Last night, in a warm and welcoming space at the top of Foyles book shop on Charing Cross Road, a group of us ‘Escalatees’ got together to read our work to an audience of family, friends, and industry professionals. (Pics to follow shortly.) This Showcase is an annual event that rounds off the Escalator Literature ‘year’ (more details here), and it’s fair to say that it’s loomed fairly large in all our minds for the past few months. To help with the collywobbles Writers’ Centre Norwich very kindly supplied us with a performance workshop a week earlier (taught by the super-talented Aoife Mannix) to equip us with the necessary skills. And for one writer at least (by which I mean me) it was a revelation.

As a kid I loved acting. I even trod the boards for two years in panto at Norwich Theatre Royal as one of the Central School ‘Babes’ (back in the day before ‘babes’ had acquired its saucier connotations), and I still remember the joy of the jingling brown envelopes on payday. (Yes, jingling. Not rustling. It wasn’t a hugely lucrative career.) But the part of myself, all pale and quivering, that sits hunched and bleeding at the keyboard (to paraphrase Hemingway) had always been Land’s End to the John o’Groats of that kid who loved acting. They’d never so much as set eyes on each other. So when Aoife suggested that we might perform our work, rather than read it – that we might, God forbid, use gestures – I had a bit of an epiphany. ‘I write to be read, not heard,’ I’d told my fellow Escalatee, Mary Nathan (you can read her fantastic work here), rather pompously, as she gave me a warm-up coaching session. And, yes, that’s still true (the page is what really matters to me), but as The Writer moves ever further from the Graham Greenish creature of fifty-odd years ago to the all-singing, all-dancing festival stars of the 21st century I suppose it can’t hurt to have your inner actor and your inner writer exchange a sweaty-palmed handshake at last.

Unless, of course, you happen to be a poet nominated for the Forward Prize. In which case, maybe don’t bother…