Episode 71 – Michael Marshall Smith – World Class Fiction Writing

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what’s up guys Xavier Catania here is such a fun light-hearted episode with the very warm Michael Marshall Smith who I would regard as a world class fiction writer if you’ve ever wanted to know what is in the mind of an established writer from the process to writing itself and literally everything in between Michael has been in the realm of fiction writing for at least a few decades and he has the awards to back up the caliber of his work so many thanks

to Michael for making time to be on the show make sure you get to his website Michael Marshall smooth calm to get to his work you can find us on Twitter Facebook and YouTube all at the human XP guys we survived on listener support so get to the human xpcom / donate buy us a cup of coffee lunch or dinner if you’re into what we’re doing here it helps us sustain not only the show but the level of content we can get to guys on a regular basis without much

further ado here is mr. Michael Marshall Smith thank you so much for listening the human experience is diving into the realms of fiction writing as we speak to our guest mr. Michael Marshall Smith Michael my good sir welcome to hxp hi good to talk to you Michael you have a wide-ranging career in in writing and you just give us your background how you got into writing and who you are for anyone that may be listening that doesn’t know please sure

well I mean I’ve been writing I suspect for about 20 years I started off in in short fiction I guess the easiest label for that short fiction would be horror fiction but it’s of a particular sort of type which is more to do with unease and dread and being unnerved rather than you know vampires and I mean I have I’ve written about vampires but I’ve always tended to come at it from a kind of a maybe more more English low-key perspective and so that’s that’s what I

did for a number of years and then it occurred to me that I should start trying to write novels and sort of just with completely off my own bad I started writing a novel which eventually became something called only forward and my complete surprise it ended up being a rather sort of surreal zany science fiction novel which is completely different to anything I’d done before that was accepted and got published and so suddenly I was somewhat committed on

that path which I was happy to do because that’s what my head was full of at that time so I wrote a couple more books in that vein one called spares one caught one of us and then had kind of a switch of genre and found myself writing present-day kind of conspiracy thrillers the first of which was called the straw men and from then it sort of developed I’ve sort of ended up almost with these two different strands Michael Marshall

who tends to write the more present-day more real-world fiction and Michael Marshall Smith who is rather more experimental your first published story the man who drew cats won the British fantasy award in 1981 for best short story your novel only your first novel only forward one the August Derleth award for best novel on and and then you won the the philip k dick award and then you were nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1995 1996

and 1997 wow you’re just covered in trophies for me it’s it’s writing is it can be such an excruciating thing I mean you should you’re looking at this page and nowadays I mean I guess you’re using a computer to write and the it’s just it’s getting past that initial just that blank page that is just staring at you and how do you how do you gain inspiration what is your muse well I mean you refer to the sort of some of the early successes and they you know

they were great I mean you know how extraordinary have your first short story win an award and so on and they you know these are these are these are lovely things in there they’re good for the ego and they’re good for your initial confidence because as you say when you first start out you know you to a degree you have no idea what you’re doing I mean to be absolutely honest as a writer you you may spend the rest of your life feeling you have no idea what

you’re doing but that’s that’s part of the writers job and what writers process and but but a little burst of early confidence is good but to be actually honestly you know the job remains the same over the years and over the decades and as to where you get your ideas I you know nobody knows the answer to that question I’m I’m as likely to get an idea wandering around the aisles of Safeway as I am to be sitting in my desk or or concentrating it’s it’s it’s one

of the both magical but also slightly scary things that the initial the initial idea the spark the thing that you may end up spending the next year and a half of your life dedicated to will come from a place that you can’t name and you can’t there’s no map too you just have to trust that sometimes as I say you wandering around you’re looking for capers and suddenly paying oh what if a man was doing this and such and such a thing happened and and off

you go and it’s that’s that’s the you know I sometimes think that that being a writer is you know people think of as a solitary job and it really is a very solitary job but within that it’s almost like running a small company that happens to live with Union in your own head it’s like you know as a start-up you know in your head and the somebody is responsible for getting the words done somebody who’s responsible for dealing with

and there is some man or woman who’s off down a corridor somewhere no one’s quite sure where the offices and every now and then they’ll come running to the main room say here’s an idea and you look at it you think now that’s been done or you look and you say oh interesting and then the whole company turns around and that’s what they’re working on for the next year and a half and it’s it’s it’s a strange mental process would you say

that your first short story the man who drew cats winning the award would you say that that had a positive effect on you or or did it how did it affect your mentality to win a win an award so quickly in your career um I think I think you know like a lot of like a lot of life events it had a variety of effects I mean the first was obviously confident you know the first short story that I completed was given an award and you know there were concrete positive

things that came from that in that at the awards ceremony where I where I was where I got that the thing there was an editor there and she said congratulations to me as I came down from the podium sort of thing and at that stage I was halfway through writing this incredibly speculative oh well this will be my trunk novel but let’s give it a try anyway not one so I sent her a letter because this was back in the days when you sent letters rather than emails

saying you know I wonder if you’d be interested in the short story collection and she very politely pointed out to me that short story collections from unknown writers are not something that major publishers regard with much enthusiasm but if I wrote a novel then she’d like to see it so that gave me the impetus to finish the novel and I sent it off to her she said yes we’ll take that and so you know the positive effects were very straightforward an

award plus someone agreeing to look at my first novel with a kind eye and bang off you go of course there’s then a variety of pressures that come from that as soon as you do something you feel that you need to do it again and if you don’t do it again then maybe you’re not doing it as well as you were last time and the way the publishing market works particularly now more so now than then is that you can very very rapidly get pigeonholed into niches that are then

