You’re obviously best known for writing the Doctor Who books but how did you actually get into that
Well, the first things that I ever had published were for the Virgin Books Doctor Who range, back in the early nineties. I had various short stories published before that for magazines, which I got paid very little or nothing at all for.
After that I went off and did other things and got an agent. I was actually writing nonfiction when I was asked by Justin Richards at BBC Books to do a new Doctor tale ‘Autonomy’. So I was quite pleasantly surprised to be asked back, after more than a decade away from Doctor Who. Of course, they’re a very different style of books now from what they used to be when I was first writing for them.
Looking at your other books, you have a pretty diverse style of writing. Which style would you say is your favourite, that you’re most suited to?
I think I do try to diversify, so I don’t think I do have a particular favourite. I think all writers have to diversify; up until 2002 I’d only ever written fiction and then I started writing non-fiction about the eighties.
I try to sort of turn my hand to as many different genres as I need to be a professional, working writer. Most people I know who are professionally published seem to have lots of different aspects to their writing career, they’re either mixing fiction and non-fiction, or their doing scripts and poetry and comics and short stories.
When I’m asked what’s your favourite book I always say it’s the one I’m working on at the moment which I think is the easiest answer! I mean it’s a question of surviving as a writer really more than anything,
I’ve been reading your book I Hate Christmas: a Manifesto to the Modern-day Scrooge. With Christmas drawing closer I have to ask; do you actually hate Christmas as portrayed in the book?
It’s a jokey book. I’ve picked up on various opinions that it is a bit over done, it tends to start in August and so on. But I’m trying to distance myself from that now; I’ve done so many radio interviews based on the book that I’ve got to a point where I’m now saying I won’t do it anymore because I don’t really hate Christmas!
As you can tell from the book I’m more tongue and cheek about it than that. Some people miss the point and think that I’m a kind of seasonal misery, so radio stations will try and get me on to be the ‘bah humbug’ person which isn’t really what I’m about.
It was fun to do that at the time, a nice quirky anti- Christmas book and it did well, but I’ve kind of moved on from that now.
In your book Losing Faith, was there a particular message that you were looking to give out? Did you learn anything yourself when writing that kind of book?
I always learn something from my writing. All my characters are to people who are in situations that they’re not entirely happy with, who have found themselves in lives that they never expected.
Losing Faith is a twenty-something crisis book. It’s all about how people change when they have to go out into the real world and face the realities that their friends might not be the same people they had such a great time with at college, the way that relationships can change and people can become more cold and distant towards you. It certainly made me think of ways in which some of my friends and I have changed over the years.
My subsequent novel This Is The Day takes it a step further, when people have got settled into domestic bliss but find it unfulfilling in some ways too. The characters are not the same characters that are in Losing Faith but could easily be people who knew them.
Have you based any of your characters or settings on things familiar to you? Using family and friends or anything like that?
I try not to because I get into trouble for doing that! Sometime I take ideas and I steal people’s jokes. There was somebody’s wedding speech that I used in Losing Faith; I think he’s forgiven me for stealing his jokes now!
There are characters who are kind of aspects of people I know and there are some situations which I’ve taken from things which could of happened. For example, if someone had made the wrong decision at some point in their life or had met somebody different.
Do you have any particular projects going on at the minute?
I’m doing a couple of non-fiction books and I’ve got a children’s book which my agent is trying to find the right publisher for at the moment. I’m doing a lot of publicity around Doctor Who: The Autonomy, which only just came out last month. I’ve got a new book about politics aimed at new voters called X Marks The Box, which is coming out at the next election, though we don’t know when that will be yet! I hope to be doing another Doctor Who but that might not be for a while- probably after the new actor Matt Smith has had some time to settle into the part.
Another novel which I have been working on, which has been an ongoing project for two or three years or so, may end up going somewhere, so yes, four or five different thing on the go.
Out of all of your books, if there was one that you could take back and re-write a part of it, which book would it be and why?
I look back on my first Doctor Who and see bits of the plot that are quite clunky and parts that are quite naively written, but if I went back and tried to re-write it now it would be a totally different book.
I do look back at my old work and think of it quite critically; I say to myself ‘Oh God who wrote this rubbish?!’ I think it’s healthy for writers to do that. Once you have that critical distance from your work and can tell when something isn’t working, you have the courage to re-write it which must be good surely.