Interview with thriller author Alexander McNabb…
[Note from Steve: Alexander McNabb is mainly an author of thrillers, having written Olives – A Violent Romance, Beirut – An Explosive Thriller, Shemlan – A Deadly Tragedy, A Decent Bomber (just reviewed in Bookpleasures and this blog–see below), and Birdkill. He has been working in, living in, and travelling around the Middle East for some thirty years. Formerly a journalist, editor and magazine publisher, today he is a consultant on media, publishing and digital communications. Alexander is also a frequent conference speaker, chair and moderator – as well as commentator in broadcast and print media – particularly around technology, media and online issues. When he’s not writing books, he’s posting half-thoughts and snippets on his blog, Fake Plastic Souks, which he started in 2007 during the Arab Media Forum. The title refers to the ‘new’ souks of Dubai, so much more convenient and classy than the real thing. Oh, and for anyone who hasn’t been exposed to Arabia, a souk is a collection of shops, a sort of traditional mall! Without further ado, let’s throw some questions at him.]
Alexander on writing:
1) Why, how, and when did you start writing?
I suppose it all started with reading, I’ve always been a voracious reader. But I gave up smoking in 2001 and had to find something publicly acceptable to do with my hands. I realized I’d written millions of words of copy in my career as a magazine editor and publisher as well as my years working in communications. I’d written speeches, op-eds, letters and white papers on behalf of CEOs, Sheikhs, and Kings so I thought I might as well have a go at writing a book. I was, of course, quite remarkably clueless about what that actually entailed. My first book was a spoof thriller called Space, which was very funny but not really a Booker Prize troubler. It took over 100 rejections from British literary agents for me to get the point.
2) Did you publish the first book you wrote?
Yes, oddly enough, in the end. I took a look back over Space for some editing workshop I was doing a couple of years back and it tickled me pink. So I bunged it up on Amazon for $0.99. It was written as a spoof of the very genre I ended up writing in, but it made me laugh and laugh. It has one review on Amazon, ‘This book is not funny.’ [Note from Steve: Alexander shouldn’t worry—those one- and two-line reviews on Amazon are generally meaningless.]
3) What is your biggest problem with the writing process. How do you tackle it?
I don’t have a single gnarly problem that lies in wait drooling and waiting to attack. Each book has had its own quirks and issues to manage. Olives is written in the first person and makes a really solid emotional connection with readers as a result. Beirut had structural issues and my editor made me tear it all down and rebuild it, losing one too many goody and one too many baddy on the way. For Shemlan, the editor took out 15,000 words of flashbacks which I have just restored because I felt, after having considered his advice for two years, the book as I intended it achieves what I set out to achieve. A Decent Bomber suffered the most difficult gestation – that’s taken two years to write. And then Birdkill followed right after as a massive sigh of relief and just tumbled onto paper. Well, DOCX. You know.
4) Do you feel writing is something you need to do or want to do?
Writing is most assuredly something I want to do. Marketing, now that’s a whole other ballgame.
5) Have your personal experiences (or situations) influenced you creatively? If so, how?
Yes, my first three books are Middle East based. My experience with callow British journalists interacting with Arabs; of Jordan and Beirut (that sexiest of cities) and thirty years of wandering around this part of the world have undoubtedly had their effect. Writing makes you a thief, a stealer of things. A glance, a gesture, a phrase, a personal quirk.
One great sadness for me was the chapters in Shemlan that are set in the massive Ottoman souk in Aleppo have lost their setting. The souk is gone, blown away in the Syrian civil war, and you’ll never see its like again. I guess I’m at least glad I preserved it in my book. A souk is a traditional market, often organically growing, so shops cluster by specialization. The Al Madina in Aleppo dated back to the 14th century and had a Byzantine church at its center. It was literally a city in itself – over 30 miles of covered alleyways packed with shops selling pretty much anything you could imagine. It’s been comprehensively flattened, destroyed along with much of the city of Aleppo. Think Hiroshima in 1946 and you have something of an idea of the scale of destruction in Syria today. [Note from Steve: if we add all the cultural treasures destroyed there, what has happened in Syria is a crime against all civilization.]
6) How much of your creative ability do you think is innate and how much is learned?
You can’t teach storytelling, but you can learn some rules about how to do it better. I learned a lot from realizing readers were important. They say it’s a big moment when you first see your book in print; it wasn’t that way at all for me. The big reveal for me was my first book club and meeting people who had read – invested in – my book and wanted to talk to me about their experience. Woah, but that was a biggie!
7) What is the last book you read? What are you reading now?
Inspector Cadaver by Georges Simenon. I really enjoy reading his stuff – and I generally hate that genre, Agatha Christie et al. And I’ve just started Steven Hawking’s Brief History of Time. I’m not late to that particular party; it’s a quantum effect.