quite difficult to escape from so there’s always you know it’s it’s there’s always more than one thing happening absolutely so Michael where where would you say your biggest challenge was I mean you’ve been writing for quite some time and you’ve gone from I think you started out writing comedies alright a long time ago I did I did comedy at university yes I went to I went to Cambridge and I was a member the footlights and I had a lot

of fun writing writing skits then for a couple years after me and some of the guys who I’ve done in a college we had a couple of radio shows for BBC Radio we had a TV pilot and we wrote for other people and Sanne for a while that was very much what I was what I was doing and then I had a kind of epiphany moment where a friend of mine I’ve been badgering him to try and read one of my favorite books a book called lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and he’d been sort of

dragging his feet on that and he’s finally said we’re in the pub and he said all right I’ll read this damn book but you have to read one that I’ve just read I said okay and he handed over to me and it was the talisman by Stephen King and Peter Stroud and that just kind of flicked a switch for me and I got by the time I got to the end of that book I thought okay this is the kind of thing that not only do I want to write this is

the way I want to spend my life and very rapidly I found that my imagination stopped finding you know in those days if I’d have been wandering around the supermarket I’d have had an idea for a skit and then pretty rapidly it became instead that I’d have an idea for a short story and so that I think was the first thing so dragged me more into that into that sort of area okay you have quite the career I’m just looking at your biography and you’ve you’ve

produced for various films you’ve done a couple short stories you’ve written / produced you have writer credits how how are you accomplishing this well I I mean I should stress that a lot of those credits are extremely low and sometimes speculative levels I mean my mind my career in the film in TV industry has has hardly been stellar but I think you know you know in the old day I mean this is something that’s increasingly true of

the job or the lifestyle or the life of being a writer which is that it’s not as similar as it used to be it used to be that there would be a certain amount of money around and yes you could be one of the super bestsellers but there was also a strong midlist a place where people you know wrote books in a timely fashion year after year and they’d be paid just about an hour and they’d have enough of a career that midlist it has been

much disappeared in publishing these days there are now publishers tend to be very focused on either the guaranteed bestsellers the people who you know whack it out of park year after year after year partly because there’s a there’s a sitting waiting audience that just sort of perpetuates that situation and so they’re either looking for those all they’re looking for the newbies the people who have wandered in with you know a very interesting first book that

they can then just you know do something with the idea of people who are producing interesting stuff year after year after year that’s for the time being and this this is I hope cyclic or something that will move on from but for time being that that eras market has been quite squeezed out and so what a lot of writers are finding is that you need to spread it around a bit you need to you need to turn to a little bit of screenwriting you need to try and do a

little bit of stuff on the web you need to it’s a it’s a portmanteau career rather than just being the one straight thing and I think a lot of writers also find that I mean I’ve written I guess I think it must be about 90 short stories now and there are some ideas that come to me and they’re a short story they’re not going to be a novel and they they don’t feel like there should be a script they’re gonna be a story and you know

part of the job is trying to recognize what’s the best home what’s the best shape for these store these ideas that come to you and so that’s why there tends to be a little bit of variety within people’s careers because they’re making these sort of strategic choices what do I do this is not a book so what do I do with it and I’m I’ve always been comfortable writing in those different formats and so I try to keep doing it entreat them and I find this process

intriguing so your first after your first successful story you became good friends with a variety of different writers and editors how did how did having that level of contact and interaction how did that benefit your writing and your kind of your career and and the way you moved forward well I think I think it benefits on a couple of levels I mean I started hanging out with with a small coterie of sort of English short story writers who’d been nicknamed

the miserab lists because at that stage basically you’re all you know single guys in our mid-20s living in in rainy London writing to be honest and cried miserable short stories often often influenced by people like in a Ramsay Campbell so you know eerie little tales Jeremy out sort of you know single men or women who’d been done wrong by their partner and whose life was going to yeah going to hell and what was good about that is

that you know it is a very solitary task around there are days when you just think what am i doing why am i doing it is anybody gonna care and to occasionally in it’s partly having other people read your stuff but it’s pass it’s also in some ways more importantly just having some peers and some like-minded people to hang out with I mean particularly with whole writers you get a bunch of horror writers in the pub you’ll notice two things one they never

talk about writing and two it’ll be the most fun you’ve ever had because they tend to be extremely light hearted people you know I think people think all writers is these really grim dark gothic people but they never are they tend to be just just people like a beer and like like a chat yeah and so if you’re trying to forge a fella fairly solitary lifestyle as a writer than having that recourse from people who do to spend some time with people who do understand

the kind of thing you’re doing is important but I think also from a more career in commercial point of view it’s also it’s like when when people ask me you know how to write become a writer what are the early steps particularly in genre fiction I think the most important thing you can do is to go to some good conventions because party you’ll meet like-minded people partly also in the bar you may meet the the woman or man who is going to be the person who’s six

months from now is putting together an anthology on a particular topic and if they’ve met you and if they’ve read your other stuff then they are more likely to look with favor upon something that you submit and so you know people meeting people like Alan Dale how or in particular you know man who’s you know gone on to be you know my best friend Stephen Jones who’s an absolute Titan in there in the figure of genre fiction there’s no question that meeting these

people and being inspired by them and having them give you confidence and support it’s it’s desperately important particularly in the early stages when you were writing your own fiction you were working as a graphic designer and viewer in the corporate world earning a living I mean how did how did your writing routine kind of vary from back then and where you are now burning and living as a writer now because I imagine that writing books when you’re starting out

can’t pay very well and yeah I mean must be difficult to earn a living as a writer it is I mean I you know short stories paid next to nothing could be absolutely understood for a long time that’s that’s what I was doing I mean I you know you write short stories partly for the love of it you know if you like the form I mean I see I think there’s certain ideas in certain genre and you know dark fiction I think is definitely one of them where a lot of the best work

