1 - I love telling stories, and TV was where I first learnt how to do it. The first TV drama I ever worked on was EastEnders, whilst I was still a publicist. I took a gang of the cast, including Dean Gaffney to Paris where they were filming a World Cup special and wished I was working on the scripts instead of buying Campari for journalists!
Eleanor Moran
2 - Soon I got my break. I was a script editor on ITV's Where The Heart Is, helping the writers to hone their stories and story lining the whole series. Then I got to work on an ITV adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, giving me an incredible opportunity to learn how to re-shape a novel into TV. Little did I know I'd be adapting my own novel a few years later!
3 - After that I spent many years at the BBC, making my way up to executive producer. I worked on all kinds of shows from Spooks to Being Human to Rome. I was still in denial about wanting to write myself, but I worked on a series of biopics about authors. I came up with the idea of doing a drama about Enid Blyton, heroine to millions of children but a horrible mother herself. Helena Bonham Carter came on board to play the lead, and the show got an International Emmy, amongst other things. I also did the queen of romance, Barbara Cartland, starring Last Tango's Anne Reid. The budget for pekinese dogs was off the scale!
4 - My chance to write myself was a real moment of divine intervention (I'm a bit woo woo!) A friend dropped out of a residential Arvon writing course and offered me her place at a knockdown price. My life was in turmoil at the time - my longterm boyfriend and I were agonising about whether or not we were in it for the long haul. The dilemma turned into my first novel, a bittersweet rom com called Stick or Twist. I got an agent off the back of the first 10,000 words, and then I felt I had to finish it. I was lucky enough to get a two book deal, and ever since, I've been juggling TV and writing with varying degrees of success!
5 - I used a TV set as the backdrop for my second novel, Mr Almost Right, a story about a girl who is at the bottom of the pile, working as a lowly costume assistant and falls in love with the (married) leading actor on a downmarket period drama. I loved having the chance to use all the little details that I take for granted after years working in this environment and it was great fun to write an actor as a deeply flawed hero.
6 - My third novel, Breakfast In Bed, was set in a restaurant and featured a young female chef. I hung round the River Cafe listening to outrageous stories about chefs shutting each other in the cold store until they had hypothermia and turning the air blue with their insults. The BBC optioned it (so exciting!) and I was commissioned to adapt it with the production company behind Poldark. I'd left the corporation by then, and was spending a few months in LA writing before I took up my next TV role. Writing a script turned out to be so much harder than I'd thought, and I had even more respect for the incredible screenwriters I'd worked with over the years. I had to 'kill my babies' and come up with new plot twists that weren't in the novel. It didn't ultimately get made, but I'd still love to have another go at a script when I have time.
7 - My new novel, A Daughter's Secret, is the most suitable for adaptation of them all and I cannot deny that knowing that contributed to my decision to write something with a more investigative plot. Mia is a young psychotherapist who specialises in working with children. When angry teenager Gemma steps through the door - the last person to see her father before he went on the run and took a major criminal trial down with him - she vows she'll keep away from the details of the case. But Gemma's dangerous obsession with her father touches on Mia's own troubled history, and when the police start pressuring her to feed back information, the lines get dangerously blurred. There is talk of adaptation already and I would LOVE to see Mia on our TV screens. This time I won't go anywhere near the script!
8 - I love creating kick ass female heroines in my own novels and in my work as a TV executive. I run a drama department for a thriving production company, and I am constantly trying to think of cool new premises starring memorable women. A couple of years ago I came up with the idea of a show centred around a female judge and it became Lawless with Suranne Jones. Since then, I've become obsessed with creating more law shows thanks to my incredible criminal barrister friend, Caroline Haughey, who I met as a result and became the inspiration for Suranne's character Lila. She's helped me with a whole host of other ideas, including an atmospheric 50s set legal show, as well as designing the complex crime plot in A Daughter's Secret. And who is the love interest in the novel? A police lawyer of course!
9 - It sounds pretentious but I have to 'find' a character in order to be able to make them live and breathe in a story. By the time I've finished a novel, I could tell you what they would do in any ridiculous scenario you might throw at me! Sometimes I have an actor in my head who I think could embody them to help me do that - when I was writing Breakfast In Bed, Kevin McKidd was front and centre in my mind. Chefs are sensitive and macho all at once - it's hard physical work but you have to love flavours - and I was watching a lot of Greys Anatomy, where he played an ex-trauma surgeon (very sexily) at the time.
10 - One joyful part of my job is that I have to watch an enormous amount of TV. American agents send me DVDs of new shows, and I trawl through the upper reaches of the Sky planner for titles that have smashed it over there but we haven't necessarily heard about. Story is story - watching The Affair recently really made me think about how to tell a complicated love story and keep your readers invested in flawed characters. I love shows which aren't crime formats - Nashville, Veep, Brothers and Sisters.
A Daughter 's Secret by Eleanor Moran is published 6th August by Simon & Schuster, price £7.99 in paperback