8) Whose writing inspires you the most and why?
Lawrence Durrell. Oh, my word, but he created a lavish thing in The Alexandria Quartet.
9) Do you have a favorite genre?
No, I’m very catholic. I originally spoofed the thriller genre because I was running out of books I wanted to read at the Dubai airport bookshop—you know the Appian Progression or the Gerontophile Possession and all those other titles where the hero is a normal guy who takes on a shadowy cabal of bad guys and somehow always ends up on a solo run through Europe and then beats them all and gets the girl. [Note from Steve: sounds like The Bourne Identity, both book and movie.] Good, thick, action-packed reads for that long flight, what I ended up calling “airport novels.” I’d read so many of them that I started to lose the ability to figure whether I’d already read one or not. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a genre I enjoy. But I had this strange desire to stick crocodile clips on its nipples and wire them to the mains. Which is, when you think about it, a worry in itself.
Now, I’ll read anything that’s good. I love books with a strong sense of place that surprise me. I love being surprised.
10) Should writers read in their genre? Should they be avid readers?
Yes and yes. Without doubt.
11) How do you find your plots?
I dream them. I kid you not. I’ve, literally, dreamed my novels. If I’ve been stuck with a book’s progression, I’ve taken the problem to bed with me and more often than not woken up with the solution—if not clear in my mind, somehow easier for me when I tackled it the next day.
I love the story of the bloke who invented the sewing machine. Having wrestled with the problem to no avail, he woke up one morning having dreamed of being chased by pygmy head-hunters brandishing spears with a hole in their tips. Eureka!
I think dreams are our way of managing experience and input, a sort of file management routine that lets us sort our most recent experiences and weigh them against our remembered relationships, a way of learning what prioritizes and balances our memory, learning and experience. We discard the unimportant, re-calculate our understandings, and problem-solve our issues. We re-balance, based on the inputs from the day that was. I truly believe my subconscious helps me build books. [Note from Steve: I concur, at least for some dreams!]
On the other hand, I might, clearly, just be a total loony. [Note from Steve: the most important characteristic a writer can possess?]
12) Are your characters based on real people?
A couple are. Pat, the character in A Decent Bomber, is my wife’s uncle. He’s a mild-mannered, gentle man who keeps a small herd of milk cows on a wee farm up on the margins of the Cummermore Bog in South Tipperary. He likes tea. As a younger man, he was a bit of a Republican. Being a bit ‘green’ as a lad hardly marks you out in South Tipperary, you understand.
I’ve long teased Sarah with dark mutterings about how uncle Pat’s sitting on an IRA arms cache. It’s amusingly incongruous if you know Pat.
And then one day it hit me. Hang on. What if he WAS? And what if bad people came calling? Really bad people. And what if he had a past? And what if…?
I started to throw the idea around and pick it up by its ears to see if it squealed. I did a little research and yes, it could work. I worried a bit about what I was setting out to do to Pat, the placid, kind man with a Pioneer badge (A Pioneer pledges to forswear the drink) who’d done nothing to deserve being turned into a gun-toting leviathan. And then I got over it and started writing. That’s the trouble with this writing thing, it tears away your morality and leaves you stealing people’s souls.
13) How do you name your characters?
Every which way. As I said, writing books turns you into a thief. The biggest act of thievery in Olives, for instance, is Northern Irish spy Gerald Lynch. He’s got a hang-up about being called ‘Gerry’; it’s always Gerald. He’s spent twenty years escaping from being Gerry Lynch. That, for instance, was stolen. Someone said it to me in a meeting and I couldn’t wait to get away and make that phrase into a new character. The spy in Olives was originally a fiftyish, gingery fellow called Nigel Soames. Gerald Lynch, born of a theft, replaced him that very evening and has gone on to be the central character in my two subsequent books. I re-used Nigel Soames in Shemlan. Never waste a character….
14) Which comes first, plot or characters?
These days, I’ll sketch out my raw plot, but the characters frequently modify it or put their stamp on it, as we found out with Boyle in A Decent Bomber, who embarks on a torrid affair I had never intended for him!
Pat’s niece Orla was never meant to have a girlfriend, a relationship that throws her life into turmoil. That whole development was the last thing on my mind, and I do not for the life of me know where it came from—it just happened.
It’s odd how these things can develop. That relationship, unintended in my original telling, becomes crucial to the story of A Decent Bomber. Orla, already in a state of considerable confusion, gets treated pretty badly in the scheme of things. Not only is she confronted by her strange feelings for another woman, she finds out her beloved uncle Pat isn’t quite what he seems to be. The rock and anchor she seeks in her new turbulence turns out to be a catalyst for complete chaos.
