My guest in the House of Dreams this month is the author Alison Boyle, who attended one of my workshops a while ago. I love the idea of ‘writing in the space between sleeping and waking.’

In the space between sleeping and waking I found a way of expressing the internal voice of a main character in my latest book ‘from Pakistan to Preston’.

Most of the narrative is in the third person, and I’d been looking for a convincing internal voice for Tommy O’Reilly that exposed the indecisions whirring round his head. Tommy’s self-expressive flights, which I scribbled on scraps of paper at the moment they occurred to me and not a moment later, bring a change of tone and perspective to the story. Through this voice I hope that readers feel they understand – and feel – Tommy’s struggles in loving Sunehri Saleem.

The rest of the book is quite grounded, featuring the unusual work setting of an artificial silk factory in the North of England.

I found that the signposts in Jenny’s dream workshop allowed me to travel a little more confidently down some imaginative pathways I had only tentatively explored through my writing before. The biggest surprise was finding that her workshop didn’t activate a warning beep on my ‘Is this new age nonsense?’ monitor.

from Pakistan to Preston by A.T. Boyle is published by Artificial Silk. You can see a 2-minute trailer here artificialsilk.org/video.html  and read about Alison’s event at the Manchester Literary Festival here http://manchesterliterature.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/very-well-placed.html

Have you ever found the answer to a creative conundrum in a writing workshop?