Interview with Stuart Neville

Stuart Neville has been a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra, a baker and a hand double for a well-known Irish comedian, but is currently a partner in a successful multimedia design business in the wilds of Northern Ireland. His novel The Twelve is a magnificent debut thriller which is being billed as one of the best first novels in years.

Mark Thwaite: What first gave you the idea for writing The Twelve?

Stuart Neville: I woke up early one Sunday morning with an image in my head: a man drinking in a bar, surrounded by the ghosts of all the people he's killed. I immediately reached for my little mobile phone-cum-PDA which has a word processor built in and started writing a short story. I finished it that day, but over the following weeks the protagonist wouldn't leave me alone. I wanted to know what happened to him next, and it kept nagging at me until I really had no choice but to turn it into a novel.

Mark Thwaite: Are you a fan of thrillers and is this why you set out to write a thriller yourself, or was genre never something you had in your mind when you began?

Stuart Neville: I've always been a fan of thrillers and horror, and there's a grey area between the two where writers like Thomas Harris and John Connolly thrive. I knew The Twelve was somewhere in the same area as I wrote it, but that didn't influence me in any specific way. I didn't consciously write to a genre. I think you have to write without those restrictions and let the story be what it is organically. You can always push it one direction or another in revisions.

Mark Thwaite: Your book tells its story against the backdrop of Nothern Ireland's recent violent past -- do the Troubles haunt you as they do your protagonists?

Stuart Neville: I was born within a few days of Bloody Sunday, so the Troubles were the normal state of affairs for me, and anyone of my generation. But you get used to peace very quickly. I think I'd be shocked to my core if I saw soldiers on the streets tomorrow, but it's not much more than a decade since it was commonplace. My nephew just started driving in the last year or so, and he'd be astounded if he was ever stopped at a checkpoint and had his car searched, yet within his lifetime it was an almost every day occurrence. I was lucky to never be directly affected by the Troubles, I never lost anyone close to me, so I don't have those kinds of emotional scars to deal with. Many people do, though, and for their sake we shouldn't take peace for granted.

Mark Thwaite: Do you think post-conflict Northern Ireland is struggling with its past or do you think it is already beginning to forget those dark times?

Stuart Neville: We're starting to look back on past events in a more objective way. As a society, we have to move away from the idea of the Troubles being something the 'Other Side' did to us. All factions need to stop pointing the finger, looking for blame, and start looking inward. All of us, from whichever side of the divide, are going to have to face up to some uncomfortable truths that we were perhaps blinkered to in the past. I believe fiction will be the driving force in this, whether on page or on screen. The most interesting fiction about any conflict doesn't come until it's over. Take Vietnam or World War II, for instance. The best stories about those wars didn't appear until years later. The next decade will be a very interesting time for writing from this part of the world.

Mark Thwaite: Did you do any particular research before you began writing your novel?

Stuart Neville: During the writing I had to research different types of weapons and how they work, like how to chamber a round in a Walther P99, or the magazine capacity of a Glock 23, or the wound ballistics of a nine-millimetre bullet. I kept hoping the authorities weren't keeping an eye on what I was searching the web for. I might have looked a little suspicious!

Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing your debut? How did you overcome it?

Stuart Neville: Mostly, it was just keeping my head down until it was done. I can't say the first draft was a difficult process because it was so fast, it almost seemed to write itself, but the subsequent revisions were more of a challenge. My agent once told me the true mark of a writer's talent is how much the work improves between drafts, and I think he's right. The revisions are where the graft is.

Mark Thwaite: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

Stuart Neville: I could never write longhand because my handwriting is so terrible. I'd never be able to read it back. Everything is on computer. To be honest, I don't know how writers managed in the past even with typewriters! I usually write quickly, but revise each sentence as I go along, so I'd be lost without that backspace key. When I've completed a first draft of anything, I usually give it a quick polish, kind of like a draft 1.1 then I give it to one or more of my critique partners. I'm very lucky in that I've got a few people who are very talented writers with sharp eyes to call on, and I value their perspective greatly. When I get their notes back I happily start hacking the writing to pieces and putting it back together again.

Mark Thwaite: Did you know how The Twelve would end when you began writing it, or was writing a voyage of discovery for you?

Stuart Neville: I need an ending before I can start in earnest on anything, whether it's a short story or something longer. As soon as I decided to turn the short story The Twelve began as into a novel, I knew what the last few words would be. Personally, I need points of departure and destination, and then it's a matter of joining the two up. How I do that is usually a matter of improvisation, flying by the seat of my pants. I studied music at university, and a large part of that was jazz improvisation. One of the basic principles when improvising music is that you can go as far outside the bounds of the piece as you want, just so long as you can bring it back in again. I view writing a story in much the same way; you can push the plot in any direction you like, disorientate yourself and the reader along the way, confound all expectations, so long as you can bring it home. Robert KcKee, the screenwriting guru, talks about a story having a 'spine'. I fully subscribe to that point of view, and it was a huge breakthrough for me when I really grasped the idea. For me, the story must have a head and a tail, and a spine to join the two. How you put flesh on the spine is where the discovery happens.

