Peter Kerr discusses his move from travel writing to fiction
Peter Kerr
Peter Kerr is the author of travel memoirs Snowball Oranges 
What made you become a writer?
When we returned to the UK after almost three years of trying to grow oranges for a living in Mallorca, people all seemed to ask the same questions about our family adventure: ‘How did you cope with the language, climate, the locals, kids’ schooling, different lifestyle,’ etc?
So, one day I decided I’d write down some answers in narrative form. A page became two, two became twenty, twenty became fifty, and after two years Snowball Oranges was complete, although I’d never really set out to write a book in the first place.
Did you find an agent or a publisher first? How did you find them?
I tried to interest agents first, gamely going through the lists in The Writer’s Handbook and The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. Eventually, a very supportive London agent took me on and tried extremely hard for over a year to find a publisher for me, but eventually threw in the towel. The major publishers she approached said encouraging things about the book, but ‘just couldn’t find a hook to hang it on’. I was then obliged to go back to the Yearbook and Handbook, this time going through the lists of publishers and approaching them myself.
What would you say are the key ingredients to a successful query letter and synopsis?
I think it’s safe to say that keeping the query letter and synopsis as brief and to-the-point as possible is essential. Agents and publishers are inundated with submissions, so anything too long-winded and full of irrelevant information isn’t going to encourage them to read on. You’ll be earmarked for a rejection slip even before their eyes have reached the end of the first paragraph! Essentially, what you are presenting them with is a sales pitch, so always ask yourself if you’d ‘buy’ what you have to offer on the strength of your ‘advert’.
Did you face much rejection initially? How did you deal with it?
Having taken two years to write ‘Snowball Oranges’, it then took another eight years to get it published. I must have approached and been rejected by every publisher except The Guinness Book of Records – and perhaps that’s a record in itself!
That initial London agent gave me some advice which proved to be crucially important in the long term. She told me not to sit about waiting for a publishing deal to materialise for my first book, but to keep writing, to keep trying to climb the learning curve.
“Try your hand at fiction,” she said, “because that’s the way your non-fiction writing comes across.”
I followed her advice, and in those eight waiting years I wrote four novels, two feature-length screenplays and one-hour pilot TV dramatisations of each of the five books I’d completed. None of these learning-curve exercises met with any positive reaction from the publishers and production companies I offered them to either.
By this time, however, I had invested too much time and energy into being a wannabe writer that I was determined not to give up, and eventually my ‘Snowball Oranges’ manuscript landed on the right editor’s desk at the right time. Ten years after I wrote that first page, the book was finally published and, thankfully, became a bestseller, even picking up an award or two. Now the hard work – and trying to write books for a living is hard work – seemed an awful lot easier to bear.
How did you make the transition from writing about your own life to writing fiction?
After something of a track record had been established through the English and ten or so foreign-language editions of what had eventually become six non-fiction books in the Snowball Oranges series, a publishing deal materialised in 2006 for the four fiction books I had written during those eight, long ‘waiting years’. These were the three humour-laced Bob Burns Investigates mysteries and a town-meets-country caper called Fiddler On The Make.
Some revision and polishing of the original text was required, of course, but the stories are essentially the same as when these same books were widely rejected up to twelve years previously.
My first ‘newly-written’ fiction book, The Gannet Has Landed, was published in 2008, and it now looks as if further stories may spring from the Bob Burns, Fiddler and Gannet seeds already sown.
With your fiction, what comes first – the plot or the characters?
There’s no pre-conceived plot whatsoever. I haven’t a clue what’s going to happen when I start to write a book. In fact, even when the story is well under way, I don’t know at the start of each day’s writing what will end up ‘on the page’. I’m an ex-professional jazz musician, so I suppose the improvisational element is as much part of my book-writing as it was of my music-making.
Characters, their quirks and idiosyncrasies constitute the foundation and building blocks of all my stories. It comes from an interest in people – watching them and empathising with what makes them laugh and, sometimes, what makes them cry. Once characters are established in a book, they help write the story for you. They come alive and present you with useable surprises all the time.
What would you say are the key ingredients to a successful novel?
