Author Interview: Simon Lelic

Today's author interview is with Simon Lelic, author of The Facility. Simon Lelic has worked as a journalist and currently runs his own business. Rupture, Simon’s first novel, received incredible, widespread reviews and led to The Times branding him as ‘set for literary stardom’. Rupture was shortlisted for the Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards. The Facility is his second novel. (I took that from the tour website, just so you know - yes, I cheated! (= )

About The Facility (also from the tour website): Henry Graves has dedicated his life to the prison service, but he is unprepared for the challenge his new and secret assignment brings. Tasked with managing a government facility hidden deep in the countryside, Henry finds himself tested as never before: by the confused and frightened prisoners, by the sinister Dr Silk and, above all, by his conscience.

Tom Clarke, a precocious but naive journalist, has his own problems meanwhile. His career – and his life – is turned upside down by the arrival of Julia Priestley, who seeks his help in finding her estranged husband, Arthur, an innocent dentist who has been arrested under severe new anti-terrorism legislation.

The authorities admit they have taken him but will not say where he is being held – or why. Discovering a trail that implicates those at the very top of government, Tom and Julia begin a quest to find Arthur, and the truth about his incarceration. But some people will stop at nothing to keep the facility’s secret hidden, and soon the couple find themselves fighting for their lives…


And now, on to the interview:

What was the hardest part of writing The Facility?

I wrote The Facility in something of a vacuum. My first novel, Rupture, had been accepted and scheduled for publication but was almost a year away from actually being released. As such, I did not have the distractions of publicity requirements, reviews (good or bad!) or even the pressures of a deadline. Rather, I could enjoy and look forward to becoming a published ovelist, and write The Facility with something of a sense of liberation. In that regard, it was easier in a way than writing Rupture. The hardest parts about the process, really, were the day-to-day challenges that writing, as a discipline, presents. See below!

If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything about this novel?

I try not to play this game! I will not pass a manuscript to my publisher until I am one-hundred-percent happy with it but once a draft is considered ‘final’, I rarely look back at it. I have not read, and do not plan to read, either Rupture or The Facility since they were published, for instance. Of course I have to accept that there may be things, had I been writing a novel at a later time, that I would do differently with it. The trick, I think, is putting everything you have learned in the experience of writing one novel into the book that follows.

Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?

If you mean the things I find most challenging in the process of writing, there are plenty! I would never go as far as to claim that writing is hard (being a social worker is hard; being a full-time mother is hard) but it is certainly a leap of faith. There are always points during the course of writing a novel where obstacles present themselves (in terms of plotting, for example, or tone or characterisation) that seem, at the time, to be insurmountable. The hardest part about writing, I find, is not allowing whatever dilemma presents itself to consume you; to knock you completely off track. There is always a way forwards, even if it means first taking several steps back.

Who designed the cover of The Facility?

Stuart Wilson at Macmillan. It’s great, don’t you think? And I have just seen a proof of the paperback jacket, which in my mind is ever better...

What inspired you to write your first book?

My first ‘book’ was a story about a teddy bear who escapes his owner and visits a funfair. It was entitled, imaginatively enough, ‘Ted Visits the Funfair’. It came complete with illustrations and a cover and totalled, I imagine, something like 500 words. During a couple of months of illness, I in fact settled on turning the idea into a series. I wrote a prequel and had two ideas for sequels – but then got better and went back to school. After that, in my teenaged years, I attempted numerous knock-offs of The Lord of the Rings. None, it goes without saying, was good. Finally, I settled my aspirations on becoming a journalist. It was, after working for eight years of so in business-to-business publishing, that I became weary of the Style Guide and decided to try something more . . . novel.

Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?

Although I hold a number of contemporary authors in particularly high regard (Don DeLillo, Hilary Mantel and David Mitchell, for example), Cormac McCarthy is a constant in my mind in the number-one spot. He writes in such a compelling, lyrical, relentlessly engaging way. I love, too, that he writes with such fluidity, sparsely but with enormous emotional depth. Coming from a journalistic background, where writing is often, by necessity, formulaic, it is always refreshing to read prose that creates its own rules. Few, if any, do it as well today as McCarthy does.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

I am not sure I have earned the right yet to dispense advice but, if pushed, I would tell aspiring authors to be selective about what advice they follow! I know from experience how tempting it is to latch on to every utterance you come across concerning ‘how to write’, to the point where you are frantically trying to accommodate conflicting, contradictory counsel. Find what works for you; forget about how other writers do it.

Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?

Other than a sincere and heartfelt ‘thank you’ for investing their time in reading my novels, I would hope that any message I hope to impart comes across in the books I have written. Not too heavy-handedly, however – there is nothing more off-putting than a book that tries to preach.

Thank you so much Simon for stopping by!  Be sure to check out The Facility!