"There’s always some stage of the process where we think what we’ve written is utter garbage, and beyond repair."

An interview with Nick Guthrie

In the days of the pulps, it wasn’t uncommon for working fiction writers to have a half-dozen pen names. As a self-described publishing “magpie” who adopts different genres and pseudonyms, Nick Guthrie might argue that those days are back, albeit in an updated digital landscape.

We caught up with Guthrie to hear more about his adventures in publishing, building community, and his advice for writers just starting out.

I’d love to hear about how you got started. How long have you been writing, and when did you begin to seriously pursue publication?

I’ve always written. I loved writing stories at school, and when I was at home I’d fill exercise books with very dull stories about my future rise to fame as a football player. I graduated to trying to write real stories where things happened other than a young striker called Nick scored a goal in every match, trying to emulate whatever I was reading at the time: the Biggles books, Watership Down, the Famous Five and Secret Seven books. One of my school memories, from when I was about eleven years old, is of friends gathering round me as I read out the new instalment of my latest weird story, in which I would always try to pack twists, jokes and shocks to keep everyone hooked.

Looking back, that must have been a weird experience for me, because I was generally the kid that people forgot they went to school with¹. I always tended to be in the background when anything was happening – probably because I was too busy writing wacky stories.

I carried on writing through school and university, and then I just happened to be lucky enough to get a few breaks writing for magazines, and then writing games tie-in novels, and I’ve gone on from there.

Like any writer, I’ve been through good periods and bad, and there have been various points where I’ve found myself thinking that maybe the time had come to pack it all in and look for some more conventional way of struggling to pay the bills. But… How do you do that? I couldn’t imagine a world where a part of my brain wasn’t constantly prodding away at how something might become a story, or how a story might become a better story. I still can’t imagine that (which is quite an admission of failure, for someone whose livelihood depends on having a decent imagination…).

So for me, the question isn’t so much “How did you become a writer?” It’s how could you ever not have become a writer?

On your Substack, you're open about the fact you've also written under other names. I'd be curious to know more about your decision to use pen names for different projects. How did that come about and how have you found it helpful?

Most writers probably do it the other way around. They start out by writing under their own names and then the reality of the publishing industry confronts them with the question of maybe switching to a pen-name. Publishing, and bookselling, gets easily confused by magpie-writers like me who jump genres and age groups. They also don’t like mid-list authors who have a book that doesn’t sell as well as the last one. Adopting another name is a very common solution to both of these challenges.

For me, it was a different path. I’ve spent most of my career in the background, a jobbing writer, if you like. Most of my work has been under other names, for no reason other than that was the part of the industry where I got my breaks. My early successes were mostly in magazines where most of the content doesn’t even get a by-line. My early book deals were for tie-in work-for-hire which was published under a shared brand name. I moved into ghostwriting, which I still do, and which by its nature is secretive; non-disclosure agreements prevent me from talking about that kind of thing in any detail.

When I’m writing “my” work, I really am a magpie. I like to write this, and then I like to write a bit of that, and then whatever the next shiny idea is that grabs my attention. As I said earlier, the publishing industry struggles with that. The point-of-sales algorithms want to know how your previous book sold so the shops know how many copies to order of the new one, but if your new book is a Regency romance and your last one was about werewolves in space, you really do blow those algorithms.

The rise of indie and self-publishing in the 2010s could have been made for me. While I wouldn’t describe myself as a techie, I’ve always been comfortable with technology, and this helped me particularly in the early days of the internet when I wrote a lot of online content. When Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and others opened up online publishing around 2010, I was an early adopter. It meant that, alongside all the commissioned work I was writing, I could also do the magpie thing and write whatever I fancied, and that I could make this available to readers under various pen-names just to keep things tidy. Pretty soon, I learned that simply making it available wasn’t enough, so I had to get to grips with online marketing and audience-building. I wrote all kinds of things, from pulp thrillers to sci-fi to romantic adventure, and I loved it.

It really was liberating. Publishing is slow. Sometimes work-for-hire is super-fast, and I’ll be racing to write the words so they can be published next month, but far more typically you write a book and it won’t see the light of day for a year or two, sometimes even more. And sometimes the book will never appear at all, because, for example, the movie it was spun off from turned out to be a flop and nobody wants the book you’ve written.

With self-publishing, I could finish a book one day, get a decent cover sorted that evening, and have it on sale the next day. It really was exciting.

In some ways this was a world apart from the kind of writing I’d been doing, but although I describe myself as a magpie-writer, I think there’s a thread that ties it all tightly together.

