The award-winning author used to work as a journalist at the Bristol Post
Emily Koch, Bristol author and former journalist(Image: Barbara-Evripidou)
A Bristol author’s short story about a swimmer at Horfield Leisure Centre is to be aired on BBC Radio 4 later this month. Emily Koch, who was once a journalist for the Bristol Post and has since gone on to publish three novels, has written ‘Lane Seven’ following swimmer Jack who is unsettled when he spots his ex-girlfriend in the next lane at his local pool – despite her always claiming she was afraid of the water.
Emily, who lives in Bishopston and is currently finishing her fourth novel, will have her short tale aired in the station’s Short Works slot on May 22 and it will be available to listen back to for a time after that.
She tells BristolLive: “I was contacted by producers at BBC Bristol asking if I’d be interested in writing a short story for them, which was a really lovely surprise. It felt really nice that they were Bristol producers commissioning it and me, a Bristol writer, writing it and then it ending up on a national platform.
“I nearly said no at first. I thought, I’m not sure. Am I the obvious person to do this? But I’m glad that I did because it pushed me to do something a bit different.
“I quickly knew that I wanted to set it in a swimming pool. I’d probably been swimming that morning actually – it’s as simple as that and not a complicated process of inspiration. I go swimming at Horfield Leisure Centre twice a week and I do somewhere between 40 and 80 lengths and I felt it was a great place to set something like this.”
An actor has been cast to read the story, which will air at 3.45pm and will be available on BBC Sounds after that.
‘You see the same people but you never truly know them’
Emily adds: “There’s loads of sensory details – the sounds, the feel of the water – and also it’s such an interesting space because you’re surrounded by people but you don’t really interact with them. It’s not like going to a yoga class or something where you get to know people and chat to them.
“We don’t really stop and chat, it’s more kind of head down and swim. So there’s all these people that you see week in, week out.
“I don’t know if everybody else does this – or whether it’s me with my writer’s brain – but I end up inventing lives for everyone and coming up with what their stories are. Quite early on I knew that I also wanted the story to be about a relationship, partly because I don’t often write directly about romantic relationships. I felt like I wanted to do something a bit different.”
While Emily may see the same faces during her swims, and Jack may be based off of a face in passing, but she admits the tale of Jack and his water-fearing ex-girlfriend has come from her own ‘writer’s brain’. “There’s no particular person that I’ve seen that I’m thinking is other characters in this story, so it’s very much a fictional scenario.” She says.
“I think it really came from this idea around this place where you see the same people but you never truly know them.”
Emily, who has won awards for her writing, says that the story is in some ways both different and not so different to what she is used to writing. While the short story is obviously shorter (2,000 words compared to her most recent 102,000 as she works on her fourth novel) she says there’s a somewhat unsettled and uneasy feeling to the tale. And being a mystery fiction writer, this is what Emily does best.
Horfield Leisure Centre, on Dorian Road
“It felt like a really different muscle to be flexing, having to write a short story with far less words than my novels,” she goes on to say. “But it was really fun to do.
“I also found that my writing is usually quite a process for me – I think a lot of fiction writers face a lot of shaping and rewriting to get it right over a period of time and every now and then you get a chapter you write that comes really easily, but most of the time it’s a slog.
“But this story came in quite a fluid way and it just had that kind of clarity from the start that made it feel quicker to write. And that was a really nice feeling.”
Emily got into writing fiction towards the end of her decade-long career as a journalist at The Bristol Post. She was already working on a book but wasn’t finding the time and energy to commit to it. “In the end I ended up leaving and I went and did a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Bath Spa Uni,” she tells BristolLive.
Emily says she often thinks up stories for the people she sees in her daily life(Image: Barbara-Evripidou)
“I thought I’d give myself a proper year to do this and if at the end of that year I felt like it wasn’t working, I’d find another job. By the end of that Masters I’d written a draft of what would become my first book, ‘If I Die Before I Wake’.
“I put in the work, but I was also quite lucky that I met my agent while I was on the course in quite a serendipitous way. I just got chatting to someone at an event and then ended up sending the book to him when it was finished and he liked it. I ended up getting a publisher and here I am, three books in.”
Emily goes on to say that her experience in Journalism is weaved into her current writing. “Everything I write goes back to that time. The stories about ordinary people that you think ‘those things will never happen to me’, but as a journalist you learn through people’s experiences that they do happen to ordinary people.
“What I really like to write about is ordinary people who have their lives disrupted and how they deal with it. And this short story is kind of just a smaller version of that.”