Interview with Andrew Blackman

Q: Hello Andrew. You and I ‘met’ fairly recently when you discovered a Book Review on my website of Luke Bitmead’s novel ‘White Summer’. Your novel, ‘On the Holloway Road’ won the Luke Bitmead Writer’s bursary and this is how you became a published author via Legend Press. How have you found this experience and what other strategies did you deploy or plan to before being published? Also, how do you think t’interweb can help or hinder aspiring writers?

A: I deployed the usual strategies for several years with a previous novel – sending out the covering letter and synopsis to agents, publishers and anyone else who would accept them, waiting six weeks, getting a rejection slip and sending them out again. It was demoralising, because I had given up quite a lot to follow my dream of being a writer, and for a while it seemed that I had given it up for nothing. I was feeling very low, and to get myself going again I wrote a new novel, setting myself the goal of writing the first draft in a month. I enjoyed it immensely, and was surprised to find that the first draft was much better than the previous novel that I’d spent years working on. I submitted it for the Luke Bitmead Writers’ Bursary, and went back to hacking away at the first novel.

Then in July last year, everything changed. I went to an award ceremony in London, knowing that I’d been shortlisted for the Luke Bitmead prize but not really believing I would win it. An hour later, I was a published author, holding an oversized cheque and making a garbled speech. Seven months later ‘On the Holloway Road’ came out, and seeing it on the shelves in Borders and Waterstones next to the ‘real’ authors has been quite literally a dream come true.

To answer your other question, the web can definitely help and hinder aspiring writers! The positive side of it is that the writer’s life is no longer solitary – you can find thousands of other writers and talk through your problems, have your work critiqued, etc. Plus, when you have been published, you can meet readers much more easily than before. And of course the main benefit is that it makes self-publishing so much more viable.

The downside of the web is that the writer’s life is no longer solitary. Rather than getting up in the morning, putting a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter and staring at it until something comes out, a writer today powers up his laptop, finds that his antivirus software needs updating, sees that he has 15 new emails and cannot concentrate until he’s opened them, finds himself answering them, clicking on links, laughing at Youtube videos, checking the football scores, reading blogs, rebooting to allow the antivirus software updates to take effect, and finally opening up Microsoft Word with an hour gone and a head full of distractions.

Q: Prior to your current career as a novelist, you worked in a bank and in New York as a journalist. How have these experiences shaped you as a writer and how useful is a background in journalism for a novelist? Does it make anything more difficult?

A: Working as a banker made me realise that money wouldn’t make me happy, which is a useful thing to know before embarking on a writing career. Journalism made me even clearer about my goals. I’d done it because it was a way to write and get paid a regular salary, but although I enjoyed it, I still found myself getting up at 5am to write my own stories before work. That was when I knew that I couldn’t avoid pursuing my original dream of being a storyteller. I quit and moved back to England to do temp jobs and focus as much of my time and energy as possible on fiction writing.

Journalism was great for sharpening my writing skills – I was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and every story I wrote was mercilessly edited, sometimes by many different people, and usually for the better. Also, a deadline was a deadline – it didn’t matter how I felt, whether I was ‘inspired’ or not. There was a page in the newspaper with a gap 10 inches long, and by five o’clock that day I had to produce 10 inches of words to fill it. I got used to writing quickly, cutting out everything but the essentials, accepting that the story wouldn’t be perfect and letting other people help me make it as good as it could be.

Writing in a ‘literary’ style is of course very different. Your words need to be fresh, whereas in journalism it’s more about following a pattern. There’s a Wall Street Journal ‘style’, and they want all the stories to sound approximately the same. I also found it impossible to combine the two – I was freelancing for a while, but found myself thinking about all the calls I had to make instead of about my fictional characters. I had to give it up and do jobs that didn’t fill my head so much.

Q: ‘On the Holloway Road’ clearly owes a lot to Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’. What does this book mean to you and what were the circumstances that conspired for you to produce ‘On the Holloway Road’?