I’ve always enjoyed writing to constraints. When I was younger, I loved the thrill of that group of friends gathering round me while I read my latest story, and you might think I had complete freedom in what I was writing – it wasn’t schoolwork, after all. But the constraints were tight: an adolescent writing a story for other adolescents doesn’t just need to write a page-turner; every paragraph, every sentence, had to have enough hook to keep their easily lost attention.

I’ve said I loved writing stories at school, but I used to hate it when the teacher, thinking they were being nice, told us to write whatever we wanted. What I wanted was a prompt or a limitation that I could both write within and push up against. I liked boundaries, because sometimes you could get away with crossing them.

Maybe that’s why my writing career has followed the path it has. Work-for-hire is always limited by its nature, and often comes with a user guide to what you can and can’t write that feels like it’s longer than the finished book will be. Ghostwriting is obviously someone else’s story told better than they could tell it – you can’t stray far at all.

Self-publishing, being so spontaneous and fast, might seem like the polar opposite, but in reality, it’s just a different set of constraints. We’re back to that gang of friends crowding round to find out what happens next: if you can’t write the hooks and surprises, you’re never going to cut it.

Self-publishing is 21st Century pulp fiction: keep ’em reading to the end, and finish with something that’s going to make ’em rush out and get the next one.

Reading this back, I realise that all might sound a bit cynical and formulaic, and I might come across as a hack. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I love reading. I love writing. I love story. I’ve been doing it for years, and it still thrills me when I’m writing something and it surprises me as I’m doing so, and I hope that comes across to my readers.

Somehow I’ve made a life out of writing, and I couldn’t really ask for more than that in an industry that rarely pays even prominent authors enough to live off. I’ve had so many lucky breaks, I must be doing something right.

And in the end, I’m still that magpie, always curious, always wanting to try something new, always hoping to surprise and make you read the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page.

Tell me more about Dead East. What inspired you to form a crime authors collective?

We’re not the first to do it, by any means. Here in the UK there are at least two very successful collectives that have led the way. The Northern Crime Syndicate has been going for six years, and Murder Squad is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

The UK’s Crime Writers’ Association runs regional groups, and Dead East came out of discussions among the Eastern Chapter of the CWA. I should stress that Dead East isn’t a CWA project, but all of us are CWA members, which helps establish our credentials, as the CWA is a professional organisation where you need a publishing track record for membership.

In these discussions, we kept coming back to the challenges in promoting our work. Back in the day, publishers had more resources for this, but now there’s increasing expectation that authors should be good at self-promotion. Yes, this is an industry that expects people who choose to shut themselves away from the world to play with words on a screen to suddenly be in-your-face extroverts versed in marketing and publicity. For some of us that’s fine, but I think they’re the exception.

Working together in a small group makes all that seem a little less daunting, particularly as we have some accomplished public speakers in our number, and one – PN Johnson – whose other career was as a TV frontman.

There are lots of benefits to working as a collective. When you’re on your own, if you’re lucky you might have one new book a year, and you’re that eccentric who is quiet for eleven months, but then is in everyone’s faces for a month when the new book comes out. If there’s a bunch of you, new books and other events are happening throughout the year and there’s always something to talk about. And if you’re like me, you find it much easier to promote someone else’s work than sing the virtues of your own. Once something like this gets going, the whole ends up being much greater than the sum of its parts.

So what do we do? We’re just getting started, so I don’t think any of us know what shape Dead East will take in a year’s time, or five or ten years’ time. We’re talking to bookshops and other event organisers about in-person events, and we think we have far more to offer as a group than we would do as any individual approaching these people to pitch an activity. We expect to be running workshops and panels at regional literary festivals, and supporting each other’s signings and readings wherever these things take place.

To kick things off, we’ve launched a newsletter, in the hope that it will allow us to establish and maintain some visibility within the crime and mystery field. It would be easy just to produce a newsletter about us, but we don’t want to do that. Even though we have new books and stories coming out regularly, it would risk becoming repetitive and appealing to only a small audience.

Instead, while we do want to highlight the work of writers directly involved in Dead East, we're hoping that the newsletter will be far more than just our news: we want it to be a stage for all crime fiction from or about the Eastern region, and a platform for news, fiction and new content from across the entire genre. My own view of it is that I’d like it to be the kind of publication that would be of interest to me because I’m a reader living in the east of the UK, but equally I would still want to subscribe to it if I were living in New York or Australia, because it might highlight authors new to me, or market opportunities I might otherwise have missed.

Dead East can be found online here.

Who are your biggest influences? Have you had any teachers or mentors who especially stand out as formative?

