Tell us about yourself and what inspired you to start writing.
It was a gradual process, and one that wasn’t entirely planned. Having not excelled academically at school, I found myself pursuing an artistic path by going to art college, and it was here that I became interested in the world of creative advertising and ideas. It was also here that I teamed up with a good friend who was a skilled artist – far more talented than myself. And since we were advised to work as teams of art directors and copywriters, we took the view that I should become the copywriting partner while my other half would be the art director. And so it was that we would eventually gain employment in the advertising industry, and I would start to write copy for press advertisements and the occasional radio and TV commercial. This was back in the 80s when London was arguably producing some of ithe most creative advertising in the world. It was a fairly brutal world though. You were thrown in at the deep end and you either swam or sank. Fortunately for us, we swam, and did rather well, and I was able to hone my skills as a writer; skills that have served me well. Indeed, advertising is often cited as a very useful training-ground for writers and film directors. The late Alan Parker who started as a copywriter believed that his years in advertising were invaluable, and taught him to tell stories in a particularly short form. Most TV commercials are no more than 30 or 40 seconds in length.
I suppose writing was also something that I had always been reasonably proficient at, and was one of the few subjects at school that just came naturally. And going back to my school days, I had a very unusual and inspiring English teacher by the name of Clive Lawton. He was very charismatic and had an affinity with kids to the extent that he really was on our wavelength. He’d do the most extraordinary things and turn everything on its head. On one occasion he announced that instead of him marking our essays he was going to ask us to mark his, and then handed out old essays he’d written in the past. He’d often tell us that the syllabus was boring, and that we were going to ignore it and have a serious discussion about something fairly contentious like advertising and the blatant use of sexual imagery. The point of his lessons was to make us think and to convey to us the power of words. And by teaching in this wholly unconventional and radical manner, he not only gained the attention of every single child in that classroom. He also instilled a love of words and ideas. And as a result, every child in my class passed their O level exams, and nobody received anything less than a B grade. Later on when I started working as an advertising copywriter, my Creative Director, a man by the name of Ken Mullen was also influential. Ken was and still is a brilliant writer. He had two degrees in English Literature from Oxford University and is the only English advertising copywriter to have had his work quoted in the Oxford Book of Modern quotations. These included two headlines he had penned for The Times newspaper when he was working for Leo Burnett – ‘Our sages know their onions.’ And ‘No pomp. Just circumstance.’ He encouraged his entire creative department to immerse themselves in literature, cinema and the arts in general. But perhaps, more importantly, he wore his learning lightly and was incredibly funny and approachable. He was, in short, the best boss you could ever hope for.
On one occasion, he and his art director had created a press campaign for marketing real fires and fireplaces for domestic use; a campaign that revolved around testimonials by famous authors. Ken penned a simple headline: ‘Pictures I See in my Fire’, and invited various authors to write a long piece to fill an entire page of The Times newspaper. If memory serves me correctly, he asked a number and the first to accept the challenge were Frederick Raphael, the playwright, Charlotte Bingham and Beryl Bainbridge. All three pieces were eventually penned, approved by the client and cleverly designed like editorial pieces with a small photograph of each author sitting next to their open fire at home. Beryl Bainbridge’s auto-biographical piece about her childhood was touching and like everything she writes, absolutely captivating. The press advertisement went on to win a silver award at the prestigious British Design and Art Director Awards as the best written advertisement to appear in any publication that year. And I had the pleasure of sitting next to Beryl Bainbridge at the award ceremony. Had it been anyone else, I’m sure I’d have been too scared to utter a single world, but the lovely Beryl Bainbridge was one of those remarkable people that just made you feel at ease, so I ended up chatting away to her as if she was my nextdoor neighbour. The thing I remember vividly is that every few minutes she’d produce a notebook and take notes, occasionally asking how to spell a certain name or title. She explained that if she didn’t write down interesting details and observations, they’d simply evaporate like dreams. Looking back on that experience now makes me think that she may very well have inspired me back then to write something other than advertising copy.
