You can find my interview with Liam down below! Thank you again! Enjoy :)
1. First
off, thank you Liam for taking the time and doing this interview with me! Let
me start with asking you what the inspiration was for your novel "Wild
Life"?
You’re very welcome – thanks for having me. The idea for Wild Life actually came to me years ago,
back when I was at university. I lived miles away from the campus, so I used to
trek across town, cutting through this creepy local park on the way. Whatever time
of day it was, I always had the feeling I was being watched, that somebody was crouched
in the bushes, staring out at me. As time went on, I developed the idea further,
imagining a whole community spying on me from the shadows, living off the land,
hiding in the trees. Things just sort of snowballed from there...
2. How long
did it take to transform your idea into a book? Have you re-written some parts?
Wild Life
was actually the first book I ever attempted to write, almost eight years ago.
I gave up about halfway through, down to a lack of confidence more that anything
else. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head though, and as my career slowly
developed I kept going back and working on it secretly, jotting down character
ideas and plot points when I should probably have been doing other things.
Around four years after my first attempt, I finally sat down to write it again,
but about halfway through disaster struck – I dropped a cup of coffee on my
computer, destroying all of my work. I was too devastated to start over, and so
again I moved on to other things. A few years later, my novel Real Monsters came out, and following
its success my publishers asked if I was working on anything else. Without
thinking, I began pitching Wild Life to them, telling them about this secret
community of middle-aged men living out a Lord of the Flies style fairytale in an
abandoned inner city park. After that, I didn’t really have a choice, and so I
sat down to write it for the third, and thankfully final, time. After all these
years, I’d kind of got it into my head that the story was cursed – that it was
going to mysteriously delete itself from my hard drive or spontaneously burst
into flames or something. I can’t tell you how relieved – and amazed – I was to
finally get there in the end!
3. When did
you find your passion for writing?
According to my Mum, my first literary triumph came at the
tender age of five, when I won the Year One short story competition for my
piece ‘Why I Feel So Sad’ – I guess that set the tone for things to come. In
all honesty though, my passion is for stories, rather than the physical act of writing.
I make up stories all the time, about strangers, friends, things I see out of
the window. I have an overactive imagination, I guess, and writing is just one
way of getting those stories down. Writing’s too slow though. It takes forever
to write a novel. It’s frustrating. I’ve got a pad with about 60 novel ideas
sketched out. I’m going to have to live to 100 if I want to get them all down.
Either that, or I could farm them out, à la James Patterson. I could build my
build my own literary sweatshop, row after row of starving students chained to
laptops while I stand there with a whip and bullhorn. Actually, that sounds
like a few of the call centres I’ve worked in…
4. Which
authors inspire you and why?
Authors who write with integrity, who don’t sell out, or kowtow
to the latest fad for thirty pieces of silver. Authors who have a physical
impact on me, who tie my guts in knots, wring out my heart, or keep me up for
days. Authors who stick doggedly to their vision in the face of widespread
indifference, financial hardship and increasingly infinitesimal attention
spans.
In no particular order, I’m a big fan of the following: Justin
Torres, Dave Eggers, Benjamin Myers, Emily St John Mandel, Adrian Barnes,
Socrates Adams, Colin Barrett, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, D.W. Wilson, Cormac
McCarthy, Wells Towers, as well as the usual suspects: Bukowski, Kerouac,
Vonnegut, Hemmingway, Herbert Selby Jr, Raymond Carver…
5. Which
advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Brace yourself for a life of unremitting poverty, isolation,
back pain and faltering eyesight – ha! Seriously though, my advice for aspiring
authors is to stop making excuses and start, right now, today. I know people
with an insane amount of talent but walk around with empty notepads. ‘I haven’t
got enough time in my life to write.’ ‘I’m not in the right place
emotionally.’ Screw that. There is no
right time or right place. All you’ve got is now. Start writing. And then once
you’ve started something, for god’s sake FINISH IT. Don’t give up halfway
through because it’s stopped being fun. None of this is fun. You’re not doing
it for personal enjoyment. You’re doing it because there’s a sickness in you
that needs cutting out and smearing across the page. So get cutting. Chop-chop.
6. Last but not
least: Can you give us a sneak peak into your new book? ;)
The book I’m working on at the moment is called The Tourists. It tells the story of a
British family whose cut-price package holiday turns into a nightmare when the
tiny island they’re staying on erupts into anarchy, leaving them stranded,
destitute and unable to speak the local language… Think Station Eleven set on
Ayia Napa!
