Emily Barr's Blog

My earliest memory is of my mother reading me a book. She was heavily pregnant, and I was leaning on her bump listening, when the baby kicked me. That was the first time I interacted with Adam, who is now a London DJ and who has, since that first kick, been a constant in my life.

Being read a story is comforting beyond anything. These days I read to my two younger children before they go to bed, even though they are the grand old ages of eight and eleven. We have been through a lot of Noel Streatfeild, with Thursday’s Child voted into the top spot. We have been through the Harry Potter series more than once (also more than twice). We’ve had Artemis Fowl, Charlotte Sometimes, Tom’s Midnight Garden: we read whatever comes to hand and looks interesting, much of it from the heap of my old books that surfaced recently.

While I certainly wouldn’t have ever admitted to my friends that I still had a bedtime story at the age of eight, it is not considered remotely babyish any more, because people of all ages listen to stories whenever they can. When my daughter Lottie had a friend for a sleepover recently, I found myself reading the whole of Neil Gaiman’s and Chris Riddell’s The Sleeper and the Spindle to the girls as they lay in their beds, rapt. I lost my voice, but they were relentless about the fact that I needed to get to the end, and they were, of course, right.

The thing is, though, that these days you don’t actually need a personal reading slave on hand. Not so long ago, audio books were a niche item. I remember buying Rosamund Pilcher casettes for my grandmother when listening was easier for her than reading. I bought a tape of Macbeth when I was revising it for GCSE. Years later, I got the children a box set of Stephen Fry reading the first Harry Potter book, though the CDs got scratched and out of order.

It all changed with MP3 players. While traditional publishing has been though turbulent times, audiobook sales have boomed. Audible, which is Amazon’s audio arm, doesn’t even sell CDs, but only retails digital downloads which are accessible to anyone with a smartphone. My daughter now listens to audiobooks on my phone every night as she falls asleep, and this has made her extremely happy, though Audible’s algorithms now assume that I’m only ever going to be interested in the oeuvre of Jacqueline Wilson.

For a writer, the existence of audiobooks is a wonderful thing. Last summer I listened to four different actresses reading the same section of Backpack, my first novel, which was going to be recorded as an audiobook 13 years after its publication (the extract was a little bit sweary, which was entertaining). Audible were using Backpack to recruit someone new as a narrator, and these were the four finalists. I listened to each of them, and two stood out. The job was given to one of them, Emma Fenney, who I met in the recording studio one hot August afternoon. I had never thought, before talking to Emma, that Backpack, with its setting in multiple Asian locations, is filled with challenging accents: she had been on YouTube working out things like the intricacies of Lao-accented English. I found myself almost apologising to her.

The fact is that, no matter what happens in the world of publishing, people will always want books. Whether they read them on paper, or on screens, or listen to someone else doing the reading for them, humans of all ages want to be told a story. And that is an immensely cheering thing.

‘If you sell your film rights…’ 

 This is what people say when you write books. Writing a book is good, but someone coming along and buying the film rights is, it is assumed, the thing that will make you rich. Occasionally that happens to people. Nicholas Evans, for example, sold the rights to The Horse Whisperer to Robert Redford in 1995, for £3million, before he had even finished writing the book. Generally, however, ‘sell your film rights and you’ll be rich’ is an idea that writers greet with hollow laughter. 

While I have sold various film rights for small sums over the years, the only time someone has tried very hard to make a film of one of my books was when the wonderful director Antonia Bird bought the rights to Backpack, my first novel. I was amazed that a proper director (of Priest and Ravenous, among many others) was interested in my book, which she had bought at an airport looking for something easy to read on the plane. While the film never got made, it was the start of an inspiring collaboration and a friendship that lasted until October 24th, when Antonia died after a seven month illness. 

The first time she called me, I was unable to come to the phone as I was in hospital: my first baby was two weeks overdue and had shown no inclination to be born, so I was lying back with drips and machines attached to me, having labour induced. When I was back on my feet, however, we met in London, and she laughed about the oddness of calling me and being told by my mum that I was busy giving birth. ‘I said to everyone in the office, “she’s actually having a baby right now!”’ she told me. ‘No one else thought it was as brilliant as I did.’ 

When, despite much effort, the Backpack film never got funded, we tried other projects together. We tried to get funding for a film of another of my books, Plan B, and for a TV series about Britain flooding, and for a film that will always be The One That Got Away, to me. 