It would take a few years, but then one day I began writing a story as an experiment. I had no fully developed story in my head and 15,000 words later, I simply came to a crashing halt. I had no idea where I could take the narrative, and it was put to one side until my daughter picked it up, read it and then nagged me endlessly to finish it. I never did. But a couple of years later I had an idea for a children’s book, and this time I spent some considerable time working on a detailed synopsis. At the time I was working at a large agency with the same working partner from college days, who had just decided to retire from the industry at the grand old age of 47. And at that time the agency was undergoing an enormous merger with another lumbering giant. Some bright spark at the time described the whole thing as being tantamount to the Hindenberg coming to the rescue of the Titanic. Anyway, the merger was an incredibly painful and time-consuming process. In fact, it dragged on for the best part of a year during which all work dried up and my creative director became ostracised and shoved to one side. Rather than just twiddle my thumbs I started working on my first work of fiction.
By the time I was eventually made redundant, all I had to remove from my office was a stack of laminated ads, a showreel, a Collins English Dictionary and a tatty manuscript entitled ‘Sleeping with the Blackbirds’, which made it into print the following year.
Describe your writing process? Is there anything unique about it?
I write on an old Chromebook around the house and occasionally out of the house, as well as on a PC with Widows 10 in my attic. I use Google Docs and Grammarly, which can be useful. I never play music when writing. If I did I wouldn’t get anything done as I’d find it too distracting. I’m a plotter rather than a panster. The plotting is the hardest part of the process for me and takes me an eternity. The writing is relatively easy. ‘The Chair Man’ my thriller took a long time to research, too.
Have you published any books or do you have a desire to do so?
My first book ‘Sleeping with the Blackbirds’ was written while I was waiting to be made redundant from an advertising agency going through a global merger with another agency. It took an entire year, by which time I’d finished the book. It’s an urban fantasy for children and young adults and is a hard book to pigeonhole. It’s a kind of allegorical tale that revolves around an unhappy schoolboy and a lot of anthropomorphic birds. In 2018 it was longlisted for the Book Viral Millenium awards and was selected the following year by the Indie Author Project for distribution to public libraries across the US and Canada.
My latest book ‘The Chair Man’ is a thriller. It’s set in London in 2005 and revolves around the central character of Michael Hollinghurst, a successful corporate lawyer who becomes a victim of the London 7/7 terrorist attack on the capital’s transport system. While most passengers in his train carriage are killed, Hollinghurst survives, but is left in a wheelchair as a tetraplegic. As a result, he struggles to come to terms with his predicament, and also suffers feelings of guilt as a survivor. As time passes, he also becomes increasingly angry, and harbours a very strong desire to seek retribution via the internet by posing as an Islamist radical with the intention of tracking down and deterring potential terroirists. However, this obsession doesn’t go entirely to plan, as both GCHQ and a terrorist cell become aware of his presence; and before too long, Hollinghurst becomes quite literally, a sitting target. I wrote this book because there are so few novels that feature protagonists with disabilities, and the idea of a wheelchair user gaining freedom and independence through the internet and then getting themselves on an incredibly dangerous roller-coaster that they simply can’t get off, was one that really appealed to me. So with this book, I set out to address a problem: this dearth of disabled protagonists in fiction, while hopefully conveying a compelling yarn. While some will admire Hollinghurs, his actions will always be morally questionable. And his recklessness in putting others at risk, as well as involving the computer skills of a child with autism, also have to be questioned. In this respect, I hope readers find ‘The Chair Man’ a thought-provoking read, while also being entertaining. Many readers have already said that they didn’t see the ending coming and were taken by surprise by the twist in the tail, which for any writer is obviously music to the ear. So on that note, I will let you judge for yourself.
Do you have any favorite poets or authors?
There are so many. P. G. Wodehouse, John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Jerome K. Jerome, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, John Irving, James Thurber, Harper Lee, Margaret Attwood, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, to just name a handful.
Do you have a favorite book of poetry or poems?
I read literary fiction, thrillers, historical fiction and biographies.
What are you reading now?
I’m currently reading ‘an Unmarriageable man. by Ashok Ferrey who I recently had the privilege of interviewing on my website.
What do you like to do when you’re not writing? Full-time job, pets, hobbies?
Gardening, reading, walking, watching films and listening to the radio (Radio 4 and Times Radio)
Are you working on a current project?
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