1. How do you handle writer's block?
To be honest —
badly. That said, simply because you can't write doesn't mean you
can't do other things that revolve around your writing. At this
very moment I've reached a creative crossroads 17000 words into
what I hope will be my fifth novel. I've already scrapped 10000
words and rewritten the thing once and I'm rather keen not to have
to start again. The last time this happened — after the first part
of The More Things Change
— I literally had to move onto another project (the short story collection)
and wait for me to realise what direction the novel needed to go in.
2. Have you ever put yourself into a story?
There is a school of thought that all writing
is biography and it's one I agree with but it's chewed-up,
out-of-sequence, pink-tinted and unrecognisable by the time we
get finished to it. The closest to me, me on a bad day about ten
years ago, would be the Jim Valentine you meet in the park at the
opening of The More Things Change
but he's nothing like who I am today. That said, I could easily
become him again.
3. Write about what you know. What do you say?
No one has ever said that to me and I certainly have never said that to
anyone. I would qualify that statement: write about what you think you
know. Writing, for me and I would imagine for most writers, is about
discovery, as you start to search for the right word you investigate your
feelings, opinions, memories, you focus and concentrate in a way you likely
never have done before so be prepared for what you uncover. Plans are all
good and well but Burns had it right when he wrote:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley.
Nothing I write goes to plan. It's perhaps saying too much to suggest that
the book takes on a life of its own but sometimes you end up taking the
scenic route on the way to your goal.
4. Do you have any traditions associated with writing?
No, no gimmicks, routines or anything like that. I usually write on a PC
but if I wake up in the night I'm just as likely to grab a notepad or a
few sheets of typing paper.
5. Which of your books would make the best movie?
I'd have to say Living with the Truth.
Truth is such a disarming character. I've always seen him as a young
Paul Nicholas
(Cousin Kevin from Tommy), a charmer.
6. What character from your writing stays with you the most?
Jonathan Payne strangely enough. Even though there is more of me in
Jim Valentine, Payne — pain, get it — was a rite of passage for me.
I had not written a word or even had a passing creative urge for
three years and everything went into this sad little man.
7. Is starting a new book difficult for you?
No. I could start a new book every day. I've
never found the blank page intimidating in the least. Direction is
the problem for me. With the one exception of Milligan and
Murphy
I've never known where my characters will end up. Their journey is as
much my journey.
8. Do you have a recurring motif that appears in your books?
All my protagonists' names begin with the letter J and the action
always starts on a Tuesday. The J is a vanity thing since they're
all bits of me.
9. How much research do you do for a novel?
Loads. Thank God for the internet. I check everything. Some things
come easy, some not. Finding recipes for crow took a bit of time
and I never did find out the going rate for a prostitute's services
in Ireland in the thirties so I gloss over what I'm not sure about.
I think it's important to get your facts right.
10. What writers and/or novels influenced your work?
Finding out too much about a writer can be a bad thing. For a long time
all I knew about Philip Larkin
was that he was a librarian living in
Hull
and that was fine. Reading Andrew Motion's biography certainly
filled in the gaps. That said, Larkin was the first writer whose work
grabbed me by the collar. One day I will get round to his novels.
I was tremendously influenced by One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was the first novel I bought after
leaving school, the first grown-up book I ever read. I admired its
brevity and its punch line blew me away. I make a point of re-reading
the book ever ten years or so. For a long time my writing edict was:
say what you have to say and get off the page but slam the door behind
you.
The first writer I
met was William McIlvanney
and I have always had a great
affection for both the man and his writing. It was reading
Laidlaw
that showed me that a poet could write a book.
The big discovery for me was Samuel Beckett of course. I own everything
of significance the man ever wrote and have enough books about him to
fill a shelf. I have seen or listened to every play. As I grow older I
find that what concerned him in later life also preoccupies me, the
inadequacy of language to properly convey what we want to another human.
