"I've always been a storyteller"

“I've always been a storyteller,” declares Sara Sheridan in a mild Edinburgh accent. “Even when I was a kid I'd sit around with my brothers and tell them stories and things. So I don't particularly see what I do as high art or anything. I simply write stories and more or less make them up as I go along. I mean, if I sat down to write my first novel again it'd probably be a completely different book.”
The darkly pretty 29-year-old may have always been a storyteller but she wasn't always a writer. The last time I saw Sara Sheridan she was running an art gallery and restaurant called The Blue Raincoat in Galway with her then husband Seamus. I ate there regularly and was friendly with both of them but lost contact with Sara when they divorced in 1993 and she moved back to her native Scotland with her young daughter Molly.
Imagine my surprise then, when I opened a recent issue of Company magazine and saw her pictured with a group of twentysomething female novelists under the caption “THESE GIRLS ARE WORTH #2,500,000!” (a reference to the collective sum of the hefty advances each writer had received from their respective publishers). And my further surprise when I opened GQ and found that they had named her as one of the hottest new BritLit talents on the strength of her recently published debut novel Truth Or Dare (described on its jacket as “a story of female friendship, family and premeditated murder”).
So, Sara, you've obviously been busy since we last met . . .
“You could say that,” she giggles. “I didn't always want to write. I basically got really sick of work and I had a daughter and I thought 'I want to work at home because I don't have time to work 9-5 anywhere else and if I'm going to do this I have to think of some way of making money that's gonna be enough to support Molly and I.' There weren't that many things I could do at home and I was 28 at the time so I just thought I'd like to have some kind of fixed career by the time I'm 30, so maybe I'd try writing a book. And that was it! So I quit my job and everybody thought I was completely insane and I went home and just sat down the next morning and started to write. And it's worked out.”
It certainly has. Although Truth Or Dare was initially rejected by a number of different publishers, Arrow eventually coughed up #30,000 for the manuscript and signed her for a three-book deal. Pretty smooth as career changes go. But writing novels is a completely different ballgame to writing menus. Are you suitably disciplined for your new profession?
“Yeah, very, very disciplined,” she nods. “I think you have to be when you have a child, regardless of whether you write or not. When I did that photo shoot for Company it was really weird because I was the only one there who had a child. And I think only two of us were married. But when you have a child you have to be incredibly fit, particularly when you're a single mum because you've nobody to fall back on day to day. So you have to be very disciplined in everything to fit the writing in - and now to fit the publicity in and all the extra side stuff as well. But I do 1,000 words a day when I'm writing prose. And that works for me. It might take me a couple of hours or it might take me 6, 7 or 8 hours, it doesn't matter. As long as I do my 1,000 words I'm fine. Sometimes I might go over 1,000 words or something like that. But then one day I did 5,000 words and then I couldn't write for the next four days. One thousand a day is my pace and I can't go any faster.”

spiral of intrigue
Truth Or Dare tells the story of Becka and Libby, two ordinary girls who find themselves in an extraordinary situation. When the owner of the flat they're “borrowing” goes missing, they suddenly find themselves caught up in a spiral of intrigue involving IRA terrorists, blackmailing bankers and dodgy financial deals. It's a rollicking road movie of a book - the action moves between London, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and, predictably enough, Galway - an exhilarating, funny and poignant tale of female friendship and solidarity.
“Basically I just started out with one initial premise,” she explains, “which was what would happen if you had the keys to someone's flat and you knew that person was going away and you needed somewhere to stay and you went to stay there and suddenly discovered that something dreadful had happened to that person. They had disappeared or whatever. And that was it. That was all I had to start with. So I just took up the story from there.”
Did you deliberately set out to write a feminist book?
“Well, not really,” she says. “I mean, it's about women but I'm not a staunch feminist or anything. But I do think that the feminist side of the book is quite interesting. I mean, feminism is just nonsense, it's really 'people-ism'. But I like the idea that the book has heroines who behave like heroes. And I think that Libby and Becka very much behave like heroes in the story. So you can see anything that they're doing being done by Rambo or James Bond or someone like that. Whereas heroines in fiction usually tend to spend a lot of their time dragging children out of fires or being very brave in the face of a man telling them a nasty thing or something. You know, a fictional heroine managing to blurt out 'you are the most arrogant man I've ever met' to some bad character is usually as good as it gets. And that's their great heroism. Whereas my female characters behave very much like traditional heroes. I think that's an interesting concept.”
I noticed that they were always eating in the story as well. You obviously still have an interest in food.
“Yeah! Where do you think that came from now?” she laughs. “It was actually only afterwards that I realised that there was lots of food in the novel. It was just something that the characters were into, I suppose. Actually, it was something I was quite conscious of with the book that I'm writing at the moment, I was thinking that I'd have to be really careful not to write too much food into it or otherwise I'm just going to be known as the girl who loves to eat!”
Perhaps “the girl who loves to work” would be a more appropriate moniker. Now happily settled into her new career as a writer, Sara Sheridan is not short of things to be getting on with at the moment.
“I sat down and worked it out the other week. I figure I've enough on at the moment to keep me busy for the next five years. And that doesn't count doing screenplays of books I've written or anything like that. But I'm really happy doing this, it's a whole new thing for me and I'm really going for it.
“My next book's gonna be called The Pleasure Express and it'll be finished in the next month or so. It's about a high-class hooker in Hong Kong. And where Truth Or Dare was about idealism or people believing that they're idealistic - and both the characters do, even if it is a rather twisted idealism - The Pleasure Express is much more about selling out, which is why it's set in Hong Kong at the time of the handover. But beyond that, I've also been asked to write a couple of screenplays and then I've a third novel called Ma Polanski's Pockets already plotted out which I'll begin next January. So yeah, I'm pretty busy (smiles).”