Catherine Pate in the Hot Seat

Catherine Pate lives, works and writes in London, UK.

FE: What inspires you to write?
CP: I think my best work has been inspired by personal experience – it’s sometimes easier to get under the skin of a situation if you’ve actually been in it. I’m also fascinated by the dark places in my imagination, which don’t have any outlet in real life, and that inspires me to write, so I can sort of ‘act out’. Recently I’ve been inspired by observing people who don’t know they’re being watched, not in a stalkerish way (!), but it’s really interesting to see what people do when they’re not interacting with anyone and to imagine what they might be thinking about, or where they’re going, or what their life is like.

FE: What gets in the way of your writing?
CP: The ‘select-all/delete’ function on my computer! I have a tendency to be overly self-critical and to compare myself to all the good writers that I read, which is not a good thing. I know the best way to write is just to, well, WRITE, so I’ve been endeavouring to do that more – to get it out of my head, then prune later. 

FE: Which of your pieces are you most proud of and why?
CP: I wrote a poem for someone that really summed up an intense and hugely romantic week we’d had together. It was a gift, but the process of rationalising my thoughts was therapeutic too, and for once I was very satisfied when I read it back. The recipient of the poem told me recently that they intended to write the words into a song- it made me really happy to think that they had a life beyond the one I’d given them.

FE: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given as an aspiring writer?
CP: It was a technical comment – write what you observe about your characters and let the reader do the work to figure out what that means. For example, “beads of sweat were visibly forming on his forehead and he glanced rapidly from side to side” is so much better than “he sat there looking nervous and suspicious”. 

FE: How do you deal with writers’ block?
CP: I’ve very often suffered from writers’ block owing to the fact that I’m too critical about my own work. Recently I addressed it by starting a journal, and hand-writing letters. It’s a great discipline because you have to get out what you want to say in one go, and can’t delete things like you can on a computer. And the act of regular writing has got me into the habit, so that now when I attempt fiction or poetry, the words flow more easily.