Interview with Michael Loveday
By Kathy Silvey
KS: It’s wonderful to meet you, Michael, and I want to begin by saying how much I enjoyed both your novella Three Men on the Edge and your new craft book Unlocking the Novella-as- Flash. I understand you would have been a footballer, but you write too well. How did you determine you were a writer?
ML: Thank you Kathy. Good to meet you too! I guess I fell into writing gradually. I know some published writers who longed from an early age to be living out an identity in adulthood as a writer, but that was never the case for me. I suppose you’re already a writer once you start writing fairly regularly, whether you’re published or not. And for me that was in 2001, during a period of ill-health when I was off-work. It was a form of entertaining, consoling and distracting myself, and it did the trick at the time. I got the bug for poetry then and just kept going — poetry, journaling, and eventually, around 2010–2011 — spending more time on fiction. And along the way I started sending out to journals. But initially it was just a private thing for myself. There’ve been times when I’ve written less, times when I’ve written more. Even if I’m not working on stories or poems, it’s rare for many days to go by without me journaling in some way. I use journaling a lot as a creative tool for career/life reflection, problem-solving, and so on. I tried Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages tactic many years ago, and that served a purpose, but nowadays I use specific journaling exercises I’ve picked up over the years from places like IAJW.org or myjournalversity.com.
KS: Three Men on the Edge is set on the outskirts of London, but you now live in Somerset. How does Bath compare with the edge of London as fodder for stories?
ML: I’ve not written many stories set in Bath or Somerset yet — only a handful. I’d like to do this more. It’s certainly a rich landscape to be in, with plenty of remarkable countryside and buildings with a complex history. I actually started writing about the edge of London because I had an uneasy relationship with the place I was living in — the far outskirts of a metropolis felt like a strange, out-of-kilter place to be. Most of my friends lived more centrally, and my work was often in the centre too, but I hadn’t really removed myself to the countryside, it was a kind of remote almost-rural-but-not-quite suburb. Neither one thing nor the other. So my fiction for a while was a way of working through that weird, uneasy feeling. Maybe I haven’t found the raw, emotional material in my current landscape of Bath yet, the dramatic/narrative fuel for channeling it into fiction. I’ll sure it’ll come with time.
KS: Three Men on the Edge was shortlisted for the 2019 Saboteur Best Novella Award, and I am so charmed by the name of that award. Is there anything in particular you like to think of your writing as sabotaging?
ML: I can’t claim there’s a deliberate policy of sabotage as such! But I like the idea that writers generally might encourage a policy of rebellion in order to challenge mainstream values — asking difficult questions about perceived norms. One of my favourite writers is Joseph Conrad, for example. But it’s not easy to address political issues directly in fiction, and do it with the level of nuance that Conrad did in novels such as Nostromo. Most of us haven’t a hope of managing it. And even Conrad himself was more conservative than an outright saboteur.
KS; At least two sections of Three Men on the Edge drew from The Odyssey, but of course work like yours which has so much internal monologue reads like Ulysses, too. Do you consider the influence on you to be more Homer or Joyce?
ML: Gosh — those are quite lofty influences! To be honest, I wouldn’t claim either as an influence, really. I sometimes use the term “permission-givers” when describing the writers who have influenced me — people whose writing (or general attitude) offers a model for what I might attempt. But there are quite a lot of such writers. Sometimes it might even be a particular book rather than a writer. For Three Men on the Edge as a whole I was often fantasising that I was attempting to fuse the spirits of two books of short prose: Jack Robinson’s Days and Nights in W12 — among other things, a work of local landscape and history — with Dan Rhodes’s Anthropology. which takes a playful look at relationships and personalities. I wanted to write about personal relationships while making the area in which I was living at that time — Rickmansworth, on the NW edge of London — an integral feature of the work. But other writers/books influenced different stories or different sections within the whole.
KS: After writing Three Men on the Edge, which is a novella-in-flash, you wrote the guide Unlocking the Novella-as -Flash. What is it about this moment that makes it ripe for the writing and reading of flash fiction a well as of longer works made up of flash? Have our reading habits been transformed by being online? Has writing become less a question of sustained endeavor and more of polishing one facet at a time in stolen moments?
ML: I guess the advent of online journals and social media has had a massive impact on reading habits, book-buying, and writing habits too. Maybe, too, for the lives of many contemporary writers, there’s an increased pressure on our available spare time so more people write in snatched moments — but then Raymond Carver and Alice Munro talked about that same impulse some time ago, how they only ever got small scraps of time, so they focused on short stories. And it’s fair to say that the novella-in-flash is also a sustained endeavour. I see it as the best of both worlds –compressed and sustained.