11. How would you describe your philosophy of writing?
Writing does not need a plot but it must have
a point. The point often reveals itself through the process of
putting words on paper. In Living With the Truth it's
that it takes time to get to know things and longer to understand
them and, by the time you do, there's no time left to do anything
meaningful with that knowledge; with The More Things
Change
it's our inability to change who we really are, all we can do is
embrace it, and, with Milligan and Murphy, the priest summarises
the point to that book when he says that there are no reasons for
unreasonable things, so stop looking for them.
12. Do you have any advice for authors looking to get published?
Be honest with yourself. Nothing I have ever written is going to be a
best seller. That doesn't mean what I've written shouldn't be read but
my expectations are realistic. When I was sixteen I was happy enough
to pay to get my first poem in print. I knew it was an act of pure
vanity and could live with that. The Web fills a similar fuction these
days. There are so many places online where you can find stories and
poems but I wonder who reads them. Even back in the day when my poetry
was appearing regularly in small press magazines in the UK and the USA
I was still a bit cynical about the whole market but maybe that says
more about me.
Getting published is a lot like writing. There is a place for natural
ability, for learned techniques but nothing beats pure luck. That said,
if you keep what you've written in a drawer, then either you already
know how good you are or you'll never know.
13. Can you describe your typical writing day?
Working full
time means that you write when you can. The hardest part by far is
getting the first draft down, the skeleton. Some writers, like
Jeanette Winterson,
start with too much material and trim away, I,
on the other hand, start with a basic story (e.g. Milligan and
Murphy leave home for no good reason, have no idea where they are
going and end up on a boat which will carry them to their future)
and graft on details. Once I have an idea I will tend to work at
it for every free minute, in the early hours of the mornings and
all weekends, just to get what I find the boring bit out of the
road. After that I'm never working on more than a paragraph at a
time, often a sentence, sometimes even a word. I once worked out
that I had devoted an entire day to the first sentence of
Living With the Truth.
14. Who are your heroes?
There are men and women doing their best or having a go and all
credit to them, there are people I'm glad have lived — in addition
to those already mentioned,
Woody Allen,
Richard Brautigan,
René Magritte,
Philip Glass, the members of
Pink Floyd — but I'm afraid
I take the same stance as
The Stranglers, there are no more heroes
anymore.
15. How do you choose the name's of your characters?
I've never sweated over any character's name. In one case all I had
were the names of the two protagonists. As I left work for work one
morning, I crossed over the River Clyde and the following line popped
into my head: "Milligan and Murphy were brothers," and that was it. I
had no idea who they were, what they would become but I knew this was
the first line of my fourth novel.
Of course, virtually every character in
The More Things Change
is named after someone in Beckett, even the cat and the dog.
16. Should popular fiction be taught in schools?
Everything possible should be done to
encourage children to read, yes. All Hail the divine
J K Rowling.
I don't think reading is dead yet. Writing on the other hand is
suffering and will continue to unless grammar is taken more
seriously. I was lucky, in Primary 6 we had to endure a year with
Miss Stirling who devoted an entire year to teaching us how to
break down sentences into their component parts otherwise, to this
day, I still probably wouldn't know what an adjective or a pronoun
is. I still struggle with punctuation but that's mainly because I
think in very long sentences. And don't get me started on texting.
17. Why use inkblot-style images for your book covers?
My father sent away for a memory course back in the sixties and the main
thing I remember to this day was the way it focused on visual memory.
When you walk into a book store the first thing you are confronted with
is images, hundreds of them and everyone judges a book by its cover no
matter what they say. I wanted something on the covers which would make
them both unique and familiar at the same time. Simplicity was the key.
I had always been struck by the early covers of the
Iain Banks novels
alternating from white on black to black on white.
That said the image on my homepage is based on the most bat-butterfly-shaped
image but what we did was overlay this on top of an actual butterfly to
provide what I hope is a very striking image.