‘Ignore her. She’s an English student’. The novelist Catherine Fox on creative writing

Catherine Fox has been blogging novels in weekly instalments, which she compares to the nineteenth-century custom of publishing novel chapters in monthly periodicals. Unlike nineteenth-century writers, though, Catherine Fox sets her work in the very present day, and this means that characters and readers in her most recent books found themselves in 2016 and 2020, responding in realtime to the various challenges of Brexit, Trump and Covid. This grounds Fox’s work in the nowness of composition and an openness to the improvisation enforced by real life events: as Fox puts it, experience ‘rinsed through the washing machine of fiction’. Because he is always polite and competent, Andy Kesson manages to compare Catherine Fox’s narrator to a zombie…