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A Week of 1988 Telly (All Four Channels of It)
I left school in the summer of 1988 with a handful of GCSEs and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the TV listings, only one of which has earned me a penny since. Telly mattered in 1988 in a way it…
Continue reading →Where Do Authors Get Their Ideas?
Ask any novelist what readers most want to know at a book signing, and the answer never varies. Not “how do you structure a plot,” not “how do you find an agent,” and…
Continue reading →The Biggest Book Advances Ever Paid (and the Spectacular Art of Not Earning Them Back)
I have never had a book advance. Not a penny, not a fiver, not so much as a book token. I publish through my own imprint, Inchgate, which means my advance negotiations consist of me asking myself…
Continue reading →What Would You Change About Your Life If You Could?
I write novels about ordinary people who reach back and change their lives, so this question trails me about like a faithful Labrador. People assume I keep an answer ready… a tidy…
Continue reading →Books Like One Day by David Nicholls
One Day plays a cruel little trick on you. It picks a single date, 15th of July, and checks in on the same two people once a year for two decades, until you know Emma and Dexter better than you…
Continue reading →The Toys Every 1980s Kid Begged For at Christmas
Every November, roughly when the tinsel appeared in Woolworths, an entire generation of British children launched a campaign of psychological warfare against their parents. One objective. The…
Continue reading →How Much Do Authors Really Earn?
Of all the questions people ask when they discover what I do for a living, the one they actually want answered is rarely the one they say out loud. They ask where my ideas come from, or…
Continue reading →Famous Authors Who Racked Up Dozens of Rejections
There exists no lonelier document than a rejection letter. It’s essentially a receipt for something you never bought. I know this not from receiving them, oddly enough, but from…
Continue reading →What Life Cost in 1985 (When 77p Bought You a Pint)
I spend an unhealthy amount of my working life in the past. Not literally; my GP would have something to say about that. But a fair chunk of my fiction lives there, and you cannot drop a…
Continue reading →If You Could Go Back, What Age Would You Return To? (Think Carefully Before Answering)
I’ve spent the best part of a decade asking this question for a living. Every time travel novel I’ve written starts from the same itch: if someone handed you a return ticket to your…
Continue reading →Books Like The Time Traveler’s Wife (10 Love Stories That Refuse to Stay in One Decade)
The cruelty of The Time Traveler’s Wife is that it makes you fall in love with two people who keep losing each other through no fault of their own. Henry vanishes mid-sentence. Clare keeps…
Continue reading →How Long Does It Take to Write a Novel? (And Why “It Depends” Is the Only Honest Answer)
It is the question every novelist fields more than any other, usually from someone you half-remember from school who has resurfaced on Facebook after decades of total silence. “Saw you…
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