What is your favourite childhood book?
Magician, Raymond Feist. I loved this book, and would finish it and start reading it again in the same sitting. I read loads of fantasy when I was a kid and although I never really thought it was something I wrote about now, I realised it has influenced my writing in subtle ways; for example the Apprentice Thief is about a young boy who travels across a vast distance to find his mother. During his trials and adventures, he becomes a man. So I wrote a good old fantasy quest without realising it!
What have you written to date?
I have written 5 novels, but the first two were write offs. Then I wrote The Mirror Game, and another novel which I need to work through again, although I am fond of it, but not in love with the ending as yet, and The Apprentice Thief.
What are you working on at the present?
I’m writing a slightly darker one about a schoolteacher who moves to a remote Canadian community to build a school. There is a murder, and he ends up being accused if it. The story is then about him clearing his own name but also finding the real killer.
What genre do you write?
Ha ha good question! I tend to think story first and the benefit of not having a publisher at present is I feel I am free to try a few different genres. Broadly, there tends to be some sort of mystery or crime involved, but I like it to be unusual, for example The Mirror Game is about a reappearance of a man thought to be dead in the trenches of WW1 but he turns out to be rather more sinister than when he left.
What made you decide to sit down and start something?
I have been a working musician for years and the process of making music is similar. The difference I suppose is with music you create a shared world, in which you all create part of it. With writing you create the world and you pretty much have the final say in everything! At some point maybe not even consciously, I decided to try writing and I loved the fact it was musical, that I could improvise with words like I did with music, but only had to sit on my sofa to do it! The process of improvisation is not making random things up, but rather using a set of ideas, a language made up of experiences, daydreams, all those bits and pieces that collect down in your subconscious that you can then draw on to create stories. So you could say I’m still trying to make music just in a different way.
Do you work to an outline or plot or do you prefer to see where an idea takes you?
We have an idea which largely forms in our heads. The writing process is nothing to do with typing but what happens up there in Poirot’s “little grey cells” when we are driving, eating or whatever. The reason I don’t like the panster/plotter idea is that it over simplifies a very complex and beautiful process: everyone is a panster ie they have an idea which forms into a book, and everyone is a plotter ie they take that idea and hone it and shape it until it becomes the finished article.
Do you think the cover plays an important part of the buying process?
Absolutely essential. It’s the first thing a potential reader sees and gives them a clue as to whether they are going to like this book. It’s a bit like smelling a lovely meal cooking. You think ‘I’m going to really like this.’
How long do you spend on research before starting your books?
I am terrible. No time at all. If I have a good story, then I go with that and research along the way. I then make notes after the first draft and delve deeper into whatever I need to.
What is the hardest thing about writing a book?
Getting the story down and not losing heart at about page 100, you know that point when you start thinking’ I’ve got about 3/400 pages left to write and I don’t know what the hell is going on.’
What is the easiest thing about writing a book?
Weirdly, the same. I love the process of writing, and can write something even if I have 10 mins.