Q & A with Paul Butler

1. When do you like to write (time of day, day of week)? Where do you do your writing (location)?

I don’t have a specific time, but I think it’s best to start in the morning when I’m fresh and my imagination is unfettered by everyday things. I think that’s when most people are sharpest. I don’t need any special circumstances or places in which to work as long as I have a word processor!

2. What was your first piece in print (book, review, or article, etc)?

You’ve got me there. Probably it would have been some conservation material and pamphlets I wrote for a countryside conservation project in the UK. Here in Newfoundland, it would have been opinion pieces for the Evening Telegram and CBC radio in the mid-nineties. I’m not too good with record keeping when it comes to my own work.

3. What character from your book(s) is the most like you? What one would you most like to be?

Huh. None of them really. I like writing about people with major stuff going on, serious psychological problems, as I find it’s more dramatic that way. I’m very loath to write about people who are emotionally stable. I like people with major struggles, internal as well as external. I tend not to enjoy novels in which the writer tries to make the protagonist too sympathetic, so I try not to write like that. I’m a little saner than most of my characters, at least I like to think so, but I have huge affection for many of them. Some of them, e.g. Sheila in NaGeira and Gabrielle and Fleet in Easton’s Gold, are essentially “good” people, and those that are a little over the edge, e.g. Tommy in 1892, I like just as much, in a way, because I see their struggle, the effort that they have to make just be as near normal as they can get.

4. What other jobs have you had besides being a writer?

Pretty varied kinds of work. I’ve been (in no particular order) a teacher of English as a Second Language; an education officer in a conservation project; a postman; a warehouse person in a pharmacy; a worker in a pasta packing factory, a bread factory (you’d never eat the stuff again once you’ve worked in that particular place, I assure you!), a fruit and vegetable packing factory, and a Trivial Pursuit board game packing factory. I’ve worked in an engineering plant, in catering, and I’ve worked in a bank and in a (U.K.) Department of Health and Social Services. 

5. What was your favourite book(s) when you were a child?

I read the Enid Blighton stuff when I was a boy, the “Adventure Series.” Everyone in the UK read those books, although it’s hard not to blush about it now because some of the attitudes about class, race, and gender were pretty dubious. When I was about ten or eleven, I read Watership Down by Richard Adams, a kind of environmental fable from the point of view of rabbits whose society is encroached upon by unrestrained development. That one really stayed with me because it was the first time that I really saw that a story could draw you in emotionally while saying something important at the same time. 

6. What are you reading now?

Not a great deal, unfortunately. I have read some novels in the last few months, Atonement and Saturday both by Ian McEwan and Every Light in the House Burnin’ by Andra Levy, but from time to time I do fade out from reading for a short spell, maybe because it feels too much like work when I’m involved in manuscripts myself.

7. What kind of music do you listen to?

Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Beatles, Debussy, Vaughan Williams. I got a retrospective album of Syd Barrett after he died a year or two ago and reminded myself how much I loved those songs when and after I was at college. 

8. What is your favourite movie(s)?

F.W. Murnau’s Faust, Dead of Night, a lot of “horror” movies from the 1920s, ’30s, and beyond, although they’re not really horror movies by today’s idea of horror. I like the Billy Wilder movies like Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment because they are witty but at the same time don’t shy away from human reality. Tootsie is one of my favourite comedies, along with Life of Brian.

9. If you could live during any time period and in any place, when and where would you choose?

Probably now for all the obvious reasons like universal healthcare, literacy, the availability of knowledge, the ability (although not always the intent) to feed and clothe everyone, etc. But there’s always a romantic and impractical part of me that would like to go and feel myself into a place when the day-to-day stakes seemed a great deal higher, or even the turn of the century (19th to 20th) when such inventions as the cinema were new and there seemed infinite possibilities for it. 

10. Make a question of your own and then answer it.

Do you think novels are generally longer than they need to be?

Yes, I do. The most oft-quoted guideline for word count 50,000–100,000, or sometimes 70,000–100,000, comes from commercial concerns not artistic ones. Joseph Conrad’s best remembered novel is Heart of Darkness, barely 100 pages. H.G Wells’ best remembered novel is The Time Machine, even shorter. Albert Camus’ The Outsider, ditto. Somehow our idea of what constitutes a long form story got messed up, and we expect the thick and weighty piece of work with characters who disappear too quickly in our memory and details that aren’t relevant enough to plot, theme, or character development. I’ve never read a novel that’s too short, but I’ve read hundreds that are clearly too long. I think writers show respect for their reader when they don’t put them to the trouble of reading material that could easily have been published somewhere else instead—an article about history or a short story separate from the novel in question. Honing your story down so that everything illuminates or relates directly to theme is a discipline, and I think readers appreciate it.