If you’re interested in the creative process at all, you’ve probably come across a blog called The Creative Identity, run by Stephanella Walsh. It comprises great essays on the issues involved in writing. Stephanella also conducts interviews. This morning, there’s one featuring me.

Almost a year ago exactly, in my second Creative Times, I linked to a fabulous, if slightly perturbing, post by writer Ian Hocking. In it, he talked about giving up writing.

Later on:

Q: What is the writing tendency you most deplore in yourself?

A: I haven’t learned to fully switch off the Evil Editor on the shoulder. This is probably because I spent so long switching him on.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t like Life of Pi.

A: When do you feel satisfied that you’ve done enough research?

I: I don’t think I’ve ever felt satisfied with research. There’s always something that you’ve handled wrong. With specific regard to a novel, where you’re dealing with the representation of lived experience, there’s no way everything is going to ring true. A phrase might be wrong; or a train line that you thought was there in 1904 wasn’t built until 1910, or some such. I’d go as far as to say that if I ever had that feeling of satisfaction, I’d be losing my grip on reality.

CT: What’s next for Dr. Ian Hocking?

IH: I want to get a more important title. Vicar, possibly. Rear Admiral, at a push. Your readers can vote in the comments.

Reviews:

“I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stupid thing online. It’s a very bad idea, and there’s a lot of angry people in the world. And it’s weird to absorb all that weirdness.”

Structure:

“There’s this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn’t really interest me. To me, it’s kind of like saying, ‘Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.’ Well, you don’t. In other art forms or other mediums, they accept that it’s just something available for you to work with. I actually think I’m probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it.”

Fame:

He insists the Oscar means little: “I like having the trophy, but only on a very surfacey level does it mean anything. It’s just kind of a… Kerouac has a line about fame being a newspaper. You know that line? When I read that when I was a teenager, I didn’t know what it meant, but now… Fame doesn’t really fill you up in any way.”

A few days ago, I heard that Robert McKee’s Story is available as an audiobook. I read it as a teenager, thinking I’d be learning the ropes, and in a sense I did, but rather more because the points at which I disagreed with McKee forced me to think about what we mean by an act, or a scene. I’m still not sure.

► Laura Barton meets film director Charlie Kaufman | Film | The Guardian

[…] There was a launch party for the Macmillan New Writing imprint, and I met the reader who had pulled my book out of the slush pile. That was a great moment. She took the trouble to find me and congratulate me and say how much she had enjoyed the book. Needless to say, I was extremely grateful to her.

Back in the day, I reviewed Roger’s excellent Taking Comfort.

► The view from here: Interview with R N Morris — Part 1 of 2

This is what Val McDermid has to say about John’s books:

His characters endear themselves to us, and we care what happens to them. The writing is always quirky, never flashy, and … he leaves us wanting more of an engaging crew who feel like friends by the end of the book.

John is doing a blog tour to promote his latest book, and I’m happy to host him on the proviso he submit to an interview.

Can you tell us a little about the background to your book?

Background. I’d written and published six novels in the Sam Turner series, based in York. Tough guy PI, good on character and dialogue but a little hackneyed on plot. I was writing about Turner in real time and he was getting old. I know there are things you can do about that to keep a series character in circulation. But I wanted to do something new with the writing, and I’m also getting older and less and less reluctant to play games and run literary tricks.
I wrote a couple of novels with Stone Lewis at the centre — these were based in Hull, a little more down at heel — and Stone was considerably younger than Sam Turner and he wasn’t a PI. I was hopeful for him. The boy could’ve done good.

But again there was a soft-centre to the novels; something quite unfashionable, it seems.
In a review of one of those novels, Ann Cleeves mentioned that I was writing about kindness. And she was right, there weren’t — and still aren’t — many people doing that.

It was clear also (after 8 books) that I wasn’t going to be the next big thing in the crime-fiction arena. This revelation (for me) coincided with a tightening up in the publishing world, the beginning of that process by which the mid-list writers would be weeded out and replaced by proven best-sellers and a proliferation of first-time novelists who were thought, for one reason or another, to be promotable.

