PAUL Sayer, once a literary star, was working as a cleaner at a secondary school in York. “Being a writer they gave me the English department to clean,” he says, dryly.

Here was a man whose first novel, The Comforts Of Madness, propelled him dizzily skywards, but now he was mopping out a room where writers and literature were discussed.

He never told them who he was because he couldn’t think of a way of bringing the subject up – “Hello, I’ve come to empty your bins and I once won the Whitbread Book of the Year award.”

Before that, he did a seasonal spell at Rowntrees, which he didn’t much enjoy. The girls working the line with him suggested he try cleaning, and he ended up doing two hours in the afternoon at Huntington School for two or three years.

All of which seems a long way down from the previous highs. Paul wrote The Comforts Of Madness, published 22 years ago, when he was a psychiatric nurse at Clifton Hospital in York. After his novel won the Whitbread prize, Paul, still working as a nurse, was propelled into a strange, different and undeniably exciting literary world.

Looking back, was he surprised by the success of Comforts? “It was very short, only 134 pages,” he says. Yet a remarkable book had found its moment, it happened – and a fluctuating writing career was born.

Paul enjoyed the ride and why wouldn’t he? He says now that it was like riding a rocket without any steering. Not that he goes in for steering, being a non-driver.

So he lived out the good years. “It was a living,” says Paul, who is 54 and lives in Haxby. “You don’t make as much money as people think you do. But it was okay for ten or maybe 12 years – perhaps 14 years.”

Five more novels followed and the last, Men In Rage, was published in 1999 to little acclaim.

“The literary world had changed, it was not the same one I had started with… I was not part of it, the celebrity novel was pushing people like me out.”

He pauses and then mentions sales, which weren’t great for Men In Rage. Your interviewer apologises for not having read the book. “That’s all right, no one much did,” says Paul, in that deadpan way he has.

So there he was, a writer who no longer wrote, cleaning the English classroom as the only work he could think to find.

He quite enjoyed the job, but he was struck by how awful the kids could be sometimes, how badly they could misbehave – and yet grow up nicely a few years later.

One day at school, pupils broke in, vandalised the place and, in the process, hurt one of the cleaners. Paul remembers a real mess, blood spilt. This upsetting incident set in motion the idea that became Like So Totally, a strikingly convincing first-person novel about a teenage girl’s assorted rites of passage in Scarborough.

“I was getting rejections by the pile; it seemed like no one wanted me much,” says Paul. “But while I was at that school, I had a sea change in my head, really.”

He began to think about adolescence, exploring the idea of why some teenagers behaved so badly, and yet mostly grew up all right in the end. Such contemplations on adolescence led to Like So Totally, which is published by Solidus on Wednesday.

Originally, he was going to write about a boy, then he had the idea of a heroine instead, and so Jessica Lovely was born – blonde, bolshie, beautiful and convinced she has foreseen her own death (“It’s the summer that I die” are the book’s opening words).

“I thought it would be more interesting to write about a girl. Girls getting in trouble – I don’t remember that from when I was a lad. I didn’t want to do the stereotype thing and have her living in a sink estate. I made her quite middle class.

“Adolescence is a transient phenomenon. Someone can seem quite vile but it passes when you grow up.”

As for Jessica Lovely, he got on with her immediately. “The voice was really easy. I like this character – I like her a lot.”

And he certainly puts her through the experience mill, including assorted initiations, lesbian sex, rape and being left for dead, and then imagines her life as an adult, before returning to the sour flats of adolescence.

For two years, Paul has been working part time as the Royal Literary Fund Fellow to the Environment Faculty at Leeds University, and the students he sees there are mostly fine young adults – “whereas only a couple of years earlier, they were being odious”, he says, speaking generally rather than in particular.

The other main character in his novel is Scarborough itself. Paul and his wife, Anne, a nursing manager, have had a holiday home there for years, a caravan above the old football ground.

“It’s like a second home,” says Paul, who grew up in South Milford and has lived in York since he was 18. “It’s a very charismatic place if you step back a bit, with its two bays and the castle…”

The seedy grandeur of the seaside is fully explored in Like So Totally, adding to its appeal.

As a writer who had been up and down the contours of success, Paul was grateful for receiving a Wingate Foundation scholarship to help him write the novel, which has been picked by More4 as a book for summer.

Along with lots of others, says Paul, dampening down his own enthusiasm.