I’m studying for an Open University degree in humanities. Last year I took the A215 Creative Writing course, which covers a wide range of written forms, including poetry, life writing and short stories. I learnt a lot, including:

• writing a twelve-line poem can take as long as a thousand words of prose (and I know which I prefer)
• my own life has – thus far – been too uneventful to make good reading
• I’d really like to take up travel writing, but can’t afford the fares
• my writing tends to be ‘very plot driven’ (no surprise there, given the genre I like to read and hope to be published in).

I was delighted to have been the winner of the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival’s 2009 Condense-a-Crime Classic Competition. This was my prize-winning, Twitter-sized summary of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd:

‘Two of my patients having died in quick succession – the widow (driven to suicide), the squire (stabbed in the neck) – I was delighted when Hercule Poirot sought my counsel. While the police wasted time on the butler, the drug addict and the impoverished stepson, Poirot uncovered everyone’s secrets. Even mine.’

If only writing a novel could be so simple. But, as author Martyn Waites told me at the Festival, my earnings-per-word for those fifty words were a lot more than he got for his first book!