When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I don’t think there was ever a time when I didn’t admire writers as members of society, and aspire to be one. I wrote lengthy religious essays when I was ten. Poetry too, in some gawky fashion – but rarely stories. Of course my ideas about what it is to be a writer have changed over the years – particularly my ideas about what does not count as being a writer. The giants of my early reading were Camus, Sartre, Mann, Nietzsche and more Nietzsche. Fowles was the only modern writer I stumbled upon who seemed to take the business seriously – though of course I have been shown many others since.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Meeting the Jet Man? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
Clearly the inspiration came from events, particularly the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which I participated. With that raw material I wanted to do at least two things. First, I wanted to put a human face on the bomber pilot – the people whose distorted voices you hear calmly reporting a weapon impact, halfway through the Six o’Clock News. It isn’t enough to see such pilots as an other, as a ‘them’. They live next door, they are in the checkout queue behind you. And it’s only when they have a human face that you can begin to do the second thing – which is far more interesting – and that is to ask what it does to a person to be so completely part of a machine, both the aircraft and the wider military machine. Some of my suggested answers to that question will not be popular – I certainly do not see all the outcomes in a negative light.
Of course, the basic question isn’t unique to jet pilots, not by a long shot. But it is particularly acute and clear for a pilot on operations. I once saw a clip of myself on television, climbing down from the cockpit after a bombing mission. I was grinning from ear to ear and walked confidently over to do a live interview. I did not recognise myself. What I saw was The Jet Man. That degree of dissociation is part of what I wanted to write about.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
I concentrate very hard on not hearing all the other voices that want to speak when I open my mouth. All the authors I ever read and all the people I have really listened to – they all want to grab the microphone. I have to produce some sort of diversion to keep them busy while I sneak off-stage and write. Luckily they leave me alone when I’m revising and re-writing.
How and when do you write?
Mostly in fragments, anywhere, anytime. Often first thing in the morning but just as likely on a boarding pass as I wait for a plane, even once in a dentist’s waiting room.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I read a lot of poetry, of course. But I try to focus on a particular poet for days or weeks at a time, reading the work and the secondary literature. Most recently I have returned to Dylan Thomas. I have always found him an easy poet to listen to, but a very difficult one to understand. It seems to be a common view that poems can be picked up in isolation from their context and fully, or nearly fully understood. No doubt there are such poems – but I believe them to be the exception rather than the rule.
Other than that I read a lot of non-fiction – philosophy and history. I would generally chose the short story before the novel – maybe I have too short a concentration span!