This one started when Antonia called me full of enthusiasm for the idea of making a film about the City and financial collapse. It was 2006, and the economy was wildly booming. Antonia  sensed that something was afoot, and wanted to get a film about financial collapse made, not really sure whether it would happen in real life or not, but knowing that it would make a brilliant story. I was living in rural France and was heavily pregnant with my third child: Antonia and her adored husband Ian came out to stay with us for a few days, and she and I worked on a story about a woman called Rose uncovering stories of bankerly wrongdoing, causing systemic collapse and going on the run.

It was intense and stimulating. Antonia was utterly focused and writing with her was a joy. I rarely work with anyone else, and those days (plus more, in both France and in London) were a wonderful insight into her world. Antonia was an energising whirlwind to work with: she was infectiously obsessed with the project in hand, optimistic with the right tinge of cynicism, massively open to ideas and always ready to laugh. We sat at the kitchen table in France, and (on her second visit) I jiggled my baby, Lottie, while Antonia wrote our plot on blank postcards with her purple pen and we shifted the scenes around. When she returned to London the process continued by email: I remember desperately finessing a synopsis document, knowing I had 15 minutes before I had to leave for the school run, determined to send it before I left because I could not bear to disappoint her. Her replies would come almost instantly, new ideas, responses to what I had written, bouncing it all around until it felt right. They often opened with a jaunty “back atcha”. 

Antonia always had many projects on the go and talked about them with passion and generosity. She gave the same level of energy and commitment to everything she did. While I knew her, she made films that ranged from The Hamburg Cell, a fictionalised account of the September 11th hijackers, to Off By Heart, a wonderful documentary about children reciting poetry, which won her a BAFTA. 

Over the years we went to meetings with producers (who generally said ‘write the whole script and then we’ll see’), and we never got a project off the ground. The financial collapse happened when that screenplay was on the back burner, and the fact that we hadn’t got the prescient film made in time was a source of darkly amused regret to both of us. Antonia picked me up from airports, took me to tea once at BAFTA (my excitement was ill-concealed), and would always meet for coffee or lunch if we were in London at the same time. A few years ago my brother and I had a night out with her that started at Shoreditch House and ended in a Mexican restaurant near London Bridge. All I remember from that night is the three of us laughing (and Antonia didn’t even drink). We never got a film project off the ground, but our relationship became a straightforward stimulating friendship. 

The last time I saw her was 18 months ago, when we met for lunch in London. She grasped her hair with both hands, as she always did, and talked about the film she was researching about Bradley Manning: she was passionately political and principled. Generous as ever, she also told me to write a short film that she could direct, so we could use it as a calling card for a bigger project. I did, and that script bounced between us for a while. She was full of plans: she and Ian were going to buy a camper van and come to visit us in Cornwall. I asked her to come and talk about film at a children’s writing course I was running, and she was  enthusiastic and  apologetic that she couldn’t make the dates that year. 

The next time I tried to see her she was away in the Peak District filming the acclaimed TV series The Village, and wrote to me amused to have bought one of my books at a Waitrose in Derbyshire. The time after that she replied to my text with a chilling: ‘I am very ill’. 

I knew it must be something terrifying: she would never have used that phrase otherwise. And so it turned out. She died a few months later after suffering from anaplastic thyroid cancer. The loss to the world of film is intense and shocking. 

I have never had a film made of one of my books, and I probably never will. I did, however, get to be friends with Antonia Bird for 12 years. That is something I will treasure for the rest of my life. 

My new book, The Sleeper, is out on July 4th. This is the kind of sentence you have to write often in the run up to a book’s publication. If you want anyone to buy your book, you have to tell them it exists. 

I have worked many night shifts on The Sleeper. I have written it on the train and in cafés and in my house. I have worked before sunrise and in moonlight. I would be out for a run and would suddenly smile inanely because a plot hole had resolved itself in my head. For a long time no one knew anything about it beyond the ‘it’s about a woman having an affair on the night train’ I would say when I absolutely had to say something, with all the finality I could muster. 

And now it is on its way out into the world. It doesn’t belong to me any more. People will read it, and they will decide whether or not they think it’s any good, and all of that will be utterly out of my hands. My eldest child is going to secondary school in September, and sending a book out into the world feels freakishly like sending an 11-year-old into a building full of teenagers. 

I am nervous, but they will both be all right, I am sure. I am extremely proud of the pair of them. 

Anyway. Did I mention I have a new book coming out? If you live in the Falmouth area, please come to the launch party on July 4th. Here is the invitation. And if you read it, I hope you enjoy it. 

Like many writers, I love running. I don’t go far or fast, but I’ve arranged my life so that, almost every school day, I take my children to school (either by train or hitching a lift with a neighbour) then run home. It’s only 2.5 miles – absolutely nothing compared with what a serious runner would do – but it gets me going for the day, and I arrive home with my head out of domesticity and ready for writing.