Winged with Death was born into this environment. I consciously decided to write a narrative which would respond to my strengths as a writer, to ignore any genre conventions or considerations, and to write only for myself. My immediate requirement was to experiment with a first-person narrative, something I had never attempted before in novel form.
Once I found the narrator’s voice I could begin the process of wedding together the thematic contents. These, initially, consisted of time — I wanted to write a novel about time — of dance and of revolution. With these ideas I felt I could begin to write. A dream gave me Montevideo — a place which had recently experienced revolution, or at least a revolutionary situation, and which, coincidentally was based on the River Plate, the birth-place of the tango.

You mention an increasing desire to run literary tricks¹. Which tricks did you employ in the new novel? Were some more successful than others?

Freudian slip there, maybe. What I meant to say was that I am more reluctant to play literary tricks. My aim was a clean rather than a tricksy narrative. I wanted the narrator to tell it how he sees it, both from a distance (Montevideo) and close at hand (York); bearing in mind that both memory and everyday experience, in different ways, are veiled for us.
It isn’t a trick, but Eliot is always there to remind us that all time is eternally present. And his concept of historical sense is, of necessity, present in some form in all creative writing. That being the case my novel references several long-dead writers, including figures like Scott-Fitzgerald and Faulkner, writers who have wormed their way into the crevices of my consciousness. I’m not going to name them all, or point out where they are referenced in the novel, and neither are the included references some kind of quiz. But the reader is supposed to glimpse them, often through, again, some kind of veil. They are more like grounding elements within the text. Markers, if you like, which point to where we may have been and the steps by which we have arrived at wherever it is we are now.

And something else, which also is not a trick, but something that all writers must constantly be reminded of, or that they must remind themselves about. And that is to trust the reader. Not to give the reader too much, either too much information, or too much description, or too much emotion. What the reader is waiting for from a text, is the stillness, the silence within it. What the text has to provide is just enough information, just enough clues for the reader to engage his/her own imagination. And no more than that.
So the narrative must include space, holes, gaps into which the reader can diappear. If that’s a trick, then I’m guilty.

You mention Scott-Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Is there an author who you could point to as the single greatest influence on the way you write?

I suppose Scott-Fitzgerald and Faulkner were both important. But I read widely from an early age and was impressed by many writers from all over the world. I devoured Zola and Maupassant as a teenager, and all those wicked (but Droll) priests and monks in Balzac. I loved the Russians too; Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov (still read those short stories now) and Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Mayakovsky and Yevtushenko. I discovered Isaac Bashevis Singer at a young age and read just about everything he published in his life.
Later came Knutt Hamsun, (who actually taught all of us to write) and Ibsen, and Strindberg.

Mark Twain carried over from my childhood into adulthood, and I think he’s the only one I couldn’t leave behind (maybe Robert Louis Stevenson as well?), and Huckleberry Finn is still, I believe, one of the most important novels I’ve read.
Later still there was Tennessee Williams, Erskine Caldwell, and there is still Carson McCullers, Joseph Roth, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Edward Fitzgerald’s translations of Omar Khyaam.

Along the way I brushed up against, fell in and out of love with, DH Lawrence, Dickens, Coetzee, Swift, le Carre, Orwell, Carol Shields, Larkin, Jean Rhys, Hardy, Willa Cather, Andrew Marvell, Beckett and Forster and Gragham Greene.
These and dozens of others, no doubt, left their imprints on my soul. But you only asked for one. It would have to be Hemingway, I’m afraid.

Afraid because I don’t read him these days. Not at all. I tried something a couple of years ago and couldn’t get on with it at all. Far too macho. All those terrible assumptions. We really wouldn’t have got on.

But during the formative time, for me, when I was learning the tricks of the trade it was Hemingway who told it as it was. It was as if he was talking directly at me. I could do no other but gobble up his style, his economy, his adventuresness with the language; how he could make it fit whatever it was he was trying to express. Deceptive, I know, and knew then, because behind the easy-going feel of his narratives I could hear an ocean of hard work — and, finally, he was an inspiration, able to reach out and make me sit in front of a an empty page and sweat.

Best of luck to John with his book. If you prefer to read with your ears, you can listen to John talk to Sarah Waters of the Yorkshire Post talk about Winged with Death, too. And check out John’s website.

