Interview With Author Philip Leslie
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I have had one novel titled ‘The History of Us’ published by Legend in 2009. ‘What Remains’, a genre occult novel attributed to Fran Leslie, was published briefly by December House in 2013 and later slated for republication by another eBook firm. Covid put the kybosh on that. I have since published it as an eBook on Kindle. Fran Leslie has also published ‘Back Now’, a time-slip dystopian comedy set in 1980. Writing as Alan Leslie, I have published three experimental-ish novels ‘Mise-en-Scene’, ‘Nascent’ and ‘The Chariot Race’.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My most recent eBook on Kindle is a comedy, ‘Nascent’, by Alan Leslie, set in Norwich in the present day. Part One is a genre thriller that is abandoned because the author is ‘unable to do car chases’. Ghost writers specialising in car chases he finds too fussy about what cars and what kind of roads they prefer. Part Two re-introduces the characters and themes in the first part in a fictional autobiography of the author Philip Leslie. The theme of incest in Part One is dropped for a more conventional boy meets girl love story. One of the inspirations of ‘Nascent’ is Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’, also some of the novels of Philip Roth and Martin Amis’ appearance in his own ‘Money’.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
My first drafts are pen on sheets of old-fashioned foolscap paper. I alternate between blue and black ballpoints. The first Word draft will be in a typewriter font.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
There are many! Initially Dylan Thomas and Joyce, then Golding, Muriel Spark and Nabokov. In more recent years WG Sebald’s books have been stimulating.
What are you working on now?
Since January 2023 I have been working on a long (340,000-word) novel set on just two days, in 1981 and 1980, though there are many flashbacks and anecdotes. I was inspired by WG Sebald’s novels, which purport to be factual. The second of the two parts of my own project, definitely of the art for art’s sake variety, takes a real event, a school coach trip to Lavenham in Suffolk towards the end of summer term 1980, and transforms it into fiction along the lines of Joyce recreating a particular day in 1904 in ‘Ulysses’, a big I was obsessed with when I was an art student.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I am very poor at using the internet for promotion.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write for yourself. Forget about publishing and simple enjoy writing for the sake of writing. Resist sharing it with other people. Ignore all the advice you hear about striking out adjective and adverbs. Use plenty of them. Keep the thesaurus closer than your mobile phone. Write quickly, aiming to have a completed manuscript that is far from perfect but finished. Now spend months and months rewriting it, Cats are good listeners: read your book aloud to one, or a dog if you have one of those handy. Avoid the temptation to read aloud or share this particular work with a human being.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Read everything you write aloud.
What are you reading now?
‘There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job’ by Kikuko Tsumura.
What’s next for you as a writer?
To complete this latest edit my long novel and in the meantime to try and sell one copy of ‘What Remains’.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Proust’s ‘In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower’, the volume set in Balbec, LP Hartley’s ‘The Go-Between’, Hardy’s Collected Poems and Heather Clark’s superb ‘Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath’.
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