Boyle wriggled his way into the story as an uninvited guest as well. And nobody was as surprised at the way his love life turns out as I was. One minute he’s in his office and the next my fingers had tapped out a scene that was the last thing from my mind. I actually sat back and questioned what the hell had just gone on. I hadn’t meant it to happen at all and then found myself having to deal with the consequences, just as Boyle must have had to have done.
Sometimes these things happen. Characters do stuff they’re not supposed to do, grow a life for themselves and make their own decisions. You just have to go along with it and let them do their thing. It often works out rather wonderfully. In Shemlan, for instance, it led to the whole glorious car chase across a frozen Baltic sea. I didn’t even know the Baltic froze over, let alone that there were seasonal ice roads connecting the Estonian mainland with its islands. In A Decent Bomber, that unplanned relationship of Orla’s ended up resolving the whole book.
15) Any comments about writing dialog?
I enjoy dialogue (we do spell ‘dialogue’ different this side of the pond, see?) greatly. I was about to say most of all, except I enjoy the other stuff too. But I love dialogue muchly. I like to play with words, accents, characteristics. I like to try and put an accent or personality across subtly without descending to patois. I think you can use ‘real’ English without having to make your reader wade through deciphering your attempts at an accent. I once read a book that was 600 pages of awful cod-Scottish dialogue, all ‘De ye ken woar are mean, mun?’ I had to do it, I’d agreed to review it for a radio program. If I ever meet the author, I swear I’ll punch him. [Note from Steve: The Goldilocks Principle applies to the use of dialect.]
16) How do you handle POV?
Close your eyes. When you open them, you’re going to be IN your next scene. Experiencing the events unfolding, smelling the air, feeling the temperature, having the urges. Reacting to the situation you’re in. Take a good, long look around you. Now go. [Note from Steve: an apt description, even for omniscient, often called God’s-eye view.]
17) Do you do fact-finding for (AKA research) your books? If so, how?
How researching A Decent Bomber didn’t get me arrested, I don’t know. Surely someone, somewhere is looking out for people from the Middle East displaying an interest in supplies of ammonium nitrate and detonators? Maybe they are, and a whole team of over-excited NSA types has just been stood down. “Calm down, lads, it’s just another bloody author”….
I now know how you make a one ton bomb. It’s a bit like being able to touch your nose with your tongue. There’s not much call for the skill.
Meeting former IRA man Brendan Curran was a big deal for me, not least because it made me realize the book I had written didn’t achieve the aim I set out for it. I’ll confess I was nervous about the meeting, which started with me spotting a 50 mm brass shell on the sideboard and him asking me the immortal question, in a thick Northern accent, “So. What are you about, then?”
Ulp.
My serious and dedicated research in Belfast consisted mainly of getting hammered with the in-laws and staying in the lavish Merchant Hotel. If you’re ever in Belfast, go for a few late night drinks at The Spaniard, the nearest thing to a Hamra bar I’ve ever encountered outside Hamra itself. (Hamra’s a suburb of Beirut that’s full of bars.) You haven’t been drunk in Beirut? You haven’t lived my friend.
It was nice that an anti-internment march in Belfast the next day plunged Belfast right back into 1990s time warp, with riot police, armored squad cars and water cannon on the street. The researcher in me was like ‘thank youuuuu’.
You have to find out all sorts of things. Cow diseases, train timetables, bullet impact velocities and the like. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to actually kill a cow if you’re not using an RPG. The organizational chart of the Tipperary police was one delightful evening’s work. Ferry timetables, capacities and freight sailings get jumbled up with the color of this police station wall or the reception layout of that hotel. Visiting locations (suspicious drive-byes of Banbridge police station, still covered in cameras and festooned in loops of razor wire) and checking facts, distances and even number plate series conventions all come into it.
And all because there’s an Internet and somewhere in it is Nigel who knows the air speed of an African swallow. Unladen.
18) What reference works do you use most?
Google.
Alexander on the writing business:
19) Do you use an agent?
Had one. Sacked him. Felt great.
20) Do you self-publish or traditionally publish?
Self. The traditional lot won’t have me. Closest I got was Beirut where 14 top London imprints took seven months to turn it down. The worst rejection was:
“There are lots of elements to it that I like – there’s an austere, almost Le Carré feel which I like and the author can clearly write. The dialogue and plotting stood out for me in particular. I’m afraid though that it is—for my purposes—a bit too low-key; the ‘commercial’ bit of my job title requires me to pick out titles which are going to appeal directly to supermarkets and the mass-market, and I feel that this would be too difficult a sell in that context. ”
How you can call a book about the theft of two 100 kiloton warheads and a 50 meter luxury yacht full of Albanian whores low key, I don’t really know.
21) What are your most effective marketing techniques?
I don’t have any. I find marketing wearying, to be honest. The blog and my website are pillars. I’m at my happiest talking to people. I love book clubs. Love ‘em to death.
22) Do you release trade paperbacks or ebooks?
