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?
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*
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.
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