Mike Gayle, author of 'The One That Got Away' - Romance award-winner discusses starting loose, being pigeon-holed, and novellas
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike Gayle is a prolific author. He's published 20 novels, many of which land on the Sunday Times Bestseller List, and has been translated in over 30 countries. He was the first male writer, and writer of colour, to win the Romantic Novelist Association's Outstanding Achievement Award. He's back with a new novella called 'The One That Got Away'.
It tells the story of Reuben and the love of his life who is getting married... only to someone else. He has a day full of activities planned to take his mind of the wedding, only when a phone call changes everything, he must face the truth about what he's trying to outrun. It's a novella written for Amazon's 'Original Stories' imprint, and was the perfect place to put this small seed of a story he was mulling over. You can get a copy here - https://shorturl.at/khaDI
Mike's career started as an Agony Uncle, and writing for teen magazines during the 90s and 00s, in their pomp. We discuss how writing for such a specific audience made him learn key secrets for writing novels.
You can hear what else he has learned in a 26 year long writing career, why his chair tells a lot of stories, how his collection habit distracts him, and what he thinks about being pigeon-holed as a 'romance writer'.
Find more of Mike's stuff here - uk.bookshop.org/shop/writersroutine
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome along to a brand new episode of writer's routine. This week we're chatting to the prolific Mike Gale, published 20 novels which have been translated into over 30 languages. You can hear why through all of that time it's his chair that reminds him how hard the work is. |
| 0:27.6 | That chair is evidence of me turning up every day. And I think it's just a really beautiful reminder. That's how you write a novel. |
| 0:38.5 | You turn up every day. |
| 0:40.1 | It's not about the amount of, you know, it's not about you putting in whole days and |
| 0:45.3 | trying to write the, you know, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 words in a day. |
| 0:51.0 | It's just about turning up regularly and doing your little bit. |
| 0:56.0 | And if you keep turning up and if you keep doing it regularly, sooner or later, you're going to find yourself typing the end. |
| 1:03.0 | And we get into why he's quite particular about how it looks. |
| 1:07.0 | When it comes to fonts, I am a real stickler, so it has to be Helvetica. It can't be |
| 1:14.9 | anything else. I feel really distracted if something is in a different font. I can't quite say why |
| 1:24.5 | I find Helvetica is so pleasing, but it's the only one that I will write in. |
| 1:30.3 | And I write in 12 point, double spaced as well. |
| 1:34.3 | And again, for me, that's what a written page looks like. |
| 1:39.3 | And if I see anything else, it just throws me completely off. |
| 1:48.0 | It's all on the way in a brand new episode of Writers' Routine with Mike Gale. |
| 1:55.9 | Yes. |
| 1:57.2 | Welcome along to the show. |
| 1:58.7 | My name's Dan Simpson. |
| 1:59.7 | This is Writers' Routine. |
| 2:01.2 | Thank you so much for bearing with me through the last week, mini hiatus. This week we're with Mike Gale. We try to get to the bottom |
| 2:07.5 | of his writing day. We uncover where, when and how he does things. Now, Mike's career started |
| 2:15.4 | in journalism, starting out with Agony Uncle columns and |
... |
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