JAMES GAULT MEETS AN AUTHOR ... RICHARD SAVIN
Richard Savin is a novelist, ex journalist and one time London restaurateur who writes alternative history fiction.
His novel ‘A Right to Bear Arms’ is currently available in Amazon as an e-book and a paperback.
Hello Richard. Our readers are always fascinated by what makes authors tick, so let me thank you for agreeing to take part in this little exercise in amateur psychoanalysis. In one way or another, you have been writing for a very long time. Can I begin by asking you how you got started and how you keep going?
I had decided I wanted to be a journalist when I left college but in those days it was a very closed shop and hard to break into. You had to be a member of the NUJ to get a job, but – you had to have a job in journalism to get a union card. It was pretty Kafkaesque. So for a while I compromised, working in the City of London, commuting with a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella, doing a job I really didn’t like.
It was an interest in motor sport that finally opened the way for me. I’d been driving in club events at weekends and I began writing freelance pieces for motoring magazines, particularly a publication called Autocar. This in turn led on to a broader field of writing, particularly politics and world events. You could never be sure who would take the stuff, you just had to keep churning it out on spec and firing it off to people you thought might be interested. Sometimes I’d write a piece and not find out it had been published till much later. I remember filing a very small news item with the Daily Mail about a British diplomat who had travelled overland by car to take up his post with the High Commission in Pakistan – I only learned it had been used when a cheque arrived in the post two months after publication.
The lucky break for me came in the late sixties when I joined an international press agency, first as a stringer then later as an editor.
What kept me going in the early days was often no more than the sheer pleasure I got from writing and the sense of achievement at seeing my work in print and that remains true for me right up to the present day. Enjoying what you are doing is the sustaining force.
You’ve travelled a lot and lived in various countries? How has that affected what and how you write?
The first thing it taught me was how to write on the move and to write to order. Not to put off getting stuck in. For years I travelled with an Olympia transportable typewriter; it was often the largest piece of luggage I carried.
Of course my writing as a journalist was less affected by the foreign experiences than by the needs of the story. What I write now is another matter; I’ve heard it is said you should write about what you know. I was born at the outset of the Second World War and have strong memories of air raids, and being bombed; especially the V1 ‘doodlebugs’. I also covered the Third Indo-Pakistan war and have been at close quarters with two revolutions and a number of military coups, so you might expect that to colour my writing – and to a certain extent it does. However, life for me has never been a simple straight line; a long acquaintance with food, wine, cars, doubtful adventures and all the fondly remembered moments of romantic liaisons and tragic farewells also have their impact on how and what I choose to write.
You’ve had a long career as a journalist and now you’re a novelist. What do you find are the similarities and differences between the two forms of writing?
The most important role for a journalist acting as a reporter of events is to verify the facts and write a balanced story. You then hand it over to others who may add a comma here or drop a word or two there, swivelling the syntax and lending to it what you might then consider a fictional slant. Writing a novel is often the other way round; you research the facts that others have established and from this material you create the fiction; the plot, the characters, the narrative and the dialogue – it is a much freer experience.
When you write, what is your goal –to entertain or to enlighten readers? Or do you have another motive?
Writing for me is like satisfying an addiction. It is something that brings me pleasure just in the execution of the act. There is a beguiling rhythm to language which I find very satisfying. But the greatest reward for me is to entertain, to know that someone has read the words and been moved – to laugh, to cry, to hold their breath; this for me is the goal.
You say you write ‘alternative’ historical fiction? Can you say why you choose the periods of history you write about and also in what way is what you write ‘alternative’?
Ah, well that one is not quite correct. I have written alternative history with ‘A Right to Bear Arms,’ and I shall do again, though my next book due out later this year is a thriller set against the real history of WW2 and so by definition not ‘alternative history’.
I confess to a particular interest in the first half of the 20th century though I am not confining my writing exclusively to that period or the genre of military fiction. I do however enjoy writing about it. It was an exciting time in history, part of which I lived through; it heralded the dawn of the internal combustion engine, air travel, the radio, television, the spread of the telephone, the camera, the movies, the talkies, the birth of the computer and two of the bloodiest wars in world history. It was a period which brought fundamental change to the lives of ordinary people – so quite a lot for a writer to bite on.
A lot of writers are asked if they have some advice for other writers? Do you? Very few writers are asked to give advice to readers. Would you like to be one of the few to do so>
I hesitate to give advice but if I had to I would say, ‘write something every day. Do not wait for the muse to be upon you.’ If you really want to get things done you need to apply discipline and write to a schedule; I personally treat writing as a job.
Advice to readers? Give the book a chance even if it’s slow to get off the ground. Personally I am always inclined to persevere – it may reward you in the finish.
What are you currently working on and what do you have coming up?
Like many writers I have a queue of situations and characters lining up and jostling to be heard. Next up is a wartime thriller with a touch of romance running through it. ‘The Girl in the Green Baker’s Van’ is due out in August.
The project in hand – first draft just written and getting preliminary edits – is a psycho-thriller set in modern day Manhattan and Michigan; working title, ‘The Girl, the Scarecrow and the Harlequin Goat,’ we are aiming to launch in time for Christmas.
In between times a novella, ‘A Short Drive to the Office,’ – a rewrite of a serialised article published some years back – may get squeaked onto KDP before the year dies.