is actually done in the short story form so there’s many reasons to love it for its own sake but it’s also a way of basically we’re finding your craft getting a sense of what kind of writer you are what kind of thing you’re interested in what your voice on the page is gonna sound like but you’re right they you know you they won’t buy you a cup of coffee to be absolutely honest and in terms of working as a graphic designer I was a kind of fake

graphic designer I I got a day job because I needed one I had by that point already made the decision that I was gonna try to be a writer so I just needed to find something to do and I was working for this company this is back in the days when all graphic design was was you know some weird magical process where you gave the word to somebody they took them off they made bromine’s out of it they were cut up they were cutting back and my father was an academic

happened to get a deal on a at a very early Macintosh and I basically took that over from him and rapidly realized that you know the desktop publishing revolution was actually gonna change everything and so I kind of sideswiped into saying okay all this stuff which is taking you days at a time I can do this in half an hour and so I basically kind of lagged as we seining and myself er a semi career as a graphic designer because that you know I can write good

copy star from that basically was was a way I earned a living I also wrote corporate videos which have you know basically training videos for corporate Co so basically I was just finding a way of using my my limited skills to to pay the bills while I while I wrote and I didn’t actually go full time as a writer for quite a long until after I think was just before my second book came out because I lucked into an opportunity to do a massive sort of screenwriting job

which was converting parker’s we’ve world into a eight part TV series which has still not seen the light today 20 years later but it was enough but I I took the plunge and said okay I’m getting just about enough money here that I gotta call myself a writer and go with it and that’s that’s basically what happened Wow yeah it’s intriguing is there a certain type of genre or what is your opinion on John risotto as a whole do you find them to be restrictive or do

you find that when you pick a specific genre that it helps do certain genres help books sell better I think I think the genre issues of is a very naughty one again you talk to writers and they all have very different takes on it sometimes it can be extremely helpful it depends what drawing you’re in a crime for example crime or mystery is a very marketable profitable reputable genre if you say that you’re a crime writer then people go okay you write those mysteries

they’re very successful I like mysteries it’s you know that that can be there can be a great help and there are certain other dramas if you say you’re a science fiction writer then people go it’s kind of dirty I’m sure you know some of those you know people with glasses and you know might might you join that but it doesn’t sound like my kind of thing although having said that they will then happily watch science fiction material

in the cinema but they don’t think that it’s the kind of thing they want to read and at the very bottom of the pile is you kind of almost don’t want to say you’re a horror writer because people will just dismiss that as the sort of you know it’s the true ghetto fiction despite the fact that you know some of the great you know I think it’s unfortunate in some ways that Stephen King spent his whole time writing horror subjects because I think it’s a pro

stylist he’s extremely good or rather writers like you know Tom’s Locati or led Baron or Shirley Jackson or Peter Straub who are beautiful prose writers knew right at least as telling me about the human condition as anybody else but because they’re perceived as Horror Writers is a kind of negative cachet about those Yama’s and so a lot of writers can find that they find themselves backed into a sort of genre position that’s hard for them to escape

and that can be unfortunate particularly if it happens to be Shauna that’s that’s out of fashion at the time so I’m a Plowman right I’m very happy to be to write in a variety of dramas over in Harvard science fiction of a crime of ensue novels and that’s not because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing or maybe it is I don’t know but it’s there’s something about each of these different fields that appeals and I kind of don’t see why I should limit myself it’s a bit

like saying to a painter okay great you have to only use blues for the rest of your life and it’s like well there’s a lot you can do with blue but I’d like access to some of the other some of the other colors and I and you know as the best genre fiction writers demonstrate there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t alt write anybody insecure literary fiction plus you get to have monsters and cool stuff and a sense of wonder and and all that other stuff so

for me it’s getting the best of both worlds but you have to be aware that is a career decision yeah absolutely hey Michael when you’re when you’re coming up with characters for your novels your book do they reflect people that you encounter in your real in your life or I mean is this just purely imagination or thinking I never do the the sort of romantic laughs reflection of people in real life it’s just never it’s just never didn’t to be absolute

honest characters come to me I am I don’t make them up the the way a book tends to start for me is that I will have a basic idea it’ll be a sort of well what if or wouldn’t it be weird if or wouldn’t be horrible if and that tends to be the basic idea and then around that to a degree outside my control initially some possible environments and events will start to accrete in my mind and with that will come some characters often a sort of

sense of voice and then there’ll be a couple of core people who basically just arrived my head and say okay well I’m part of this thing I’m going to be one of the people who are involved in this situation and maybe driving it and that tends to be the initial kit that I’m delivered with by whoever it is who works off down the corridor and the in the you know novel writing start up business then comes the bit we have to say okay if this looks like what I’m

gonna be doing next what else do I need and you say well probably me need a character who’s a bit like that actually I probably need to evolve this kind of environmental situation this kind of event will probably need to happen and that’s when you start to make some sort of conscious decisions as opposed to just accepting what it is that you’re back brain is handed to you and then that’s the point at which a lot of grown up authors would sit down and say okay he

was a wedding great sheet of paper I’m now gonna rigorously plan this out so that I have everything worked out yeah yeah I am unfortunately not a grown-up writer I still tend to prefer or unconstraint to work in a far more sort of free-form okay I’ve got a sense of what’s happening here a sense of where I’m going let’s just sit down and see what happens it’s my preferred way of working I’ve tried the other way once or twice and it’s been okay but for me the

