In the latest of our ‘Creatives In Profile’ interview series, it is an honour to introduce author and creative writing teacher, Tim Leach.
Tim is a historical fiction author and creative writing teacher. His first novel, ‘The Last King of Lydia’, was published by Atlantic Books in Spring 2013, and has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. A sequel, ‘The King and the Slave‘, was published in 2014. He teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick, and he lives in Sheffield.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me about yourself, where you live and your background/lifestyle – is writing your first love, or do you have another passion?
LEACH
After studying creative writing at Warwick and living in London for a time, I now live in in Sheffield, which must be one of the country’s best kept secrets – a lovely, friendly, creative city with the Peak District on its doorstep. Shh, don’t tell anyone, or they’ll all want to move here…
Other than writing, my main interest is rock climbing. It has much more in common with writing than you might think – they both share a kind of rarefied loneliness that appeals to me. There is no one lonelier than a climber on the wall or a writer in his/her study, but the act of climbing or writing changes the nature of that loneliness from being something awful into something beautiful.
INTERVIEWER
Did you want to become a writer when you were young?
LEACH
No, I wanted to be an actor! At university I began to get increasingly interested in writing, and after a brief tug of war between the competing passions, writing won out. They share a surprising amount of common ground in character creation, narrative rhythm, and the importance of understanding your audience. I like the greater creative control you get in writing, although I do sometimes miss the thrill of performance.
INTERVIEWER
Who inspires you?
LEACH
The writers who inspire me most are cracking storytellers first and foremost, but who also have a fine eye for prose, an empathic feel for character, and an ultimately optimistic view of human nature. John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, George Orwell and Tolstoy are the exemplars of this for me. I do also love brilliant stylists like Virginia Woolf and wild imagineers like Italo Calvino – I could never do the kind of work they do, but I like to admire them from afar…
INTERVIEWER
Your debut novel, ‘The Last King Of Lydia’, blends historical fact with fiction and philosophy. How did you balance the competing threads of ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ – what does the term ‘reality’ mean to you? Would you ever change a fact to heighten the narrative drama of a book? How flexible is the truth?
LEACH
I seem to always pick unreliable source texts to get around this problem, where there is no certain record of events. This gives the writer rather more room for manoeuvre. I try to stay away from ‘actually impossible’, but am content with ‘wildly improbable’ – my approach to historical fiction tends to be to pick the most interesting version of the story that could possibly be true, rather than the most probable version of events.
What is ‘reality’? I think that we are creatures of narrative, it’s how we understand and process the world. We tell stories to survive, and the stories that we tell become our reality.
INTERVIEWER
Could you tell us a little bit about your research and writing methods?
LEACH
I always have one source text that is my anchor – Herodotus’s Histories for The Last King of Lydia, for example. If I ever get lost or confused or overwhelmed, that will be the book that I return to.
For the first draft, I research more to get a feel for the period than to hunt for fine details. This usually means reading works of the period that I am studying, and to read other authors who have attempted to write about a similar time and place. Then, when I’m editing, I’ll read lots of non-fiction to dig out particular details that I need to flesh out the writing. I think research should always be fun, otherwise you’re not doing it right.
As for the writing itself, I set a word count target (usually 500 words or more) and write that for six or seven days a week. Slow and steady is my preference, keep moving forward until it’s done.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve mentioned before that you began writing the novel while working in a bookshop in Greece staffed by “wandering lost souls”. Can books – and writing – help such souls to become ‘found’?
LEACH
Yes and no. Ultimately, it’s the people in my life who make me feel ‘found’. I think we are ‘found’ when we feel connected to people, ‘lost’ when we are not. But writing keeps me alive when I’m ‘lost’ – for me, it’s a survival mechanism for facing down seemingly hopeless situations. And when we come back from being lost, we often come back with good stories to tell, stories that can connect us to people again, until we are lost once more.
I think this cyclical process of being lost and found is universal human experience rather than being restricted to creative types, but perhaps they feel it more acutely than most. This may be why artists have always been depicted as wandering between different worlds – dream world and waking world, spirit world and real world, the living and the dead.
INTERVIEWER
When writing, what do you think is most important to keep in mind when typing your initial drafts?
