What inspired me to write the book?
I took a solo trip to the Greek Islands in 1988 while at University at St Andrews in Scotland and spent three months sleeping rough on the island of Paros, where I lived a hand to mouth existence and turned rather feral, keeping the company of character-types I never would normally have done. I always thought there was a story in there somewhere – what might have happened if things had turned extreme? But took me 30 years to figure out what that story might be. Originally it started out in a semi-autobiographical vein (written in the third person – a protagonist called Adam; I don’t know why – I think I was feeling biblical!) but I met a writer at a party who said that biographical novels don’t sell – I’d have to include a murder. Protesting I never murdered anyone while in Greece, he suggested I make it up. So I did.
What’s my daily writing routine like?
I have a tendency to write at all times of day and night – and do a lot of my planning and thinking (problem solving) while walking. However, my routine – such as I had while performing nightly in the West End in Mamma Mia, when I wrote the bulk of the novel – was to start as early as possible in the morning and write solidly for three hours, then revisit and edit those pages in the afternoon (or at night, or on the tube or on the loo!) I find mornings best, but snatch time where I can. I’m writing the sequel now but finding it hard to get a flow – partly as I now have two children and we are home-schooling because of Corona virus. Come the evening, when I actually do have the time, I just want to drink wine…
Do I write about people I know?
The Lizard is definitely inspired by people I met and worked with while on Paros – or at later times, while travelling – but they are fictional takes on all of them. Several of the characters are amalgamations of various people I knew – and still do know. But what was fun, was that as the story progressed, the fictional characters took on their own identities and became independent of anyone I knew. They then started to lead me. I also found that minor characters suddenly became lead characters – as their fictional identities/possibilities became stronger and clearer. I think that if you try too hard to base a character on someone real, it can stop you taking them where the story needs to go, because you become trapped in the idea of ‘character’ (much like actors do when rehearsing – where you try to find a mystery ‘character’ that lies outside of yourself and your own physicality). But the truth is anyone can do or say anything if they are put in the right circumstances. I had an end in mind for the story, but I very much made it up as I went along – inspired by Stephen King’s advice in ‘On Writing’. I really went on an adventure myself – and the further I went into the story, the more faces and places returned for me to draw on.
What is my background and what led me to writing this book?
I trained as an actor, (I still act professionally – recently played politician Michael Gove in a play about Boris Johnson!), studied German at St Andrews Uni in Scotland, and I grew up in various countries overseas, owing to my parents work with the Foreign Office. We spent four years in Cyprus – where I went to school for a while, before heading to the UK to boarding school – and have always travelled to Greece for holidays. Greece is very close to my heart and therefore an easy subject for me to write about. I also used to write short stories as a child and I’d make them up at night to tell my brother – when we shared a room. So, there has always been a storyteller in me. I then went on to write songs in a band and then a couple of plays and a screenplay (The 1 act play, ‘The Cage’ was produced at the Edinburgh Festival, but the screenplay is still waiting). Plays and screenplays are hard to produce because they rely on the opinions and decisions (and finances) of many people. So I thought I’d approach a purer form of storytelling where I could do it all, exactly as I wished it to be – and it was either going to be good enough or not. The reader would decide – no one else. And it’s a question of taste of course, anyway. But I didn’t need anyone else to help me write it – other than my phenomenal writing coach Jeff Ourvan, without whom the story would never have been finished! And that is how The Lizard came to be.
How did I think about the title of the book?
It emerged while writing it. Initially the novel was titled ‘Anonymous’ because I loved the theme (who are we when we step onto new soil where no one knows us?). Then it became ‘Hunter Gatherer’, and at one point even The Reflex (all theme based titles – although I blame Duran Duran partly for the latter one!). But eventually ‘The Lizard’ became glaringly obvious – referring to both the protagonist and the anti-hero villain in the novel. A furtive creature sitting alone on a rock – governed my heat; with one eye on security, the other, on the next meal.
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