Ten Questions with Adam Marek

Adam Marek

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

I’ve been writing since I was a kid. When I was 11 I was highly commended in the WHSmith’s young writers’ competition for a story I wrote about a witch that lived in a cave. I illustrated it myself with gold ink. I wrote a novella for a school project when I was 13 about a boy who could turn into a dragon. When I was 19, I started writing almost every day, working on a children’s novel and short stories and scripts – I have a stack a metre high in the attic that no one will ever see.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

From the meeting of new experiences with old preoccupations. I think that the more you write, the more your unconscious mind gets the idea that you want it to come up with original ideas, and so it works away at them in the background until it finds a pleasing combination of known things, which it melds to form something new and unknown. My unconscious most often delivers these very welcome parcels when I’m lost in mundane tasks – especially showering, washing up and driving. I have a crayon in the shower which I sometimes use to write ideas on the tiles.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

I’m very interested in perception and the mind, mutations, nature, monsters, sci-fi b-movies. There’s almost always something of my own life in my work, so I write a lot about parenthood and relationships, in combination with the themes I just mentioned.

4. Do you plan your writing?

Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. With short stories, I often just sit down and enjoy discovering the story as I’m writing it. Then I’ll plan and plot as I’m rewriting it, to make it work better. So with shorts, I’ll often come up with the raw material, and then apply structure to it in subsequent drafts. With novels, I work differently. A couple of years ago I made the mistake of starting work on a novel idea before I knew where it was going. I only had a beginning. I wrote 70k words before realising it wasn’t going anywhere and was fundamentally flawed. I had to abandon it. With the novel I’m working on at the moment, I planned it thoroughly. I know exactly where it ends up, but I’m allowing myself to explore new ideas as I’m writing it, and then replotting. It seems to be working okay so far. In one way though, every bit of work feels like the first time, and I approach it slightly differently every time.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

I get up at six in the morning and write for an hour every day – I have a day job and two kids, so this is the only way to get writing done. I always start writing with a fresh cup of tea (tea is the writing vitamin). I like Moleskine notebooks, and I carry a Spacepen in my pocket everywhere I go – I hope one day to actually get to use it in zero gravity.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

Haruki Murakami is the only writer whose books I’ll rush out for on the first day of release. I like Margaret Atwood, JG Ballard, George Orwell, Will Self, Ian McEwan. I have a lot of favourite books where I’ve only read one book by that author: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Perfume by Patrick Suskind, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Watership Down by Richard Adams, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

Someone who eagerly awaits my next book.

8. What are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel, half of which is set on the International Space Station, so I’m doing a lot of research as I write it. Right now I’m about 50k words into the latest draft. I’m not sure how many drafts I’ll write before I’m happy with it.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

I just finished Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, which was awesome. I read and listened to it both as a paperback and an audiobook, alternately. Midnight’s Children goes straight into my top ten favourite books. I listen to a lot of audiobooks on my iPhone so I can still read when I’m driving, walking, stretching. Right now I’m reading The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and listening to The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, edited by John Brockman – it’s a collection of 25 essays from leading scientists about their predictions for the next 50 years in different fields of scientific study.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Write regularly and relentlessly. Never think you’re good enough. Never give up. Don’t invest all your happiness in getting published – it can take a long time, and then right away you automatically invest your happiness in the next time you get published. Enjoy the process – its pains and its delights. Decide right now that you are a writer – it’s much easier to write knowing that you’re a writer, than trying to write as someone who wants to be a writer – confidence shows on the page, but be humble too. Enter competitions – deadlines are great motivation. Go to book festivals and see other writers read their work and talk about it. Read interviews with writers. Study their methods, then find your own. There’s a great quote in How Fiction Works by James Wood from Flaubert talking to Maupassant (and I’m not trying to sound wanky quoting Flaubert – I’ve never read Flaubert, it’s just a great thought): ‘There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has in it something which is unknown’. Find something unfamiliar in the familiar and show it to the world because we all want to see it.