Thank you Richard. All the best with your projects and we look forward to your new thriller.
Richard Savin is a novelist, ex journalist and one time London restaurateur who writes alternative history fiction.
His novel ‘A Right to Bear Arms’ is currently available in Amazon as an e-book and a paperback.
Hello Richard. Our readers are always fascinated by what makes authors tick, so let me thank you for agreeing to take part in this little exercise in amateur psychoanalysis. In one way or another, you have been writing for a very long time. Can I begin by asking you how you got started and how you keep going?
I had decided I wanted to be a journalist when I left college but in those days it was a very closed shop and hard to break into. You had to be a member of the NUJ to get a job, but – you had to have a job in journalism to get a union card. It was pretty Kafkaesque. So for a while I compromised, working in the City of London, commuting with a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella, doing a job I really didn’t like.
It was an interest in motor sport that finally opened the way for me. I’d been driving in club events at weekends and I began writing freelance pieces for motoring magazines, particularly a publication called Autocar. This in turn led on to a broader field of writing, particularly politics and world events. You could never be sure who would take the stuff, you just had to keep churning it out on spec and firing it off to people you thought might be interested. Sometimes I’d write a piece and not find out it had been published till much later. I remember filing a very small news item with the Daily Mail about a British diplomat who had travelled overland by car to take up his post with the High Commission in Pakistan – I only learned it had been used when a cheque arrived in the post two months after publication.
The lucky break for me came in the late sixties when I joined an international press agency, first as a stringer then later as an editor.
What kept me going in the early days was often no more than the sheer pleasure I got from writing and the sense of achievement at seeing my work in print and that remains true for me right up to the present day. Enjoying what you are doing is the sustaining force.
You’ve travelled a lot and lived in various countries? How has that affected what and how you write?
The first thing it taught me was how to write on the move and to write to order. Not to put off getting stuck in. For years I travelled with an Olympia transportable typewriter; it was often the largest piece of luggage I carried.
Of course my writing as a journalist was less affected by the foreign experiences than by the needs of the story. What I write now is another matter; I’ve heard it is said you should write about what you know. I was born at the outset of the Second World War and have strong memories of air raids, and being bombed; especially the V1 ‘doodlebugs’. I also covered the Third Indo-Pakistan war and have been at close quarters with two revolutions and a number of military coups, so you might expect that to colour my writing – and to a certain extent it does. However, life for me has never been a simple straight line; a long acquaintance with food, wine, cars, doubtful adventures and all the fondly remembered moments of romantic liaisons and tragic farewells also have their impact on how and what I choose to write.
You’ve had a long career as a journalist and now you’re a novelist. What do you find are the similarities and differences between the two forms of writing?
The most important role for a journalist acting as a reporter of events is to verify the facts and write a balanced story. You then hand it over to others who may add a comma here or drop a word or two there, swivelling the syntax and lending to it what you might then consider a fictional slant. Writing a novel is often the other way round; you research the facts that others have established and from this material you create the fiction; the plot, the characters, the narrative and the dialogue – it is a much freer experience.
When you write, what is your goal –to entertain or to enlighten readers? Or do you have another motive?
Writing for me is like satisfying an addiction. It is something that brings me pleasure just in the execution of the act. There is a beguiling rhythm to language which I find very satisfying. But the greatest reward for me is to entertain, to know that someone has read the words and been moved – to laugh, to cry, to hold their breath; this for me is the goal.
You say you write ‘alternative’ historical fiction? Can you say why you choose the periods of history you write about and also in what way is what you write ‘alternative’?
Ah, well that one is not quite correct. I have written alternative history with ‘A Right to Bear Arms,’ and I shall do again, though my next book due out later this year is a thriller set against the real history of WW2 and so by definition not ‘alternative history’.
I confess to a particular interest in the first half of the 20th century though I am not confining my writing exclusively to that period or the genre of military fiction. I do however enjoy writing about it. It was an exciting time in history, part of which I lived through; it heralded the dawn of the internal combustion engine, air travel, the radio, television, the spread of the telephone, the camera, the movies, the talkies, the birth of the computer and two of the bloodiest wars in world history. It was a period which brought fundamental change to the lives of ordinary people – so quite a lot for a writer to bite on.
A lot of writers are asked if they have some advice for other writers? Do you? Very few writers are asked to give advice to readers. Would you like to be one of the few to do so>
I hesitate to give advice but if I had to I would say, ‘write something every day. Do not wait for the muse to be upon you.’ If you really want to get things done you need to apply discipline and write to a schedule; I personally treat writing as a job.
Advice to readers? Give the book a chance even if it’s slow to get off the ground. Personally I am always inclined to persevere – it may reward you in the finish.
What are you currently working on and what do you have coming up?
Like many writers I have a queue of situations and characters lining up and jostling to be heard. Next up is a wartime thriller with a touch of romance running through it. ‘The Girl in the Green Baker’s Van’ is due out in August.
The project in hand – first draft just written and getting preliminary edits – is a psycho-thriller set in modern day Manhattan and Michigan; working title, ‘The Girl, the Scarecrow and the Harlequin Goat,’ we are aiming to launch in time for Christmas.
In between times a novella, ‘A Short Drive to the Office,’ – a rewrite of a serialised article published some years back – may get squeaked onto KDP before the year dies.
Thank you Richard. All the best with your projects and we look forward to your new thriller.
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