I don’t enjoy organised exercise any more than I would enjoy an organised job. I can’t stand in a line and follow the instructions of an expert, even though when I’ve tried it I’ve always ended up having a good (if inept) time. Somehow, in spite of the exercise buzz, I cannot bring myself to go back the following week.

When you run, as when you write, you create your own world. I love my route home from school: it includes both a graveyard and the edge of the Atlantic at Falmouth Bay. I normally forget to take my ipod, so my soundtrack is raucous seagulls and waves, and, more prosaically, passing cars, sometimes with surfboards on the roof.

When you run, it feels as if the world cannot touch you. You’re moving faster than walkers, slower than anything with wheels, and your headspace is entirely your own. You pass into scenes (men in fluorescent jackets in the graveyard, toddlers and dogs at the seafront) and straight out of them. You get to look at things without them really having time to look back. You pass through: the only thing you need to do is to keep moving.

Sometimes I run home noticing everything I pass. Occasionally I get annoyed by having to run out into the road to accommodate a dog on an implausibly long lead that crosses the pavement like a finishing line, or by having to skip over said dog’s poo. If it rains, I just run through it, and if, like today, it seems suddenly to be spring, I notice that far more than I otherwise would. At other times, however, I think about the book I’m writing, work out plot holes and plan ahead. Problems that seem intractable when you’re staring at a screen can be suddenly, effortlessly resolved when you’re out in the world, passing through.

I’m doing the Falmouth half marathon in a couple of weeks. It is very hilly and extremely hard work: I did it a year ago and this year I will solely be trying to get up the very steep hill at the 10 mile mark, in Budock, without walking. If it defeats me, however, who cares? Running, like writing, is an intensely solitary pastime, and I do it, like writing, because it makes life better.

This is for all the writers out there:

Inaugural Barrington Green Short Story competition

We are delighted to announce the first annual Barrington Green short story competition, run in conjunction with Falmouth’s Splash 2012 arts festival.

This contest is open to anyone, in the UK or abroad, who submits a short story of 1000 words or fewer before the closing date of August 10th 2012. Stories can be on any subject and in any style: we are looking for well-constructed stories that make us gasp, laugh and want to read more of your work.

The winner will receive a free place, including hotel accommodation, on a Barrington Green writing weekend, where they will receive intensive writing tuition from people who know what they are talking about. Run by novelist Emily Barr and scriptwriter Craig Green, Barrington Green offers creative writing workshops for adults and for children. Our adult workshops are based at the Greenbank Hotel in Falmouth: our next one is Write Your Novel, on September 27th-28th, and there are more planned for January and June 2013. The winner can pick the course that suits them best.

Emily Barr is the bestselling author of eleven novels and a former Guardian journalist. Craig Green has written scripts for Rik Mayall, Stephen Fry and many others, as well as an award-winning series of children’s books. Both are avid consumers of short stories.

Please email entries as double-spaced attachments to writers@barringtongreen.co.uk, with a cover email giving your name and contact details. All entries must be received by midday on Friday August 10th 2012. The winner will be notified on August 17th, and a collection of the best entries will be issued at the ‘So you want to be a writer?’ session at SPLASH 2012, in Falmouth on Sunday September 9th 2012.

It is easy to say, off the top of your head, that it is impossible to teach someone to write. There is a huge array of creative writing courses out there, and not one of them is going to magically make anyone ‘become a writer’ if they don’t already have talent and drive.

However. You can, it transpires, encourage people of all ages to tap into their innate writing talent, and to let their imagination run wild. You can show them different ways of writing, help them find a starting point, and stand back and watch the amazing results.

Last September, I started a writing club at my children’s primary school. I did it out of a vague idea that it would be fun, coupled with a feeling that I should do something nice for a school at which all three of my children are extremely happy.

I roped in Craig Green, the school’s other resident writer-parent, and the writing club was, instantly, something amazing.

The children who come along every Monday (and they are a diverse group) are, when they step into the club, bright, keen, ambitious and imaginative. We have watched them grow in confidence until even the shy ones are often jumping up and down in their desperation to be picked to read out what they have written. If they don’t want to read aloud, Craig (who has the voice for it) will do it for them. Everything everybody writes is appreciated. We have set them to work writing stories, plays, poetry, haikus and letters. They always seize the task and throw themselves into it. Both of us are phenomenally proud of our writers.

We go nowhere near the National Curriculum, and never give a moment’s thought to SATs or box-ticking of any sort. We encourage children to write for the joy of it; and they respond in an overwhelming and phenomenal way. I see in their faces the same joy that I take in losing myself in writing my books.