journey that the walk along the path is going to be at least as interesting as any other part of the process and you never know quite how you’re gonna get to where you want to go and so I tend to I tend to work that way which can lead to some very very long dark periods where you’re lost and you have no idea where you’re going next but it seems to be something I don’t have a choice over they say is there something that you have kind of relied on or is kind of

your secret that no one really knows about that maybe well tell you what I see it’s just menu I mean is there is there something that you kind of go to that maybe is a little bit unusual or just something noteworthy that we could share with the people listening that may inspire them into you know kind of finding their own their own way I think it’s difficult I mean I think you know what everybody including including career writers hoping for is that kind

of the Magic Bullet the silver bullet that makes it that makes it easier the the guaranteed the guarantee technique the guaranteed source of inspiration the guaranteed way of working and I don’t have one with that I’m just gonna come right out there and say that I think I think part of it is probably because they’re you know there are two ways of approaching writing and neither of them was necessarily better than you know that there is a degree to which you can

just see it as a sort of journeyman thing almost like a pop writer you say okay I’m good at producing stories and I’m just gonna turn these things out and it almost stays separate from you or self or your being or you can write from your own life and have a very personal relationship with what it is that you’re writing I think a lot of the best writers tend to be of that camp and I think if there is a if there is a secret and there’s a very interesting

question it’s not one I’ve actually sort of approach like that so if I falter a bit because I’m actually thinking in real time okay try try try not to do I think it is it’s there are some things that you need to do if you want to be a writer you need to write obviously and you need to read if you don’t do those two things it’s simply won’t happen people who think that they can write novels without having some awareness of what’s being written in the field both

now and in the past without refreshing themselves it’s you know that the the writing muscle is very close in the mind to the reading muscle and by reading you you help exercise the writing muscle so I think that’s that’s deeply important you also need to put yourself in a position where where you you realize that you need to you need to be a little bit kind to yourself and you need to sort of understand that it’s not always gonna be easy and there are certain

pressures you can put yourself under which is simply not going to help you and I don’t know I don’t know where you stand on foul language on the show but this a.m. doesn’t you’re fine okay good oh okay a stream the cursing is about to come in now and there was a there’s a Hemingway quote which I’ve shown dad ages ago but actually we we learned a year or two ago and he said and the first draft of everything is and that has been one of the most useful

quotes that I’ve sort of relearned recently because a lot of people put themselves particularly on their writing a first book under a huge amount of pressure to produce perfection or something like it and that’ll kill the novel stone-dead and it’ll kill you and it won’t get finished if you accept the fact that it is it’s a process that that I think is more than anything else the key so-called insight that I have which is that writing is not an event it’s a

process and you will it will take you a while to come up behind you it’ll take you a while to get to the stage where you’re ready to write it you will then write a first draft which will almost certainly be and if you reassure yourself for that and say not only is this not my it’s not my problems this way everybody does I’m racking through a first draft or something right now and this is my 14th novel or something in two or three times

a day I said doesn’t matter just get it down to the matter if it’s crap just get this first draft out because until you’ve got a first draft you don’t actually know what it is that you’re writing then you go back and so it’s the it is that process thing and you know whatever works is the other thing you’ve got to find your own individual process it may be that working in a coffee shop works for you it may be the music on the background works it may be you need

absolute silence it may be that handwriting is a more visceral way of doing it for you and that even though it takes longer and is more tiring it’s just you you’re able to access your inner whatever it is more securely that way so it’s sorry there’s a very long-winded answer to not answer to your question but I think respecting the fact there’s a process and taking the time to discover what yours is that I think rather than thinking oh this guy on the

website you have to do it this way or someone else applies it the only way to get publishes that way there may be useful nuggets to be gleaned there but you also have to understand that it’s this these are somebody else’s way and you probably won’t be securing what you’re doing until you’ve found your own so kind of finding your own process and also understanding that whatever you release the first draft is not going to be perfect and removing that that sense

of needing to be perfect right away that pressure moving that removing that pressure away that that tends to help absolutely I mean because you know removing barriers is part of the process not feeling you have to write to any particular genre not worrying too much about the audience to start off with not worrying about whether all your sentences are perfect I mean there’s a time for it and you know again later parts of the process I mean I I have a

particular bugbear about word doubling I died I want to see the same word appearing more than once in a paragraph come in list it words like handle though and you know I can get bogged down and just making sure that my prose is up to a standard that I hope to aspire to and so there’s a time for that but like anything else in life you can often feel that you’re very hemmed in by by barriers and some of those are very real but some of those will be ones that for

sometimes good reason sometimes bad reasons you place there yourself and the fewer barriers you can put between you and you know the empty page wants to be filled voids want to be filled nature abhors a vacuum it’s there waiting you just have to get the barriers out of the way yeah wow that’s very profound so something something Michael that you do is you shift between these two names usually lived between using Michael Marshall Smith and then just Michael

Marshall what prompted this modified name idea and and in what ways would you feel that that you know writing under these these separate names affect your writing well I mean the the the truth foster that is that they was initially not my decision I mean basically I’d written dark you know horror ish fiction short fiction for a number of years under the name Michael Marshall Smith I then wrote my first book only forward which they said in the future therefore

was theoretically science fiction although it’s it’s kind of surreal and it has a lot of darkness in it didn’t seem any big deal for me because as far as I was concerned it was all just a speculative weird fiction that had a fairly similar voice going through it then after writing two more books of that time spares and one of us I’d always been fascinated by the idea of by the phenomenon of zero colors and I thought I had a take on it along the

lines that you know we tend to as as received so often in life we tend to ring-fence certain types of behavior and say okay that’s not us this is unrelenting evil that we cannot understand and that’s quite a comforting way of approaching the world but it seemed to me that serial killing actually represented the far extreme of a kind of neurotic behavior that we’re all to one degree or another prey to and I read up I spent a lot of time and this