This fine collection should prove thought-provoking and sad, musical and enervating. A kaleidoscope of lives, twisted but bright, and a worthy debut.

Tom’s new anthology is called Roof Whirl Away. It comprises twenty-six stories set in various times, places, and worlds. One of my favourite is ‘Tick Tock’, which begins with the line: ‘The crocodile took the man on a busy Sunday afternoon in the park.’

I asked Tom if he’d like to be interviewed for This Writing Life.

Shall we do an email tennis interview? Feel free to expand your answers into any random territory.

Okay, tennis.

How did you come to be a writer? Is it something you’d always wished to be, or can you trace it back to a particular moment?

It took me a very long time to start writing. Far too long, you’d have to say. I was just an ordinary kid raised on a council estate, a Secondary Modern boy. Writing wasn’t ever really an option. It wasn’t something that seriously occurred to me, to be truthful, although I’ve always been an avid reader. After I left secondary school I wrote the occasional letter and that was it. I didn’t knock out a succession of five-hundred page novels as a child. There are no exercise books filled with jottings, no secret diaries or journals. The attic isn’t packed wall-to-wall with my collected juvenilia. I didn’t write my first story until I was thirty-eight years old. I was doing a degree in English at the time and there was a large noticeboard in our student common-room and someone suggested starting a wall magazine. They wanted stories and I had an idea so I sat down and wrote the story. People seemed to like it and I wrote several more. Later, when I was offered a post-graduate grant to do an MA I managed to get on the Creative Writing course at UEA and that set me down the road I’ve travelled ever since.

Can you tell us a little about what it’s like to study a Creative Writing MA? Obviously, not all are the same, but what was it like for you? Which aspects of the craft can be improved in a teaching environment?

Malcolm Bradbury used to say that one of the most important things about a creative writing course is that it dramatises the notion of being a writer for the student. You’re there for a year and you’re treated as a writer by the staff and by your peers. This is very liberating and it gives you a heightened sense of purpose and worth. This was especially so for the MA at UEA, as it was the first one of note in the UK and hard to get on to. In my day, we just wrote what we wanted to and then took turns, two students at a time, to bring it to the writing workshop. It could be a complete short story or an excerpt from a longer piece or novel. There were no writing exercises or projects or formal lessons on technique or grammar or whatever as some people seem to imagine. Just our own writing. Malcolm would guide the discussion and make general points in a non-confrontational way. The workshops were tough sometimes, but never angry or less than objective. Other writers are always the best critics and bad habits are soon exposed. There was nothing taught on the course that wouldn’t have become apparent to us as writers eventually, but having the spotlight put on your work with a certain amount of rigour and intensity surely saved us a lot of time. The second part of the course took the form of one-on-one tutorials with Angela Carter. Angela was more confrontational, but still kind. You had to learn when to cave in on a bad idea or how to stick up for yourself when you really believed in what you were doing. I think what she really wanted was to instil a sense of commitment in us, a passion for writing and our own ideas.

That sounds like a fantastic start for a writer. You mention the passion for writing and for ideas. That, I guess, is the art. But there’s the business of writing too — the economic forces, the luck and the graft. Many people wouldn’t bother trying. How have you maintained your passion for writing?

Ah yes, the business side of writing, can’t claim to be a success at that. Without particularly wanting to I ended up as a short story writer. This in a country that has more or less given up supporting the short form. I’ve written two novels, but novels are not what I do well and quite rightly they haven’t been published. I now love writing short stories and I think you can do things with a short story that you just can’t do with a novel. There’s a focus and yet there’s also a kind of poetic discretion. A short story can move you and leave you thinking in a way a novel rarely can. As for maintaining a passion for writing, I wish I could say that I have always maintained my passion. The truth is, it’s been very hard to keep going in the face of a general disinterest from the publishing industry. Without a novel promised in the pipeline, short story collections are nearly always passed on by the major publishing houses and agents have no interest in short story writers. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of support and encouragement from the people who’ve actually taken the time to read my work. Also from UKA who published my first collection. But most importantly from my wife who has supported me financially.

Can you tell us a little about how the publication process works for a book of short fiction? One might think that short fiction is less likely to be re-shaped by an editor than, for instance, a novel. Did you find the process relatively straightforward?

