about me

Since I began writing in earnest I have always found myself drawn to the darker aspects of the human psyche. Although my work is of course largely informed by my reading habits: J.M. Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Hoban and David Mitchell are all key influences, (so too are some aspects of modernist gothic literature, particularly Ian McEwan’s Cement Garden), I think also, and possibly more importantly in my development as a writer, was my experience of growing up in a small rural town in the post-industrial north, during the 1980’s.

Purely in terms of a visual palette, this period, this place is always with me. The disused factories, the blackened chimney stacks, the neglected pebble-dashed council houses, all these images permeate my writing, and indeed most of my fiction to date is set in and around the area of West Yorkshire where I spent my childhood. Yet the effect that these places, and that the people who live in them, have had on my writing, is far more complex than a simple geographical setting. What has informed my writing most is the hunger that these places nurture; the hunger to escape them.

Whether it was through alcohol, petty crime, violence or drugs, as a young man I saw how my classmates, and then my co-workers tried to escape their surroundings.

Everyone, yet particularly the young, seemed trapped.

Everyone, it seemed to me was seeking some form of release from the dark, oppressive moorland and those endless grey skies.
Throughout school and college, eager to find some way to explain what I was seeing, I toyed with music, film, poetry until I finally found my medium – prose. And so writing about people who were trapped became my form of release.

Not however, to say that the various other methods weren’t well and truly exhausted first of course - petty crime and drugs principally - but these means of escape were always pursued with the mind that they would only add to the richness my life experience, and so the art I wanted to create.

Quite by coincidence, it was while I was taking these first tentative steps towards finding myself as a writer, that my father made good his own escape. The morning I returned home from a party bleary eyed and hung-over to find he and his new girlfriend gone, and the house gutted, I have since realised has been the singular most important influence on the theme I now return to again and again in my fiction.

No longer simply escape. But also the abandonment such escape necessitates.

In No Love Lost, the novel I am currently working on, this theme is key to the lives of all of the characters. Centring on the relationship triangle between two brothers and a mysterious woman, all of whom have in some way abandoned or been abandoned by family members. John, the younger brother, for example, has been left to care for his invalid mother, while his elder sibling, Philip, has spent the past few years travelling the world, while Meredith, the woman who insinuates herself into their lives, and who ultimately leads to their destruction, was abandoned as a child, and grew up in a children’s home. It is the exploration of the respective guilt, frustration or blind anger resulting from this abandonment which informs how each of the characters in my novel interact with one another and which ultimately leads to their tragic ends. Each of the characters wants to understand why they have been abandoned, or have abandoned others. Yet for each of them the answer is different. For one character perhaps the answer lies in fear, for another madness, for another it is a question of self preservation.

In terms of how I actually write my approach has not changed much over the years, I have always regarded myself as a self-disciplined writer and generally try to write for at least an hour every day. I do see writing as a craft, and something which must be practiced and honed in order to improve, and I think this workaday approach to it helps me to become less precious and more professional in my perspective towards my own work.

In terms of how I actually express myself, I think my approach has changed considerably from my first juvenile forays into fiction - from the way I construct sentences, right down to the lexicon I choose to employ. When I look back now at earlier examples of my creative writing, much of it seems overly verbose, hyperbolic - above all too preening and self-conscious – to make for enjoyable reading.

These are all factors I am now always consciously trying to rectify in my current work. Now, if not in my life, in my creative writing, at least, I am aiming for simplicity. I want to tell the story in the most succinct, and if possible, the most visual way available. Here, my love for Cinema is of some value, for just as Fellini, Herzog, Tarkovsky or Hitchcock have done in film, I too want to use vivid images, albeit textual images, as shorthand in my stories. I want to show what I think, what I believe, what I see, and not explain it all away. Because it is in the showing, the experiencing, that for me, all good art, but particularly good literature comes to life.

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