PAC Interview: Richard Salsbury

The past few months have been filled with activities revolving around the Portsmouth Authors Collective - all of which have have required lots of time and energy and organisation - things that are in short supply in my world. Hence, it's been a shameful length of time since I posted my last author interview. Forgive me.

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The Portsmouth Authors Collective seeks to put the spotlight on local talent who live in and/or take inspiration from the city and its surrounding areas. I was thrilled, therefore, to be asked to interview Richard Salsbury a couple of months ago at the launch of his debut novel Mute. Here, we reprise that interview for this blog and for the PAC website. 

 

Author Bio:

Richard Salsbury is a novelist and award-winning short story writer based in the south of England. His work has appeared in Artificium, Flash Fiction Magazine, World Wide Writers, Portsmouth News, the FairlightBooks website and on BBC Radio. He is an editor and website designer for environmental writing project Pens of the Earth. He also plays the guitar and brews his own beer.

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Loree: Hello, Richard, and welcome to my blog. I’m thrilled to get another chance to interview you. Mute is a great debut – intelligent and genuinely thrilling. Why don’t you kick things off by telling us a little about the inspiration for your novel. Where did it come from? How did it begin?

Richard: I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of cults, about what leads people to become entangled with them and the influence that cult leaders hold over their followers. Rather than featuring a religious cult, I went for one based on rationalism and science, which appealed to me in an ironic sense. Also, wouldn’t a cult based on science have a particularly convincing argument? I mean, you can’t argue with the facts, can you?

Loree: Mute has quite a complex storyline. You have several point of view characters and a number of different threads. How did you juggle the various elements and keep track of each character’s development?

Richard: Mute was very tightly plotted right from the start – a lot happens in a relatively short space of time. To keep track of it all, I used a spreadsheet (rock and roll, eh?) with the rows as units of time and the columns as the various characters. It was colour-coded and showed me exactly what each of the main characters was doing at any given time.

Loree: The point of view changes with each chapter, alternating between Wes, his wife Alex, and two or three other characters including Kieran – Wes’ would-be killer. Why did you choose to have multiple viewpoint characters? I mean, all the advice cautions us against this sort of structure, right?

Richard: I don’t believe in advice that’s universally applicable, there’s only advice that works for this specific story. I usually default to a single point of view, but for Mute, the reader really needs to see things from a number of perspectives in order to see what has happened and why.

Loree: Was one of these viewpoints more difficult to write?

Richard:  Alex and Clive were, simply because they are the furthest from my own experience. But that in itself is a good reason to write about them. As a writer, I feel I should be setting myself challenges and trying to see things from another point of view, otherwise it’s too easy to fall into a grey, comfortable space in which I’m just agreeing with myself.

Loree: Which character was the most fun to write?

Richard: The would-be murderer, Keiran, was alarmingly easy to write! Since he has a pretty rigid philosophy, it was not hard to follow the logic of this thinking and how everything in his life has to conform to it. But he’s not as fully invested in this philosophy as he thinks he is, which made him all the more interesting.

Loree: I loved your portrayal of Keiran. He and his brother felt frighteningly real in an Andrew Tate sort of way. Scary stuff.

Your main character, Wes Henning, is intriguing, too. For some unknown reason, he’s unable to speak. He’s been mute since birth, in fact. What was your thought process when creating him?

Richard: To an extent, the book is about the way that communication is changing in a digital world, and how reliable it is, so it fitted that theme to have a character who can’t depend on speech and has to find different ways to express himself. I spent a couple of days trying to live like he did – without speaking at all to my wife and finding other ways to communicate – to see what it was like.

Loree: In the story, it appears there’s no physical reason for Wes’ inability to speak. As someone who’s fascinated by why people – why characters – are the way they are, this fact is incredibly interesting. If there’s no physical reason for his inability to speak, it must be psychological, right? Do you know why Wes can’t speak?

