I think I'd agree. Writing a newspaper column is in many ways directly antithetical to writing fiction - you have to pretend to be more certain and opinionated about things than you in fact are, whereas writing fiction should be an exercise in uncertainty, a quest to discover what you think.
I'd say that journalism is second only to teaching creative writing as one of the contemporary enemies of promise for a young writer.
I like to think that I'm now too long in the tooth to be corrupted by the process - but I may be wrong. I am particularly fortunate in having an excellent, tough editor at Macmillan, Marion Lloyd. She certainly helped tighten up the text after I delivered it but it had already gone through four drafts by that stage so quite a bit of self-editing had already taken place.
I'm glad you were able to suspend belief - the story of The Angel Factory is rather strange but I wanted it all to be rooted in the real world. My novel Kill Your Darlings was narrated by a failed writer, eaten up with envy of his contemporaries. It seemed evasive not to set the book in the literary world that is actually there so I did use real names - for example, rather than inventing a successful novelist of about Gregory Keays's age as his fantasy-hate figure, I used Martin Amis.
I slightly regret this because commentators and critics in the self-absorbed literary world began to think of the book as a satire and it was even billed at one festival as a 'homage to Amis's The Information.
