Tom Fletcher is a young author (in his twenties) who has already made a name for himself thanks to spine-chilling readings of his work at Manchester’s monthly live lit event, There’s No Point in Not Being Friends.
He has published a number of his short stories in a three-author anthology, Before the Rain. The Thing on the Shore is the second book in the series that began with The Leaping.
(We also interviewed Tom back in August 2010, go here to read that interview.)
Mark Thwaite: When did you start writing The Thing on the Shore on Tom?
Tom Fletcher: I started writing it as soon as we submitted The Leaping to publishers, more or less. So that was in 2008. I didn’t feel like I could just sit and wait to hear back about The Leaping – I had to have a backup, something else to try if The Leaping didn’t get picked up. It was very fortunate, as it turned out, because when Quercus asked if I had anything else on the go, I had the beginning of The Thing on the Shore to show them, which resulted in a two-book deal.
Mark Thwaite: How long did it take you to write?
Tom Fletcher: I finished the first draft last summer – so about a year to write the first draft. But that was fitting it in around full-time work, so I was only using the evenings and weekends in that year. If you added up just the time I spent working on it, it would have been three or four months maybe.
Mark Thwaite: Tell us a little about the story and why you wanted to tell it…
Tom Fletcher: The story originated with an idea I had when I was working in a call-centre, which was that call-centres – being such transient, generic, baseless places – were potential gateways between worlds. I also had some ideas about the corporate objectification of people percolating, and somehow the two things fused together in my notebooks into this story about people struggling to work out what their functions are, and a sadistic manager who’s trying to use them for his own supernatural purposes. Hopefully it’s relevant to our times – it’s set in a town where jobs are scarce, economic outlook is grim, and people don’t have many options, so they feel bound and trapped by their employers.
Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult thing about writing the book?
Tom Fletcher: Building a consistent ‘magic system’, although I’m not sure that’s the right expression for it. It was difficult creating an internal logic for the alternative world element of the book that created drama and tension but at the same time made sense, and didn’t allow for any deus ex machina type moments.
Mark Thwaite: This is your second published novel – was writing it easy than the first?
Tom Fletcher: Writing it was easier in a sense – I had the deadlines and the encouragement that come with publication. But I tried to approach it in a different way, which created new difficulties. I tried to plan The Thing on the Shore out in advance, whereas I didn’t do that with The Leaping, and I found it very hard to stick to the plan. I didn’t, in the end – the book found its own way – but that tension between the way the novel wanted to go and the way the plan went did prove tricky at times.
Mark Thwaite: Your novel is set in Whitehaven. Is place important for you? Setting almost has the quality of a character in your novel – is that something you worked hard to achieve?
Tom Fletcher: I’m glad you said that! Place is very important for me, yes. Not in a literal, every-streetname-has-to-be-accurate sense, but in terms of the feelings, the sights and sounds and smells, yes. So a person who lives in Whitehaven might notice a few technical differences between the real Whitehaven and the Whitehaven of the novel, but that doesn’t bother me – I’m more interested in capturing the atmosphere. I used to live in Whitehaven, and I lived near Whitehaven for years, so I know what it’s like – I did make a particular effort to make references to certain details, certain views, that kind of thing.
Mark Thwaite: Here on the Quercus blog, you recently wrote: “The Thing of the title is from this other world, but the title is also a reference to the themes – in particular, to the borderline between ‘human’ and ‘object’ that I think is going to become even more indistinct as technology progresses and society is shaped increasingly by corporate culture.” Can you say a little bit more about this?
Tom Fletcher: Again, it was partly inspired by working in a call-centre. But when I looked into it, there are technologies used in videogames and some call-centres that allow semi-believable conversations with machines or networks – so, the machine responds to what you say, and uses recorded human voices. I read quite a lot about robotics and post-humanism, and the relationships between people and machines, and so – without giving too much away – there a quite a few human / non-human relationships in the novel.
That’s the technology part. The corporate part is simply the idea that, increasingly, people are subservient in many ways to corporations. And the bigger the corporation (and they are very big indeed, obviously), the more abstractedly the workers are thought of. And although I’m not at all anti-technology, computers and information technologies do make more and more jobs the same. The more people work for or are dependent on large corporations for which profit is the most important thing, the more dehumanised and objectified people will be.
Mark Thwaite: Do you think ‘genre novels’ are given their due in our literary culture?