LEACH
Just. Keep. Going. It’s the easiest thing in the world to stop, to endlessly edit, then to give up in despair. You’ll hate the writing for long periods of time. This is normal. You’ll be convinced that it is terrible. It might well be. So what? Keep going anyway. There are worse things than writing a bad book. I’ve written bad books and thrown them away, and I don’t regret writing them in the slightest. You never learn anything if you don’t write, if you don’t finish.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a specific ‘reader’ or in mind when you write?
LEACH
Not a specific person, no. But I always try to imagine my reader as someone who has absolutely no interest in what I’m writing about. For my first two books, I assumed that my reader both knew nothing about the ancient world, and didn’t particularly care about it. My challenge is to win them over by telling them an absolutely irresistible story.
Preaching to the converted is easy, and makes for lazy writing. The compliments from readers that mean the most to me always start with “I don’t usually read historical fiction, but…” or “I really thought I wouldn’t like this book, but…”. Those are the people I write for.
INTERVIEWER
For all writing, the importance of finding the right ‘voice’ is of course crucial. Often, writers’ speak of developing an ‘other’ – who provides that voice when they write. How have you created and refined your voice and tone for your writing – and do you have a separate, ‘other’ persona who helps you write?
LEACH
Yes, but it changes from book to book. It isn’t an abstract writerly persona, it’s a specific character. The Last King of Lydia and The King and the Slave are written in the third person, so the persona is more concealed, but it is there. I am working on something at the moment written in the first person, so the character is rather more obvious!
INTERVIEWER
What are your thoughts on some of the general trends within the writing industry at the moment? Is there anything in particular you see as being potentially future-defining, in terms of where the industry is headed?
LEACH
I’m optimistic about the potential of the internet to connect readers to books they would not otherwise have heard about. I’m pessimistic about the future of bookshops, and the impact that will have on connecting readers to books they would not otherwise have heard about.
INTERVIEWER
In an internationalist, interconnected world, ideas and creativity are constantly being flung across community threads, internet chatrooms and forums, and social media sites (among many others). With so many different voices speaking at once, how do you cut through the incessant digital background babble? How do you make your creativity – your voice – stand out and be heard?
LEACH
First, you’ve got to have something interesting to say. Lots of people just want to write a good book, and many of them achieve this. But unfortunately, simply being “good” is not good enough – the recycling bins of agents and editors are filled with plenty of “good” books. You have to be exceptional in some way. What is unique about the story you want to tell? Why does it need to be told? Why are you the one to tell it? If you can’t answer these questions, then there is no reason for your work to stand out from thousands that are just like it.
After that, I think that books aren’t disseminated by writers, they are disseminated by readers. Nothing beats a personal recommendation when it comes to selling a book, and so it’s all about finding your champions – bloggers and online reviewers, friends and family, they are the ones who spread the word. So find your passionate readers, and cherish them.
INTERVIEWER
Following ‘The Last King of Lydia’, your second novel, ‘The King and the Slave’ has since been published. What was it like to revisit Croesus et al in writing it?
LEACH
Very enjoyable! I originally tried to write the story as one big book, as I always had a very specific ending that I was heading towards. But the story was simply too large and complex for one book. So it was very satisfying to finally get to the ending I’d been working towards for many years.
INTERVIEWER
Could you tell us a little about some of the future projects you’re working on?
LEACH
I’m a little shy about saying too much about the next project – suffice it to say that it’s another historical project, but set a little closer than Ancient Greece, and quite a lot colder…
INTERVIEWER
Could you write us a story in 6 words?
LEACH
Oh, I wish that I could.
INTERVIEWER
Could you give your top 5 – 10 tips for writers?
LEACH
- Write every day. Inspiration be damned, get some words on the page no matter what.
- Be bold, brave and radical with your editing. The red pen can do remarkable things to your first draft, but only if you’re both wildly inventive and absolutely ruthless in your redrafting.
- Get good readers for your work, and learn to listen to them.
- Be patient. It’ll probably take you about ten years of daily practice to get any good. Plan accordingly.
- Lower your overheads. The less money you need to earn, the more time and energy you are going to have to write.
nothing in the rulebook 