Interrogating John A A Logan, a man with a big back-list just waiting to get out.
How do you strike the balance between
writing something you want to write and writing something that people want to
read, in terms of the compromises you make, if any?
I try to only
work on stories that genuinely excite and surprise me, as I move along through
them discovering what comes next. As long as I have that element of delight and
discovery in the story, I feel there’s a fairly good chance of carrying readers
along as well. When I edit, if something feels wrong, or is inconsistent, I
remove it, all in the effort to improve the story. Trying to get deeper into
the heart of the story as a book goes on, and removing any impediment to that.
I spent several years writing material that I would call “private writing” or
“practise writing”, which no-one is EVER intended to read, before I moved into
a phase in the seventh year of writing where most of what I produced was
publishable in the form of short stories which I sold. So I always had a clear
distinction between writing that was only for myself, and writing that was for
other people. Bit like the difference between a diary and fiction. Fiction
seems to be a more high-octane kind of writing, it takes off as though
jet-propelled. I’m in the 23rd year of this writing process now, and
I still separate the “private/practise/diary” writing from the fiction. I know
I’ve hit the fiction/story/novel area of writing, which is for public
consumption, when a piece of work seems to take off, accelerate and assume a
life and driving energy of its own. There’s a unique excitement that comes with
that work as well, which tells you this is something other people might want to
read too. That doesn’t mean it won’t need a lot of editing and controlling,
though!
What excites, attracts or appeals to
you about the genre(s) you write in.
So far I’ve written fantasy, thriller, supernatural,
science fiction, psychological, noir, war, social realism, literary fiction,
allegory, speculative, spiritual, magic realism, espionage…lots of
love/romance/relationship elements in the mix sometimes too (some of that was
published in paperback anthologies, some in ebooks, and some of it is in my
“backlist”, not quite out there as epub yet, but on the way!). I think this got
started when I loved short story writers and novelists from all those genres,
and also film-makers like Stanley Kubrick whose voice and style remained
recognisable whatever the genre or subject matter he was working in. So each of
those genres excites me, but also the freedom to move among them is important
too. It’s always the process of the story that excites me I think, following it
through to its own proper conclusion whatever the subject matter. I enjoyed
very much doing a thriller like The Survival of Thomas Ford, but equally I
enjoyed adding layers of psychological complexity to the characters as the
story evolved, and then letting nature, or even the magical/mystical spirit of
nature, encroach more and more on the story and on the characters as the book
reached its conclusion. Comedy too, finding the vein of humour in even the
darkest moments, and vice versa. In my new book, Storm Damage, there are ten
stories of varied genre: science fiction, a suspected witch in an English
village just after World War One, a bombing raid over World War Two Dresden
that turns into a ghost story set in modern India…another story about a pig
meeting a wolf on a hillside and having his life changed…so it may be that what
excites me is splicing together the DNA of these different genres like a mad
scientist! Perhaps somebody should stop me before it’s too late!
Do you have a box, drawer, folder etc
where you keep thoughts and ideas for future stories? Such as names you have
come across, bits of dialogue, ideas, characters - even if you have no idea
when you might use them?
No, so far I keep it all in my head. I know that is a bit
odd! Many of my favourite writers did keep notes and plans on index cards
etc…or work on novels in sections. I was at a talk about 14 years ago by the
novelist, Bernard Mac Laverty, who wrote Cal and Lamb. He said he had tried to
keep a notebook for story ideas but then he would be in the flow of writing a
story and that he felt it was wrong to “lasso” those notes into the story, it
just felt wrong to him. I know for many writers it works well, but for me it also
isn’t the right thing. I just keep moving forward with a given story, and trust
that it’s all there in the subconscious somewhere, dialogue, characters, ideas,
ready to come out when I need them. I know Robert Louis Stevenson worked the
same way (in fact, before sleeping at night I’ve read that he would knock his
pillow three times and invoke “the brownies” to come to him in his sleep and
give him the idea for his next story…then he’d wake in the morning, a new idea
mysteriously come to him, and there would be the new book, ready to get on with).
Graham Greene also wrote about using the subconscious this way. He’d read the
work he’d done that morning, last thing at night (if he was sleeping in his own
bed, he said!) and let his subconscious work on the material while he slept,
then as soon as he woke in the morning he would write the next 500 words
(exactly 500) of his story. And he would do that every day until the book was
finished. Even Hemingway would go to write in the morning, dipping into what he
called “the well”, being careful not to empty it, always leaving something
there for the next day’s work. So, it seems for some writers it’s external
folders and notes etc, for some others it’s the subconscious used as an
internal “folder” to draw on, and I’m in the second group. I also don’t write
in sections, or “parts”, as I know some people do. I pretty much start at the
first word, and write straight through to the last. Graham Greene had some
phrase for that process I think, something like “the last words of a novel are
written in the subconscious mind before the first words are ever put to paper”.