Adam Marek’s debut short story collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize – the biggest prize in the world for a collection of short stories. His stories have also appeared in Prospect magazine and in anthologies including When it Changed and The New Uncanny from Comma Press, two Bridport Prize collections and the British Council’s New Writing 15. He is working on his first novel. A new short story by Adam can be found in Matter 9. Visit Adam’s website at www.adammarek.co.uk 

Ten Questions with Mike Harris

Mike Harris

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

Teaching at a Manchester Comp in the late 70s and running a big, mostly female school drama group with a colleague and friend. Lots of good girl actors, very few (none, actually) scripts with lots of good female parts so we devised and wrote a play about the militant suffragettes and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

The pressure to have ideas in order to sell scripts and maintain myself in the manner to which I have grown accustomed. Otherwise, from books, news events, etc., rarely if ever from my own life, which is too unutterably dull to wish to inflict on the world.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

Dunno. Is humour a theme? I think detecting themes and so forth is a literary critic’s job and I wouldn’t want to scab on them. Otherwise, how would they earn a living?

4. Do you plan your writing?

Yes. Planning is essential if you are working to a deadline and neither you nor other people involved get paid if you don’t deliver on time.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

An intricate and finely honed system of work avoidance which includes making cups of coffee, rolling and smoking fags, replying to unimportant e-mails and answering questions about my routines and rituals.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

In no particular order: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Austen, Sterne, Chekhov, Beckett, Joyce, Dickens, Doris Lessing, Evelyn Waugh – I could go on. One of the best recent novels I’ve read is Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

I’m a script writer, the only people who read my stuff are editors and producers and they do not inhabit the realm of the ideal. As for audiences: the one’s who turn on or turn up.

8. What are you working on now?

A play about gang violence for a TIE company. Think ‘The Wire’ for kiddywinks.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

Would you believe Derrida’s ‘Of Grammatology?’ Well actually, I just finished it. Not unlike mud-wrestling an octopus, except what an octopus would have to say while he squeezed the life out of your brain would be more sensible. My excuse is I’m doing a part-time PhD for fun, either that or I’m certifiable. Derrida is the very opposite of what any writing or thinking should be. Mystagogic, pretentious, opaque, untrue and buried deep within its own fundament.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Don’t listen to advice from weary old writers. But if you really must:

1. persist.

2. don’t listen to the praise or criticism of anyone you don’t trust enough to tell you that your work is crap when it is.

3. don’t give up the day job unless.

4. you instantly get a new one teaching writing part-time in a university.

Mike Harris is a scriptwriter and theatre director with something over 100 scripts broadcast or performed. These include radio drama, TV drama, professional touring theatre, theatre in education, youth theatre and large scale community plays. He teaches script part time on the MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam and has held writer’s residency at University College Cork, HMP Wakefield and The Lemon Tree Arts Centre Aberdeen. A script extract by Mike appears in Matter 8.

Ten Questions with Alison MacLeod

 

Alison MacLeod (photo by Kate MacLeod)

Ten Questions with Jane Rogers

Jane Rogers

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

I always wrote as a child, and had things published in school mags, university mags, and wrote for a regular performance evening at university. My first proper publication was a short story in Spare Rib magazine when I was 21. I wrote my first novel while teaching half-time; put it away for a year because I thought it was no good, then reread it and cut it by a third. I sent it to 2 agents: one rejected it and the other, Pat Kavanagh, took it on. She sold it the following week to Robert McCrum at Faber.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from? 

It’s random – sometimes things I’ve read, or conversations; often places are important (eg. Australia in Promised Lands,  and Raasay, in Island). Often the plots of existing plays or stories or fairytales are important (again, Island, where I took ideas from The Tempest, and used a number of fairytales, and based the plot itself on the fairy-tale idea of transformation.)  History is a good source for me too – both Mr Wroe’s Virgins and Promised Lands grew out of an interest in a particular historical moment or event.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

Yes, although I often don’t realise it is the same theme until I am well into the novel! I guess obsessions are relations between parents and children, or between children and parents (and there often seem to be lost, abandoned, or strangely powerful children); and idealism (that is to say, the effects of idealism, or of having a set of passionately held convictions, on the world of the protagonist. Thus an interest, in at least two of the novels, in colonialism).

4. Do you plan your writing?

Of course. But the plan is constantly changing and evolving as I work, so I am regularly dumping plans.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

Not really, though I know my best writing happens first thing in the morning, so I try to organise my working life around that.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, Charlotte Bronte, Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, Raymond Carver, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Taylor; and on and on. It is a bit random – I love reading and like different writers in different moods. Currently I am discovering Flannery O’Connor and loving her.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

No.

