale byelection into a national crisis, warning about extremism tearing us apart, one phrase leapt out at me. Immigrants who integrate, he said, “have helped write the latest chapter of our island story.” Unless my publishers had really upped their game, I knew he wasn’t referring...
Becoming a writer
My twentieth novel, Reservoir, is a psychological thriller about memory, secrets and shame. My central character Hannah has reinvented herself in order to escape her past. Like me, she has moved from a working-class background into a profession that is traditionally middle class – in her case it is psychotherapy rather than writing. At a recent...
Imagining an island
While fine-tuning my fourth novel, Missing, I started thinking about my fifth. In the Scottish Borders, fact-checking my references to Hawick, I mentioned to the friend with whom we were staying that I was thinking of setting my next novel somewhere totally fictional, somewhere superficially familiar but with local customs and minor rules that would...
Be creative
Let’s say you would like to write a novel. You have a plot summary, gained over weeks, months, years, which has formed in your mind while you have been out walking, running, having a bath. The plot is simple and effective, and you can describe it in less than a minute. Your friends like your...
