British author Fay Weldon offers creative writing tips

British author Fay Weldon, known for feminist perception and wit in her stories about marriage, modern life, and mores, wrote, by her count, at least eight novels during a three-day visit to the Storrs campus recently.

Weldon, the Aetna Visiting Writer in Residence for the spring semester, worked closely with 10 creative writing students, most of whom were writing novels.

An hour at a time, she wrote with them and showed them how to construct their stories.

“It’s a much simpler task than people teaching creative writing believe, writing novels,” said Weldon, who has written 25 of them. Her latest, She May Not Leave, will be released in the United States next month.

Weldon, who has been nominated for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize in contemporary fiction, is perhaps most widely known for writing the initial episodes of the television series Upstairs, Downstairs.

In a talk at the Dodd Center with English professor Regina Barreca, her friend and host, Weldon said she told the student writers to start out by getting away from “I.” They should start their novel with somebody with a name, somebody different from themselves, she said, and ask, “What were their parents like?”

“My impression of you,” she told students, “is that you all write phenomenally well.”

Weldon began as an advertising writer in London in the 1960s, working in what was then a wide open field, writing television commercials.

Weldon then decided she wanted to sell an idea, so she tried TV dramas.

She found that she could move stories forward through dialogue, and viewers would expect something to happen. She likened her first novels to television shows in which she did her own casting.