8. What are you working on now?

Just finished a novel, The Testament of Jessie Lamb.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

Flannery O’Connor short stories, and Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Always leave as long as possible between finishing a draft and rereading it; the longer you leave it, the more objective you can be when working out what’s wrong with it.

Jane Rogers was born in London in 1952 and lived in Birmingham, New York State (Grand Island) and Oxford, before doing an English degree at Cambridge University. She taught English for six years before the publication of her first novel, Separate Tracks. Since then she has written seven novels, original television and radio drama, and adapted work (her own and other writers’) for radio and TV. In 1994 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Work as an editor includes anthologies of new writing, and a reference guide to fiction. She has taught writing to a wide range of students, and is currently Professor of Writing on the MA course at Sheffield Hallam University. Jane lives near Manchester with her partner and two children, making occasional forays to Australia, where her family live. She published a short story in Matter 4.

Ten Questions with Maurice Riordan

Maurice Riordan

I started in my twenties at university.  But it proved to be a false start – and it was a long time before I regained enough confidence to commit to it.  That was in my mid-thirties.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

I’m not sure I have ‘ideas’ as such.  Or the ideas are very general and optional.  Poems start with a phrase perhaps, or just a mood.  And I start jotting things down, quite randomly.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

Time.

4. Do you plan your writing?

No.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

Cheap notebook, good pen, early morning start.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Bishop, Borges,  DH  Lawrence’s nature poems.  Only the last have I read recently.  I dip into a bi-lingual edition of Dante regularly .

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

No – but I hope someone still reads me 30 years down the line!

8. What are you working on now?

Just some new poems.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

Nothing specific.  Lots of random dipping into this and that, much of it stuff  I’ve read before.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Become intensely passionately involved in the work of several other writers.  Don’t bother trying to write yourself if you don’t have that capacity.

Maurice Riordan’s most recent collection, The Holy Land (Faber, 2007), received the Michael Hartnett Award. Previous collections, A Word from the Loki and Floods, were nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award.  Other books include A Quark for Mister Mark:101 Poems About Science and Hart Crane, which appeared in Faber’s ‘Poet to Poet’ series. Born in Lisgoold, Co Cork, he lives in London and is Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. Maurice has two new poems published in Matter 9.

Ten Questions with Toby Litt

Toby Litt (photo by Katie Cooke)

 

 

 

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

When I was about eleven, I had a very good English teacher called Monica Hetherington. I wanted to impress her, so I once or twice I showed her things I’d written outside the ususal class exercises. She was always quietly encouraging. In my last year at school, I gave her a poem I’d written called ‘Eloquent Flesh’ about Francis Bacon (the painter). When I asked her what she thought of it, she said one word, ‘Superb.’ She was a very good critic, and I trusted her opinion. Even though I knew she probably meant superb-for-a-sixth-former, it still meant a great deal. That poem was, at the time, the best thing I’d ever written. For quite a while I wrote almost nothing but poetry.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

From previous ideas that I want to attack, subvert, mutate, harass. From genres. From how-life-is.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

I try to keep these as unfocussed in my head as possible. Blurs are more interesting than lists. One thing that is fairly clear, however, is that I am fascinated with how people organize or try to organize themselves. So, couples, families, groups, meetings, crowds.

4. Do you plan your writing?

Some books or stories I plan minutely, others not at all. For Hospital, which had over a hundred characters, I had a scene by scene breakdown on the large noticeboard in my study. There’s a picture of it here: http://www.tobylitt.com/hplan.html. I play the drums in a band called okay came out very haphazardly, over a period of ten years, quite often when I was away from home. It was only quite late that I had a sense of how it would come together. As I want each book to be different from the others, so I try to write them in different ways, physically.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

No. I try to write as much and as hard as I can. I try to concentrate on each sentence intensely but within the flow of the developing story. If I think of a change, I make it quickly, even if I sense it’s a mistake, then I move on.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

Virginia Woolf. Samuel Beckett. Isaac Babel. Henry James. Muriel Spark. Gilles Deleuze. Paul Celan. James Joyce. Osip Mandelstam. Emily Bronte. This is getting to be like a MySpace box. And it’s making me want to go and read them. Of contemporary writers, I admire Niall Griffiths, Les Murray, Junot Diaz.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

Yes, any devoted rereader.

