Emily, who I mentioned in an earlier post, has been writing since an early age and started her blog last year. She came into my Birkbeck journalism class a month ago and told us all a little of how she ended up in print. This post should have been written soon after her visit, but the computer has been on the blink. Emily was introduced by our lecturer as ‘Emily Benet, who went out there and did it’.

The Shop Girl blog centres around the comings and goings in Emily’s mum’s south London chandelier shop where she works. Emily ended up working in the shop for a lack of anything else to do after she dropped out of the well-known creative writing course at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She originally intended to stay in the shop for a year, but ended up staying for three.

At first Emily hated working at the shop, she hated the long stretches of inactivity and the weird people who kept coming and bothering her. These odd-balls include the woman who insists Emily buys antique jewellery, and the man who tries to sell her copies of The Guardian with all profits supposedly going to ‘the children’ or ‘the church’. Not only did they annoy her, they didn’t even buy anything.

In common with many people in their 20s, Emily was plagued by the idea that she was not in a ‘proper’ job. Surely, working in retail is no way to live one’s life. For six months she broke free and got a job in an Estate Agents, but it didn’t last. After returning to the shop, she escaped again to take the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course and then taught English to foreign students. Again, this was unsatisfactory and she ended up back at the shop.

Despite being stuck in the graveyard of her dreams, Emily had plans. Although she didn’t enjoy the UEA course, she was still passionate about writing. It started when she was a child, and by her teens she’d had a first short story published and even won a writing prize. Now her spare time was spent writing a novel, Painting Pears.

After almost three years of hard slog on the book, Emily took a trip to South America. Getting away gave her the space to see the book was no good. Now, looking back she can see why. Working in the shop had made her fed up; this anger affected her writing: “I hated the first character and the first character was me.” she said.

A new approach was called for. Rather than plugging away at a book in her garret, Emily decided to start a blog. She already had a website, where she posted her pieces from various creative writing courses. However, to get a readership a website needs regular updates, so a blog seemed a better idea.

As a blog needs a topic, the obvious choice was the shop. She wrote the first post in early July, 2008. Somehow the writing wasn’t so tough this time, it started to flow. Although Emily was still working in the small chandelier shop, now her strange customers who used to annoy her now made great copy. Base metals had been turned into creative gold. Luckily, she says, the anecdotes and quotes stay in her head, so she doesn’t have to take notes, but she added that it would be difficult to find time anyway.

At first only her family and friends read the blog and left comments. A turning point came when her brother advised a bit of internet marketing and in particular to use Facebook’s community building possibilities. She joined various writing groups on the social networking site, and wrote about the probability that shop was going to close down (”it always is”, she says now) on her local community forum SE1.

Soon Shop Girl was getting more visitors and comments, which, of course, was great. The internet marketing campaign didn’t just bringing in interested readers, but interested parties. Soon after the post on SE1, which had also mentioned her passion being ‘not lighting, but writing’ she was contacted by a local film director who was looking for ideas and asked her to write a script. That was back in October, and the pilot episode was filmed the weekend before she came in.

One of the Facebook groups Emily joined was for Salt Publishing. This small publisher based in Cambridgeshire got in touch in January and asked her for a book synopsis. “My first thought was that perhaps all Salt fans were asked to write a synopsis” she said. The company liked the synopsis and so began her path to becoming a published author.

It was only six months after Shop Girl started, and Emily had two projects on the go. She wrote in her free time: Getting home around 6 o’clock, she’d write after dinner from 8 to 12. To write you have to make sacrifices, reckons Emily: “you can’t have a lovely tidy house, for instance, and have time to write a book.” Luckily, her boyfriend is tolerant, although she does have Sundays off.

An advantage of working in the shop is that it is a practical rather than mental job, so even after a physically tiring day Emily still has the energy for writing. When she’d worked in TEFL, the teaching was exhausting, and preparing for the lessons was a worry that sapped all her mental energy.

It’s obvious that having a good subject is a great strength of the Shop Girl blog, but Emily reckons that “blogs don’t need to be what you know, but how you tell it.” A successful blog must have regular posts, although Shop Girl has shown that once a week is enough. It’s also important to include images, Emily gets comments saying ‘I didn’t read the blog, but I really liked the picture of …’

Most bloggers would probably agree with her when she says that she enjoys getting comments. There was however one very negative one. A furious Facebooker fulminated: ‘you are one of the most uninteresting and mundane people I’ve ever encountered’, and raged ‘no wonder you people lost the colonies’. Whether Mr Irate meant the British or Spanish Empires, (Emily’s dad is Spanish), or both, is unclear.

For those who are considering a blog, Emily thinks its best to put your worries aside and just do it. Although on occasional quiet weeks, she has had to pull out a story from her vast memory of goings on in the shop, on most nights it’s a matter of “sitting there until you’ve got something on the paper.” For her, it’s habitual: “I was the kind of girl who had to do her homework before she could go out and play.”

Initially she was bashful about introducing herself as ‘a writer’ to strangers at parties, but now she’s even made business cards marked ‘writer’. But as bookshops can return books at no charge to themselves for up to a year after they receive them, it’s now up to us to read Shop Girl Diaries.