Welcome to the second instalment of the RM Gurnhill blog!
If you'd like to know more about myself or my work, please don't hesitate to contact me through the contact form on the site.
Questions posed by Paul Grant & Zak Peat
Pencil drawing by Jo Lanta
Q: What inspires you to write and create books?
I've always been in love with reading, and then I became obsessed with old-school roleplaying in the '80s. Games-mastering RPGs involves a lot of imagination and storytelling techniques. It was then a natural progression to start writing these stories down once I stopped roleplaying. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Once an idea or a germ of an idea appears in my brain, it kind of sits and germinates until I pay attention to it, at which point I start developing it and it evolves into something. 5 Years, for example, was inspired by an apocalyptic line from a rock song. This inspired the first scene where the camera pans down from a blue sky to 2 soldiers stood on a cliff top talking, with the first line a voice-over as the camera pans. So, the novel began life as a film script in 2003. In 2009 I was in the coronary care unit of the hospital and asked my wife to bring the file of notes over to give me something to do. I developed it into the novel it is now and finished the first draft in 2013. I put it to one side and then revisited it this year with fresh eyes ready for publication.
Q: So, what were you aiming to achieve in your writing, and don’t you find that working for a living and writing are not mutually compatible?
Fantastic questions! Time constraints are immense when you are working, bringing up a family and all the rest of life’s intricacies and responsibilities. The time I can find for writing varies by novel and has increased significantly as I aged and my life has developed with the children now grown up. Take Blackeyed for example; I wrote the first line at college in 1985, followed by little else. It was an idea for a book, no more. It was 1988 before I wrote anymore of the Corlandian Ballads, where I wrote disparate ideas for action scenes down, with no set purpose or structure. In 1990 and 1991 I decided that my ideas needed some order, and inspired by the intricate worlds that my idols had constructed (Vance, Tolkien, Gemmell etc) I set about creating my own world to base my novels in. From 1994 onwards to 1996, I started to structure the world data, which expanded, and again started writing disparate action scenes on and off for a couple of years, inspired by the music I was in love with. The next time I seriously revisited the novel was in 2003, my life a totally different life to the one of 6 years earlier, and with a BA Hons degree in English Literature under my belt. By this time, I had decided that I would eventually seek representation and become a full-time published writer. First I needed to prove that I could write at least one novel, and by proving that I could then repeat this feat, I would be learning and honing my craft, and developing my own writing ‘voice’. On Hallowe'en 2003, I finally finished the first draft. And promptly filed it until 2014.
Although 5 Years began as a film script in 2003 after completing Black-eyed, it quickly fell by the wayside and I shelved it to pursue other projects on and off as we raised our daughters and got on with life. In 2009, during a long spell in the Coronary Care Unit, I began to think deeply about pushing my writing on again; I revisited 5 years and decided to follow the novel route. During 2010 and a long spell recovering from a heart bypass graft, I worked out the characters and plot, and set about writing it. In 2013 the first draft was complete.
In between these episodes, I have planned, plotted and written various snatches and shards of different novel ideas, from horror to post-modern drama, as well as writing an album full of lyrics, over a hundred poems, blogs, training manuals; you name it - I've probably written it.
My aim now though, is to release a Corlandian Ballads novel every two years, and one literary novel a year.
Part 3 of this question and answer session coming soon.
Comments