Q) How did you get started in your writing?
A) I have always been writing ever since I could write. It began with diaries, poems and short stories at school then progressed to love letters, essays and newspaper articles. But deep down I just knew I was meant to write novels, so when I was 28 and pregnant with my first baby, blazing with confidence I left my job and started writing in earnest. I ditched my first attempt at chapter three, had my son Sam and then started writing Three In A Bed. As I always warn people, just four sleepless and penniless years later, it was published!
Q) What advice do you have for people hoping to find their first publisher?
A)Accept that it is hard and it usually takes years to become ‘an overnight’ success. Accept that there may well be many rejections on the way. Rejection is good, it makes you stronger! You may have written the exactly right thing at the exactly wrong time. It may need to go back in the drawer for a while. It may need some major re-writes. It may need to be set in space/ in a bank/ on a canoe. The agent who gives you the bad news may be right! If your first attempt is totally and utterly rejected despite all your efforts, move on to your second attempt… and so on! Keep reading the writers who write the kind of books you want to write. See what they do wrong, see what they do right. Writing is partly a gift, but mainly a skill. We all get better with practice! If you are very lucky, you will find a good and wise agent… like mine!
Q) Tell us about your latest book...
A) Late Night Shopping is the sequel to The Personal Shopper. I have always wanted to write a sequel because I love all my heroines like members of my family and find it very hard to say goodbye to them. It follows personal shopper Annie Valentine and her slightly chaotic family in a new adventure – to Italy, the shoe and handbag capital of the world! I had great fun writing it and I think it will be a hoot with a heart to read. I always hope my readers will laugh out loud but also shed a little secret tear or two for my characters.
Q)And what’s in the pipeline?
A) I think there may be more to come from Annie V. She may be moving into the glitzy world of TV makeovers… watch this space! Also, in July, the very first of my Secrets at St Jude’s books comes out. Now, this was fabulous fun to do! It’s for teenage girls and is set in the exclusive world of a snobby Edinburgh girls’ boarding school. Book one, New Girl centres on Gina, an unruly Californian teenager who is sent to the school as a punishment. Fitting in is not going to be easy!
Q) What books do you like to read?
A)Anything and everything, but my favourite writers are the ones who can bring humour and a sense of the sublimely ridiculous to even the most serious subjects like Primo Levi, Annie Proulx, John Irving and Marcel Pagnol. I love Nancy Mitford and Anne Tyler. PG Wodehouse is the funniest writer ever. I don’t like crime or horror because I’m quite highly enough strung as it is! (Although I have read both Martina Cole and John Connelly and they were excellent!) I read chick lit on planes, Sophie Kinsella can take my mind off dying in a fireball like nothing else. My comfort reads are non-fiction housey/ foodie/ home books like Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat and Rita Konig’s Domestic Bliss which is hilarious (but possibly not intentionally!) Being an English lit grad I still love Shakespeare and Chaucer. If you want to know about plot and character, study the masters. I’m also something of a children’s book expert as my two are mad bookworms. We love the Just William stories, Horrid Henry, Harry Potter and everything by Roald Dahl.
Q)What was the last book you bought?
A)I left the bookshop last time with The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory: the film was good, but the book was cracking! And South by South East by Anthony Horowitz for my son. He says ten out of ten! By the way, books are ridiculously cheap, buy more!!
Q) What do you like most about being a writer?
A)There are undoubtedly some downsides, trust me! But I keep entirely my own hours and I get to daydream and scribble for a living… what more can I say?!
Carmen Reid
April 2008