Tom Fletcher: Not really, no. I find this a difficult question to answer simply, because in answering either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, I’m acknowledging difference between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’, and I’m not sure that there is that much difference. More and more, I struggle to identify exactly what it is that differentiates on set of books from another; often it feels as if a book of genre ‘x’ was written in another decade, or by another author, then it would be published in a different genre. So it’s not so much that I don’t think ‘genre novels’ are given their due – I just think it’s a shame (if inevitable) that books are categorized at all, really.
Having said that – if it wasn’t for genre categories, then there wouldn’t be genre conventions, and there wouldn’t be genre communities, and those are really great things.
Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?
Tom Fletcher: I’m working on a third novel in this series, which is called The Ravenglass Eye. It’s about a series of killings in a small, west Cumbrian village, and a girl called Edie who knows more about them than she realizes. I want to use this book to expand a little bit upon the mythos of the series.
Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?
Tom Fletcher: Just – thank you all for reading this! And thank you for reading the book, if you have.
Wonderful review on Spooky Reads for Tom Fletcher’s The Thing on the Shore:
Tom Fletcher’s 2010 debut horror novel The Leaping was an eye opener in the direction of the new blood emerging on the circuit in its skilled author; it was also a breath of fresh air in regards to his approach to the genre.
At its heart lay a group introspective, an exploration of relationships, platonic and otherwise, within a circle of friends. And beneath this lay a slumbering, brutal tale that was equally raw, honest, and often times beautiful and bleak. Oh yes, and there was a bucket load of Mario Kart thrown in for good measure.
With The Thing on the Shore there’s a continuation of many of the same themes that made The Leaping so endearing, and compulsive. Yet there’s also a twist to the yarn that makes this book stand up for analysis on its own as equally well as its forebear.
Geographically, in this book, there’s a move coastward to the small town of Whitehaven. The job market here is far from ideal, and the call centre run by Outsourcing Unlimited is relied on by many as a source of employment. To say there’s something rotten here would be an understatement though, and as many of its staff might suspect, the management almost definitely doesn’t have their best interests in heart.
Arthur lives with a heavy shadow over his heart from when his mother died almost fifteen years previous. Many issues surrounding the nature of her death, in a surreal plunge from a cliff, remain unspoken between his father and himself. His father has turned to drink, and his sanity appears crumbling in the years since, and both are dependent on the call centre for their living. Around them things decay, figuratively and literally.
Luckily he has a support group of friends there for him, albeit quirky and strange, though equally endearing, they meander on as best they can, taking what challenges are thrown at them with wry humour and perseverance. But life isn’t easy – and it seems to be getting harder as the border between reality in this bleak place, and whatever else may lie beyond in the great unknown, appears to be being challenged by malign forces…
Read the entire review over on Spooky Reads.
Tom Fletcher is a young author who has already made a name for himself thanks to spine-chilling readings of his work at Manchester’s monthly live lit event, ‘There’s No Point in Not Being Friends’.
He has published a number of his short stories in a three-author anthology, Before the Rain. The Leaping is his first novel. His second, The Thing On The Shore, is published by Quercus in February 2011.
Mark Thwaite: What first gave you the idea for writing The Leaping?
Tom Fletcher: I was on a Creative Writing degree at the University of Leeds, and I wrote a short story that was a contemporary-set version of Little Red Riding Hood. I was uncharacteristically happy with it, and felt that there was a lot more in this setting, these characters, this idea, if I could get at it. So, really, the idea came from my interest in folktales.
Mark Thwaite: Can you tell us a little more about the story of The Leaping…
Tom Fletcher: It’s about a group of friends who have just kind of washed up at the beginning of their adult lives and are looking ahead and feeling quite disillusioned about everything. Everything is the same, and everything feels superficial. And, as a result of this boredom (nihilism, almost), a love triangle develops; that love triangle is the catalyst for a couple of the friends to move away to Wasdale, West Cumbria. A housewarming party is thrown, but the house has a history all of its own, and the party converges with another gathering – ‘The Leaping’ of the title, which is a folkloric happening that I won’t say too much about for fear of giving away the ending!
In essence, it’s about the lure of escapism. The very appealing notion of ignorance being bliss, and the dangers inherent in that way of thinking.
Mark Thwaite: The Leaping blends horror, folktale and quite disturbing realism: did that blend come naturally as you wrote, or did you plan from the outset to create a ‘genre-blend’?
