On How I Got Published

After writing four and a half novels

I get asked about this.

Here’s the short version.

Between twelve and fifteen years old, I decided I wanted to be a writer.

I think first of all I decided I didn’t want to work in an office or wear a suit. And so I thought about joining the army or being a vet.

If you had asked one of my teachers to describe me, they might have said, He’s very creative but I didn’t think of it that way.

I just did lots of different things to stop being bored.

I wrote poems, and the beginnings of a fantasy novel, but I also played guitar and wrote songs, painted sub-Surrealist paintings, and even made a pillbox hat from some golden cummerbund fabric I bought in London.

Larkin wrote about his childhood ‘I suppose it’s not the place’s fault’.

Yet at the time, I thought it was the place’s fault. I grew up in a village with a large and beautiful park and lots of antique shops. I wanted to live in Bedford, where things happened, or Milton Keynes, where there were things to buy.

My plan for ‘O’ levels was to fail them and then take a foundation course at Art College in Bedford.

I passed my ‘O’ levels, and had to do ‘A’ levels.

By the time I got halfway through them, I knew I wanted to be a writer, not a painter, and that I needed to study English at University.

Between starting my first novel, after graduating in 1989, and getting published, in 1996, I wrote a lot.

Mostly poetry.

I lived in Glasgow, Prague and Southfields.

(This is all very simplified, and makes me sound very driven, which I admit I was.)

Now we’re getting on to the bit you want to hear about.

I should say that against George Orwell’s advice to aspiring writers, I was working in a bookshop — and reading the trade press for clues.

A family friend, Terence Blacker, the only writer my parents knew, read a novel I’d written and recommended an agent called Mic Cheetham. She’d just left a big agency and her author Iain Banks was going with her rather than sticking with them. If the had the author of The Wasp Factory’s trust, and Terence thought she was okay, those were good enough recommendations for me.

I sent her a novel I’d written in Prague. We met in the Groucho Club. She took me on, then was disappointed to discover I’d already tried all the publishers she was intending to try. She stuck with me, but phone calls became infrequent.

Having written four novels, with no breakthrough, no publication, I decided I must be doing something was wrong. Maybe I couldn’t do it all by myself.

I met the writer Jacqui Lofthouse at a party, and she told me about the MA in Creative Writing she was taking at the University of East Anglia — with Malcolm Bradbury.

It sounded like what I needed.

I applied, saying I wanted to write a novel; I was interviewed, and said I wanted to write short stories.

They let me in.

Malcolm Bradbury liked my writing. That was clear from the first time he read it.

I could be funny on the page.

This must have been a relief to him, a satiric novelist who looked for the humour in every situation — especially the writing workshop.

I realise now how rare this is, on Creative Writing MAs — that someone likes funny writing and doesn’t mind writing to be funny and is (despite this) funny.

Midway through the year, Malcolm Bradbury announced that he was editing an anthology of work from his 25 years teaching at UEA. We were sitting in the college bar, in a large booth, in a tight circle.

‘And I suppose,’ he said, mischievously, ‘that means I’ll have to put one of you lot in it.’

This was a bit like chucking a comedy bomb into the middle of our little group.

About a quarter of us would admit wanting to be in the anthology, the other three quarters yearned for it in dignified silence.

Cut to a month or two later.

(I realise that I’ve never told anyone the details of this next bit.)

Everyone knows we’re soon going to hear who Malcolm has chosen to include. Meanwhile, I have submitted some funny stories to the workshop — but Malcolm isn’t teaching that any more. He isn’t reading work that’s submitted. He’s moved on.

Nevertheless, I print up an extra copy of the mini-collection, and I design a cover that looks something like this —

And I put it in the workshop in-tray.

And I put it on the top — hoping Malcolm might spot it.

I admit, that’s what I intended.

I don’t know what happens next, but I assume Malcolm did spot it, and that he took it, read it, liked it.

One evening, I was walking in to Norwich, where the MA students were meeting for a drink in a pub.

I saw Malcolm coming the other way, down St Giles Street, and he stopped me and told me he’d like to publish those four short stories in his anthology.