In Conversation with Author and Lecturer Paul MacDonald

Not many academics can saddle a horse, let alone make said saddle. But then Paul McDonald has followed a refreshingly different path into academia. Now Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton (where he runs the Creative and Professional Writing Programme), Paul began his career after leaving school at 16 to train as a saddle-maker. His recently published latest novel “Do I Love You” has been heralded by the Times as a ‘a wholly unpretentious, humorous, easy read.’

Transition Tradition interviewed the author, Walsall F.C. supporter and lecturer to find out how academia has helped and hindered his practice as a writer.

1. Paul, on the surface the shift from saddle-maker to senior lecturer in English is unexpected. How did you get to this point and has your path surprised you or just others?

My current position as a writer and academic astonishes everyone who knew me when I was at school. I didn’t enjoy school and I truanted habitually. As a consequence I left at 16 without qualifications and embarked on an apprenticeship as a saddle-maker (saddle-making is the town trade in Walsall, which is why Walsall FC’s nickname is the Saddlers). I enjoyed it at first but after a few years I reached a stage where I felt I needed a new challenge. Many of my old school friends were graduating from University at the time and I thought: if they can do it, so can I. I joined the Open University as undergraduate aged 21, partly in an effort to keep up with them.

I studied science and arts foundation courses, but the course that changed my life was an 18th century interdisciplinary course called The Enlightenment. It had a substantial literary component which provided my first significant encounter with quality fiction. Up to this point I’d mainly read popular fiction (i.e. Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Skinhead, The Rats, etc), but here I came across three novels that altered the way I thought about the world, and fiction: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Voltaire’s Candide, and Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuse. They are books that explore ideas in an entertaining way, and which spoke to me powerfully. The authors seemed to be saying interesting and important things about the human condition, and having great fun at the same time! I enjoyed the experience of reading them and writing about them so much that I decided to study literature full time. I began a degree course at Birmingham Polytechnic in 1986 and it’s at this point that I started to write myself. One day I was in a doctor’s waiting room and I picked up a copy of a story magazine called The People’s Friend. I recall thinking: these stories are rubbish; I bet I could write something this rubbish! So I had a go. I sent my first effort to My Weekly, a magazine of romantic fiction aimed at the popular women’s market. I submitted the story citing only my initials and they accepted it, assuming I was a woman. They gave me a cheque for £30 made out to Ms P.J. McDonald. It was a very lowbrow beginning but I was excited to find that I could write publishable stuff. As an undergraduduate I continued to write and publish stories of a similar kind as a way of supplementing my grant.
{break}Despite spending a great deal of time writing trash fiction, I managed to scrape a good degree at Birmingham and qualified for a for a research scholarship to study for a Ph.D. However, I had a year long gap between graduating with my BA and beginning my research and I needed to find something to do. This was 1989 and the Tory government at the time offered something called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme for anyone wanting to create their own business. It paid £40 per week and provided a convenient way of getting off the dole. I signed up for the scheme, and went into business as a professional writer. In that year my total earnings as a writer came to £70. I dived gratefully back into higher education as soon as my first grant cheque turned up in September 1990.

I continued to write whilst working on my research and I became a little more ambitious (some would say pretentious) with the kind of material I produced. I began submitting work to some of the more ‘literary’ journals that were around at the time: Stand, Iron, Panurge, Ambit, etc. I found it much harder to get accepted here (despite the fact that such magazines often didn’t pay) but the few successes I had, tended to be with work that had a humorous dimension. Thus when I eventually began to write a novel it seemed sensible to make it a comic piece. However, I didn’t start the latter until I was in my late 30s. By this time I’d completed my doctorate and had a full time job teaching American Literature at the University of Wolverhampton. Middle age was stalking me and it became clear that if I was ever going to write a novel I’d better get cracking. I wrote Surviving Sting, and that was published in 2001. It was well received and so I wrote another, Kiss Me Softly, Amy Turtle, which appeard in 2004. Between the publication of my first and second novels my employers decided to introduce a creative and professional writing degree and, as the only member of staff who’d published any fiction at the time, they invited me to teach on it. I’d never taught creative writing before, but I agreed to give it a go. I’m glad I did because I really enjoyed it! The publication of Surviving Sting effectively changed the course of my academic career: creative writing is still central to my teaching and I currently run the Creative and Professional Writing Programme. Naturally I tend to keep my background in the popular romance genre to myself.

2. Your new novel ‘Do I Love You’ has just been published by Tindal Street Press – is it difficult to combine your role as an academic with professional practice?

It’s hard to find the time to write but I think that, if you’re the kind of person who’s compelled to write, you somehow manage it. And I’m pretty lucky given that my subject as an academic is writing. I still teach literature modules and, as a critic, I have to read and analyze a lot of creative work. Reading is probably the most important thing a writer can do, apart from writing itself. Also I’m always talking to students about their writing, trying to motivate and inspire them, but I find that, very often, it’s my students who inspire me! Their enthusiasm and creative energy boosts my own. So my work as an academic tends to complement my work as a writer.