Tom Fletcher: I didn’t intend any kind of genre-blend, no. It all came naturally – all this stuff is connected in the way I see the world. My intention – my motivation, really – was to write a novel about contemporary life. My interests in folklore, and my own taste for horror, science-fiction and fantasy fiction, meant that supernatural elements crept in, but the ‘horror’ element of it is, to me, inseparable from realism. I think most realist fiction has elements of horror in it. There’s a great quotation from the writer James Kelman:
‘All you’ve got to do is follow some people around and look at their existence for twenty-four hours, and it will be horror. It will just be horror’.
Mark Thwaite: How long have you been writing for Tom? How did your first manage to get published?
Tom Fletcher: I used to write stories when I was a child – aping books that I loved, like the Redwall books by Brian Jacques, or the Deptford Mice books by Robin Jarvis and just never stopped. (I mean, I never stopped writing. I stopped the aping, hopefully.) Seems as if I have a preoccupation with talking animals, maybe.
I first got published by submitting a short story when Comma Press put out a call for submissions from new writers – they were putting together an anthology, which became Parenthesis. Sarah Hymas, of Flax Books, read my contribution to that (my story was called The Big Drift) and asked me to contribute some work to an anthology that she was putting together, which became Before the Rain. As payment for that, Flax set me up on a mentorship scheme. I asked to be mentored by the writer Nicholas Royle. He read the draft of The Leaping that I was working on, offering advice along the way, and then offered to become my agent. He submitted the book to Quercus, and now here it is!
Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing your book? How did you overcome it?
Tom Fletcher: Writing a book is quite difficult in lots of ways. The way I write – to just start it, fix the characters, and then let them lead the story – means that there’s no plot at the beginning of the process. The plot is something that emerges. It’s a labyrinth that the characters create with their own neuroses, preoccupations, attitudes, actions. So getting the balance between plot and character, or plot and atmosphere, is a difficult thing for me.
Mark Thwaite: How did working with an editor help you to shape your work?
Tom Fletcher: Working with an editor is fantastic, because – well, really, I see an editor primarily as a reader. And having a reader who can tell you what works and what doesn’t work is invaluable. Although it’s true that I enjoy writing and it’s a way of testing myself and exploring the world, I do want other people to read what I write and take something from it. And that means listening to and acting upon feedback from my editor. If you want to write fiction that conveys something to people, that people can relate to or bounce off or tap into, then you have to listen to those people. And your editor represents those people.
Mark Thwaite: Did you know how The Leaping would end when you began, or was writing a journey of discovery for you?
Tom Fletcher: I knew how it would end, but not the story. Writing the book was definitely a journey of discovery, yeah.
The ending of The Leaping is quite strange, in retrospect. It didn’t feel strange to me at the time because it is so firmly rooted in folklore that I knew, and the way the book ends is so important thematically, but I’ve had people tell me that reading it feels like taking LSD. Which I’m happy with, but it puts me off LSD.
Mark Thwaite: Is there anything you feel you can’t do well as a writer that you’d like to be able to do?
Tom Fletcher: Sometimes – like every other writer I know – I’ll read a book and think, no way. That’s it. I may as well give up. Because that book I’ve just read is so brilliant, so vital. (The Road by Cormac McCarthy, for example.) What tends to inspire that feeling the most is the unique use of language. When you know purely from a sentence or two who you’re reading. Cormac McCarthy is one such writer, Muriel Spark is another. But then, really, I think that’s something that comes with experience and confidence – it’s about finding your voice.
Everybody has a different voice, and if a writer can find it and then have the confidence to use it, then it will really elevate that writer’s work. I think that finding their voice enables a writer to articulate feelings and meanings with more clarity and resonance. In the same way that some concepts only exist in certain languages, some things can only be expressed once the voice is found. So – that’s what I’d like to work on.
Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing?
Tom Fletcher: I recently stopped practicing Kung Fu regularly due to various time pressures, but really loved that – I fully intend to pick it up again next year. I also love videogames, films and reading.
Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your ‘ideal’ reader? Did you write specifically for them?
Tom Fletcher: No, not at all. I think with fiction there will always be a demographic who ‘get’ it, who really relate to it, but then also it’s valuable for other demographics to read that same fiction in order to get a better understanding of the first demographic. If that makes sense.
