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Real Life Story

From the Nottingham Evening Post
Saturday 8 February 2003, by Mhairi McFarlane.

Clare Littleford used to have a job ordering traffic cones, where the only 'thrill' lay in choosing whether they had rubber bases or reflective stripes. Now she's writing thrillers and being wined and dined by powerful publishers. The fledgling Nottingham author talks to Mhairi McFarlane about finding the confidence to ditch the daily grind.

Most characters in novels are unconstrained by the world of bills, faxes, photocopiers, deadlines and dreary clock-watching which are an all-too-familiar reality for the office-bound masses.

Clare Littleford has done her fair share of stressful and boring nine-to-fives... and yet didn't want to take a flight of fancy out of it all in her fiction.

'I think it's really important that characters are rooted in real life,' she says. 'I always wanted to write about real people and a real place, which is why I set it in Nottingham. The book is partly about the pressures of ordinary life and the desire most of us have at some point to escape from it.'

Yet the 29 year old could be forgiven for wanting to let her imagination run riot, as professionally, she is more or less living her dream. Her first novel Beholden, published by Simon and Schuster this month, sees the fruition of an idea which came to Clare on the bus.

A psychological crime story, it follows Peter, a planning officer at Nottingham City Council, who spots a girl each morning on the bus, scribbling in a notebook. One day she disappears, and Peter finds her diary. His involvement in the search for the missing woman, interspersed with extracts from her notebook, form the narrative - which builds to a shocking twist.

A former city council employee herself, Clare explains: 'No matter what job you do, I think at some point everyone's wished they didn't have to get off at the stop for work, that they could just disappear off somewhere. I wondered, 'What if someone did do that?' and the premise of the story went from there.'

Clare lives in Bulwell with her black cat Castro ('...not that I'm a fan of Fidel, but when we got him from the rescue home, he was called Casper - and to me that's a name for a white cat') in a redbrick terrace which was wrecked by the recent floods. 'We were all calling out of our doorways to each other, it was quite scary,' she says.

Clare is originally from Bedford, in a place she describes as a 'sprawling suburban housing estate on the edge of the sprawling commuter-belt town'. Needless to say, she didn't find Bedford as inspiring a place as Nottingham. She moved here following an English Literature degree in York.

Clare has always shown signs of being a writer. On her website she describes early attempts: 'I wrote a lot... I can remember the excitement of starting a new story when I was young - writing that first paragraph, looking at the words, then getting bored and starting another story, just to get that buzz again.'

By the time she was 12, Clare was actually finishing a lot of what she started. However, it didn't translate into envisioning a career as an author. 'Writing was one of those things like being an actor or an artist, something other people achieve... you kind of get put off even trying. You have to take a leap of faith that it's something you can do.'

'The problem with doing an English degree is that it can also be intimidating - I didn't see how I could ever write anything anywhere near as good as the books I was reading.'

'James Joyce fascinated me... I couldn't work out what he was trying to do with language.'

The literary ambition was mothballed and Clare started working for the housing department at the city council. She's careful not to be too negative, but it's clear it was a tough role. 'It's the kind of job where you were faced with other people's problems and the reality of their daily life.'

'You see the sharp end of inner-city life. A lot of the tenants were really nice, but others would have issues with drugs or alcohol... I represented the 'enemy'.'

Clare eventually needed something less stressful and started working for a literature development project. She attended a weekend course for writers organised by East Midlands Arts, and met tutors on the Nottingham Trent University MA.

'Being a writer didn't seem like an impossible dream then,' she says. 'It gave me the kick I needed, when before I'd just been too tired at the end of a day's work to do anything.' She worked on short stories and started a novel.

When the literature project folded, more soul-sapping temp jobs ensued: among them ordering traffic cones; in a call centre for a rollerblind manufacturer; and for an armoured van company.

It was enough of an incentive to make Clare enrol on the MA, which still gave her the freedom to work part-time. 'The scariest aspect of it was knowing that people would be reading my work. Although it was terrifying, if you want to get to a stage where you're published, you've got to get used to it.'

It also taught her the tricks of the trade.

'The main change was in my approach to writing, taking it more seriously, learning to edit myself and thinking about structure. You have to learn to write and write until you can't physically write any more!'

Humility is also important. 'A lot of writers don't like the advice from agents but you have to accept they know a lot about books and a lot about what sells,' Clare says.

Beholden was born on the course, and she suffered very few knockbacks before finding an agent who believed in her as well as a publisher who believed in her book.

'It was a huge thrill to see the book in print. I can't wait to see it in Waterstone's.'

Clare now has a two-book deal with Simon and Schuster (she's not saying what advance they gave her) and at a recent literary event, was being questioned on ideas for her fifth novel.

'I think they just wanted to make sure I had more than two ideas in me...'

Still working freelance in inner-city community development, her second novel is taking form on her computer upstairs.

'It's a psychological crime novel set in Nottingham again, and it will involve possibly one department in the city council. This time the story will have a female protagonist.'

So, will Clare Littleford do for Nottingham what Ian Rankin has done for Edinburgh, or Colin Dexter for Oxford? We'll have to keep reading to find out.

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