It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.
I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.
Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.
Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.
Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.
Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.
I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.
I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.