Mark Thwaite: How do you write? With pen or pencil? Straight onto a screen? Revision after revision or spontaneously?
Tom Fletcher: Straight to screen, usually, although I do keep a notebook for when I’m out and about. And as for revising – with novels, I revise constantly, again and again, yes. Short stories are usually written spontaneously.
Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?
Tom Fletcher: I’m working on a short story for an as-yet-untitled anthology edited by the horror writer Gary McMahon, a short story for an anthology of fiction inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, a short story for a bird-themed anthology to be published next year, a short story for a book of ghost stories to be published in October, a short story for an anthology to be published by Cant Books, and I’ve just started a third novel – The Ravenglass Eye. I’m also about to start editing my second novel, The Thing on the Shore, published by Quercus in spring.
Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer? And who is your least favourite?
Tom Fletcher: Favourite writer – maybe Bret Easton Ellis. I really don’t know though. It changes every month. Don DeLillo is amazing. And Muriel Spark. And Iain Banks, with or without the ‘M’. Neil Gaiman. The list really does go on.
Least favourite… I don’t know. I rarely read a book that feels like a waste of time, if ever. Oh – The Corrections, by Jonathen Franzen. That book discouraged me from reading anything else by him, and that’s the only book I can think of that’s had that effect. So let’s say Jonathen Franzen. I think he can take it.
Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite fictional character?
Tom Fletcher: I love Dean Moriarty, from On the Road. He’s that classic example of a character who lives a life you maybe want to live, but if you live that life in this world, in this time and place, then you’re probably lost.
Mark Thwaite: Do you have a favourite quote?
Tom Fletcher: The first one that popped into my head was a Tom Waits lyric:
‘Now when I was a boy
My daddy sat me on his knee
And he told me,
He told me many things.
And he said, “Son -
There’s a lot of things in this world
You’re gonna have no use for,”
And he was right.’
Probably any Tom Waits lyric would function as a favourite quote, though.
Mark Thwaite: What is/are your favourite book(s)? What is the last book you started but didn’t finish?!
Tom Fletcher: I genuinely don’t have a favourite book. As for the last book I started but didn’t finish… I don’t know. I don’t think I ever do that!
Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?!
Tom Fletcher: Just don’t stop writing, really. That’s the important thing. And then don’t be afraid to submit it for criticism, whether that’s from editors of anthologies, or publishers, or friends. Join a writing group, maybe. Feedback is so, so important, not because your work is bad, but because you need encouragement to carry on.
Mark Thwaite: What do you think of e-books, online writing, blogs, fan-fiction etc? Are you involved in online writing yourself?
Tom Fletcher: I love books as objects, but I can really see the appeal and the worth of e-books. I was cynical about e-readers at first, but then I moved house, and, halfway up two flights of stairs with the fifteenth crate of books, I started to realise what they really meant. Not just for the publishing industry, but for every aspect of life in affluent countries.
Online writing – blogs etcetera – I think it’s fantastic. Not all the writing out there is fantastic, but the idea that anybody with a computer and internet access can reach an audience, and potentially enrich the life of that audience, is wonderful. Even if that audience is only one person, that’s worthwhile. There’s this totally innaccurate idea that all bloggers are egotists writing about themselves, but that’s not true at all – there’s really great fiction out there, poetry, journalism, analysis, humour. There’s a whole literary scene. (And I mean ‘literary’ as in ‘relating to fiction’, there). A whole network of scenes.
These aren’t necessarily people who have been rejected from publishers or anything – these are just people who have grown up with internet, and for whom the internet is the first port of call when sharing anything.
Unsurprisingly, given what I’ve just said, I have a blog – www.fellhouse.wordpress.com. And I kind of help out, occasionally, with an online magazine called ‘other’ at www.otherother.org. I can’t take any credit for the hard work there though – that should go to Socrates Adams, who has his own blog at www.chickenandpies.blogspot.com. He’s the force behind ‘other’.
Mark Thwaite: Are you optimistic about the future of books and reading?
Tom Fletcher: Yes. Paper books – I’m not sure. I think they’ll always exist, but they’ll become collectors items eventually, like vinyl is today. As for reading and books in general, if ‘books’ means e-books as well as paper books, then yes – I’m very optimistic about the future of those things.
Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?
Tom Fletcher: Thank you very much for reading this, and for buying/reading any of my books. It’s much appreciated, believe me.
I knew I wanted to write more about call-centres, after finishing 
