I’ve been writing stage plays for over twenty years and, over the years, I’ve published a range of collections, including Plays: One, The Two Handers, The Three Handers, and a list of individual plays.
But I’d never written a novel. Until now.
In this blog, I’ll tell you about my first thriller, Autumn Leaf and my experience writing it. I’ll also explore the differences between writing a play and a novel.
So, grab a brew and put your feet up.
My love of reading
I’ve always wanted to write novels. I’m an avid reader, and I love nothing more than immersing myself in a great book.
I’m a big fan of thrillers, so it felt natural that that was the genre for my debut novel.
Undiagnosed.
I was a passionate reader as a kid. I was a massive fan of mysteries and horror novels. However, I always struggled to read. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read—far from it; I could sight-read pretty easily. But I was a slow reader, and I often needed to reread paragraphs multiple times before I fully understood them.
Added to that, when I looked at the page, I had this little bubble in front of my eyes. The words felt like they danced across the page, which was incredibly distracting. I told my parents about it, and we went to the opticians, but it turned out that my vision was fine: 20/20.
This was in the 1980s, and conditions like dyslexia were rarely diagnosed, so I just put up with it. I did the reading I needed for schoolwork, but it was always a massive effort. And the difficulty I had with the page pretty much killed my love of reading. I did it when I had to, but I stopped reading for pleasure.
Trainspotting
I rediscovered my love of reading at university in the 90s. I was studying pop music at Salford University, and like many Gen Xers, it was books like Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting that reminded me how much I loved losing myself in the pages of a book.
Trainspotting reminded me that novels can feel alive and dangerous. I loved the vernacular narrative voice—it made me concentrate differently, I think. The words felt loaded with emotional truth. The text felt poetic and filthy—and I loved that.
Writing lyrics
I considered myself more a musician than a writer at this stage, but I wrote lyrics.
I’ve always written lyrics from instinct—I kind of let them write themselves. I find a melody, then I let words emerge as I sing them. I feel like I let the words be in charge of finding themselves; I don’t worry about meaning—that comes in the crafting later.
I explain my lyric-writing process in this video:
I’ve always loved writing lyrics, but I think there’s a limit to how much you can say. I’m sure many lyricists would disagree with me on this, but that’s why I became a playwright, because it was an accessible way to say more with words.
My music is available on all the streamers. Search for MusicByMachines, or have a listen here:
My new album, Filthy Disco, drops on 24th Nov.
Anyway, I digress:
Getting diagnosed
It wasn’t until I did my PGCE in the early 2010s that I realised what was going on with my reading. During a dyslexia awareness session, the tutor listed the symptoms we should look for in our students to help identify learning difficulties.
The list was like a bullet-point précis of my teenage self:
- Difficulty recalling directions beyond the first two or three instructions.
- Continual rereading.
- An inability to recall what you’ve just read.
- Forgetting verbal instructions, like failing to recall a phone message to pass on fully.
- Words that dance about on the page.
After the session, I had a chat with my tutor, who suggested I have a dyslexia assessment. I booked the assessment, and the outcome showed a “spiky” profile, identifying extremes in learning styles, from a higher-than-normal sense of spatial awareness to a much lower-than-usual level of retentive reading comprehension. But I have no problem with spelling or sight-reading, which is why my learning difficulty went undiagnosed. The tester also diagnosed scotopic sensitivity—the words moving and vibrating on the page.
It was interesting to finally understand what had held me back as a teenager. Nonetheless, like many dyslexic people, I did really well at school—I found strategies to cope—and I got excellent GCSE grades (not so much with A-levels, but I’ve always put that down to discovering partying!).
How I read
The big thing was the scotopic sensitivity—the words that dance on the page. It’s relatively straightforward to calm down with coloured-sheets that you place over a page. We discovered that my calming colour was purple, and they gave me sheets to put over my laptop screen, and it works.
These days, I use app screen filters:
- On my Mac laptop, I use an Apple App Store app, Dark Light.
- On my iPad, I’ve set up an automation that adds a colour filter from the Accessibility menu whenever I write in Pages.
- On my Windows laptop, I use an app called ClearView.
- In Final Draft, I set the background colour to my calming purple.
- On my Kindle, I changed the font to OpenDyslexia.
I particularly love reading on a Kindle. The ability to change the font and text settings is perfect for controlling my scotopic sensitivity.
Autumn Leaf: a thriller
So, getting back to the point of my blog. My debut novel!
Autumn Leaf is a taut, unsettling thriller about Will, who has fled his gaslighting wife, finding retreat in a cabin by a lake. But the retreat he hopes for isn’t forthcoming: he discovers cryptic messages around the cabin—in a steamy bathroom mirror, on a sheet of paper taped to the underside of a table, on his laptop screen. This leads him to discover that someone is watching him. And they seem to be getting closer.
Who is pursuing him? What do they want? And should he confront them?
Autumn Leaf is available in paperback and on Kindle right now.
The writing of Autumn Leaf
As mentioned, I’d always wanted to write novels. But I could never quite find the right starting point. I couldn’t find the narrative voice. I was so used to writing plays that writing narrative text felt unnatural.
I’ve been a part of a Levenshulme-based writing group called Fambles since 2018. We meet monthly and share our work with the other writers. The group is mainly novellists, but I always shared the plays I was developing. I’ve found the group totally invaluable in developing my work, and of course, we’ve all become great friends.
But being in the company of other novelists gave me the confidence to try novelistic writing myself. And the group have been super-supportive, sharing their expertise and offering constructive feedback, which has fired me up.
The distinction between playwriting and novel writing
Terrence Mann said:
“Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good.”
I often share this quote with my playwriting students. Sure, it might seem biased, but the thing about writing for the stage is that you learn to write taut action, using the limitations of the theatre to tell your story.
You’ve got set, props, and costume, but effectively, dialogue is the driver of action in a stage play. But it’s essential to make that dialogue active; otherwise, it feels clumsy and unnatural in the mouth, and expositional.
Dialogue is a function of characters doing things to each other; it’s born of strategy and objective. And this—I think—helps when it comes to writing dramatic novelistic scenes.
Writing for theatre is often more impactful when you strip it back—it’s often about what your characters don’t say than what they do. So, as a playwright, we become adept at underwriting.
However, what I’ve loved about writing novelistically is the opportunity to build the tension, partly using the type of description we tend to avoid as playwrights.
Building the world of Autumn Leaf
I’ve loved building the dread of discovery in Autumn Leaf. I’ve loved creating a world you can feel, smell, and touch. And I’ve loved shitting myself up while I wrote it. Because the cabin is so remote, I let my imagination run wild with the terrifying possibilities that that isolation suggests.
I had great fun writing the book. And I hope it’s as much fun for you to read.
Autumn Leaf is out now in paperback and on Kindle. Read a preview here:
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