The write stuff

AS Marion Husband knows only too well, it isn't easy being a novelist.

And it can be especially hard for just an ordinary wife and mother. For someone based in the North-East, so far from publishers in London, the chance of getting into print can seem dishearteningly remote. This is how Marion used to feel before she landed her big break and looking back, she sees the obstacles that then stood in her way.

"It was an obstacle being a middle-aged housewife from Stockton - very much so," admits the 46-year-old mum of two. "You just have to overcome it. You have not to worry about what people think about you."

Now well established as a writer, she can safely take this stance. Her latest book, The Good Father, was published recently and if it equals previous efforts, she'll be doing very well.

In 2005, New Writing North gave her the Andrea Badenoch Award in recognition of Paper Moon, the second novel she had published, and prior to that, while still a student on a creative writing course, she came out top of the whole year to be awarded the Blackwell Prize. Yet while the plaudits have now arrived, it's been a long and tiring road. It all began when Marion first embarked on writing as a child.

"I always wrote when I was a little child, as children do, and as a young teenager I wrote a lot of teenage angst stuff, then I stopped writing altogether when I was about 18 and I started working for a bank," she says.

"But I always thought of myself as a writer - it never kind of leaves you."

She married in 1984 and had her children, Kay and Greg, now 21 and 20, straight away.

When Marion next sat down to write they'd reached the ages of five and six.

IWAS working part-time for the Yorkshire Bank in Stockton and one day I started to write again, little bits in secret in front of the television, and my husband found me one day and suggested that I go to creative writing classes, which I did,"

she says. "I met Bob Beagrie, one of the board members of Mudfog, which is a local publisher, and he suggested that I submitted some of my short stories. In 1998 my first collection of short stories was published."

What had begun with casual scribblings had now become a full-blown pastime, with Marion spending many hours absorbed in writing reams of words. Her long-term project was a novel - and it turned into an obsession.

"I'd been trying to write a novel and finished one and thrown it away," she says.

"I'd write and write and write and in moments of despair I'd throw it in the bin.

"I don't think it was publishable but that was because I'd only just started to write seriously when the kids had gone to bed, from nine o'clock at night sometimes until about two or three. I remember going to bed with the birds singing."

Although proficient as a writer, Marion had never read her work in public so when requested to by Mudfog, her first response was panic. She says what made her overcome this was her hunger for success. "They said to me in order to sell these pamphlets what our writers have to do is go out and do readings',"

explains Marion. "I was terrified. I'm very ambitious as a writer so although I was scared to death I knew I had to do it because I wanted to sell these stories, I wanted to become known, and I think I was so ambitious I would have really done anything.

"I fought my nerves and got up on stage and read at the Corner House in Middlesbrough and realised that I liked reading to audiences, which surprised me because I was quite shy."

What still eluded her, however, was getting her novel into print. She kept returning to a story that had never left her head and it was starting an MA that was the spur for its completion.

"On the first week of my MA in creative writing at Northumbria University, in October 2001, I began to write what became my first published novel, which was The Boy I Love," says Marion. "It was the same idea I'd had ever since I started to write so it came really easily to me because I'd written it before.

It was very controversial because it's about a gay love affair set in 1919/1920. It's about gay soldiers."

Her fascination with both world wars and with the soldiers who returned from them feeds into Marion's work in general, not least her fourth and latest novel. Yet far from writing wartime sagas in a safe, romantic vein, she uses often-graphic language to convey quite gritty tales. If some are shocked by her directness, she maintains this isn't planned.

"I don't do it deliberately to be provocative,"

says Marion. "With The Boy I Love the gay characters became much more interesting because they were gay, because there's more drama and there's more conflict. When I was writing The Good Father my agent said has it got any gay men in it?' and I said no' and she was relieved. I don't mean to shock but I do mean to be realistic and to write about what these characters would actually do.

"I write from a male perspective - that's something I'm just naturally drawn to - and my male characters are much stronger than my female characters. Every novel I write I always think I'll write more female characters and stronger female characters, but so far that hasn't really worked."

She may be guided by her instinct but this has served her well to date, with Marion slowly being recognised as a leading North-East writer. The fictional setting of her novels - a place called Thorp - is based on Stockton, and she draws heavily on her memories of her childhood in the town. Since she became a published author she's started teaching creative writing, and now she supplements her income with her salary from this. Yet Marion's dream is that one day her books will make enough to keep her, and she has lost none of the drive that got her where she is today.

"I want to build up a readership so the next book will sell a little bit more, and then a bit more and so on," she says. "I've built up this career for myself from nothing, just from this idea that I'd like to write a novel about two gay men."

■ The Good Father by Marion Husband (Accent Press, £7.99) ■ For more information, visit www.marionhusband.com