I think I'd agree. Writing a newspaper column is in many ways directly antithetical to writing fiction - you have to pretend to be more certain and opinionated about things than you in fact are, whereas writing fiction should be an exercise in uncertainty, a quest to discover what you think. I'd say that journalism is second only to teaching creative writing as one of the contemporary enemies of promise for a young writer. I like to think that I'm now too long in the tooth to be corrupted by the process - but I may be wrong.
I am particularly fortunate in having an excellent, tough editor at Macmillan, Marion Lloyd. She certainly helped tighten up the text after I delivered it but it had already gone through four drafts by that stage so quite a bit of self-editing had already taken place.
I'm glad you were able to suspend belief - the story of The Angel Factory is rather strange but I wanted it all to be rooted in the real world. My novel Kill Your Darlings was narrated by a failed writer, eaten up with envy of his contemporaries. It seemed evasive not to set the book in the literary world that is actually there so I did use real names - for example, rather than inventing a successful novelist of about Gregory Keays's age as his fantasy-hate figure, I used Martin Amis.
I slightly regret this because commentators and critics in the self-absorbed literary world began to think of the book as a satire and it was even billed at one festival as a 'homage to Amis's The Information. I think this is the kind of device one can only use once. You're one of a small number of authors who write both children's and adult fiction, with a high profile and reputation in both camps. Has this had effects on the way you write for each audience? I don't think so.
I find that writing fiction for the two very different audiences quite invigorating and helpful to me as a writer. Sometimes it takes a while to get out of one fictional mood and into the other but quite often the change sharpens me up. For example, if I'm a bit stuck in an adult novel, it can be quite a relief when Ms Wiz comes knocking on the door.
