Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your career/published works or work-in-progress, including your Masters project(s)?

I’m a novelist and scriptwriter from the Black Country, England. My debut novel, Marco?, which received a distinction grade from the Manchester Writing School’s MA programme, was published in 2022 by Lendal Press.

Marco? is a darkly comic crime novel about a working class man who’s lost his job, his home, his girlfriend, and his mind. When he wakes from a drug-induced nap to find a man ransacking his apartment, he snaps, decides his ex was kidnapped, and like a coked-up Philip Marlowe groping around in the dark, he sets out to save her.

It’s a fiver on Amazon. You should buy it.

My other works — play and film scripts, short stories — are mostly unproduced, unpublished, which is a disgrace. The flash fiction piece ‘I Still Love You’ was listed for the Writing School’s ‘QuietManDave Prize’ in 2019, and collected alongside others in 2020’s A Box of Porn. You should buy that too.

How do you think being part of the Manchester Writing School community has helped your writing career?

I once asked a London theatre producer why my shortlisted play, The Sandwell Six, hadn’t won their competition. He told me they “need a local angle,” asked if I’d “considered sending it to theatres in Sandwell?” Guess how many theatres there are in Sandwell.

Close proximity to an artistic milieu — no matter how disdainful I might sometimes be of such things — was a missing ingredient in my training as a writer. The Manchester Writing School gave me the opportunity to surround myself with other artists — staff and students — with people who had the time, the money (loaned or otherwise), the will, or the contractual obligation to put writing above other things.

Existing in a world of famous novelists, poets, editors, and international competition winners doesn’t guarantee success by any means, but having those people to bounce off, to disagree with, to compete with, did improve the standard of my work, and being at the Writing School did make me feel like I was a legitimate part of England’s creative network in a way that my home town couldn’t.

I wouldn’t call my writing history a career — too few successes so far — but the things I am proud of — my novel, my published stories — all exist in part because being at the Manchester Writing School made me believe that they could, even should. Given a time machine, and the six grand or whatever it was, I’d go again.

What did you find was your most valuable experience as part of the Manchester Writing School? What were the highlights?

The biggest thing for me was working with lecturer Joe Stretch. His ability to interpret vague statements about writing — preferences, frustrations — and construct them into rules, helped me to build a philosophy, where previously I’d relied on intuition.

I told him, for example, that I didn’t like how a novel that was written in first person, from the perspective of a child, had contained lines like “the buildings looked like gravestones against the night sky.” Stretch said “First person’s a cage you put yourself in, and it can be tough, but the integrity of the cage is everything.” Try getting a stray one-liner into your work with that voice in your head. See if you think I managed it.

In case Joe’s left or lost his touch or something though, it should be said that the depth of quality in the department is clear — from lecturers and student support, to the manager, the staff are sharp, kind, and generous with their time.

What advice would you give to students looking at studying at the Manchester Writing School, or just starting out on the course?

Find the best writer on the course and punch them in the face, day one – let them know you’re there. If you’re the best writer, congratulations, punch yourself in the face. Only joking, of course. My real advice is to get to know the best writers, tell them what you like about their work, and then steal it. Listen to what people like about your work, and if you agree, lean into those traits.

Also here’s a helpful reading list for anyone starting out.