Inspired by this, Craig and I have set up a writing venture, Barrington Green (named after a village we invented, using our names, to use as a setting for much of last term’s writing. There is a map of Barrington Green that I made myself, so it does exist. It was recently invaded by aliens, which was unnerving for the residents, though no lasting harm was done). With the help of Falmouth Town Council, we are offering workshops and courses to children from the wider community. They will take place in the Council Chamber, which, as settings go, is very grand indeed.

This part is mainly interesting if you live in Cornwall. Things will kick off with a workshop for children aged 8-13 on May 1st. We have ten places available, and they will be given to the children who produce the most striking written work about, or set in, Falmouth. It can be a story, a poem or a script, and we are interested in things that make us gasp or laugh; things that are original. If your child, or any child you know, would like to enter, they should write something in 500 words or fewer and email it to competition@barringtongreen.co.uk before Friday April 20th.

That workshop will be a warm-up for our intensive August summer school, from August 6th-9th, with sessions for children from 8-11 (mornings) and 12-16 (afternoons). We have already booked in guest speakers including TV writer James Henry and children’s author Liz Kessler, and children will have a chance to try out many different ways of writing, as well as working on their own longer project.

We will be offering some scholarship places for this week – details to follow. To join our mailing list, just send an email to writers@barringtongreen.co.uk. You can also find us on twitter @BarringtonGreen.

And, wherever you live, even if it is far from Cornwall (and let’s face it, many places are), encourage your children to write. They are amazing.

I recently finished my book, Stranded. There are several finish lines in getting to the end of a book: one of them is going through the copy editor's queries, a task I have just accomplished.

A copy editor's job is to go through a book and check every detail. Occasionally, going through their queries can be, ahem, frustrating. This time it wasn't: every point she made was spot-on. And then I got to the 'style sheet' she'd added to the end.

In my defence, I couldn't spell-check the book properly because my computer was running so slowly (it has since broken completely and been replaced). My style sheet is an alphabetical list the copy editor made for me of all the spelling and style errors I made. I find it delightful and funny, because it gives you a perfect précis of the book as a whole. For that reason, I'm reproducing it here. This is my sheet of shame:

adrenalin

bougainvillea

Brizzie (Brisbane)

chirruping

cholesterol

cooperation

drily

earrings

earth/heaven

Ecstasy (drug)

email

fallback

flip-flops

geckos

girlie

guidebook

hellhole

Hotmail

impostor

jet lag

jokey

make-up

Mass (church service)

minuscule

mosquitoes/mozzies

multicoloured

multi-storey

newly-weds

OK

on to

pockmarked

rainforest

rainwater

rear-view mirror

ringtone

sandcastle

seafront

seawater

semicircle

shiny

slidey

smiley

stallholder

T-shirt

unshakeable

unusable

Valium

veranda

Westerner

whitish

And that, alphabetically, encapsulates absolutely everything you need to know about my new book.

This evening I was looking for a piano book for one of my offspring, when, instead, I came across an old school magazine. It contains a youthful poem of mine from my sixth form days. Once I finished cringing heartily at the heartfelt angst and self-importance of it, I started laughing. This is a classic piece of pompous crap poetry.

In fact, the difference between how bad it is, and how amazingly insightful I thought it was at the time, is so hilarious that I feel the need to share it. You are allowed laugh. Here goes (it's quite long, I'm afraid – do skim over it):

Earth Shattering

Why is today merely an extension of yesterday,

Which, itself, was an unplanned afterthought

To its own yesterday?

Why is there always steely-grey relentless acid rain,

Which, drop by drop, dissolves my defences,

Making me remember, when I'm trying to forget?

Do you remember when each day was an adventure,

Shaped effortlessly, individually?

Remember our field: three orange triangular tents,

Long, yellowing, prickly grass, with angelic daisies,

Two gentle Jersey cows, with eyelashes?

It was three miles to the farmhouse.

One morning, you got up, wrote a note, and cycled to the farm to buy the milk.

You can't have been gone long when we woke up.

It was a gorgeous day!

The smell of freshly cut grass drifted across from nearby fields.

A sky like the tinted ones on postcards smiled down on us,

And, in the distance, a patch of scarlet

Brightened the golden and green spheres

Of our patchwork quilt.

We made daisy chains for the cows

And waited for you, for the milk.

After an hour, we were beginning to be thirsty and irritable;

You'd probably stopped to swim, or to drink the milk, or simply to sit in a field, being.

Finally, someone cycled off to escort you back.

He was gone slightly too long.

And when he came back,

We didn't dare ask,

But he told us, all the same .

Then everything was a mockery

Of itself. The childlike sky with its cotton-wool clouds

Closed in on us, chanting

'I don't care! I don't care!', laughing.