was sort of a hobby because I was writing a fiction of the time reading a lot around the area of serial killers and and becoming more and more convinced that actually they weren’t that different I mean some as they horrific they are and this is not a defensive circus in any way but anyway I felt I had a take on and eventually for I can’t gonna write this so I wrote a book called the straw men which initially had some fantastical

elements in it but in the end wound up being a conspiracy laird modern-day mystery novel that I had quite a different I mean the voice was similar but the texture was different partly because it was less humid than the previously been in before because I thought me you know serial killers and they’re not funny that’s not let’s you know break down the jokes and it wasn’t said in the future because I thought you know I want to try

to make a point here if I sit this in the future that can be distancing so that said in the present day by the way I ended up with a novel that was actually you know qualitatively quite different in some ways to our publishers eyes and they looked at this and I said seriously what the hell you write the science fiction stuff for the jokes and the talking phryges words this but they they liked it enough and finally I haven’t had enough potential that they

were prepared to you know publish it as my next novel ins probably actually strong has been most successful thing I ever did or I’ve done so far but they said we’re gonna have a problem here because readers come to you expecting one type of thing and you’ve had it them something which is completely not that type of thing also there may be a new audience out there who you didn’t want the strange science fiction but will be up for this kind of thing you know

because it wasn’t that long after the sort of the big Thomas Harris I forget what it’s called the the fourth one of those and so my American publishers said how about we we do some sort of name change just to signal to people and I came up the idea of saying okay but I’m not going to change you some completely different because that would be weird to me how about I just lop off this list and they said okay we’ll go with it and

and at the time I sort of because there’s a you know I’m sure you were that the certainly deceased you know British writer Ian banks who who wrote more general fiction under Ian banks and then used Iain M banks for for speculative science fiction and maybe the other way around and I thought okay there’s a precedent there maybe you can have two strands so you write the very weird speculative cross you’re on with stuff under Michael

marshal Smith and something that is a little bit more grounded in very commercial fiction you write under under my commercial and that kind of made sense to me and I wrote I wrote two more books instrumental G but unfortunately I found that that the the person in the backroom of the startup kept coming with weirder and weirder ideas each time and so the Michael Marshall book started slowing slightly more back towards Michael Marshall Smith material not in terms of

science fiction but in terms of the maybe the more horror and easy supernatural short stories and so in the end it hasn’t worked especially well because I haven’t kept the distinction very clear partly because the distinction just simply isn’t very clear in my head it’s possible that life would’ve been a lot simplified if they’ve kept that distinction clear but I don’t like traumas I don’t I don’t particularly believe in them I think

there’s a there’s a sense of wonder and as you know I think all of us however much we may pretend otherwise on a day to day basis know that there’s something else going on some people put that into a religion box some people put it into a spirituality box some people put it into a Hillary’s emails box you know but there’s this sense that behind the veil there is some dread truth that we’re not being told and the job of for me of

fiction is to every now and then just not throw the door why but open the door and say you know reality does a stop where the walls of our house stops the stuff outside the window and we know it’s there we know that sometimes we think that we know the phone’s going to rain just or at 4:00 it rings we have our little superstitious rituals before we do something although there are things that make us feel more comfortable in life there are things

that make us feel uncomfortable in life and many of these are not rational we are open to this and I’m mistrustful of any sort of body of thought or any type of fiction which completely shuts the door on that and so that’s why I’ve tended to end up sort of messing up the consensual reality distinction because I basically don’t believe in it yeah that’s a perfect segue actually into my next question which is you know you when you were growing up you had an interest

in Zen and reading philosophy at your university Colin Wilson Gurdjieff among others do you still carry this interest in philosophy and are you influenced by the esoteric metaphysical side of things like I mean I think I think in in adolescence and and why was ecology I did I did study philosophy at Cambridge I found you know particular como San Carlos was a huge eye-opener to me because he needs that user visa his prose is good he’s a

he was a very wide-ranging you know writer in terms of subjects and a great sort of aggregator of and and curator of different thoughts and you know he read a lot of even a lot of slightly dubious nonsense as a lot of these people do but he was deeply inspirational in terms of sort of saying think about the world this way it doesn’t even matter to degree whether it’s true you know I have to find this now you know cuz I just I remain interested in in fourteen

material and conspiracy stuff and that kind of thing to a degree you know truth is a very moveable feast and very often things that regarded as being truth and you see this in science to whatever it may claim to the contrary it’ll okay here is that here’s the status quo in terms of what we believe about this subject and that is the truth and anyone who suggests otherwise is wrong and then ten years down the line it’ll be oh but

we found out this other thing so that turns out that was all wrong but this new thing is completely right and anything else you say is wrong and so that’s anybody’s thought that does that and isn’t open to the idea that actually wrongness probably you know outranks and importance rightness because it’s often wrongness of the leaders in the right direction and I think that’s something that I got from a lot of those sort of thoughts and ways of just regarding the

human the human beast and the human mind as being somewhat more interesting then was often pretended I think I think that is something that has absolutely staying with me and in the last couple of years for variety of reasons I’ve ended up you know finally getting read around to reading some young and some of his sort of interpreters in a way that I can’t believe I never really had before but maybe you know and again it’s gonna

sound a little bitter but maybe you know certain things come to you at the right time when when your life is ready when you are ready to receive them yeah and you know I’m not a particularly woo I’m not a particularly hippie person in general but I am prepared to think that there are currents in our life there is there is development that happens within something that might as well be called a soul and that every now and then life will