If I knew the answer to that I’d be a very rich man. All you can do is write what pleases you, because you’ll never please everyone, so there’s no point in trying to. However, always write whatever you do write to the very best of your ability. I believe that taking yourself too seriously is a mistake, but taking your writing seriously is an absolute must, even if it’s lightweight, humour-laced stuff like mine. It isn’t easy to write ‘easy-to-read’ material, if it’s to have any substance to it.
WB Yeates put it perfectly: ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.’
What do you find the most challenging aspects of writing?
I wasn’t too bad at art at school (and I illustrate my own books now), so I tend to write in a visual way, trying to paint vivid word pictures for the reader. But it’s all too easy to become self-indulgent in this respect. Setting a scene or describing a character should be an exercise in economy of words. I have to keep a tight rein on myself in this respect.
Whose writing do you admire?
Authors who are master wordsmiths and great story-tellers. There never have been too many blessed with both of these gifts. The two whose writing I return to most are Robert Louis Stevenson and Laurie Lee.
Plucking the right words out of thin air is a difficult enough task (a thesaurus won’t turn you into a Stevenson or Lee!), but making such selections unerringly and then being able to weave them into beautiful prose as part of a spellbinding tale is a rare talent indeed.
By way of contrast, there’s an American humorist, playwright and novelist called Max Schulman, who, in the 1950s, wrote some spikily satirical books, which would still stand up well as mickey-takers in today’s ‘advanced’ social and political climate.
Like Stevenson and Lee, Schulman knew how to bake the tastiest of word pies, and he also went about it in his own totally unique way.
What inspires you?
The thought of returning to the bleak outlook of those eight years before Snowball Oranges found a publisher. To make a living while I was writing in hope, we moved house twelve times in ten years, buying a property in need of improvement, doing it up while living in it, then selling it on to start the process all over again – and not always seeing a profit.
Whenever I get the laziness urge that’s euphemistically known as writer’s block, I recall that disruptively nomadic way of living. It’s an excellent source of inspiration.
How would you describe your writing style?
Conversational and accessible, I hope. I try to see the funny side of life, whenever possible (and sometimes when it’s patently impossible), and I’d like to think that this manifests itself in stories, whether fact or fiction, which are entertaining and escapist.
Please describe an average writing day.
Our two Border Terriers wake me at 6.30 to remind me it’s time for them to be served breakfast. I duly do their bidding, have a bowl of cereal and a bit of fruit myself, take the dogs for a walk, then settle down in front of the computer in my upstairs ‘playpen’. I check the emails, and then get stuck into the writing, which I’ll continue with all morning, taking regular short breaks to nip downstairs for no other reason than to stretch my legs and focus on something other than the computer screen for a few minutes.
A light lunch in front of the BBC One O’clock News leads on to another dog walk, then it’s back up to the ‘playpen’ for a repeat of the morning’s routine.
On a good day (I’m not the fastest of writers), I will have completed one whole page by dinner time, when I usually pack in writing for the day.
It may sound like a fairly regimented procedure, but if I didn’t make a point of sticking to it, I’d never get anything done. There’s always a good excuse available for putting off work until tomorrow.
What advice would you offer an aspiring novelist?
First and foremost, make sure that you really do enjoy writing, otherwise it’ll just become a chore and this will be reflected in what goes onto paper. Then it’s simply a matter of getting on with the writing whenever you can find the time – and sometimes you have to consciously make time.
Unless you are one of the lucky few, you’ll find it difficult to get an agent to take you on, and without an agent nowadays you won’t have much chance of a publisher even looking at your material. So, determination, self-belief and patience are the bywords. And be prepared to take constructive criticism and learn from it. If a reputable agent or busy commissioning editor goes to the trouble of offering you advice, it probably means that he or she sees potential in your work, so don’t be offended by what may seem like harsh words. Writing can be a tough game, so developing a thick skin is no bad thing.
Is there a book you have written but never published? What’s it about?
The two feature-length film scripts I wrote as a ‘learning-curve’ exercise all those years ago are still nestling un-filmed in my computer, so I’m considering adapting the stories as novels. One is a humour-spiked kids’ fantasy, very loosely based on a legend linked to a goblin-infested ruined castle here in East Lothian. The other is a con-man caper set in the Scottish Highlands. The two lead characters are, in my mind’s eye, Sean Connery and Billy Connolly. Well, it costs nothing to dream, and that, ultimately, is what writing stories is all about!
Snowball Oranges
For more go to www.peter-kerr.co.uk
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