The smell of the grass grew nauseatingly sweet

Until it suffocated us. The Jersey cows

Were facists in their nonchalance.

And on the horizon, poppies were glaring blinding

Blood. All time was there

Time past, time to come.

The world stood still.

And still it stands. Although the summer's past,

The weather less lethal

(Growing slowly, rather than destroying in a second)

Although I know that 'life goes on'

And there's a routine to be adhered to

Although I have officially 'got over' you;

There'll always be a field

With daisies, cows and summer,

Where your friends will wait for the milk.

I hope the emotional impact of that will not affect readers too adversely! I used to write poetry all the time. I don't any more, and now I know why. Anyone else?

This summer, we moved from a big rented house into one that is much smaller, but ours. Even though there's less space, it feels much better being in a place that's ours, and I love not having to worry about the odd handprint on a white wall, or be inspected by officious lettings agents on a regular basis.

Best of all, though, I get to look out of the window. As we're on a hillside, there's always something to see. Outside the window is a tiny train station with no ticket office and one platform, and a freezing August evening with torrential rain, three railway employees stoically had what must have been a long-planned barbecue in the car park. They huddled together, sheltering the barbecue from the weather with their bodies, and made themselves hot dogs. After a while they spotted James, my visiting brother John, and me watching them from our window, and raised a glass to us.

When we moved in, we had a good view of a warship where green screens were erected, partly to ensure that no houses like ours appear in the background of the film World War Z,  which they were filming there. In other words, Brad Pitt was in the area. Then he went home.

Straight after that, I got up early to work one morning and almost dropped my coffee when I looked out of the window and discovered that my normal view had been almost completely eclipsed by a gigantic cruise ship that had appeared overnight. I spent a long time with binoculars, watching people on the hundreds of decks. The holy grail was catching someone looking right back at me with their binoculars. It happened in the end.

I'm writing this now looking out of the window at station, harbour and town. There are lots of seagulls on a roof nearby, and a few pigeons fluttering around. Nothing much is happening. It is utterly hypnotic.

As soon as we knew we were going to move to Cornwall, friends who already lived in Falmouth whisked us off to Restonguet, to the Pandora Inn, to show us that we were making the right decision.

It was perfect: we sat on the jetty on a warm May evening, with boats moored alongside. The food (local mussels) was perfect; the wine just right, and, after 5 years in France, my husband was beside himself with joy over the local ale. We looked at each other and smiled: this move was going to be good.

Parts of the Pandora's building date from the 13th century. It used to be called the Passage House, as there was a boat beside it that took people across the creek, for a long time the quickest route between Falmouth and Truro. Later it was renamed The Ship, before its name changed again in tribute to the HMS Pandora, a naval ship sent to Tahiti to restore order after the mutiny on the Bounty.

In the three years since our first visit, we have been back to the Pandora many times. We celebrated James's birthday last August by meeting friends there for lunch, as rain hammered into the creek outside and a quick lunch turned into a leisurely afternoon. The friends were camping nearby, and given the weather conditions, ended up coming home to stay with us, so the lunch actually lasted 28 hours.

My children (along with numerous others) love crabbing down there, tempting the crabs into nets by baiting them with bacon and wondering how crabs can possibly have acquired a taste for bacon in the first place. Once the bucket is filled with the little creatures, the children tip it up and squeal as the crabs scuttle to the edge of the jetty and throw themselves back into the water. I always say that next time I will bring nail varnish and we will dab each crab on the shell, and see if we get the same customers next time.

It is a pub beloved of locals and holidaymakers alike, accessible by boat, by the coast path, and by car, though the car park is not for the fainthearted in summer. Everyone knows the Pandora, and everyone loves it.

This morning, the pub caught fire, the thatched roof collapsed into the building, and 35 firefighters, six fire engines and a lifeboat came to put it out. Although they quickly had it under control, pictures and footage show that it is destroyed: all that remains are the outside walls. Everything inside it, including the huge model ship that stood in a glass case as the centrepiece of a room, has been lost. Early reports suggest it was a chimney fire that spread instantly to the dry thatch of the roof.

It is horribly sad: the loss of a part of Cornwall's history, the loss of local jobs (they had just put an appeal for summer staff on their facebook page), and the loss of a place that made everyone who stepped inside, or sat outside it, happy.

I hope it is insured to the hilt and rebuilt as soon as possible. The HMS Pandora sank after hitting the Great Barrier Reef in 1791, and Captain Edwards was court martialled, and is thought to have bought the inn. There have been many twists and turns in its history. I look forward to it rising from the ashes and carrying on.