bring you up to certain points and make you realize things about yourself and that’s when you’re you should be open to the broader ways of trying to explain them right rather than trying to stuff them into very small boxes so yeah I’m still I’m still interested in that kind of stuff yeah I think that in a previous interview you you said that one of your biggest influences or one of your most influential things was serendipity and

you you mentioned an example in your story one of us but began to take form via a number of coincidences that emerged in your life at that time what were those coincidences wait has this happened to you before or do it’s it’s a process it’s a process that I and again this is just one of your you know it relates back to what I was saying in terms of particular process I mean with one of us it was a particular vendor however the particular song happened to

meet and you know because one of us wouldn’t happen to be a big song at that time in the in the UK the journalist Bond song and very often I what I try to do when I’m at the beginning of a book and throughout but particularly the beginning of the book is put myself into what I kind of think offers flypaper mode because there comes a point where an idea has become sufficiently sort of real to me that in a way it kind of influences my perception of the world

not in some you know bizarre way but it’s just my head is sufficiently geared towards that one idea that it’s it’s like the white van I mean I’m sure you probably call it something else but the or the white car you buy a white car suddenly you see four times as many white cars on the right because your perception is shifted I mean that’s one that thing and once that an idea gets to a certain point in your head I think you then actually see me objectively start

seeing the world differently you start seeing things that fit in with the idea that youth the you’re starting to sort of inculcating your head it’s like it’s like a your consciousness is a lens as you start looking through a lens filtered by any certain thing you start to see more and more and more that exactly and I think I think it’s so it may be a semantic decision or not semantics but it’s it’s in terms of does the world actually change or does your

perception of the world change and so you know our coincidence is something that are real or Accords something that is that is a function of the way that you’re perceiving the world and to be honest it doesn’t really matter but either is just as interesting as a phenomenon yeah and so I do tend to find that that serendipity or coincidence or me simply perceiving the world slightly differently because of shift in perception or shift in the direction

that my inner self is facing does tend to be quite a strong impetus to some of the initial writing process the the reality of of being a writer unfortunate is that you are then sometimes have to to rein that back in because you know I found sometimes with books I mean this torment is for exactly that excuse me a classic example this because it you know it’s basically a serial for a novel but what in addition to the the things that

I was talking about earlier they sort of being interested in you know that the psychological underpinnings of that phenomena I sort of was just addressing the question of you know why I did humankind start farming and that it was a question that occurred to me and it’s all these questions that people still not quite got to the bottom of because initially it seems counterproductive because it led to a lack of freedom there were there’s more disease because

we were living together was a it was a massive reduction in the variety of our diet there are a number of things that seem actually to be counterproductive to to the quality of human life and so no one’s quite got their head around why that changed happened and again that became something that was interested in and initially in the first trottle strummin it was a huge chunk of random esoteric speculation about this and then you go to the second raff and you think

okay Michael this is very interesting to you but nobody else gives a damn and it’s stopping the plot moving forward and what was initially two chapters got bald down in the end – I think – listen the page so you’ve you know sometimes the serendipitous things that actually get you to write the thing you have to then you know kill your babies and look back and say that was great it’s great with those tips directly there but it turns

out there was an elevator around the corner so the readers that one couldn’t want to go out that way wow it’s a fascinating kind of hearing you discuss your the way you’ve developed your writing style what influences it and what kind of inspires it another thing that you seem to be kind big into is photography I mean when did you discover your enthusiasm for taking pictures and I mean something that you say on your in your on your shop is that

the pictures I create are influencing my writing and the writing influences for further images these two things seem to flow together for you mmm how do they I mean where when did you first start and how do they flow together well I mean I I’ve always been in you know interested in the visual I mean I think if my life had gone slightly differently I probably would have ended up maybe being either an artist or an architect rather than

the writer cuz that’s something that I’ve always you know I had a I had interest in those subjects well before actually considered being a writer and something that I find when I’m writing is that I know that I’m not doing my best work or I know I’m not ready to write in this I haven’t absolutely unless I can visualize the environment as clearly as I can visualize real-life environments so that kind of internal visionary process I suppose I don’t mean

visionary I mean having a vision has always been important I know you know way back in the day so enjoy taking photographs and so on the stuff that I’m doing in the moment is is a kind of new development in the last couple of years where I just found that there was certain types of ideas and emotions and and atmospheres and I don’t know beats of beats of soul if that doesn’t sound too strange that were just easier for me to express in a visual way than they

were you know you know in a written way and that is something that you know I’ve ended up getting a great deal of I know where pleasure is the word but it’s something that has become you know very much a part of my life over the last couple of years and yes there’s definitely a a kind of symbiotic relationship between the writing in the images sometimes it’s all star going out of my head that I don’t have any other particular way of expressing I haven’t

found any other way of expressing I find I can express in an image and sometimes I will see something in and have a thought about that and find that that influence is the writing and again maybe this you know partly relates back to the idea of process whatever it is that keeps your inner motor purring wherever it is that keep you’re yourself self feeling that is engaging with the world and with things that you you feel you need to express

and so on I think whatever works whatever it is that keeps you that keeps you working keeps you thinking that keeps you feeling things these four I think that that’s very important I think that’s you know that and that’s part of the sort of role that it has in my life at the moment yeah and I mean you you also you know along with kind of sharing your your pictures on Instagram you also created a website to to get artists to share their work how do you pronounce a

