18 NOVEMBER 2019 http://www.writers-online.co.uk
are when you read it,’ says Louise. ‘There’s
so much complexity there and you read it
so differently when you’re a middle-aged
woman – it’s dark and complicated. There’s
this perceived romance about it, but the text
is very clear how dark and dangerous and
violent it is. I think it’s really a book about
how violence begets violence and how if
you fail to nurture a child they will grow up
to do that to other people. It’s a book that
cultural history has altered.’
Louise is now well established as a
successful writer, cultural commentator and
teacher of creative writing – her 2007 book,
A Novel in a Year: A Novelist’s Guide to Being
a Novelist, was based on her column in the
Telegraph. But she well remembers what it
was like being both a creative writing student,
and then a struggling unpublished novelist.
‘I do think you can teach creative writing,’
she says. ‘I’m a big fan of the creative writing
course – I’m a product of it. It’s bizarre to
suggest that you can’t teach any form of
technique. Nobody expects to be able to
pick up a cello and be able to play Bach. It’s
the same with the novel. Of course there’s a
question of innate ability but if you’ve got
it there’s still an immense amount to learn.
I’ve taught on a lot of courses and find it
incredibly rewarding. I’m instinctively on
the side of the unpublished students because
I can remember what it was like to be one.’
Having an MA in Creative Writing may
be a good start for an emerging writer, but it
is just the beginning, Louise believes.
‘I came to London after UEA and did thewhole writer in a garret thing,’ she recounts.
‘I did loads of part time teaching jobs, bar
jobs. My first novel was published eight years
after I graduated and because I did the MA in
my early twenties I still had a lot to learn.’
She’s a big fan of writing competitions.
‘My breaks came though a couple of
competitions,’ she says. ‘I had a short story
that was a runner-up in the Ian St James
Award, and a radio play that was also a
runner-up. I’m a big fan of entering writing
competitions. I got a couple of real breaks
and having an enforced deadline is a real
motivator. I entered lots – certainly double
figures. I entered more or less everything that
was going, over a period of several years.’
Her efforts paid off, and she ended
up with a publishing contract – and a
healthy sense of having served a necessary
apprenticeship.
‘The first novel I published was my third
novel – there are two that never saw the
light of day. There was a lot of bad writing I
had to get out of my system before I hit my
stride. A doctor or solicitor or accountant
takes six, seven years to learn and I needed
that time to teach myself as a writer. It
takes years and years and years to learn and
thousands of words before I started to write
the good ones.’
Her first three books, Crazy Paving
(1995), Dance With Me (1996) and Honey-
Dew (1998) were well received women’s
fiction, but her writing shifted in focus and
intensity with the publication, in 2003,
of Fires in the Dark, which dealt with theNazi holocaust as it happened to a group
of nomadic Roma from Czechoslovakia.
It was the first of her novels to deal with
the history of the Romani people and her
own family history. ‘I still think of my
first three novels as early work,’ she says. ‘I
think I really moved up a gear with Fires
in the Dark. That’s when I started to reach
beyond my own experience and take a big
imaginative leap. That’s the book where I
reached beyond what I’d done before. It
was important for me to write that book- it was always there, and something I’d
get round to once I was mature enough to
handle the subject.’
Her next novel, Stone Cradle (2006),
was her second Romani novel. It’s the
most personal of all her books, and if she
had to pick a favourite, it’s that one. ‘I
have a secret fondness for Stone Cradle
because that’s my family history. It’s driven
by what I know of my family history. It’s
about people who are long dead and gone
so I have a personal attachment to that. I
see myself as someone with ancestry and
heritage and passionate interest. But I grew
up in a large modern bungalow – a settled
life. I don’t claim any kind of representative
voice, but it’s something I have a profound,
personal connection with, and part of how
I define myself.’
Louise hasn’t written any more Romani
novels but her writing on her working
class, Romani roots has appeared in two
recent Unbound anthologies: Common
People and Others. ‘There is a real sense