A sense of place

I have defined myself in this blog as 'a writer in the North' partly because the North East of England is where I set most of my work, and partly because I want to draw more attention to a region which I feel, even in the global economy of the 21st Century, gets less than its fair share of the cake in terms of commercial attention and media exposure.

It used to be worse. When I started writing, although there was a strong BBC drama production presence in both Leeds and Manchester, and of course Granada TV in Manchester, virtually all the publishers and agents were located in London. If you wanted to see them personally you had to take an expensive 600-mile round trip to the capital. Otherwise you were limited to letters and the occasional telephone call - no emails then. The inevitable consequence was that writers who worked in or near London were preferred because they were more accessible and because they enjoyed the networking opportunities which we Northern writers were denied by distance and the concentration of the media and publishing industries in London.

That disadvantage is somewhat relieved these days by the global reach and immediacy of email and the web, though I would argue that the bias still exists. Certainly it remains difficult to meet the movers and shakers personally. For example, I am a member of the Society of Authors, but have been to very few of the Society's events as most of them are held in London.

It's interesting that Northern writers who have become well-known names over the last few decades have almost all used the North as a strong element in their work - I'm thinking Alan Bennett, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Barry Hines, Alan Plater, Dick Clements and Ian La Frenais, Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell. (These are the names that immediately occur to me, and I'm conscious that there are no women in the list - Victoria Wood is the only one I can think of who fits the bill in quite this way.) It strikes me, even as I write this list, how influential for me all of those writers have been. They are the reason I started writing, and I guess that's another factor in my wanting to define myself as 'Northern' in my own work.

Last night my interview with Wendy Robertson was broadcast on Bishop FM on Wendy's programme The Writing Game, which was all about the importance of location to Northern writers (If you'd like to hear a podcast of the programme you can catch it on Wendy's blog, Life Twice Tasted.) My sense of place finds its way on my work in location (even fictional locations are at least loosely based on these places I know), character and speech. As I explained to Wendy, I never write dialect; rather I suggest dialect by the occasional use of words that are easily understood by the context, and by the characteristic syntax and truncations of the North East voice.

But if my characters are largely from my home region, I would hope that my readership was not. I like to think that the work travels well, is easily understood by all English speakers and that the themes, if not universal, are at least universally recognized.

And if they are not, I'd be grateful if you'd tell me.

North of where?

For me, the North is the North East of England, the area that sits in between the Scottish Borders and North Yorkshire, with the North Sea crashing in on the east coast, and the M6 snaking by on the west. I was born here and, apart from two or three years in Scotland, have lived here all my life. It's also the place which is the setting for most of my creative work, so that's why I have called my blog Writer in the North.

What I intend to do with this blog, mostly, is write about the writing, also about the business of publishing and other opportunites that come along for writers. I guess I'll also be making observations about things that have happened or that I've come across that might be interesting to someone other than just me. And I'll write about Northern things, not least about the North-South divide and the continued prejudice about the North, which never fails to turn me into Victor Meldrew.

Let me tell you quickly what I'm up to writing-wise. If you would like to see what books I have available please visit my Amazon author page.

So right now I'm:

1. Promoting my most recent book, a first novel entitled 11:59 published by Wild Wolf. This is a thriller set in the North of England.

























There is a print edition and a Kindle edition. In a day or so I'll create a post on some of the things the publisher and I are doing to promote the novel.

2. Aiming to sell my recently-completed historical novel Mr Stephenson's Regret to a publisher (not Wild Wolf, as they specialise in fiction on the dark side of life). I'll tell you more about that book soon, and keep you up to date with its progress.

3. Completing the process of publishing a Kindle edition of my book of short stories We Never Had It So Good. This was published by Zymurgy in 2007, reprinted last year.



















The book has sold well, but mainly in the North East. With the Kindle edition I'm hoping to widen its reach, not least in the States, and we've priced it very cheaply as part of the promotional ploy.

4. Preparing a Kindle version for trainers of a book of ice-breakers and inclusion activities. This might seem a departure from my recent work, but it's basically a reworking in a new format of a couple of products I produced in interactive CD format back in the day when I was running my own management development business.

5. In the spaces between all this, writing a new batch of short stories based in the North East which will eventually be collected under the title The Smell of the Tyne.