M.J. Nicholls
Who are your favourite Scottish writers?
Alasdair Gray, Ali Smith, James Kelman, Gilbert Adair, George Friel, and Muriel Spark.
What is your favourite Scottish novel or short story and why?
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray turned me on to frame tales, unreliable narrators, authors-as-editors, found documents, pastiche and parody, emotionally stunning artwork, the novel as an objet d’art, run-on sentences, paratextual palaver, and metafiction-with-a-heart. It’s the perfect novel.
What piece of writing of yours are you most proud of?
My last novel The Fall & Fall of Derek Haffman.
What is your 274 Miles story about?
An unidentified clamour in a lift is revealed as a biped of unknown origin.
Tell us about your writing process.
I start with a constraint, whether formal or infernal. For my last novel, I took an overly ambitious manuscript I wrote when I was in my late teens with the intention of rewriting each paragraph with the same word count (within a margin of 50 words). I am a fiendish rebuffer of sentences, rebuffing hard until I have achieved a pleasing rhythm or satisfyingly odd collocation of words. If a sentence is uninspired, flat, or functional, I will throttle that sentence with violent persistence into a pleasing plasm.
If you have one piece of writing advice, what would it be?
Craft your sentences with the patience and persistence of an arthritic horologist.
What are you working on at the moment?
Various abandoned novels to which I periodically turn to abandon anew, none of which would tolerate or survive a synopsis.
How can readers connect with you and read your work?
My website has excerpts and links, plus an interactive map version of my picaresque novel Condemned to Cymru.
My Goodreads for literary chow.