The Coconut Unlimited author on why he loves Microsoft Word, a dock full of distracting apps – and punning on Twitter
The photo is of my dear ol' mum. She passed away the same week my first novel, Coconut Unlimited, came out, which was a strange experience for me, having to be so public and so private simultaneously. While I was going through old photos, I came across some taken of her when she was a teenager in Aden, and she looked like such a 60s starlet. I really love the aesthetic of funky fashion labels and art projects that remix that vintage Bollywood feel with more contemporary design, like Pardon My Hindi or the designer Cabein. So my brilliantly talented friend Nick Hearne, who did my book cover, scanned in the photo for me and gave it that lovely effect to make it look all contemporary and funky. That's the first thing I see every morning and the last thing I see every night, and she stays with me that way. Always, she's looking left towards where my Word document is, which means she's checking my writing to see how much I'm swearing or making fun of her. Which is a nice check and balance.
I use Word for novel-writing because I find it the easiest in terms of accessibility, especially since I spend a lot of time uploading what I'm working on to Google Docs. I can work on it on the go and then easily import it back on to my Mac and format it how I want it to look. I like playing with font sizes to indicate levels of tension in dialogue, and Word is at the tail end of being so ubiquitous that it makes it the easiest thing to use.
For screenwriting, I use Movie Magic Screenwriter. It's really clunky and not as fluid as Final Draft, but it was free and I'm a cheapskate so I make do. I try to keep my desktop as clean as possible. My living space is so chaotic in terms of books and vinyl being everywhere, torn pieces of newspaper, DVDs and clothes, that my laptop needs to be ordered.
I have a day job that is extremely busy, so often in the evenings I have to cram in meetings, writing, social time, reading and bog-standard decompression. In my lunchbreak at work, I'll be working on my novel or jotting down snippets of dialogue, uploading the work to Google Docs, knowing I can consolidate everything at home and make it fit together. I don't have a fixed routine for writing – I fit it in at any opportunity. My ideal is to do it all on my laptop because that's when I'm at my best: relaxed, in my space and concentrating. But life doesn't afford me that luxury. I don't do anything longhand any more. I tried carrying around a notebook but it soon became a collection of to-do lists rather than ideas or actual writing. I tend to read on trains, then write in lunchbreaks or before breakfast or after dinner, and use the rest of my online time to listen to endless amounts of music.
I don't use Time Machine to back up my stuff. I do it manually, which is laborious but it means I am fully in control. I once overwrote all my photographs and about five hours of great French hip-hop using Time Machine, and haven't trusted myself with it since.
I have a lot of apps on my dock. They represent every facet of my geeky interests, from writing to watching to listening. It's easy to get distracted. Luckily I don't make much music any more: I realised a few years back that my strengths lay in writing. It doesn't mean my love of music has gone away, or the itch to load a programme and start fiddling about with beats just for fun, with the lovely non-pressure of knowing no one will ever hear it. It means I get more writing done. There are five new beats in the "New beats" folder waiting for lyrics. Three from an amazing folk electronica artist called Dallas Boner and two from my regular cohort Vee Kay.
Writing fiction means I have no time for poetry. I'm very close to taking "performance poet" off my bio because I feel like a fraud. I haven't done any performance poetry for years. It's comforting to keep these apps within my virtual space but between my word-writing app and my screenwriting app, that's the most creativity this badboy laptop sees.
The "Kabadasses" folder is a Comedy Lab pilot I did for Channel 4. It's about the Indian wrestling sport kabaddi. With novel writing you have hundreds of pages to expand upon an idea, whereas a sitcom is a condensed idea told through visuals and dialogue and there have to be two to three laughs per page/minute. That's scary.
The "Gavin" on my to-do sticky is Gavin James Bower, novelist and editorial director at Quartet Books, who published Coconut Unlimited. He's a good chap and makes me laugh a lot.
I use web-based Hootsuite for Twitter and Facebook because I can pre-tweet, manage multiple streams for me and for work and have everything all in one place, which is helpful when it comes to which hat I'm supposed to be wearing at any given time. Wait, I have MSN Messenger. Pah, I spit on MSN Messenger! I never use it. It must have come with Office for Mac: embarrassing. I love Twitter. It's great for a lot of things, mostly pre-preparing what seems like a spontaneous, hilarious thought and having people think you're wonderful. Actually, it's great for direct contact with your existing audience, with your potential audience, with people you respect who you're dying to impress and with people within your preferred industry with whom you have a mutual give/take relationship. But aside from all the links to incisive articles, fun blogs, excellent comment pieces, wonderful offers, impressive books, cool free stuff, badass music on YouTube, Spotify and Soundcloud, it's also receptive to a good pun.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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