One of my greatest challenges as Poet-in-Residence at the Daily Echo has been how to get the staff involved in what I'm doing.

At first sight you might have thought it would be easy. After all, these people are surrounded by words every day, and by stories. The reporters and other staff are often writing thousands of words a day related to the news that's going in the paper. They are obviously creative people, I thought. Surely they will jump at the chance to have someone in-house who can encourage and assist them in their writing. Surely there must be some writers in here?

I could not have been more wrong. All my gentle inquiries about whether people wrote stories or poems outside of work were met with a polite, if slightly shifty, silence.

One editor told me: "If you're writing all day for work, the last thing you want to do is write more when you get home."

I began to realise that words for a journalist are often just tools, ways to get information across clearly to the reader. They are a way of distancing the writer from the story.

Whatever doubts some might have about the creative input into some news stories, news writing is not an exercise in creative writing.

But as with many things, what was needed was time.

Time for me to be around the paper and the staff, for them to decide that I was not a floaty, woolly-headed poet type who might embarrass them with incomprehensible readings of my work, or ask them to write about their innermost feelings.

Time for me to prove myself as a half-decent journalist before they might reveal themselves as closet writers.

Time, and of course money. When I hit on the idea of offering a separate cash prize for staff, the interest level rocketed. For each competition since, I have received a small but perfectly formed handful of entries, the enthusiasm and quality of which has delighted me.

It may take a good 20 years of being poet-in-residence to get a flood of entries from this frazzled and possibly slightly sceptical bunch, but I consider it one of my greatest successes to have finally got some of them to show their creativity, and to have been able to reward talented and previously undiscovered writers like Malcolm Nethersole.