Being awarded the Novel Prize has been a real boost to my confidence. The final revisions to the novel kept me busy throughout 2018, begging the question of how we ever know when a book is finished. 
After that, I made a start on my current novel, also contemporary, set in the UK and Iran.
Then the pandemic arrived.
I remember back in March – and what a long time ago that seems! – being so terror-struck that I couldn’t write a word and feared I’d never do so again. Thankfully, life has settled down, for me at any rate, although we all know it will never go back to what it was.
Part of the new normal is walking around looking as if we’re about to hold up the nearest bank. But, on a more serious note, it has set me thinking again about the characters we create and how and at what stage we reveal the people behind the masks.

 don’t recall when I first began writing. As far as I know, I’ve always loved stories. My grandmother told me that even before I could speak I would scribble with crayons on paper and babble away, trying to articulate ideas without possessing the words. However, the moment when I first knew that I was a writer is clear in my memory; it was at the award ceremony for the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize.​
After spending the previous day travelling to the venue with my grandparents, I arrived as one of six shortlisted contestants. The time came to announce the winner and the judges read out the names of the runner-ups, until only two of us remained standing. When it was my name that finished the sentence, “The winner of the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize is,” I couldn’t believe it. All I could think to say was, “Are you sure?” It wasn’t until I looked over and saw my grandmother crying in the second row that I knew it was really happening. From trying to write before I understood language to the moment I won a writing competition, she saw me become this person. I had never seen her cry before.

inning the Exeter story prize in 2017 for my story The Improbable Yarn of Clark Curtis was such a fantastic boost. Winning a prize, being published and (not insignificantly) being paid. At the time I had just finished my MA in Creative Writing from Chichester University and like many people found the transition away from having the input of tutors and peers really difficult. I was encouraged by the course and my feedback to begin sending off some of my work but I never thought that it would win.
The validation and feeling of elation that it gave me knowing that other people had enjoyed my work is hard to describe. The same story was also nominated for the Trisha Ashley award for humour – this also meant a great deal. I am drawn to the silly and comical and love work that manages to be both funny and moving. 
When the anthology arrived, I greedily read the other stories and was delighted by the company I was keeping. I think without having this boost I would have drifted along a bit, lacking the confidence to share my work. As it was, I started sending off everything I had. I was shortlisted both for the Cambridge story prize making their anthology of stories across 2017 and 2018 and for the Myriad First draft awards. 

I’d like to start by saying I never dreamt of winning a prestigious prize like the Exeter Novel Prize and going on to become an author. But it wouldn’t be true. I dreamt exactly that: secretly, hopefully, and not really believing it could ever happen for a woman like me – a very ordinary army wife and mum-of-three. 
Back in 2014, it really did all feel like a bit of a fantasy. How could I possibly think I had it in me to write novels for a living? But after a couple of years of scribbling love scenes with Scooby Doo blaring in the background, and feeling the crunch of uneaten Cheesy Wotsits as I shifted position on the sofa, I had a manuscript, and I had a feeling it might be good enough to publish, so I filled in the ENP application and crossed my fingers…
Fast forward to 2015, and I had won the Exeter Novel Prize, I had an agent, and I had a two-book deal with a major publisher. Through winning the prize and getting published I was now more than just a ‘wife of’ on an army administration form or a ‘parent of’ in letters from school. My name was on the spines of real books, in bookshops and libraries – it felt like a bit of a dream. 
As any author will tell you, the publishing industry is fickle, staying published is a challenge, and the financial rewards are, shall we say, uncertain, at best. I count myself very fortunate to have had four titles traditionally published (and a fifth in the pipeline). If you’d told me back in 2014 that by 2020 I’d have four books in print and tens of thousands of readers, I’m not sure I would have believed you.
But writers are good at thinking up seemingly impossible scenarios and conjuring them into existence – it’s what we do. 
In a way, making dreams come true is just part of the job description.
 
If you’d like to know more about Clare Harvey or her books, you can find her here:
Website: clareharvey.net
Facebook: @clareharvey13
Twitter: @ClareHarveyauth 
Instagram: @clareharvey13

I was privileged to win the 2016 Exeter Story Prize for my short story, ‘Oh Cheeses’, in which a journalist/librarian befriends a poet named Arin Hart. At the time I was living in a one-room flat in Edinburgh, and was in the process of completing my PhD in creative writing with Glasgow University. The stint in that flat was one of the few times in my life that I have had a rigid writing routine, something I’ve always struggled to maintain.  
For this particular story though, I wrote five hundred words every day until the whole story was told whilst listening to John and Vangelis’s ‘I’ll Find My Way Home’ on loop. Now that song is inextricably linked with that time, and that story.
​When I felt too dry to produce 500 words, I padded out what I could produce unashamedly. When I felt tempted to carry on past that mark, I reminded myself that the next stint would be all the easier for having something already in place to grab onto at the start of next session. I aimed for a strict final word limit of 5000 words, and during the course of editing, I cut the word count almost in half. This is an exercise that I would recommend to anyone in their writing - you don’t know what a ruthless killer of your little word-darlings you can be, until you’re faced with an immovable upper limit. You may think you write concisely; this is the real test. It’s also good practice for the writerly eye.  
Another issue I have as a writer is an uneven regard for my own completed work, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What I mean by an uneven regard is that sometimes, for no discerning reason, I’ll look at something I’ve completed, and it seems like a work of pure genius. I then send it off to something, only to later discover typos and continuity/concept errors, or problematic pacing or problems with character, etcetera. Other times the work seems contrived, stuffy, and as if it had been forced out of me, but is surprisingly well received. That was what Oh Cheeses! was like from my perspective. Still, I couldn’t find anything concrete to change about it, no matter how much I combed through it, so I sent it off, on a ‘might as well’ basis. Much to my shock, and then delight once it had really sunk in, it won.  

Danny Murphy has worked as a teacher and headteacher Scotland, Malaysia and Cambodia. He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh. Though published in his professional field[1], he writes fiction to ‘reach the parts that academic prose can’t reach’.
​He won the Costa Prize in 2016 (Rogey) and the Exeter Prize in 2018  (Time to Come Home), but has had less recent success with two very different novels he’s been trying to get published: Finding Closure - a dark thriller - and All That We Can Be - the ‘coming of age’ story of a young teacher in the first year of his career. It’s difficult to get agents or publishers to commit - so he’s considering publishing these online.
Winning the Exeter Prize really motivated Danny to believe in his writing. ‘As I'm sure you know,” he said, ‘In the long lonely hours when you're stuck at your keyboard. or when you're reading a master at work (just finished reading Ian McEwan's The Children Act), it doesn't always seem that your own writing is worth reading. I'm sure I'm not the only writer who has such feelings.”
Danny’s online life is a bit uneven – improving it is on a long list, which includes starting a new novel! He can be reached at lornshillht@hotmail.com.

[1] e.g. Dealing with Dilemmas, Schooling Scotland, Everyone’s Future