Richard: It came from an old science fiction novel – More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon – in which one of the characters can’t understand his fellow men because ‘the little link between word and significance hung broken’. We take for granted the mysterious process by which thoughts become words, and I wondered what it would be like for someone born without that ‘little link’.

Loree: And what about Keiran and his brother Grant? I believe you wrote these characters before the Tate brothers emerged onto the world stage. Where did those characters come from?

Richard: Yes, they were written long before I knew about the Tates. Psychologists tell us that we are more different from each other than we realise or acknowledge, and that has some pretty dark implications. Keiran and Grant are an expression of that.

Loree: You describe Mute as a ‘literary thriller’. What does ‘literary’ mean to you, and how would you distinguish your novel from a genre thriller?

Richard: The ‘L’ word has become a real problem – to one person it can mean pretentiousness, while another takes it as a sign of good writing. A pure thriller might be written with an emphasis on plotting, twists and a breakneck pace, but I’ve always been interested in books that, while having a great plot, also take their foot off the accelerator to spend some time exploring ideas and characters too.

Loree: What strikes me about literary fiction – and why I agree that Mute falls under that banner – is that there’s an underlying question that is deeply important, somehow. Literary fiction is often described as exploring the human condition, which Mute certainly does. It’s more than entertainment. It has something to say.

One of the underlying questions in Mute, is about the nature of ‘truth’. In this day, when facts are so easily manipulated and one person’s ‘truth’ is another’s fake news – when truth, itself, seems to have become subjective – how cynical are you, and can we ever genuinely know what’s going on in the world?

Richard: Subversive influence is a major theme of the book – who is pulling whose strings and for what purpose? Yes, I’m pretty cynical about the nature of truth, and I think we’re on a very dangerous precipice. Our power to persuade has far outstripped our power to discern the truth, which is why an alarming percentage of the population now believe the earth is flat.

Loree: Mute asks some important philosophical questions about our relationship with technology – how it empowers us, but also how it makes us vulnerable. Where do you see us going in the future? Are you optimistic?

Richard: I’m not optimistic. Technology in and of itself is not the problem - it’s the ends to which it is put by the people who control it. Technology is used mostly to sell us things and tell us how to vote. There are, of course, more altruistic cases (Wikipedia, The Gutenberg Project) but it seems to me a pretty unbalanced equation.

Loree: What’s your own relationship with ‘big tech’?

Richard: I used to work in IT. Perhaps it’s my own bias, but it seems to me that the people who work in computing are the ones who are most suspicious of it, because they see how it works (or doesn’t!) and the uses to which it is being put.

Loree: Artificial intelligence is all over the news right now. What are your thoughts on AI – particularly in relation to writing and publishing?

Richard: I think there are serious problems emerging already and, as always, the legal and moral aspects are lagging far behind the technology. There are, undoubtedly, areas in which AI is going to benefit us. No-one is going to argue against earlier and more accurate diagnosis of disease, for example. But I don’t want my art to be cobbled together by a machine that has no empathy with the human condition, and I guess my fear is that the majority of consumers would be quite happy with that, as long as it’s cheap.

Loree: Your wife – Helen Salsbury – is also a writer. What’s it like being in household with two novelists? Are you competitive at all? Do you drive each other crazy with your differing writing routines?

Richard: We’re not competitive at all – in fact, the thought has never even occurred to me! We do encourage each other a lot, but we’re also very uncompromising about our feedback to each other – there’s no sugar-coating, even if that can be a hard thing to hear on occasion. We’re both committed to writing as well as we can, and to have Helen’s support in that is invaluable.

Loree: So, what’s next?

Richard: This is the first of the Strathurst novels. There are two more to come, each being set in the same fictional town. I also have nearly enough for a short story collection, and another novel – set in Portsmouth in three different time periods – is tentatively underway.

Find out more about Richard

Mute is available from Pigeon Books in Southsea, from online retailers, and from PAC events. 

RichardSalsbury.com

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Loree Westron is the author of Missing Words. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, and is the founder of the Portsmouth Authors Collective.