Have to pass on this one as I’ve never been edited by a professional editor. With UKA I was edited by a fellow member and the latest book was published by my wife’s tiny publishing company (which mainly concentrates on re-publishing out-of-print works by Victorian novelist and naturalist Richard Jefferies) and she edited it. The only textual changes that were made in the editing process on both occasions were typos.

Can you tell us something about the creative process involved in writing your short fiction? Does it begin with a character, an image, a situation?

My stories are very varied and the ideas for them come in a variety of ways. The first person stories do often start with the character’s voice. You get a new voice and the story just evolves out of this. They’ll introduce themselves in some way in the first sentence and then, if you’ve got the voice right and you’re comfortable in it, you’re off and running, going who knows where. But images can trigger a story, the vision of a place you’ve been to or something seen in a film or TV, a place that seems somehow resonant, story-filled. Books can set me off on a story also, idea-wise rather than style-wise. I’m far too lazy to copy someone else’s style if it’s a novel and my ideas are usually very oblique and the thing that’s got me going is never recognisable in the finished story. I’ve also started with a situation and just plonked some voices down in it and created their characters on the wing out of what they say and how they interact. Once, and only once so far, I dreamt the first line of a story and then had to go on from there and find a way of justifying it. The main thing for me, as I never write directly out of my own life using actual people and events, is to trick the imagination into beginning to invent with some sort intriguing spark, something that will make me want to carry on and see where I’m going to end up. I’m always looking to go somewhere I haven’t been before, for a challenge if you like. Sometimes you start something and it simply doesn’t take off and you have to leave it. I couldn’t just write one sort of story. As a reader I don’t mind writers who go deep into one particular area or type of story, I like it even, but I can’t do that myself. I’d be bored and it’s just not something I feel or am good at. It’s important to find your own territory as a writer, I feel.

Thanks, Tom. You pick up a copy of Roof Whirl Away in various places, including Amazon.

Upon its release, Déjà Vu received something approximating critical acclaim.

Oh, stop.

(Continue.)

Note that Gary is quite right to point out that there is a free audiobook of Déjà Vu, but I’d advise you to skip it for the special edition, which is closer to what I originally intended for the book.

► Talking to Ian Hocking

So, I’ve got five copies of Nemesis to give away. Just add a comment expressing an interest below and I’ll put you in touch with Random House.

Incidentally, Jo has landed himself a Flash-tastic website. Check it out.

Like the German ö. Or the “o” in Peter Sellers’ pronunciation of “bomb” in the Pink Panther-movie.

How did you get started with writing?

I read. And Read. I basically postponed writing as long as I could, that was until I was 37. Then I started writing like a madman.

‘Nemesis’ is a Norwegian book translated into English. How do you find the translation process? Does it require creative input from the translator and, if so, do these decisions ever depart from the effect you were trying to create from a given paragraph or sentence?

I probably read as much English as I read Norwegian, but I don’t take part in the translation. Because in the end all I can do is trust Don Bartlett. And I do.

The novel ‘Nemesis’ has the concept of memory loss at its heart. In thrillers, this is often linked to questions about identity, and the difficulty of accepting the darker side of a person’s character. How did this become so central to the book?

I think the question whether true evilness exists – whether it’s an antisocial gene, a response to upbringing and culture or something we simply need to survive in certain situations — is a central theme in all my Harry Hole-books, but maybe especially in “Nemesis”.

I’ve not visited Norway, but in bookshops in Iceland, as well as several in continental Europe, I was struck by the greater shelf space given to translations of American and British fiction. Do you find Norwegian bookshops supportive of native authors?

Definitely. Norwegian and – for some reason — Swedish writers dominate the bestseller lists in Norway. Sometimes accompanied by an American writer or two.

One of the aims of this blog is to document the creative process. Can you describe a little of your writing routine?

Not really because there isn’t such a thing as a routine. I write anywhere, anytime. And when I’m supposed to write I often find myself doing other things …

You’re a musician as well as a writer. How does writing differ creatively from your music? Do you find them competing for your attention?

Music for me is more like taking things out of the air, I don’t really have a method. Writing is about dreaming things up, using your imagination and instantly knowing whether you’re onto something. Writing music has taken the back seat to writing fiction now.