The women of RTÉ are brought to book

WHEN, in 2011, the RTÉ journalist Kathleen McMahon accepted a €600,000 advance for her debut novel, there was excitement throughout the organisation.

There was also surprise. Nobody knew the girl in the newsroom was writing. And, it turns out, Kathleen wasn’t the only one with literary ambitions. Since This is How it Ends, came out last year, four other women working for our national broadcasting station have secured substantial deals.

There’s the Morning Ireland presenter, Rachael English; her debut, Going Back, published by Orion, came out recently. Then there’s Sinead Crowley, the Arts and Media Correspondent. She has a deal with Quercus, for, Can Anyone Out There Help Me? Concerning families, but with a thriller element, the book will appear in July next year.

Sinead has wanted to write a novel all her life. She had started writing in spare moments. But, until she covered Kathleen McMahon’s success story, she had no idea the others were writing.

“Nobody had a clue about any of us,” she says. “We weren’t sitting around in the newsroom talking about it. It really was a coincidence.”

And, as if three RTÉ protégées weren’t enough, there are another two as well. There’s Anne Marie Casey, wife of the author Joseph O’Connor. Formerly a producer with the BBC, she turned her hand to scriptwriting, and wrote for On Home Ground and The Clinic before penning her debut, An Englishwoman in New York, published this month.

The fifth is Liz Nugent. Her debut, Unravelling Oliver will be released by Penguin in February. She works in the office for Fair City, and has never met Rachael, Anne-Marie, Kathleen or Sinead.

“There are 2,000 people on the RTÉ campus, and I only know about 50 of them,” she says.

Is it all just a coincidence – or does working for RTÉ give them an advantage?

“It makes a difference, without a doubt,” says the agent Jonathan Williams. “I represent a fair number of people in the media, and when their name is known, it will get an immediate response from publishers. They’ll be at the head of the queue.

“If you are known through your position on TV, the radio, or in the media, generally, the publisher won’t have to worry about creating a profile. The book is more likely to be reviewed, and quickly. But the work will still have to cut the mustard,” he stresses.

RTÉ isn’t the only media outlet to have produced authors of late. Three recently came from the Tribune. There’s Gavin Corbett, who beat Kathleen McMahon to the Kerry Ingredients Irish Fiction Prize; he’s joined by Paul Lynch, whose debut, Red Sky in Morning has caused a literary sensation. Then there’s this newspaper’s columnist, Mick Clifford, whose debut crime novel appeared last year. But they had the time, when the Sunday Tribune went belly up.

How did the RTÉ crowd fit writing in?

Kathleen McMahon, who is a mum to twins, dropped her hours.

“I scaled back to four days a week, then for five years I job-shared,” she says. “That was perfect. I’d work long hours; maybe a 12-hour day, but then I’d have maybe two days off. That works really well.”

Anne-Marie, who is freelance, had time on her hands when RTÉ cancelled The Clinic.

“Another series I was working on was cancelled too,” she says. “That’s when I adapted Little Women for the Gate Theatre. And at the same time I started writing fiction.”

Rachael finds the hours at Morning Ireland conducive to writing.

“I’m up at 4.30 am,” she says. “After the broadcast I have a better look at the newspapers, then I have a good bit of time to myself. We have a conference call at 7.45pm, so I work at both ends of the day. I started working for Morning Ireland late in 2010, and started writing in 2011.”

Liz Nugent works office hours, and writes outside that time. She was kick-started into it, when a line came to her.

“The first line is, ‘I expected more of a reaction the first time I hit her.’ That was in my head for two years. I didn’t know who said it, or what it was about, but it stayed with me.”

Time, for her, is difficult enough. She has enormous respect for Sinead Crowley, who has a full-time job, plus young children.

“I really admire people who combine all three,” she says. “I don’t know how they do it.”

So how did Sinead juggle the time around her three-year-old and her baby?

“I wrote in the car! If I had an interview at 2pm, I’d turn up at 12.30pm and do an hour in the car. I had my laptop with me all the time, and whenever I had a minute I’d work away on it. I thought about it a lot too. I’d write little notes, so that if I got an hour at the end of the day I wasn’t sitting there with a blank piece of paper.”

But is there something about working at RTÉ that encourages writing? Is there something in the water? There are, the women told me, advantages, but here again, the answers were as individual as the women themselves.

For Anne-Marie, both producing and script writing proved an obvious advantage.

“I’d been trained to think about an audience, and why they would keep watching,” she says. “I’d learned to know why they might switch off, and I could apply all that knowledge when I was writing the book. I thought about my readers. I made the book episodic for that reason. I wanted them to be able to read a bit, leave it, then come back and join it.”

Liz is stuck in an office at RTÉ. As staff, she’s not allowed to write scripts for Fair City.

“I can imagine that, for those in the newsroom, where news tends to be gloomy and grim, fiction is a nice diversion,” she says. “My writing isn’t much helped by my job here. But before I came to RTÉ I was in stage management. In 2002, I worked as stage manager on John Banville’s The Book of Evidence. That definitely helped. And I’d already written short stories. I’d always wanted to write something big, but I’d assumed it would be a play.”

For Rachael, the advantage is all the people she comes across in her job.

“You get used to watching people and listening to them, so you have more to draw on. Also, the structure helps. And the deadline. Someone in Orion said he likes working with journalists because, even if what they delivered was rubbish, at least they delivered!”

As for Sinead, mingling with authors brought her into the right environment.

“I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I’d interview authors with that in the forefront of my mind. I could speak to them about how they did it. I knew people who did it. That made it all real and achievable. I decided to just sit down and do it. I knew, if I didn’t, I’d regret it.”