About

My writing..

My primary purpose is to write literary, as opposed to genre fiction, though as you can see, I have written poetry and non-fiction too. But that means each novel is different from the rest. If one pleases you, the next may not. I write, at least I have so far, from a single viewpoint, in the first person. The advantages of this method are well known; immediacy, and ease of narration. The official disadvantage, that the reader has no direct insight into what other characters think, is not, in my view, the drawback it seems. We all have one pair of eyes, and one understanding. That is how we relate to the world. Does it stop us from knowing what others feel? No. We are obliged to make what we can of how they react to us, whether they lie, and we know it, or tell the truth, and we misinterpret it. From such a palette a multi-layered story is produced as easily – and I think, more convincingly – as by the double artificiality of allowing several narrators to have their say.

Therefore, each novel of mine has a ‘voice’. That voice, and the character who uses it, determines not just the subject of the novel, but its tone, style, language, and vocabulary. Thus, my first novel is an uptight tragedy; my second an exuberant satire in a tragic setting (though not to the narrator); my third a soufflé of a self-aware comedy of manners; my fourth a fundamentally serene novel of self discovery, despite its frame of racial antagonism. You may even feel that each one has a different author. If so, that will be a compliment, although certain tricks of mine are bound to show through. I have two more novels on the stocks, which I hope will come to life in the same way.