A: I read ‘On the Road’ as a teenager and loved it. Like many people, I think, I was hooked by the apparent freedom, the endless movement, hitching rides across states on the back of pick-up trucks or driving in borrowed cars and ending up on the other side of the country at some party or other. When I moved to America, I went on road trips and found the world had changed: the openness was no longer there, hitch-hiking was no longer possible, strangers would no longer talk to you, parties were no longer open, drugs were no longer fun. Then I re-read ‘On the Road’ and found that a lot of the freedom there was illusory, and Sal and Dean didn’t really find any of the answers they went off looking for.

When I moved back to England after six years in the U.S., I really noticed the smallness, the feeling of claustrophobia, the difficulty of being free and doing what you want without being watched or judged. Even though, as I said, much of the freedom in America is illusory, when you’re driving across such vast open spaces you can feel a real sense of possibility. So I thought it would be interesting to set an epic Kerouac-style road trip in contemporary Britain, to highlight some of the differences and explore the two countries’ mutual fascination. So that’s how it came about, even though, in the end, the book became less about the differences between Britain and America and more about the characters’ search for meaning and freedom.

Q: Jack and Neil, the central characters of your book, are quite different people. Where Neil is quite the charmer, his energy a magnet not only to Jack but to countless women in the novel, Jack appears almost asexual beside him. In fact, the person who most fascinates him is Neil, although his relationship with Nicola suggests he is heterosexual. I have ‘labelled’ your book as a ‘Bromance’ in the review on my website. What do you think of this?

A: I’d never heard this term before, but it’s very apt. Jack is definitely fascinated by Neil, who fills a gap in his life and seems to promise answers to all the questions that have been troubling him. The interesting thing is that Neil also needs Jack. Although he seems so independent and strong-willed, he keeps on leaving Jack and then keeps on coming back to him. He needs someone to listen to his stories, to care about his half-baked theories and opinions, to be an audience for his antics. So their relationship is clearly very close, and is a romance of sorts – ironic given Jack’s mockery of the romance novels written by his friend and rival Oscar.

Q: ‘On the Holloway Road’ is a book about a journey. I felt though that the characters did not develop spiritually or achieve any kind of redemption as a result of their travels. I felt the novel was stronger for this as it seemed a more original approach and an exercise in realism. When you started writing, did you know how it was going to end?

A: I’ve read a lot of writing books and learned about the classic ‘narrative arc’ of a novel – character starts out wanting something, confronts lots of obstacles along the way, overcomes them and achieves the goal, or at least gains some kind of understanding, resolution, etc. This always struck me as bearing little relationship to the real lives of the people I know.

The ‘obstacle course’ view seemed too linear and neat – I see life as more like a labyrinth; a much more chaotic place where you start out in one direction, end up getting lost and going around in circles, pass the same points again and again, and often end up somewhere unexpected.

I think in ‘On the Holloway Road’ there is some development, but it’s not very clear and the characters didn’t really find what they were looking for from the trip (given that they were really looking for the meaning of life, probably not a big surprise). Jack’s life could go in many different directions after the end of the novel, and I think that’s more interesting and true to life than an ending where all the conflicts are neatly resolved.

Q: As a debut author, how are you finding the self-promotion side of your new career? I read that you are now working on your next novel, how do you find working on this alongside working to promote your last?

A: I don’t really like promoting my work. That’s why I never considered self-publishing. I chose this career because I like to write, not because I like to talk about writing or think up ways to get attention, etc. Self-promotion has always made me feel uncomfortable.

I do have a website/blog where I post news about myself and my book from time to time, but in general I am quite lazy and leave it to Legend Press to arrange events for me. They’ve been very good about it – I’ve given talks at bookshops and libraries around London, judged a short story contest, was interviewed on radio and so on. I have been surprised to discover that I enjoyed doing these events. I have always been quite an introvert, and get very nervous before appearing in public, but it’s a really good feeling when it goes well and people ask lots of interesting questions and seem happy with the answers.

So in general I’d say the balance in my life is 90% writing. The promotion side is something I have to force myself to do from time to time when I feel I’ve neglected it for too long. I tend to take a long-term view anyway – if I did more promotion, I could squeeze out a few more sales of ‘On the Holloway Road’, but I think what will determine my long-term success as a writer is producing more books, each one better than the last, and so that’s what I focus on.

Q: If you were a cake, what sort of cake would you be? I’d like to be a vanilla sponge with strawberries and cream.

A: Bread and butter pudding.