Author Interview Series

Monthly talks with emerging authors of interest

Today, I have the pleasure of talking to Alex McLoughlin about his debut novel, and the vagaries of the writer’s life.

Here’s the opening paragraph of The Water Girl:

Not all ghost stories are told by the living. Ursula’s mother had been dead for more than two years when she provided hers. She had told some of it before then of course, but Ursula hadn’t paid much attention back when she was very young. Possibly, she wasn’t supposed to have understood exactly what she was hearing at such a tender age, but the sad truth was that she’d never found anything her mother said very convincing. That changed irrevocably one autumn morning as she waited for a taxi to bring her home from the hospital. Her secure, if routine, existence was brutally interrupted when she found herself compelled to watch a man put out two of his own teeth, and she learned there was more to her mother than she’d realised.

So begins The Water Girl. What was it like writing this story?

The first draft was great fun. I really enjoyed the characters, and they became so familiar they pretty much wrote themselves. Trying to pull the story together and fill in plot holes the size of Wales was trickier. Writing becomes obsessive though, doesn’t it? The story takes over your life, so you can’t think about anything else. People look at you strangely, but I love doing it.

What was the inspiration for it?

The main character, Ursula, just came to me. Then I tried to imagine what would be the strangest thing that could happen to her, and who she might meet while trying to make sense of it. The events in the story are the kind of thing I wonder about all the time. I was on a train yesterday that went through a long tunnel. I wondered what would happen if it came out the other end in a South American jungle, or on another planet, or in the middle of the Battle of Trafalgar. Who’s on the train? How will they react? Is one of them responsible for this? Can we make the train go backwards? Have we had lunch yet? Why can we hear music? It’s just the way I think.

What did you like about where you grew up? What did you not like?

Picture an overgrown, rat-infested cottage that hasn’t been cleaned in a decade. Fill it with dogs, eccentric relatives and piles of (very dusty) books. There were very few visitors and no other children I ever met lived anywhere like it. I did many things most kids couldn’t understand and none of the things other people did. Being different has its advantages, in terms of how you see the world, but can make it difficult to fit in. So I suppose I liked and disliked the whole experience.

Are you a reader? If so, who are your favourite writers? Did you learn anything from them?

There are so many great writers. When I was younger, I read fantasists like Michael Moorcock and Alasdair Gray. I always like to mix up what I read and try something outside my comfort zone every now and then. I discovered Evelyn Waugh like that.

Many favourites. I love Iain Banks and Murakami, but also really admire Margaret Attwood and Joanne Harris. Recently, I’ve been enjoying Abir Mukherjee and Natasha Pulley.

I think, if you write, you learn from other authors all the time. You absorb ideas, but also ways of telling a story. The trick is to take that influence and use it to create something uniquely your own. Which of course isn’t easy.

How, if at all, did where you grow up influence you to write, or what you write?

I can’t remember not being able to read. Reading was an escape from the chaos, as well as a way of making sense of it. I spent a lot of time outdoors in the countryside, or reading whatever I could get my hands on. The dogs were left to run around where they liked and the conversation ranged from politics, to the best kind of hops for brewing beer, or how to make skis and slide off a shed roof.

When I ran out of stories to read, I made up my own. The way they came out, probably owed something to the way I lived. I think I always felt like an outsider, looking in, whether I was at home, school or somewhere in the ‘real world.’

Did you start writing early in life? What makes you write?

I did write when I was young, but only found the time to become serious about it when I was older. I write because it seems a waste not to use the ideas that come to me. I love the whole process of creating people and placing them in unnatural situations. As they develop and evolve, I try to manipulate them along with the reader. Managing to evoke an emotional response of some sort, simply by putting words on a page, is a kind of addictive magic.

Does what you do for a living affect what you write about?

 I’ve worked in healthcare for many years. That let me experience a whole range of things from the near-miraculous, to the very dark indeed. I’ve seen people in extremely difficult circumstances, and I know you can never predict how any one individual will respond to that. It shows you the very best, but also the worst, that life has to offer. Having said that, the job I do now is fairly dull, so perhaps the occasional fantasy helps to relieve the boredom.

You seem to specialise in a kind of image-making that feels surreal, like flights of fancy. Can you talk about that?

 I enjoy the fantastical and the surreal. I’ve always been drawn to artists like Dali and Kahlo, writers like Bulgakov and Kafka. What’s intriguing is how the experience of their own lives, leads them to create something that is both alien and perfectly rational. Dreams fascinate me. I like stories that blur the edges of reality, or superimpose the dream-world onto ours. Then I try to imagine what’s going on in the mind of someone caught up in something utterly bizarre and unfamiliar. I really enjoy Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. The melancholic fantasy world she conjures up in that is astonishing. Truly beautiful writing.

Do you practise any other artistic discipline? 

Sadly, no. I couldn’t draw a square and I have the musical ability of a goldfish.

What if anything are you working on right now? 

I’ve been playing with an idea for a kind of historical fantasy. It takes a First World War soldier to an island that’s hidden from the rest of the world, and from there to the present day. I’m not sure it works. If it doesn’t, I’ll take another idea from the box and kick it around for a while.

INTERVIEWER:

Yes, one is constantly cannibalising things, rearranging and reformulating. It’s surprising how this process can yield results you would never have arrived at any other way.

Lastly, I would like to ask you about VSS, very short stories, the Twitter-now-X posts that are prompted by a single word, issued daily by a number of hosts, including #vss365, #vssdaily, #vsspoem, and others.

How long have you been working in this medium? —Because medium it certainly is! And, has it had any bearing on anything else you write?

I’ve been playing with microfiction since I joined Twitter a couple of years ago. vss365 is great fun. I enjoy interacting with fellow scribblers and playing the game. I love the challenge of trying to create a story or a moment in such a brief way. It’s also a bit of a laboratory for me. I throw ideas out there, sometimes totally crazy stuff, and see what provokes a reaction. It’s often not the ones I expect that prove popular. It forces me to keep coming up with ideas, and you never know when one of them might come in useful in a longer story.

Selected Vss365:

I think of her life as a Van Gogh, vividly splashed across the world’s canvas with unapologetic brilliance. A tiny part of that kaleidoscopic pageant was me, or so I thought. But I’m only a broken #easel, invisible to admiring crowds in a forgotten corner of the salon.

***

‘How far away is the horizon?’ the children asked the cat. Removing his monocle, the cat stared wistfully into the distance. ‘A #light year or two at my age,’ he whispered. ‘But you could be there in three blinks, if you take the sky steps and wear your frolic shoes.’

***

‘#Take it down,’ Mary said, shaking her head at her husband.

‘I thought you’d like it.’

‘A hunting trophy? Why would I want that ugly thing staring at me from the wall?’

‘It was quite a tussle. It took me ages to remove his head,’ said the moose.

The Water Girl is available on Amazon.