Look and Listen

Biography

The more you find out about people the greater chance there is they'll let you down. So where does the writer end and the characters begin? That's for me to know and you really don't need to find out. Trust me. I could list all the different places I've lived (all Scottish) and the jobs I've done (mostly boring) but that could be anyone. I've been a prodigal son, a big brother, an absent father, an absent uncle too, a black sheep, a best friend, a husband, an ex and an honorary woman; some of these I still am and some of these I wish I'd never been.

I'd love to say I've wanted to be a writer since Day One but that's not the case. I never thought about writing till I was thirteen and that was just so I could get into the school magazine; I wanted to be a composer. I was in my mid-thirties before I wrote my first novel – no idea where that came from – and since then I've churned out four novels, fifty-odd short stories and a couple of plays on top of the several hundred poems I already had lying around.

In life you play the cards you're dealt. There are days when I hate being a writer but that is what I am; I make sense when I'm writing. But I was never dealt the bestseller card. Instead I got landed with the slipstream. I describe my first couple of novels as a cross between Kafka and Douglas Adams, the third is the bastard son of Samuel Beckett and Keith Waterhouse and the least said about the fourth the better.

You can find out more about me on my website:

http://www.jimmurdoch.co.uk/index.html

and I also run a literary blog, The Truth About Lies:

http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/

Inspiration

I wish I knew. If I did I'd bottle the stuff. What I do know is you can't anticipate it and you certainly can't force it. There's no such thing as synthetic inspiration, only the real thing will do and, more than anything else in existence, it adheres to the law of diminishing returns. It's usually good for a one-off fix and that's it.