Why I write, and what I'm trying to do with it

I didn't start writing because I had something to prove. I started because there were people in my head who wouldn't leave until I'd worked out what happened to them.

That's not a metaphor I'm especially fond of, but it's the honest one. A story usually arrives for me as a single, specific image: a man standing under a bridge with nowhere left to sleep, a diary opened by someone who was never meant to read it, a room kept exactly as it was the day someone stopped coming into it. I don't begin with a theme. I begin with the image, and then I spend a very long time finding out why it won't let go of me.

What I keep discovering, book after book, is that I'm not actually interested in the event. I'm interested in the after. What a person carries once the war has ended, the marriage has failed, the money has been made or lost, the child has grown up and left. Most of what I write is really about the long, quiet second half of a decision, the part nobody puts in the summary.

Why the history

I'm drawn to the past less for the costume of it (though I won't pretend I don't enjoy the research) and more because distance clarifies things. Put a family in 1919 Birmingham, strip away the conveniences and excuses of the present, and you can see exactly what a person will do to protect the people they love, and exactly what it costs them to do it. History doesn't soften human behaviour. If anything, it removes the places people usually hide.

But I don't think of myself as a "historical novelist" in any narrow sense. The next book moves the setting entirely: a different war, a different kind of waiting. The one after that may not be historical at all. What doesn't move is the question I keep asking. What does it cost to love someone completely? And what does a person do once that cost comes due?

Why it isn't one genre

People sometimes ask why I'd write a crime novel and a war novel and, eventually, things further from either. The honest answer is that I've never experienced those as different questions. Crime, at the level I care about it, is a story about debt: what's owed, to whom, and what happens when it finally gets collected. War is a story about waiting, and about the friendships that get made inside that waiting. Love, on a page, is rarely about the love itself; it's about what ordinary people become once they're caught inside it, and who they are once it's passed through them. Different rooms. Same house.

Blackwood Street

My first novel took longer to finish than I expected, which I understand now is the normal complaint of every first novel ever written. It's about a man who builds an empire out of a single, private decision never to be powerless again, and the son who inherits both the empire and the silence that built it. I wrote most of it not knowing exactly what the diary at its centre would turn out to contain. I found that out roughly the same time my characters did.

I'm not going to tell you it's the best thing I'll ever write. I hope it isn't. But it's the one that taught me how to actually finish a book, which turns out to be a different skill entirely from wanting to write one.

What I'm trying to do

Build a body of work, slowly, across more genres and periods than any one of them can hold on its own. Not to prove range for its own sake, but because the question underneath all of it is bigger than one century or one kind of story can carry. I'd like a reader, years from now, to be able to pick up something of mine without knowing the genre in advance and still recognise, within a page or two, whose book it is.

I don't know yet how long that will take. I'm not in a hurry to find out.