BIR yeah I mean that’s something that I want to work on a little bit more I’ve started that about a year or so ago and unfortunately because of work pressures I haven’t done as much of that well I should but it’s something I’d really like to to move forward it spelled be IIT dot space i I just pronounced it bit space because other words it’s gonna be lead space or some some such a weird thing I mean it’s called be IIT space because

he came from a quote from I think Thomas perjury basically said you know why do you why do you there’s a I forget who was some famous Mountaineer was so you know why do you climb mountains and he said because it’s there and I think it was Thomas Burgi was asked the question why do you write and he said well because it isn’t there and I you know that is part of that I think that part of the creative process you feel something you see something that isn’t

there and that that desire almost need to take this thing which has a strong reality to you within your head and and make it concrete is a big part of the creative process and something I just found when you know I was I was putting up the pictures on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter for you know for my own reasons for my own satisfaction like is to degree and I found that the people were responding to them sometimes you know people were putting on captions for

ones that I hadn’t put on captions for and then a couple of people actually got in touch with me and they’d written you know short pieces and in some cases quite long short stories which which were basically riffing off the picture that I put up and I thought what that’s quite interesting because you know again you know right back at the beginning of you’re a chanting you say where do ideas come from him ideas can come from anywhere from the islands Safeway or

from some picture that some random guy put up on Instagram and that that lights a tiny spark in your head and out comes a piece of fiction and I find it interesting and I thought well you know these people have written these things it’d be nice for them to be read by people so I created this site and because you know the creative process the writing process can sometimes be hard people need feedback it’s nice for people to get feedback and it’s also

nice if there’s anything that can help people in terms of saying okay well maybe one of these images will help you to put them up and so that’s what I started doing without sign it you know this this forty or fifty pieces up there now we’re and it’s not just my pictures as a couple of other people are contributing pictures now and there’s also some music this couple I mean I way back in the day used to do a bit of music and so on sort of

it’s about derivative soundtrack type stuff so I put up those and a musician friend of mine called Suzanne Barbieri in the UK has put up some staff and as I say it’s I really want to sort of take this to a kind of Phase two but it needs that you need far more more sophisticated software to do it and it’s more more time for me someone finished this this new book that I’m writing hopefully give that a little bit more time definitely does sound interesting

to have you kind of leading these these other writers and picture takers and and and starting that up so Michael I have kind of a funny interesting story for you I happen to be part of this it’s it’s a group of about 40 people we’re friends and we just kind of have like a Facebook group that we kind of just hang out in one day a few weeks ago a month ago I asked a question to this group of friends I asked who who in your life who

who is someone that has completely changed the way you think in your life and someone that is alive that I can interview and your name came up and the person who mentioned your name her name is Louise Louise has a few questions for you she wants to know how’s your relationship with writing changed over the years yeah hi Louise if you’re listening that’s a incredibly nice thing to hear and thank you I guess it has changed I mean a so sub-question the

hero’s journey that I somehow wonder away from was how the processes writing has changed when I was first doing the graphic design stuff and so on when you first start writing it’s a kind of romantic quest it’s you versus the world it’s it’s something that nobody else knows or believes you could do and to be absolutely honest you don’t know or believe that you can do either in this you know you’ll be doing some other job too to pay for your time and to pay for

the stuff that you need and there is a real sort of you know you against the world sort of feeling about it and so at that time I I you know I had a full-time job and I was I would get back for me and I would write until 2 o’clock in the morning and I would write all day at the weekends and he had that sort of feeling about it and I always actually felt that I did a lot of my best work in about 9 o’clock ten o’clock eleven o’clock in

the evening because the world was quiet nobody’s phoning you out there’s no pressures it’s just you in a quiet room darkness outside and that always used to be my best time you know cut to 20 years later there are evening meals to be cooked there is homework to be supervised I have been a professional writer for two decades that doesn’t work anymore that that that’s that kind of process has had to evolve so on two levels one the way in which you do it

changes because the work because of the way one’s life circumstances change but also it stops being a solitary quest and it starts being a job you have deadlines you have expectations from readers and publishers you have expectations which you set yourself in terms of saying okay well that’s not quite good enough or hang on a minute that’s just the same thing again shouldn’t you be still evolving shouldn’t you be doing something different shouldn’t this it so

becomes on the one hand it becomes easier because you’ve done it for a long time on the other hand it becomes harder because you’ve done it for a long time so yeah difficult question yeah please also want to know do you enjoy the process of writing have you ever felt uninspired to write and if so what did you do to kind of reinsert your self there are many many many many many occasions on which I felt on his bed and inspired to write there are many many

many occasions of which I I had any other job in the world it’s you know as anyone has tried to do it it’s not it’s not it’s not easy and sometimes it’s a life sentence too I mean there’s a great quote from a screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan who says you know being a righteous like having homework every night for the rest of your life and that’s that’s true there is a it’s pixie you says yeah you should be doing this you’d be doing this should

be doing this it’s not something you can sort of take time off form and they’re all sometimes weighing you down and having said which there are days where I will sit down and I will then look up for hours later and have no idea what happened and find that I wrote 2,000 words and that those those are those are semi magical times and it’s a bit where those afternoons or even those half hours where stuff just comes out of the back of your head and you think I have

no idea where this is coming from and it seems to be working so I’ll just keep talking it down while while it’s still happening those are there’s a great you know that you feel quite integrated as a person you felt you’re doing something that’s that’s distinctively you those are there’s a great moments I would say there are numbered in me approximately fifty to one by the times when it’s a struggle and it’s uninspired and during

those periods you have to do two things one remember that you know being a being a clothes artist is a job and if you wait for inspiration then it’ll never happen and you know it’s it’s again isn’t that great Thurber quote about see to the old newspaperman’s crisis I don’t want it perfect I want it to stay and a lot of being a writer who’s doing that you just need to get the stuff down and then worry like about whether it’s any

