Why I wanted to write about women at work

Meet Liz Lyon: Respected TV Producer, Stressed-out Executive, Guilty Single Mother… This sums up the dilemma of my leading character Liz Lyon very well. I was keen that in WOMAN OF THE HOUR, my third novel, I would put the focus on women in the workplace.

Most of us spend so much time at work but I haven’t seen much fiction in this area. Many books depict women as mothers and lovers, with the focus on our home and our emotional lives. I’ve seen much less fiction about a woman struggling with the pressures of work. Yet that had been my life. A lone parent and a working mother, trying to keep all the balls up in the air, feeling conflicted about competing pressures. I wanted to explore that.

I worked in television for 15 years, first at TV-am and later at WestCountry TV mainly in features and live TV. On Good Morning Britain I was one of the team who booked the guests for Anne Diamond to interview and I would write research briefs. I got to meet some fantastic people and some distinctly less pleasant celebrities but it was all heady stuff. Television is a seductive industry to work in. You feel you are at the centre of things because you hear about news and showbiz events early and it is difficult to give this up.

But it is also a burn-out industry. You are expected to work until the show is ready. The hours are never nine to five or even predictable and this made it difficult for me as a lone parent. I left my career in television when my daughter Amelia was nine.

My heroine Liz Lyon is 41 years old and divorced. Her daughter Flo is 14. Liz took on a big mortgage so that she and Flo could have a decent home. She is stressed but she needs the good pay she gets at the TV station:

‘Most of the time I feel lucky to have my job but it is at moments like this when I think about leaving the station. I’m on a good salary and I need it to pay my huge mortgage. Golden handcuffs, it’s called, being paid so much money that you feel you can’t leave your job.’

Liz Lyon is someone who often can’t say what she means because she has to manage and soothe the huge egos at work. Her inner voice is different from her outer behaviour. A television station often has a feverish atmosphere, even more so when the shows are live. Live TV is more dangerous than pre-recorded TV, less easy to control. When it does go wrong the presenters and producers experience a surge of adrenalin and feelings run high. I try to capture this in the novel from the moment when a guest won’t come out of Make-Up because her hair looks awful to the scene where a prominent politician tears off his mic and storms out of the TV station. Liz Lyon is left to pick up the pieces.

The novel is also about power struggles at the workplace. Liz has a power-crazed boss. She realises that sometimes in order to survive it’s not about doing the right thing, it’s about doing the smart thing.

WOMAN OF THE HOUR is published by Head of Zeus.

Here I am conducting an interview for TV-am.

This piece first appeared on http://lauraslittlebookblog.blogspot.co.uk/