Bestselling novelist Sue Moorcroft says writing stories was always her favourite element of school work. As soon as she was old enough to understand that someone created what went into the pages of a book, she wanted to be that person. ‘I also told elaborate lies and got into trouble about it all the time,’ she adds. ‘But I think telling lies honed my plotting skills.’
How does Sue go about constructing a novel – is she a planner or a non-planner?
‘I refer to myself as a composter,’ she says. ‘This is because I like to amass a heap of material I can dig into as a book progresses. If we take as an example, I had an easy starting point becausein order to reacquaint myself with Ursula. Then I listed what we already knew about her – she’s from a big family in Dublin, had lived in Brighton since she was a student, and was divorced. She’d also been the victim of drug-related assault, which meant there was a large and unresolved conflict in her life.
