Interview with author John Lynch

Fans of strong protagonists and mysteries, you're at the right place. In this interview, author John Lynch answers eleven questions about his newly published novel, Sharon Wright: Butterfly, and talks about his creative process of writing.


No-one gives Sharon a chance. Except Sharon.

All Sharon wants is a better life—a husband who takes care of her, the kind of food they have in magazines and civilized conversation. Is it her fault that she is in the middle of a plot involving two hitmen? Well, yes, actually. It is.

In Sharon’s deprived childhood, Buggy was Top Cat—the one everyone went in fear of. Buggy ruled the roost and Buggy’s girlfriend could be the Number One female. So she married him. Of all the mistakes she could have made, that is the biggest.


 

Name:

John Lynch


Title of most recent book:

Sharon Wright: Butterfly


What inspired you to write this book?

I had just finished writing Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper, which is the story of a young man born into dreadful circumstances who nevertheless, through his own talents and with the help of others, makes something of his life. I wanted to write a story about a young woman who also had a poor start in life and that led ultimately to Sharon Wright: Butterfly.


Do you have any strange writing habit?

The oddest thing about my writing habits may be the hours I keep. I spent more than forty years as an international salesman criss-crossing the world; I’d fly somewhere that was seven hours ahead of my home and a week later I’d be somewhere else that was eight hours behind. A few years of that will ruin anyone’s body clock and now my normal working day when I’m at home goes something like this: Go to bed sometime between 8:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. Get up at 1.00 a.m. and write. At 6.00, go out on my bike and cycle the country lanes where I live for anything between 20 and 45 minutes. Get home, shower, dress and download The Times Crossword, which I do while eating breakfast. (Breakfast for me is the full English, which is why I need to cycle before I eat – if I didn’t I don’t like to think about the shape I’d be). 7.30 a.m., say hello to the person with whom I share a life, who goes to the local hotel to swim and won’t have her breakfast until 10.00 a.m., which for me will be coffee time. 8.00 to 12.00: write, with 15 minutes for coffee. By midday I’m written out until tomorrow.

But I suppose the thing that non-writers will find strange (I think a lot of writers will read this and say, “Oh, me too”; ) is the interaction between me and my characters. They are right here in the room where I write and I wouldn’t get very far without them. When I was writing Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper, Billy, the protagonist, stood over my shoulder and kept up a running commentary. “Don’t forget the anger management.” “Poppy wouldn’t have said that.” “Why haven’t you mentioned what they did to Williams?” You could almost say that Billy wrote the book. And in something I’ve been working on on and off for the last three years, I have Barabbas, Haile Selassie and John Betjeman all in the same scene and they were in the room with me having a flaming row that ended with Barabbas punching Betjeman in the face and knocking his teeth out. All I did was write down what I saw happening in front of me. And, yes, I do realise that that makes me sound as though I’m nuts but this is how I write.


Do you travel a lot to write your books?

Well, I travel a lot because that has been my work for years now. I’ve lived and worked on every continent except Antarctica. Last year I was in Suriname, South Africa, the UAE, Saudi Arabia (several times), Qatar, Kurdistan, Libya, Lebanon and other places I can’t remember offhand. I’ve just come back from Egypt and Saudi Arabia and soon I’ll be in Kurdistan again; next month I go to Malaysia and after that it will be Vietnam. So I don’t go to those places in order to write, but it’s inevitable that the places I see and the people I meet influence what gets into my books. For example, I just wrote a short story that grew out of my second trip this year to Egypt.


What country/city would you like to visit next?

As I’ve said, I’m going soon to Malaysia and Vietnam and I’m looking forward to those trips but they are business. If I were choosing a place just for pleasure, it might well be Kenya. I’ve been there many times but the problem with my kind of business travel is that I don’t get to do much sightseeing. I spent three weeks in Africa and only had one day when I wasn’t either travelling or in meetings. I said to Charles, who always drives me in Nairobi, “I want to see some animals on Thursday” and he said, “I’ll pick you up at six and get you back to the hotel for nine in the evening”. It was a long and exhausting day but we saw almost everything you can see there; the only animal that evaded us was the leopard. The highlight was a pride of lions that had killed and were feeding – even Charles doesn’t see that very often. I got a lot of good photos. So, in a sense, I “know” Kenya but instead of just fitting in a day “for me” I’d like a week of safari and camping in the bush. I’d also like another trip to New Zealand and I’ve never done the rail journey from Pretoria to Cape Town although I’ve been in both cities a number of times – it would be good to do that.


Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?

My grandfather was a coalminer in Durham and like most miners of the time he placed great value on education and didn’t want his grandson to go down the pit (as he had done when he was only twelve years old). I was showered with books from the time I first learned to read and not just by Grandad; my mother and my aunts and uncles also encouraged me to read. I thought, “I’d like to tell stories like this” and when I was ten years old I stood on the stage of Benton Park primary school in Newcastle and read to the assembled pupils and parents a story I had written. I can still remember it; my style at the time was the style of Dickens. Or, at least, that’s what I thought it was. I drank in the applause and I think my future was set from that moment.


Who designs the covers for your books? And what is the process like for you as an author?

Writers need to know what their strengths are and what they are not good at. When you’re an indie you have to make sure that the books you put out are at least as good as anything produced by the “Big Five”. For me, that means professional editing, professional layout and – above all – professional cover design. Spiffing Covers did a great job for me on Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper and A Just and Upright Man and in each case there was a lot of discussion between me and the Spiffing Covers people. You need that connection if you’re going to have a cover that does justice to the book you’ve written. I handled the cover for Sharon Wright: Butterfly a little differently; when the book was done, I trawled Getty Images till I found a face. There she was! Her! My Shazza. Then Scarlett Rugers McKenzie, an Australian book designer of genius, took the pic and made exactly the cover I wanted.


If any, what challenges did you meet while writing your latest book?

Sharon Wright: Butterfly was a lot harder to write than Zappa’s Mam’s a Slapper because I’m a man and therefore find it more difficult to get into a young woman’s head than I did into a young man’s. Also, the skills Sharon has to use to turn her life around were different from the ones that helped Billy. Sharon is a survivor who makes her sure-footed way in a man's world. When she woos Jackie Gough she does it the way a female mantis might, knowing that when she is sated he may have to die. Until then she lets him think they are equal partners and will share the money she sets him up to steal. Poor Jackie. It takes a long time to write a book. By the time I’d finished this one I knew my star character so well we were on snogging terms – except that snogging Sharon would be a risky thing to do. Jackie Gough tries it, and realises too late that the dumb blonde is no more dumb than she is blonde. But, as I’ve said to readers I’ve met at book signings and literary festivals, Sharon is not a nice person – but I love her. Getting that on paper was hard and I hope I’ve achieved it.


What do you want to accomplish before you die?

I’m seventy-two years old. I’ve been to a lot of places, seen a lot of things, met a lot of people. Overall I’ve had a wonderful life and when I look back on that little boy of ten reading his story on the primary school stage I can only give thanks to the God who has dealt so kindly with me. Is there anything left I’d like to achieve? Well, of course there is – there’s always one more goal. For me, I think it’s the recognition that would come from having one or more of my books turned into a film.


Can you share a little of your current work with us?

I have three projects currently on the go. The first is Poor Law, the second in the James Blakiston Series of historical romance/crime books set in the north-east of England in the 1760s (A Just and Upright Man was the first and I’m particularly proud of the fact that it was shortlisted for the 2015 Historical Novel Society’s Indie Award). Poor Law has been through five drafts and is now being edited; when I’ve incorporated whatever changes the editor wants me to make it will go to a copy editor and then into print. The second project is When the Darkness Comes which is where the Barabbas/Haile Selassie/Betjeman incident I talked about earlier comes from. I’ve been working on The Darkness on and off for three years now and I can’t make any promises about when I will regard it as finished. And the third project is a book of short stories set in a Shropshire village to which I have given the name Futch Mucking in a probably vain attempt to prevent residents in two Shropshire villages in which I have lived from identifying themselves. I expect to publish that one before the end of 2015.

 


You may follow John Lynch on Goodreads, where you will find the links to all his book.


Thank you for reading!


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Published on May 21, 2015 12:10
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