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Was your childhood ambition always to be a writer?
If not, what inspired you to start writing? |
Writing was the only thing I was good at. It came easily. Everything else was an effort that, being an idle toad, I wasn’t prepared to make. But considering writing as a career came later, when I was about fourteen. Before that I planned to be either a Fleet Air Arm pilot or a Grand Prix driver; possibly both. It was my interest in motor-racing that helped me discover the power of words.
As a schoolboy I read the weekly racing magazine Autosport and began to contribute letters on various topics, signed Francis A.C.Barnard, God help me. I even had the club running the British Grand Prix contacting me to apologise for organisational shortcomings at races I hadn’t attended. I became quite well known, perceived I think as a middle-aged buffer with an axe to grind, when in fact I was still in the Lower Fifth at Sevenoaks. Alan Bennett said there is a difference between writing and being a writer. It was the ‘being a writer’ bit that began to appeal to me, particularly the idea of becoming a newspaperman, like those reporters in Hollywood films with press cards stuck in their snap-brimmed trilbies.
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How long have you been writing? |
Well, I joined the Kent Messenger as a 16-year-old cub reporter so I’ve been writing professionally for fifty-two years. Even then I was writing short stories and I embarked on a novel at eighteen. Not a good idea. They say write about what you know and I didn’t know anything. The writing quality wasn’t bad but the plot was dire, a kind of Room At The Top hybrid about a young reporter fatally attractive to women with large chests. I finished it as a National Serviceman in the RAF and it got better thanks to that experience, but it was too late to save..
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What do you enjoy most about writing? |
Finishing whatever I’m working on and feeling it’s as good as I can make it. This applies to journalism, writing public relations and advertising copy, corporate communications plans, the whole range of writing disciplines I’ve been involved in through my career. I view writing, whether short or long, as something similar to a jigsaw puzzle. There’s a perfect solution, an ideal fit that you can never quite attain, however much you try. It can be wonderfully satisfying when you get close, a nightmare when you don’t. In fiction, now I’ve completed two novels for Headline (the second, Band of Eagles, will be published in January 2007), I’m haunted by the cliché, particularly in the genre in which I’m involved. There are so many traps waiting for you when you set out to describe, for example, a dogfight between Spitfires and Messerschmitts.
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Which writers do you admire? |
Hemingway, whose style reminds me of a Picasso sketch. It’s what’s left out, that whole breadth of apparently hidden knowledge and experience, that somehow still comes through. Robert Louis Stevenson. I think Treasure Island still holds up as a thrilling story with hardly a superfluous word. Hard to believe it was written well over a hundred years ago. Evelyn Waugh. Tolstoy. Scott Fitzgerald. Orwell. Also Betjeman, with his poetry and rhythmic prose, another trait to be emulated, immediately understandable, a pleasure to read and speak.
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