Thomas Fletcher was born in 1984 in Worcester, and has since lived in Cheshire, Cumbria, Wakefield, and Leeds. He is married and currently lives in Manchester. He is the author of several short stories, published in anthologies Parenthesis (by Comma Press) and Before the Rain (by Flax). His short story The Safe Children was published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press.
Tom’s debut novel, The Leaping, was published in April 2010 to great acclaim. The novelist, lecturer and Dr Who scriptwriter, Paul Magrs, described it as ‘a literary, literate horror novel’. Tom’s second novel, The Thing on the Shore, is due out in Spring 2011.
A range of recent reviews and interviews are available at Tom’s blog at www.fellhouse.wordpress.com.
If you would like to hear Tom reading from his work you can on:
Wednesday 12 May, at 7.45pm, with Nicholas Royle at The Storey Institute in Lancaster. (£7.50, £6.00 concessions).
Tuesday 25 May, at the Word Soup publication launch, at the New Continental in Preston.
Wednesday 26 May 2010 7.00 at Waterstone’s Deansgate, MANCHESTER. (£3 – redeemable against price of the book).
Saturday 5 June 2010 12.00-2.00 Waterstone’s, Fishergate, PRESTON.
KM. Hello Tom and congratulations on the publication of your stunning (and chilling) new novel.
TF. Thank you!
KM. You are only twenty-five now but I know you have been writing since childhood. Can you tell us a little bit about when you began writing and what your influences were?
TF. I started writing when I was a child purely because I loved reading so much. I think it actually struck me as a possibility when we got a computer; when I could make words that appeared as they actually do on the pages of a book. I used to sit at the computer for hours; I would start novels but never get further than the first page. I had so many first pages.
KM. Have you attended writing classes or workshops?
TF. Yes, and they’ve all been invaluable. I went to a weekly workshop run by ‘New Writing North’ in Whitehaven when I was doing my A-Levels, and then went on to do a Creative Writing Degree at the University of Leeds. Getting feedback in that way – honest, full feedback from other writers – is so important; if you don’t partake in classes or workshops or courses, then it’s very difficult to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of your own writing. I don’t believe any writer can genuinely assess their own work – because if you don’t think it’s very good, you either rewrite it or scrap it don’t you? So all of your finished pieces – you must think that they’re OK. And that means you need at least a second opinion, if not a third and fourth.
KM. I couldn’t agree more. I think it is so easy to be overwhelmed by self-doubt if you don’t have constructive feedback from peers to help you improve. Do you belong to any writing groups now?
TF. I do, yes, and we meet up regularly to workshop. We’ve just formed, and it’s the first group I’ve been a part of since university, and it’s great.
KM. You have a day-job; is it a silly question to ask if you would you prefer to write full time or do you like the routine and non-literary influences that an ‘other life’ provide?
TF. I would love to write full-time, in all honesty. I don’t write in order to make a living – I write because I can’t imagine not doing it, because it’s an absolute compulsion – but I would like to make a living out of it. And I think it would benefit my writing if I could focus on it to a greater extent. Also it would mean that I had more time for researching, publicising, that kind of thing. Right now I try to fit it all in and I don’t get enough sleep.
Other influences are very important, having said that; if I wrote full-time then I would definitely spend more time pursuing other interests that I currently don’t have time for.
KM. The Leaping is a Werewolf story. I didn’t realise I was a fan of scary books but I loved The Leaping and found it particularly rewarding because has wit, a burly sense of place and is rich with references to local folklore and legend. Can you tell us a little bit about your research process?
TF. My research process for The Leaping came from a conscious decision to go back to folklore, to the roots of the myth, as opposed to using genre tropes from the many, many werewolf films and stories in pop culture. I mean, that was a tempting option, because I am fascinated by pop culture, but I knew that looking at the actual folklore and the local legends was a more surefire way of sidestepping the clichés.
Once I had made that decision, it was just a case of reading books about the subject matter that I was drawing on. I read as I wrote; I didn’t have a plot planned out in detail when I started, so I let my research inform the plot as I went on. I read books and I read articles online as well. I found much more material in print than I found on the internet though, which surprised me for some reason
KM. Your characters are complex and believable. Can you describe your approach to character development? For example, do you consciously set out a personality profile for each individual in your stories? Are some characters based on real people?