KS: As a single parent who has written in the 45-minute intervals afforded by ballet classes, I’m pleased to hear I have something in common with Munro. My favorite thing about your craft book Unlocking the Novella-in Flash is that it is so open. When I saw how long it was and how many different aspects of writing the novella-as-flash it covered, I wondered if it would feel formulaic, but it doesn’t. There is so much space that a writer could come to it with flash fiction on just about any topic and find guidance to turn it into something long form. How did you achieve that fluidity while remaining so specific?
ML: Thanks for that comment! One thing I focused on was the level of detail in the writing prompts. Some really useful and brilliantly imaginative prompts you see shared by facilitators would have been far too specific for this writing guide — e.g. write a story in which someone has to brush a cobweb from their face. I love that kind of prompt! Almost immediately, the creative brain gets whirring and imagines a situation or location where that might happen. And for curious writers, the writing hand instinctively starts to explore on the page — Why might the person have cobwebs in their hair? What’s the character’s reason/motive for being a place where there are cobwebs? And so on. But in this craft guide, a prompt like that would have guided readers to write stories that too obviously featured the same elements. The novellas-in-flash that resulted would contain recognisable similarities. So I had to move one step back from that level of specificity to prompts like “Put your character into a landscape that’s full of vitality/abundance OR ruin/decay. How do they react?” OR “Write a story in which a character goes to landscape that’s physically dangerous or feels emotionally risky”. And so on. So there’s just enough specificity to nudge the writer onward, but they’re still generic enough that they could work for lots of different novellas. And then “The Universal Can Opener” pages in the Appendix offer lots and lots of entry points for writing any flash fiction (e.g. “Enter via a colour”, “Enter via an item of clothing”, “Start with a negative”, “Write the whole flash exclusively as dialogue” and so on), giving you ignition for confronting the blank page, in combination with any of the main writing prompts — to multiply the possibilities and create more fluidity. There were other ways in which I tried to introduce fluidity and freedom, but certainly that was one of the key ones. I did want to envisage this craft guide as cyclical and exploratory rather than a linear, step-by-step factory-style process in which somehow — hey-presto! — a novella is supposed to pop out from the end of the machine. And I wanted to design a novella-in-flash guide that still offered interesting ideas to novelists and short story writers and flash fiction writers more generally, not just novella-in-flash writers.
KS: Your activities in Unlocking the Novella-as-Flash to develop characters put emphasis on childhood and family. How do you think about the relationship between the characters in your own writing and their communities? Your main characters in Three Men on the Edge, for instance are such isolated souls while still clearly being products of their environment.
ML: This is a fascinating take. I’m very interested in the way personal identity relates to social identity, and several sections in the book explore how characters engage with social networks, local community, society, culture, institutions, and so on. While the reflective prompts about childhood are balanced by other sections exploring what makes up identity, I can definitely see that it’s possible to locate what we might call ‘small t’ trauma in the lives of the three isolated, troubled main characters in Three Men on the Edge, even though I don’t go into their family backgrounds much. By coincidence, I’ve just finished writing a short collection of flash fictions about the adult-child dynamic — family/childhood situations exploring conflicts, disappointments, and struggles. In my own writing I’m really keen to spend more time, in future manuscripts, exploring the broader sociological issues — especially the impact of institutional power upon individuals (here I’m thinking of government, the judiciary, healthcare, education, corporations, and so on). There’s a lot of talk these days in Western societies about individual agency and mindset, the theory that we “make our own reality”, and so on. And my concern is that this model of understanding each person’s life might underplay a whole host of forces that surround us almost imperceptibly and constrain or direct the lives of ordinary individuals, determining some of their outcomes. In one sense, this is a bit like the David Foster Wallace anecdote about the goldfish in the water who don’t realise the existence of water. Structural factors fascinate me, in terms of how they influence life, and I definitely want to explore them in my writing. I’m keen to do more research into the social sciences on this topic. I’m often toying with the idea of doing some kind of formal further study in fact, if I had more spare time away from work. Now there’s an irony.
KS: I expect most writers can relate to wishing they had more time away from work so they might do more work! What’s next for you?
ML: At the moment, I’m going back to writing poems — a sequence that explores moments in the lives of figures from history and takes in aspects of geography and politics too — new territory for me!
KS: I look forward to reading it! Thank you again for your time and for sharing your thoughts on writing!
Kathy Silvey writes short stories, including “From Alta Vista High” in Red Hen Press’ LA Fiction Anthology, and poems, including those in her book Herstories, published by Literary Alchemy. She is an Associate Professor of English at Santiago Canyon College in Orange, CA.