Both. For Olives and Beirut, I printed runs here in the UAE (2,000 and 1,000 respectively) and put ‘em into the shops via a distributor. By Shemlan, I’d tired of that and just used Createspace. I bring ‘em in 10, 20 or 50 at a time when I do signings or events.
My tragedy is my ‘home market’ isn’t served by Amazon or the others, so it’s hard making a dent in online book sales. [Note to readers: let’s help Alexander out there.]
23) What do you think of publishing services like Amazon, Smashwords, etc?
Love ‘em. Love Amazon, think Smashwords is genius. I get royalty checks in my postbox when I used to go and pick up rejection slips. I don’t care they’re just a few bucks each – 50 bucks is better than opening a letter containing the word NO. I did that over 300 times. You can, believe me, get enough of that.
Personal questions for Alexander:
24) What is your favorite place to eat out?
I have lots. One standout is ‘Al Sakhra’, the Cliffhouse restaurant in Shemlan, the village up in the Chouf mountains where my third book was partly set. Shemlan is where the ‘British Spy School’ was, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, between 1948 and 1978. Seriously!
Anyway, the Cliffhouse does what it does gloriously. A seat by the open window and sunny warmth, beige stone walls and the sound of music, chattering and argileh to soothe. You pour arrack or beer before you tuck into the plates of food pouring out of the kitchen in a tide of riotous colors, the dark red muhammarah, the creamy hummus piled up around little pieces of grilled lamb, the fattoush. Then sitting back with chai nana and full stomachs, enjoying the breeze and the sight of Beirut turned golden by the waning afternoon sun. It really doesn’t get much better than that.
25) What is your favorite drink?
Vodka dry Martini, lemon twist no olive, served in an Orrefors glass. [Note from Steve: shaken, not stirred?]
26) What other interests do you have besides writing?
I’m a keen cook, fascinated by the history of the Middle East, and enjoy music greatly.
27) What was the last movie you went to see?
I hate movies. I generally watch films when I fly Emirates (which is always) because a) I haven’t wasted 120 minutes of my life, and b) it hasn’t cost me $10 to watch a crappy, annoying film. Last film I truly enjoyed? In Bruges. Oh, my, but that film’s genius.
28) What would I find in your refrigerator right now?
Wine box, bottle of Lebanese rosé (Ksara, lovely), peppers, a bowl of blanched broccoli, blue cheese, Kerala poppadoms, chicken breast, some toasted sesame seeds, half a red onion and celery. The one thing you will always find in my fridge is celery.
29) If you could trade places with someone for a week, famous or not, living or dead, real or fictional, with whom would it be?
No deal. I’m good. Did you ever read Moorcock’s Behold the Man? About a man who goes back in time and discovers Jesus is a drooling hunchback and realizes he’ll have to take his place if the last 2,000 years of human history is to happen. Total genius.
30) What is your favorite (song) and why? Piece of music?
Music has always had a critical relationship to writing books for me. Tunes have influenced the tone of my writing and the type of thing I’m writing has influenced the music I listen to. I think about what I’m writing when I drive to work in the mornings, a half hour of solitary pondering that usually defines the scene I’m about to commit to type. The music on the iPod can really influence the way that goes.
Similarly, some music has had a totally seminal effect on the book I’m working on. I always had it in mind to add the “soundtrack” of each book to the end bit but never got around to it.
Olives – George Winston and Secret Garden’s ‘Earthsong’ for the ending, which still makes me cry. Beirut – Kasabian, Guy Manoukian, Oumeima and a lot of Beirut Biloma. Shemlan – An awful lot of Foo Fighters, oddly enough. And then the esoterica. A lot of Silence, a huge influence on the book, as was Jorgestrada. I picked up a recording of singing from Estonian Orthodox Churches which I listened to a lot with enjoyment. Jason Hartmoor’s first awakening in the book takes place with that playing in the background as he looks out at the beach at Newgale. Arvo Pärt, whose De Profundis was also a biggie during writing, ended the book. A Decent Bomber was written to a playlist my brother in law put together, a mad concoction of Irish genius. Listen to Fight Like Monkeys. You won’t regret it….
***
[Note from Steve: A thanks to Alexander for his candid and entertaining answers. I apologize to him: I added a few editorial comments he hadn’t seen—I hope he’s OK with that. I also took the liberty to change some of the Queen’s English to American, but I left the comment about dialogue v. dialog—I had a verbal battle with a critic once when I used the former!—she lost, and so does Alexander, because back in the US of A one can do it either way, as long as you’re consistent (epilog v. epilogue is similar). In spite of many differences in our background, I feel Alexander is a kindred soul. That’s what makes this writing business so interesting. Readers, please read my review of Alexander’s most recent book A Decent Bomber that precedes this interview–see below. Beirut sounds like my next great read from this author.]
In elibris libertas….