But I know that way of writing doesn’t work for everyone. One of my favourite
writers, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’s author, Robert Pirsig,
would keep his ideas building up on index cards for several years before
beginning a new book!
How do you manage plot bunnies (ideas
that invade your mind that aren’t usually helpful to the story you’re writing
but breed like...er...bunnies)?
Ha ha! Plot bunnies, yes, dangerous wee creatures indeed! I
do have a technique for them, having had a couple of books sabotaged by them
over the years. I stop after the first 50 pages/10,000 words of a new
manuscript, and I go looking for them. Usually they aren’t hard to spot (the
long ears and fluffy tail hehheh). I take them out then. Every 10,000 words
moving through the book I check for them again, just to make sure they don’t
succeed in turning one of my books into Watership Down 2. With The Survival of
Thomas Ford, it was very lucky I did a 10,000 word anti-bunny check, because
there was a sub-plot about corrupt Free Mason Police Officers transferred from
London Met to the Scottish Highlands, which I was really enjoying doing, but
under scrutiny I spotted that I would never have been able to control/do
justice to that unnecessary sub-plot in the full run of a long book, not safely
and surely anyway, so instinct told me to cut that one from the book.
How much of you is in your
characters? Which of your characters is the you that you’d most like to be? Or
be with ?
That’s really difficult. It reminds me of the story Kirk
Douglas told. He wrote his autobiography about his own life and his son,
Michael, didn’t seem to think much of it. Later, Kirk wrote a novel, and his son
said about one of the characters in it, “That’s you! The autobiography isn’t
you! That’s you!” So the mind is always playing these tricks, hiding from us
who we “really” are etc…other people can recognise us better. Then again, if
I’m writing from the subconscious, perhaps some of me is in every character, as
well as some of every person I’ve ever met. There are some stories though where
it is definitely “me” in a story. I tend to not let on which ones those are
though! I wouldn’t mind being The Airman from Storm Damage…he gets to fly
around in the sky at high speed, his moustache buffeted by the wind, and at the
end of the story he gets a pretty good shot at “going home” with his old
friends, though “home” isn’t very clearly defined. The characters I’d most like
to be with, at least for the night, are the talking wolves at the top of the
hill in The Orange Pig, from my book, Storm Damage!
Do you become so wrapped up in your
writing that your spouse wonders if they're married to you or one of your characters?
I’m
unmarried, but there are certainly one or two people who’ve let me know I spend
far too much time on the computer, or engrossed in the latest
book/characters etc!
What type of book do you like
reading? Is it the same genre as you write?
My earliest favourite books were by John Steinbeck (I loved
The Pearl, Of Mice and men), Stephen King, Peter Straub (The Stand, The
Talisman, Ghost Story), Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle), Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest. My all-time favourite books are: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The
Master and Margarita; John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces; Giuseppe
Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard; Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Notes from
Underground, Crime and Punishment. A Green Tree in Gedde by Alan Sharp. Cain’s
Book by Alexander Trocchi. Most of Milan Kundera’s novels. Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig; Hunger by Knut Hamsun. I found The
Master and Margarita on a bookshop shelf by accident, noticed the cover, read
the back (Satan comes to 1930s Moscow with a talking black cat and a naked
witch, turns the city upside down) and had to have that book! Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger I might never have heard of except a friend found it at the local
library and told me he thought I’d really like it. So my reading is a
hodge-podge of lots of writers I’ve come across by accident or rumour over the
years…and they’re all very different kinds of writers from various genres…films
have also been a huge influence on me, from Kubrick mentioned earlier, to
Celine and Julie Go Boating (French 1970s film with magic and humour); The
Green Ray (French again! Young woman seeking love); Bergman’s films; Equus; The
Pawnbroker; Far From the Madding Crowd; Midnight Cowboy; Deliverance; One Flew
over the Cuckoo’s Nest; The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Local Hero; The
Offence; The Man Who Would be King…………and now there are the indie books I read
like Cally Phllips’ The Threads of Time…..Reb MacRath’s Nobility……Roz Morris’
work, Linda Gillard’s……right now I’m reading the great Stu Ayris’ Bighugs, Love
and Beer, looking forward to finding out what a “nadger” is! …….In general, I
love thrillers, comedies, supernatural, fantasy, psychological…….so all those
genres seem to pop out when I write…and sometimes hybrid versions combining elements
from all the influences!
