In my last year of university, on the last Thursday of every month, I’d be found in the same bookshop waiting for the boxes of new Penguin Books to be unpacked. By the time I left University, my ambition was to be an editor at Penguin, even though I had no real idea what that meant. I persisted until I got a break into publishing as an editorial assistant in another company. From there it took me five years until I made it to Penguin. After that I continued to work as a publisher’s editor then editorial director until my job was made redundant. Unsure what to do next, I agreed to compile a monthly books page for a national magazine. From there I started writing travel features and then interiors pieces. As a result of the latter, I was asked to write some books that tied with some of the popular TV lifestyle shows. Eventually I decided to try my hand at ghostwriting and collaborated on a number of books with high-profile celebrities. All the time, my confidence as a writer was growing as I learned from the inside about structuring material, style and voice.
Finally I reached a point where I felt I was ready to write the novel that I’d always been too scared to start. I wanted to write about women of a certain age, their friendships and their relationships with men. Gradually the characters of Bea, Kate and Ellen began to come together in my mind and I had the beginnings of What Women Want. When I started to write, I knew the three women as well as Oliver, the man who would come between them. I was familiar with where they were in their lives when the reader first meets them and I knew the rough trajectory of the journey that each of them would make to reach the conclusion of the novel. However, nothing was set in stone. I didn’t want to prevent the writing from being spontaneous and I wanted to be able to have fun with them on the way.
I spent about nine months writing. I did have other journalistic projects on the go at the same time, but I wrote something of the novel every day, sometimes as much as 1,000 words, sometimes nowhere near that amount, sometimes more. When the writing went well, I loved it, when I got stuck I felt frustrated and despairing. What helped me most was having a friend, another novelist, who I spoke to almost every day. Without her, I might have given up. With her encouragement, I negotiated the hurdles and avoided the loneliness which many writers feel, and I finished the book.
When I was told that a publisher wanted to take on What Women Want, I was ecstatic. My adult life has been always involved in books and reading, and now I’m excited to be starting in a completely new direction within the same field. Now I am hard at work on my second novel.
Fanny Blake’s What Women Want is published by Blue Door and available form April 14th.
April 14, 2011