good and then the other part of it is to again defer back to something I said earlier discovering your process discovering the fact that there will be days when you get no words done but if you go out and you walk around the street and you have that half inkling that says oh maybe I need to do this that’s worth a day on which you write 3,000 words because ultimately piecing together those sort of insights will be what gets the job done Leah you know

cranking out words that shouldn’t be hard if cranking out words is hard then you might want to consider another job but it’s chasing those one of the wisp ideas and the internal man management that’s that’s the stuff that you need to suddenly learn about yourself Louise also she says that she’s read that you don’t like to discuss an idea a novel or story before it’s finished yes how how do you how do you choose the ideas that you are going to work on oh

yeah it’s true I have an almost pathological definitely superstitious fear of discussing an idea beforehand but to me it always feels it’s almost like telling the punchline of a joke before you before you’ve told the elements it’s partly that and it’s partly because to a possibly excessive degree I do get sort of rather invested emotionally and personally in the stuff that I write I don’t fall I’ve just said about it being a job I don’t you know

part feel like they did fail you know each each of the things I’ve written a lot of me goes into them and so they do you feel extremely personal in and despite the fact they don’t splurge on all the stuff on into books I’m actually extremely private rather rather introverted and I don’t let this stuff out just by saying it if it’s if it’s Gunn come out I need to have written it and spent a lot of time where there and sort of got

it to the point where I think okay this is okay this is worth reading this is I feel that I’ve said the thing that I wanted to say and so that’s there that’s the process that I personally need to go through publishers hate this because what they want before you start and certainly when they’re buying a new book renews later books is they want to be told what they’re getting and so there is that process where you have to write down a proposal for books and that that

is one of my least favorite parts of the whole thing because it feels like I’m just sort of you know it feels like I’m walking naked down the street to that stage and that’s something that I do not enjoy doing now so in terms of the the further bit of the question is it’s a it’s a gut feeling with ideas for me what I tend to do is if I think I’ve got an idea for a novel I don’t write it down I have huge files of other stuff little snatches of random dialogue

observations you know sketches of places ideas for little things but if I think it might be a novel idea I deliberately don’t write it down because I think if it takes writing down for you to remember it that’s not gonna get you through a year and so I tend to just leave those and when I tend to find with the ones that I’ve ended up committing to is that flypaper mode switches on and other ideas will start to to stick to them a

character or a fuzzy idea of a character will wandering from someone say you know that idea that you had I could be part of it or I’ll go a place and think ah this is the kind of place where this kind of thing could happen and so I and again this is just a deeply personal you know process and probably wouldn’t work for anybody else but it tends to be to me the ideas have to prove themselves to me I don’t pick them they eventually

keep they just gives like the man from Palo but in Reverse they they just keep knocking at your door saying now forget about me because I’m your next thing and sometimes sometimes it may take ten years they had the book I’m writing at the moment I had the first Inklings of the idea for it about a decade ago it’s never been the next thing that I wanted to do until four months ago when I started the first draft so it’s you know it’s oh it’s a long and winding road at

times you just have to trust that in the end you’ll get what you want to be what a process that’s so incredible her last question I must have missed in the research I’m sure you will get it I think uh maybe it qualifies in the realm of super fan are you still using the same Apple keyboard for a long long time I did use the same Apple keyboard and it did almost approach the level of superstition you know I would keep I would keep changing up that the the CPU

and the machine itself but there was this one keyboard and wasn’t the very first one that I’d use but it was I’d quite official stories have been written on it only for the first few books I think maybe even as far as strong enough further yeah it just became the thing and again it refers back to what I talked about talked about in terms of barriers earlier there was no barrier I knew where my fingers were on there cuz I can i can type about as fast as i can

think on the right keyboard and so it became something of a deal to me that that i still had this keyboard but then of course USB came along this was an old one of the really cool APB buses or something and said then I think I actually got an adapter for a while I was that so light now sir but then eventually you have to say you know it’s not the keyboard if it’s not the keyboard it’s some other part of the thing it’s not people I still have the

keyboard I don’t currently have a study I’m looking their living room table at the moment cuz that’s that’s sort of working for me but it’s somewhere in the house is that keyboard and ya know that meant a thing but now I know it’s it’s each other yeah I mean I must say that you know some of the stuff that I’ve said and also to what I must say a very interesting questions and thank you for that it makes itself as though I’ve got

this this whole thing worked out something complicated you know some we’re very well worked at a process it’s it’s been chaotic throughout I just I just do what seems to sort of make sense and I hope that you know as a sail okay no I thoroughly we’re you know we’re running out of time here I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation it’s really fun to just kind of dive into you know the mind of someone I deemed successful in writing and you’ve been doing this for

quite a while I mean I want to give you the opportunity to I mean is is there something that you would kind of send to your fans a message anything like that well I did purely and simple you know thank you for reading because you know it goes without saying that without people reading and without kind comments and you know I I wouldn’t have the freedom and the and the luxury to do what I do you know I work hard at it and I hope I hope this stuff out there which

is which is resonant with which is worth reading and also just to say simply you know I I’m on Twitter I’ve got I’ve got a website I’m on Instagram you know please get in touch please just let me know your thoughts ask me any questions you want to know why don’t you give us your your website in your Twitter please yeah the the website is www.martialartsnc.com mes s oh yeah please get in touch always happy to hear always happy to sit

arrives any questions and as I say you know thank you for enabling me to do what I do yeah we’ll definitely make the website and the link to your Instagram and Twitter available when we put this episode out Michael it’s been a pleasure sir thank you so much for lending us your time and making the time to to talk to us absolute pleasure to say thank you for the questions pretty much the interesting questions iMovie nos has been a total pleasure you guys have been

listening to the human experience we have been talking to mr. Michael Marshall Smith thank you guys so much for listening we will get you guys next week you