Bishop Auckland novelist Wendy Robertson has written 23 novels in 25 years. In her latest book, she explains how, despite being an ‘outsider’, she has drawn much of her inspiration from her deep roots in the region.

IN these parts there lurks a notion that you should keep your head down and not make a show of yourself. Poking your head above the parapet is seen as immodest, verging on the inappropriate.

More so, dare I say, if you’re a woman.

It helps, though. if you’re a bit of an eccentric.

“Our Wendy,” they used to say, “is a bit of a romancer!” By this they meant storyteller, daydreamer, a person who makes up things.

And throughout my life I’ve put this eccentricity to practical use, as I’ve published 23 novels in 25 years – making a show of myself indeed.

So now, in writing my new book, The Romancer – to celebrate these 25 years as writer – I’ve been driven not just to poke up my head above it, but to climb up onto the parapet and dance around, making a real show of myself.

For many years I’ve wanted to write a book about the writing process, which I find a perpetual source of fascination. (After all, when I’m not writing my novels, I’m teaching, tutoring and mentoring hopeful writers right across the North). But I have always been in search of a proper form for that book about writing.

Then one day, I was driving back from Appleby after recording an interview with Kathleen Jones, biographer of, among other luminaries, Catherine Cookson, a romancer if ever there was one. Changing gear on that long straight road back into County Durham, I suddenly realised what I should do. I would write a memoir of my own life, connecting it with my writing, at the same time reflecting on the writing process.

As I drive home on automatic pilot, ideas start to flood into my head. By the time I get to Bishop Auckland it finally dawns on me just how thoroughly my novels are shot-through with the details, perceptions and experiences from my own life. These are bright lights of truth that make the stories work and give them their appeal. Putting my key in the door I have a vision of a kaleidoscope with those millions of bits of experience as the colourful scraps in the drum. Every time I shake the kaleidoscope, I think, the complex shape that emerges is a distinctive story, deceptively distant from its separate personal elements, its inspirations.

Then at home with all the books piled on my desk I am astonished how I’ve used inspiration culled from fragments of a long memory, conscious and subconscious. There is my powerful great-grandfather, illiterate, but shrewd and highly skilled. There are my grandfathers, dead before I was born, but alive on the page. One was a pitman turned soldier who died in the last days of the Great War, the other was son of an auctioneer who inherited and lost a fortune in his late teens and ended up as a superior asylum attendant. That asylum (inspired by three generations who worked at Winterton Hospital, in Sedgefield), features in several novels.

There on the pages, in many guises, is my remarkable mother, tragically widowed in her 30s and bitter at being forced to return to the North. (She got to see the first novel in printers’ proofs, but, sadly, never any published book). In the novels I can also see shards and details of the lives of my brothers and my sister and then my own close family of the next generation, adding texture and details to my invented characters, making them spring to life. And in writing The Romancer I finally realise what a watershed in my life was the death of my father when I was nine.

On the pages I now see my own experience of growing up as a writer, from the age of three (when I was conscious of writing – chalking zigzags on a windowsill) to the time I was prowling Russell Square in London, waiting to see my new big publisher. I now see my warped experience of schooling, my joy in books and libraries, my parapet – mounting delight in finished pages of my own work.

THE novels especially express the inspiration of the potency of place, particularly Bishop Auckland and my beloved areas of the North-East, where, since arriving at nine years old, I have always been a stranger. Of course, being the stranger is a good place for a writer. Doesn’t the outsider see most of the game?

My characters travel or live all over the globe, but mostly come from, or return to my beautiful South Durham, whose landscape, in the 25 years I’ve written about it, has lost its pockmark pitheads and transformed itself back into a green and pleasant land.

All this seems self-evident now, but only really in writing this new book have I discovered the true impact of these experiences on what I have seen as quite different novels, separated by scholarship and research from my life.

And the title jumping straight from my childhood, was waiting in the wings: The Romancer, dancing on the parapet.

■ The Romancer (£7.99, to order from good bookshops, Amazon, roomtowrite.co.uk or direct from Wendy wenrob73@hotmail.com ■ Read more about The Romancer on wendyrobertson.com