3. Could you give us an idea of your daily writing/working routine?

I don’t have a daily routine because my work pattern as an academic changes from semester to semester. Plus I’m not that disciplined. Some days I feel like writing, some days I don’t. I do write often but I tend to shift between fiction, poetry and criticism depending on what mood I’m in. At the moment I’m working on a scholarly book about American humour, but I’m also marking student essays. I’ll probably spend an hour on each before settling down to a tuna fish sandwich and an apricot mousse. Then I’ll snooze for half an hour before zipping off to college to give an evening lecture on Catcher in the Rye. Tomorrow I’m not teaching so I might either read all day, write all day, finish marking the essays, or do a bit of all three.

4. ‘Do I Love You’ is permeated by Northern Soul, are there particular challenges for writers when introducing music culture in text?

I found writing about music very hard. Music is something that I experience on emotional and visceral levels, as opposed to a cerebral level. However, when I came to write about it I found that my efforts were rather cerebral, devoid of those emotional and visceral elements. In the early drafts of the novel much of what I wrote seemed detached from the material – it read like an essay on music rather than a convincing reaction to it. I was committing the old ‘crime’ of telling rather than showing. I had to try and establish a link between the characters’ emotional lives and the music they were supposed love; to this end I tried to make connections between music and memories, music and cherished incidents, people, states of mind, etc. It was tough. I’m not sure I’ll draw so much on music in future work – it’s easier just to listen to it.

5. Your published work includes fiction, literary criticism and poetry – do you perceive difference between your practice in these arenas as complimentary or conflicting?

They are complementary in the sense that they are all creative activities. Criticism is easier, I suppose, because you’re feeding off someone else’s text. It’s difficult to imagine having writer’s block as a critic. But even as a critic you’re still producing a creative response to texts; you construct an original argument that, hopefully, illuminates the subject in a useful way. Critics are often the subtlest and most inventive thinkers: creative in every sense of the word. However, one big difference is that there is less pressure on authors of scholarship to be entertaining. By contrast, being entertaining is the novelist’s raison d'être, at least that’s true of the novelists I bother to read.

6. How do you see the relationship between ‘creative writing’ and ‘writing for publication’? Are these interchangeable terms?

I don’t think they are necessarily interchangeable, particularly for a novice writer. When you’re finding your feet as writer you do so by writing material that is unlikely to be publishable. The majority of work I see as a teacher of creative writing is not publishable. That doesn’t mean the authors don’t have potential. They do. It doesn’t mean that the authors haven’t learned anything from writing it. They will have. It doesn’t mean that the authors haven’t enjoyed writing it. Most do. Thus, in every sense, their creative writing has positive consequences that have nothing to do with publication. But of course most authors seek publication and my job is to help students develop their skills in a way that will hopefully enable them to achieve this. There’s no guarantee they’ll be successful, but many are.

7.What advice can you give to students and graduates who wish to ‘make a living’ from their writing?

It’s tough to make a living as a creative writer. I would suggest that students be realistic about their prospects in this respect. Even many successful (i.e. best selling) authors earn surprisingly little from their books. While a typical graduate profession might pay, say, £35,000 per year, there are very few novelists with that kind of income. However, if you feel that you have a lot of saleable books in you it’s useful, probably essential, to get an agent. They’ll offer you the best chance of maximizing the commercial potential of your work.

8. You have chosen to work with a (highly regarded) smaller, independent publisher. Were there particular reasons behind this decision?

Tindal Street Press was actively seeking manuscripts ‘with a Midlands theme’ just as I finished the first draft of Surviving Sting in late 2000. They’d just scored a hit with Michael Richardson’s, The Pig Bin, and mine landed in their office at exactly the right time. I was very lucky. They did a great job with the book, both in terms of editing and marketing – it picked up a lot of reviews and it had a high profile for what was essentially a regional novel. The same goes for my second so, when I wrote the third, it never crossed my mind to seek another publisher. Obviously there are pros and cons associated with a small press: they work on a limited budget and find it hard to compete with mainstream presses when it comes to promotion and distribution. But in other respects small is good. The author-publisher relationship is a more human one; also the staff at Tindal genuinely care about the quality of the writing they publish and they work very hard on each novel they accept. They are highly regarded for a good reason and I’m proud to be a TSP author.

9. Are there any resources or services you find particularly useful as a writer?

I’m always threatening students with exposure and public humiliation if they use Wikipedia, so it is in my best interests not to give a truthful answer to this question.

10. If you discovered the ‘golden book’ would you continue teaching, writing or working?

I would continue teaching, except that I would travel to work in a sedan chair.