What lengths do you go to to convince
us readers that your book has the X factor?
Hmm…one of the characters in my new book Storm Damage,
talks about the Z Factor! I’ve only been epublishing for 9 months now. And I
only have two ebooks out. I’m conscious that I need to tell readers my books
exist, and what they are about, but that I mustn’t go on about it too much,
particularly as I’m just starting with the ePublishing. I think maybe it’s
important to let a reader decide for themselves if they feel that, for them, a
book has the X factor. And maybe the writer should stay out of it, and not
imply in any way that they believe their own book has the X factor! I did come
into this though, nine months ago, with quite a lot of belief in my novel, The
Survival of Thomas Ford. But that didn’t come from me thinking the book was hot
stuff. No, after 21 years work, I’d had a London literary agent sign a contract
with me for the book, telling me it was one of the best he had ever read. Then
he gave it to the film consultant who had discovered Slumdog Millionaire and
she told my agent that The Survival of Thomas Ford was the best book she had
read in the last 4 years. That film consultant phoned me for a total of 11
hours in 2011, discussing all the things she wanted to do with The Survival of
Thomas Ford. Then several publishers were found in London who said they loved
the book, but when it came right down to it they did not buy the book. My agent
and the film consultant blamed this on the recession etc. It was clear to me
though that they still believed totally in the book. So, with my agent’s
blessing I took the book to epublishing and then to kuforum.co.uk in January, and
the Goodreads UK Amazon Kindle Forum. I think I came in pretty strong, making a
lot of noise about how good the book was, but this confidence really came from
how good the literary agent and film consultant had been telling me for over a
year the book was. Anyway, thanks to kuforum and the Goodreads UK kindle forum,
The Survival of Thomas Ford succeeded in the epublishing sphere (winning a
Special Award recently in the Best of the Independent eBooks Awards) so I am
very happy about how it has all gone and have high hopes also for my new book,
Storm Damage. Storm Damage is a 200-page book containing ten stories, and I
have a confidence boost for that book too, as one of the stories from it was
previously published by Picador in New Writing 13, a paperback anthology edited
by Ali Smith and Toby Litt that was distributed/sold in most countries of the
world, from Japan to South America to India, to USA and UK. My story shared
space in the book with stories by Muriel Spark, David Mitchell, Fay Weldon etc.
So I suppose what I do to convince readers, is tell them stuff like that when I
can! But then they have to make their own mind up, and that’s the most fun,
finding out what readers really think. The Survival of Thomas Ford has 43
reviews on Amazon UK now, 36 of them are five-stars. So, thank-you readers!
How do you feel when a reader points
out the spelling mistake(s) you have made?
I thank them and then go and fix the mistake!
What do you like most about visiting
KUF/forums?
I think it’s brilliant that there is such a place for
authors and readers to go and interact! I remember in February there was a
thread on KUF that went on for 3 or 4 days, intensely debating the relative
merits of genres, it just grew and grew, and I still remember it now which says
something! I was really excited turning up there the other day with my new
book, Storm Damage. (Then Joo helped me out by setting me up with clickable
covers in my signature, which look brilliant, thanks Joo!) All through this
year, whenever I had some news, if I went to kuforum with it I was encouraged
or congratulated by readers and by other writers. If I had a problem or wasn’t
sure about something, I’ve found advice there too, from people who really know.
One thing I’ve never been clear about, was kuforum.co.uk set up by just one
guy, Lou? I’ve never talked to Lou on there, but if that is the case, that is
quite an achievement, considering Goodreads UK Amazon Kindle Forum and
kuforum.co.uk are THE main UK places we e-readers and e-authors can meet. So,
congratulations and thank-you to Lou! (And Susanne, and Chitma, and Kaska, and
to all the others there’s not room to list here!)
What is on your near horizon?
Ah…well, now that I’ve published Storm Damage, I have to
get a special synopsis of The Survival of Thomas Ford done which my literary
agent wants to take to film producers. Then I have to finish my sixth novel,
which again will go to my literary agent who will send it out to the London
publishers. At the same time, I have four more novels ready to go independently
through the epublishing route, but in each case I’ll want to tinker with them a
little bit more before publishing (perfectionist streak, not very healthy!) And
on the very near horizon there’s an Alliance of Independent Authors meeting in
Inverness, Scotland, on 28th September which I will be attending,
that’s another helpful organisation for us “indies”!
Where can we find you for more
information?
Thanks Joo, I enjoyed my interrogation there!
