Meet the Author

Sarah Morrison

Harbouring dreams of becoming an author? Take a moment to see if you match the profile.

Have you lived/worked in at least four different countries? Did you attend umpteen private schools/ borstals where your talent was either recognised at an early age, or you were labelled as 'thick' and left to get on with it? Were your parents divorced before you were conceived/killed in tragic circumstances and was at least one an author themselves? Have you worked in at least three of the following jobs: freelance journalist, foreign aid worker, biscuit factory operative, lawyer, rock star, double glazing salesperson or teacher, despite being the grandson or daughter of a baronet and having a double first from Cambridge University/no qualifications at all. What is your major addiction which you are overcoming one day at a time?

Facetious? Perhaps, but I was on page two of twenty of the most boring stock check ever. As the new part-time bookseller I had been given the fiction stock check to do as 'a good way of learning the ropes'. A good way of sending me to sleep was more like it, so I'd begun reading the author blurbs just to stay awake.

By Jilly Cooper I still hadn't found a 'normal' author. Even their photographs didn't seem real - serious and credible, yet casually sexy, is a hard look to pull off. Faber authors must be given special classes because they were really good at it! Private lives were equally unlikely. Fragrant and fabulous domestic bliss in London with an equally intellectual partner and well-balanced, interestingly-named children. Bohemian squalor in the ancestral pile/a Cornish barn with organic llamas and a number of nubile lovers of indeterminate sex.

Nobody was average, nobody had a life I might recognise - two parents, 2.4 siblings, a cat, a semi. You had to be special in oh so many ways to be an author it appeared. Like a lot of booksellers I dreamed of becoming one. By Georgette Heyer I'd resolved never to write another word; I just wasn't interesting enough.

And then the Events Manager was ill the day an author was coming into the shop to sign stock of their new book. I was the only one who'd read it so I got the job of steering them from the front door to the stockroom and offering them a cup of tea. I'd only picked the book up because part of it was set around where I grew up, but I'd enjoyed it and over my lunch hour lined up some pertinent comments and observations for extra brownie points.

The author was everything his cover blurb had promised ' intelligent, witty, well-educated' and was actually an improvement on his photograph, being sleek and groomed in a shirt that I knew just looking at it cost more than my entire outfit. I remembered to ask about an event he was doing that night, he was charmingly nervous about it. We laughed about a review the book had been given on television and he confided that he'd been too frightened to watch it. He was, in short, the perfect author. Having used up my pre-prepared smarts I mentioned I recognised some of the landmarks in the book having lived in the town. He politely asked where.

As children, it turned out, we'd lived ten minutes away from each other, and he'd even delivered papers up my street. And although we'd attended opposite schools in the same town, he'd gone to parties at my music teacher's house. We'd read our way round the same library, taken the same buses, knew the same shops. He was me. I went to his event that night and I actually imagined myself standing there, reading my words to people who were interested in what I had to say.

You can grow up in a small town, go to a faded school where just turning up is an achievement and have something to say and the means of saying it. You don't need a complicated bohemian background to be a writer. 'Authors' are something the people in the Sales and Marketing Department create.

Funnily enough, with my eyes opened I discovered that some of the biggest names in the Scottish Fiction section came from the same area as me. I read their words and at the same time as thinking what wonderful writers they were I thought 'in the nicest possible way' how ordinary they were. But then again, there is nothing ordinary about being ordinary.