TF. Thank you. I made sure I had an idea of all of the characters when I started, but I didn’t have any full profiles. As I was writing certain scenes, I thought about how the characters would react or behave, and let them completely dictate the sequence of events. And that really was key to their formation – once I’d finished the first draft, and I knew how things would go, I could go back to the start and rewrite sections in accordance with the way the characters behaved later on.
I haven’t consciously based any characters on real people… maybe certain aspects have been influenced by real life though!
KM. So, to some extent, plot is driven by character?
TF. Definitely. The characters have to come first. For me anyway. Otherwise I feel that they become devices just used to carry forwards a plot, and so less believable.
KM. You don’t think any of your friends (or not-so friends) might recognise themselves in your stories?
TF. Not completely. If they do, it might be that they recognise aspects of themselves. In fact that is probably quite likely. Because I want the characters to be identifiable; I want people to feel that they know people like that.
KM. Oh yes, I certainly feel that I know people like your characters.
The Leaping is told by two first person narrators; this is a very effective device. Their voices are distinct, partly because of the nature of their preoccupations and partly because one relates in present tense and the other in past tense (the shifts are very effective). Is this shift in narrative mode something that you experimented with as the novel evolved?
TF. Definitely. I switched the tense numerous times, even after I’d finished the whole thing. (That is an absolutely huge job, and a tedious one). Originally it was all in present tense, then all in past tense, then they would talk in different tenses, then one would start in past and finish in present… yeah, I experimented a lot. Part of why it happens is to differentiate the voices, and part of it is for dramatic tension, and part of it is to do with character; Francis, who narrates in present tense, is more reactive and spontaneous, for example.
KM. I’m glad you’ve referred to the hard graft that goes into redrafting. Sometimes those of us who would like to write well don’t appreciate just how much reworking goes into effective prose.
Right, sex. Sex scenes are often considered difficult to write and easy to make risible. The Leaping contains several sex scenes (and I didn’t feel like laughing derisively at any of them). Did you find those scenes any trickier to write than other sections of the book?
TF. In a sense, yes. I found that the trick was not to think of them differently to any other scene. Although that shift in attitude is tricky in itself, because you know that these scenes have the potential to be massively embarrassing.
One of the major themes of the book is the relationship that people have with their bodies, and the fear we have of our bodies being, in one sense, just objects that can be damaged or broken. So bodies are dealt with in quite a matter-of-fact way, and that extends to the sex scenes too.
KM. Can you tell us a bit about you’re the writing projects you are working on at the moment?
TF. Currently I am pre-occupied with my second novel, The Thing on the Shore. I have ideas for a few more novels too, but between finishing the second one and starting the third I want to write some short stories for anthologies that are coming out over the next couple of years. One for a book of ghost stories, one for a book of Lovecraft-inspired fiction, one for an anthology about birds, and one for a non-thematic anthology. I’m quite excited about contributing some material to ‘Other’ magazine as well, which is an online community that has not yet been launched. Keeping busy...
KM. I am looking forward to The Thing on the Shore being published, good luck with your other future projects too.
You are clearly a committed and focused writer. What is the single best piece of writing advice you have received? And do you follow it?
TF. The best writing advice I’ve ever heard (not given to me personally) is simply to write. It is so easy to not get round to it, and to procrastinate. In fact I would say the hardest thing about writing is just making yourself do it, especially when you’re not happy with what you’re writing. But you have to keep on writing in order to make your writing better. It won’t get better if you leave it for a few months and then come back to it. It will just be the same.
So yeah – write. Partly because your writing will get better as a result, but also because the chance of writing that amazing piece you always wanted to write will massively increase if you spend more time writing. In short: to write good stuff, you have to write through a lot of not-so-good-stuff.
KM. Yes, you can redraft rubbish words but you can’t redraft no words. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us, Tom, it is really useful to gather an insight into how a successful writer approaches their work. Congratulations again!
Interview by Kim McGowan
This is a great interview. Makes me want my copy of the book to arrive very fast. I think it’s good how Tom points out that large parts of writing are fairly tedious, like going through an entire novel to change the tense, or move it from third person to first, or just writing when you don’t think it’s very good. I think more writers should be talking about these sort of things.
Thanks, Jenn. I know what you mean, it is easy to assume that skilled writers just produce the goods. In fact it’s reassuring to realise that even the best (especially the best?) writers have invested massive amounts of time to make their work what it is.
You will love the book but be warned, you will never look at Wastwater without a shudder again… http://www.visitcumbria.com/wc/wastwtr.htm (have a last look now, before it’s too late)
kim