Andrew Crofts Q&A

Where did you get the idea behind What Lies Around Us?

A number of ideas came together at once: 

1. From my previous novel, “Secrets of the Italian Gardener”, I already had an established character in the narrator; a ghostwriter with a reputation that allows him access to people in the highest places. 

2. I saw that Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency had started with the book which was ghosted for him “The Art of the Deal”. It led to “The Apprentice” and that made him famous enough to win power.

3. I saw that the boundaries between politics, show business and social media were becoming imperceptible – are characters like Trump, Johnson and Farage reality television personalities or politicians? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could end up being president one day, but she could have become a film star.

4. I liked the idea that there could be a successful liberal backlash to the current rise of right-wing politics.  

5. I also liked the idea of a happily married man finding that he has become the trusted confidante of one of the most beautiful and desired women in the world.

6. It is becoming increasingly clear that behind all the power structures everywhere in the world, lie some connections to organised crime.

The power of the tech companies is something that is very much in the news and your novel addresses this head on. How worried are you personally by this?

I am not worried about it as long as I can see that the companies are being continually called out on the things that they are doing wrong. Many new industries have their moments of apparent invincibility. Once it was the railway barons, then the oil industry. I am sure that pressures of innovation and competition will eventually erode the powers of Apple, Google etc just as they eroded the powers of the East India Company, the Gettys and the Rockefellers, turning them into dinosaurs and allowing new, small companies to rise up and challenge them.

Are you on social media or do you avoid it? Do you try to stay off the tech grid?

I am as susceptible as anyone. I follow people on Twitter who I think will guide me to interesting articles, books, films and television programmes. I no longer fall for the tricks of clickbait, any more than I watch soap operas on television. There are a limited number of hours in any day and a dazzling array of things to watch, listen to and learn. I am quite self-disciplined about avoiding things that I know will suck up too much time. 

How do you get your ideas? What’s the process and how do they go from vague inspiration to fully fleshed out notions?

Many of my ideas start when I am ghosting books for people who live in entirely different worlds to me. They also come from asking endless impertinent questions of everyone I meet, particularly people who have had very different experiences of life. Then there are newspapers and documentaries and books to fill in the gaps.

Normally one idea occurs to me first, maturing in the back of my mind for a few years. Then another presents itself out of the blue and the two fit together, creating a plot which is strong enough to support a full-length book. Once I start writing and the characters begin to grow other ideas then follow.  

Tell me about the research that goes into your writing?

Again, most of my research comes from asking people questions. It is amazing how much people will tell you if you ask them. 

If I need more in-depth background information then I will start with the internet and let that guide me to the best books on any given subject.

I tend to use locations that I already know, having been lucky enough to travel extensively over the years.

  

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I don’t start writing until I have the whole plot worked out in my head because I want to be sure that I will be able to get to the end. But that doesn’t mean I won’t change direction and create new characters or think of new twists as I go along. If I think of something better, then I am happy to change my original plan. 

So you both plot & pants, a hybrid process, if I can put it that way. Can you tell me a little more about how you go about this?

I will do a chapter breakdown to make sure that I have enough material and that I know roughly where I am going to be going each day. That also cuts the job into manageable slices.

By having the plotline there in the background. I can go off at a tangent, but I need to see how that tangent will work with the rest of the story and either abandon it if it doesn’t work or adapt the following chapters.

Tell me about your writing, do you write full time?

Yes. I have written full time for more than forty years. I wrote my first book when I was sixteen and reached a point where I could support myself full time from writing about ten years later.

When is your most productive period of the day?

Late afternoon and early evening, having procrastinated and prevaricated all day. Usually, however, pressure of deadlines keeps me at the screen from about ten in the morning to about seven at night. 

Is any part of your writing biographical or are any of the characters inspired by real people? 

It is all a mixture of both those things, with an added swirl of imagination.

What writing projects are you working on now? 

I am ghostwriting a novel with an international businessman and a memoir for an extraordinary Chinese lady.

Tell me a little about your journey to success, how did you secure that all important agent and first publishing deal? 

In the early years of my career I would be writing to as many as a hundred people a week, both in search of commissions and submitting work on spec. They included publishers, editors, agents and the corporate writing world. To begin with I received a hundred percent rejections, but after a few years the percentage of acceptances from magazines and newspapers increased and an agent showed an interest, then another and another and slowly I started to get publishing deals. 

It’s the same as starting from scratch in any new business; you have to keep knocking on doors until they begin to open, adapting the product that you are offering as you go along.

Finally, I’m going to shamelessly poach two questions the author Mark Hill (author of His First Lie and It Was Her) used to put to writers on his blog. Like me, Mark was a book blogger before he became a successful author and I like to think that the answers to these questions helped him glean valuable help for his own writing. Certainly, reading them on his blog is helping me. So here goes:

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

A percentage of people in the world are never going to be interested in the things that I find fascinating and there will always be some people who will not like my writing style.

Give me some advice about writing?

If you are stuck, then start any project by imagining you are writing a letter to a friend, telling them the story from the beginning. That way your voice is bound to come through strongly.