8. What are you working on now?

I’m going through the proofs of a novel called King Death that will come out in March next year. Also, I’m co-writing King Death as a screenplay with Gerald McMorrow. He wrote and directed the film Franklyn. Also, I’m working on a book that will, I hope, have a title beginning with L.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

I’ve been reading and rereading David Foster Wallace, particularly the things he wrote on tennis – ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’ and ‘Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness’. And, for the first time, his novel Infinite Jest. This, as you can imagine, is exhilarating and distressing in about equal measure.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Don’t be afraid of learning by imitation. Believing that you’re the real thing, right from the beginning, is one way of ensuring you never become the real thing. You will learn more from fully inhabiting another writer’s styleworld than by angsting out all over your own psyche.

Toby Litt grew up in Ampthill, Bedfordshire. He has worked as a teacher, bookseller and subtitler. A graduate of Malcolm Bradbury’s Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, he is the author of Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks, Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself, Ghost Story, I play the drums in a band called okay, Journey into Space and the forthcoming King Death. He is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist. His website is at www.tobylitt.com. Toby is published in Matter 3.

Ten Questions with Nicholas Royle

Nicholas Royle

 

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

I started writing short stories in the summer of 1983, which coincided with my appearing in a play written by Clive Barker. Clive was very supportive of my (very poor) early efforts and gave me the name (and more importantly the mailing address) of Dennis Etchison, who was putting together an anthology of horror stories. In the meantime I sold my first story to the 26th Pan Book of Horror Stories. (Actually my eighteenth story, but my first to sell.)

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

From places and people I know – and from my sick, twisted imagination.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

Abandoned buildings, Doppelgängers, identity, mortality, loss. I can’t seem to help it. All these subjects keep coming back.

4. Do you plan your writing?

Only up to a point, and never sitting at my desk. Only by going for a long walk can I plot, and then only a scene or two, or a chapter or two at a time. It has to be organic. It has to be allowed to change, or I’d get bored. It’s a process of discovery as much for me as for the reader.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

The long walk, the notebook, reading out loud.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

Dead: Derek Marlowe, an English novelist who flitted like a butterfly from one genre to another – espionage (A Dandy in Aspic), thriller (Echoes of Celandine), detective (Somebody’s Sister), psychological horror (Nightshade) – without ever settling in one, hence his never becoming a household name despite being one of the most beautiful prose stylists of all time. Alive: Steve Erickson, an American fabulist whose novels range over time (usually the 20th century) and space (mainly America) and take huge risks with narrative, meaning and form (not to be confused with Canadian fantasy novelist Steven Erikson). Short stories: William Sansom, an English short story writer and novelist whose beautiful lyrical syle was often brilliantly at odds with his dark subject matter. Also: JG Ballard, Franz Kafka, Anna Kavan, Shelley Jackson, David Rose, Cris Mazza, M John Harrison, Christopher Burns and many others.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

Just someone who gets it.

8. What are you working on now?

A novel called Either/Or. Every time someone asks me what it’s about I say something different, although not deliberately. And new short stories, all the time, mainly, these days, about birds.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

I’ve just read The Dump by Ellis Sharp. Now I’m reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Next I’ll reread Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. All first novels.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Read your stuff out loud. It still might not be any good, but at least you should be able to eliminate silly mistakes.

Nicholas Royle, born in Manchester in 1963, is the author of five novels – Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams (both Penguin), The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut (both Abacus) and Antwerp (Serpent’s Tail) – and two novellas – The Appetite (Gray Friar Press) and The Enigma of Departure (PS Publishing). He has published around 120 short stories; 20 of them are collected in Mortality (Serpent’s Tail). Widely published as a journalist, writing regularly for Time Out and the Independent, he has also edited thirteen original anthologies, including two volumes of horror stories – Darklands and Darklands 2 (both New English Library) – and, most recently, ’68: New Stories From Children of the Revolution (Salt). Since 2006 he has been teaching creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has won three British Fantasy Awards and the Bad Sex Prize once. His short story collection was shortlisted for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize. Nicholas is published in Matter 4.