Mark Thwaite: You have been a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra and a baker. Which was best!?

Stuart Neville: Musician, of course! I took up guitar as a teenager and I fully intended on becoming a rock star, but somehow that didn't quite work out. I was gigging and teaching up until quite recently, but the writing has taken over now. I always have a guitar to hand when I'm at my computer, though. I tend to noodle to help me think. In fact, I think the brains of musicians and writers are wired in a very similar way. It's a combination of the mechanical and the creative.

The worst was being a film extra. I've had a little experience of film sets in a musical capacity, and a little on screen, and I can tell you there is nothing more miserable than hanging around for hours waiting for something to happen. Actors deserve every penny they get.

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing?

Stuart Neville: I've been a partner in a multimedia business, mostly making websites, for ten years now. Whatever happens with my writing career, I'll always have some involvement with the business because I helped build it from scratch. I could never walk away from it.

Apart from music, my other big passion is cinema. I have a stupidly large DVD collection, and I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching movies. It's been with me since I was a kid, and is largely responsible for my love of books. The picture house in my home town closed when I was small. We didn't have a car or a VCR, so the only way I could experience the movies of the time was through novelisations. That's why books and movies have always been interrelated for me. They're just different shades of storytelling. To this day I still collect movie novelisations, and I can't pass a charity shop without checking their shelves for a little gem. They're a nice reminder of a kind of book that has all but died out since home cinema became popular.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Stuart Neville: I think if you deliberately write to an audience, you're onto a loser before you start. That's not an excuse to be self-indulgent or wilfully obtuse, but you can't expect to write well if you're constantly second-guessing yourself. Besides, who's to say what the audience is? It's constantly shifting. I think the general public is underestimated far too often. There's been a little debate online recently about how the fiction market seems to be skewed towards women. Where are the books for men? The wisdom of the industry is that men don't read as much as women, but is that because men are more interested in beer and scratching their arses, or could it be because the industry isn't producing the kind of books they want to read? In that sense, I'm my own ideal reader. There's a vast expanse between the extremes of brainless commercial techno-thrillers and the kind of middle-class navel-gazing that blights so much literary fiction. I suppose if I'm writing to an audience, it's somewhere in that rift.

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now Stuart?

Stuart Neville: I'm writing the sequel to The Twelve, which has a working title, but I'm keeping that to myself for now. It features a new protagonist, and some characters from the first book will return. It's proving to be a slower process this time around. The sequel has a less linear plot, more intricate, with more characters to keep track of. It'll be a longer book, too.

I'm also turning out the odd short here and there. I've contributed one called Queen of the Hill to an anthology that'll be published in 2010 by Morrigan Books. It's a collection of stories that interpret Irish myths and legends in modern crime fiction scenarios, and the contributors include Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Arlene Hunt and Adrian McKinty. It's provisionally titled Myths and Mobsters, and it looks like it'll be a really interesting book.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

Stuart Neville: My favourite author is James Ellroy. He's the best crime writer alive today, and possibly of all time. For my money, no one else can balance plotting, style and emotional weight like him. A lot of writers cite The Cold Six Thousand as their favourite Ellroy book, but for me it's American Tabloid. It just completely blew me away when I first read it, and I didn't think it would be possible, but I enjoyed it even more when I reread it last year. If you're new to Ellroy, I'd suggest starting with his breakout novel, The Black Dahlia, where he really hit his stride, or perhaps one of the L.A. Quartet. The later books can be a little overwhelming, but reward the effort tenfold.

There are a few books I've read once every year or two since I was a teenager. They include Marathon Man by William Goldman, Thomas Harris's Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, and Fletch by Gregory Macdonald. It's a very different book, but I also love The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

Stuart Neville: Give and receive critique, whether from a writing group, or one of the many online communities. The ability to look at your own work objectively is vital for when you deal with an agent or editor.

Take advantage of all the resources available online, including the agent and editor blogs that have cropped up in recent years. You can learn a huge amount about how the industry works, and what's expected of you, so you'll have a much smoother ride if you're lucky enough to make it over the transom.

Lastly, don't give up, and don't take rejection personally. It's all about an agent or editor making that gut-level connection with your writing, an X-factor if you like, so if a rejection slip says "not right for me" then that's exactly what it means. It's not a secret code for "this is rubbish!"

Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?

Stuart Neville: Keep buying books! The world economy is in a bad way, but we shouldn't lose sight of the really valuable things. Books, whether highbrow or lowbrow, whether on paper or on an E-reader, are what made everything we have today possible.