Writer on the run (From The Northern Echo)

Writer on the run

3:46pm Tuesday 23rd August 2011 in Echo Woman By Ruth Addicott

Author and journalist Isla Whitcroft is about to publish her second novel. she tells Ruth Addicott how taking up running inspired her to start writing.

LIKE most journalists, Isla Whitcroft had always had a burning ambition to write a book, but after several attempts trying to finish a crime novel, she had all but given up.

It wasn’t until she took up running at the age of 43 and her brain started bursting with plot lines, that she decided to invent a series of fastpaced adventure stories for teenagers instead.

Isla, whose family is from Seaham, County Durham, has a second book out in October and is now in the process of plotting her third. She says it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t taken up running in her 40s.

“I had three children, the littlest was six and I was overweight, tired and grumpy, I could feel myself slipping into middle age,” she recalls.

“I decided I had to get a grip so I started running – staggering at first, just three-quarters of a mile around the village. The weight began to fall off, but more important than that, it sharpened my brain and within a year I’d come up with the idea for the book.”

Isla had never even considered writing a teen novel. It wasn’t until 2009 when she came home one night and found her 16-year old baby-sitter reading about the teenage spy Alex Rider that she came up with her own character Cate Carlisle.

“I said, ‘Aren’t there many girl teen heroines?’ And she said no. There weren’t many when I was young and I couldn’t believe nothing had changed,” says Isla.

“I went to bed and said, I’m going to invent a female teen heroine.”

As soon as she started writing, the plot flowed and The Cate Carlisle Files were born.

Having been obsessed with adventure stories and her brother’s Eagle annuals when she was young (“I never got the gist of dolls”), it seemed an obvious thing to write.

“I was a real tomboy, I was always on an adventure,” she says. “Cate Carlisle is cool, calm and collected and very human – a figure I’d love to have been at that age. Readers also seem to like the fact the heroine isn’t a girly girl. There’s no silly angst about what she’s wearing to the prom and although she has a boyfriend, it’s not the sole thing in her life.”

Despite being a journalist for more than 20 years, with a background in Fleet Street (she worked on The Sunday Express and Today, before setting up a women’s news magazine in Sydney), her biggest challenge was finding a publisher.

Isla, who regularly freelances for nationals including The Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, and The Sun, sent a manuscript to several agents but none took it up. By March 2009, she’d had a dozen rejections and began looking into the possibility of selfpublishing.

In May 2009, however, her luck changed when she bumped into a friend who was an agent and persuaded her to take a look at her book.

“She rang me that night and said, ‘I love it, but I’m not taking anything from you until you finish the whole book’,” she recalls.

Isla had only written six chapters and spent the whole of the summer writing the rest, working from 6am to 10pm, juggling her day job as a freelance health journalist with the escapades of her teenage heroine.

By the time she finished, she’d written 90,000 words and was told to cut it down to 65,000. Her efforts paid off and The Cate Carlisle Files: Trapped, came out in May.

Isla, 47, lives in a village on the outskirts of Towcester, Northamptonshire, but has strong connections with the North-East. Her mother was born in Newcastle and her husband, Graeme, is from Stockton. She regularly comes back to the area along with her sons, George, 14, Conrad, 12 and Lucas, nine, who have all provided flashes of inspiration at some point.

As for the running, it’s not only something she’s stuck to, but something she now couldn’t live without.

“I absolutely love it because it’s made me feel so much better,” she says. “I’ve since found out that running is directly linked to brain power, which I know because my brain is always bursting with plot lines when I come back.”

• The Cate Carlisle Files: Trapped, published by Piccadilly Press is out now. Deep Water is due out on October 1.