My biggest influences are the books I’ve read. Although my teachers were generally encouraging, I don’t recall any of them standing out as championing me in any way. I ended up skipping a lot of school in my teens, which probably says a lot. One time a teacher asked me where I’d been the previous day and I, quite openly, said that I’d been helping a band set up for a gig. For some reason, the teacher didn’t think that a day being an unpaid roadie was a valid reason not to show up at school, but that didn’t stop me.

The books, though…

I was a very early reader. I started school at the age of four and I’d already read all the books they used to teach reading. I spent a lot of time at the local library throughout my childhood, often taking out three or four books one day and returning them the next day, having read them all. I wish I could do that now! I read almost anything, but my main haunts in the library were the shelves that held the science fiction, horror and crime fiction, and the science, natural history and batshit-weird pseudoscience nonfiction. I was reading books from the adult shelves for as long as can remember.

It was the crime fiction that was my first love, though.

What first attracted you to mystery and crime fiction? Are there writers in the genre you particularly admire?

I really don’t know what drew me to mystery fiction. An easy answer would be to say it was the constraints. Just as I love writing something within boundaries, perhaps I liked to read stories where you knew it was about a puzzle, and that by the end you would have some kind of solution. I think that’s probably bullshit, though.

As I said earlier, I just love story, and crime is a genre that does story well. Yes, there’s that element of puzzle in most crime fiction, but while that can be incredibly clever, it’s just a tool, or perhaps a Swiss Army knife, that provides lots of different ways to open up characters and their motivations and interactions.

In the end, it’s all about the people, and not so much what they do, or what happens to them. For me, writing is the same. I love writing clever plots and dramatic action, but in the end it’s always about the people. When I write science fiction about alien goo, it’s still about people’s responses to all that, and how they learn and adapt – much as I hate to use a word that’s become such lazy shorthand, it’s about their journey.

Similarly, when I write crime, it’s about the impact of something dramatic and life-changing on people and their relationships, and that’s what fascinates me, and always will.

When I was that kid devouring everything he could find in his local library, it was Sherlock Holmes, any books under the Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock labels, and earlier, those Enid Blyton adventure stories that usually revolved around some kind of crime, too, the Secret Seven and Famous Five series.

In my teens, I drifted away from crime fiction – perhaps because my library couldn’t restock the shelves fast enough – and my reading leaned towards science fiction and horror. Writers like John Christopher and John Wyndham led me to Robert Silverberg, Ursula le Guin and others, and in the horror field it was all Stephen King and James Herbert.

As an adult, I’ve read all sorts. I love the work of John Fowles and Graham Greene, and I do like to read all kinds of nonfiction still.

Crime fiction has always been my first love, though, and that’s my preferred fiction reading once again. I love finding authors new to me that stir the same excitement I got from reading when I was younger; two recent discoveries are Neil Lancaster, for his gritty Scottish police procedurals, and Michelle Kidd for her psychological crime thrillers.

In terms of influence, perhaps oddly because I’ve never written for the screen, it was the TV series Cracker that played a key role in making me think I could write crime fiction as well as all the other stuff I was doing. Authors who have had a lasting impact on me in the field include Ann Cleeves and Mark Billingham, who are both brilliant both at creating memorable characters and putting them in locations that come alive as much as the characters do.

In a way, I’ve come full circle. While I never fell out of love with crime fiction, and my writing has almost always had some element of mystery or crime, I did drift away from it in my early adulthood. I’m at a time of life now, though, where increasingly I have the freedom to write for myself, and with crime fiction, it feels as if I’m finally coming home.

You've been very successful, both under your name and others (more than 20 books, movie options, agented). What advice would you have for writers who are just starting out, or still struggling to get some traction?

The obvious one is that they should write. That may sound facile, but it still surprises me how many people are deadly serious about their ambitions to be a writer but still don’t just sit down and write, and then sit down the next day and write some more. It can often be a form of self-consciousness: once your words are down on paper, or on the screen, the writer is suddenly incredibly exposed to the world, even if no-one else has seen those words yet. It’s a commitment. If there’s one genuine trade secret, it’s that almost all of us feel this way. As soon as we’ve committed to those words, there’s always some stage of the process where we think what we’ve written is utter garbage, and beyond repair.

The other half of that trade secret is that it’s always fixable, but if you don’t actually write the words in the first place, there’s nothing to fix. And it’s far easier to fix those words than it was in the first place.

Another thing non-writers, or beginning writers, puzzle about is where you get ideas, and how you actually learn to tell a story. The first part is easy, once you’ve trained your brain: ideas are everywhere. We’re all continually thinking in terms of, “Yes, but what if…?” We’re thinking of alternative scenarios and outcomes, we’re wishing things had gone differently, we’re hoping things go better. That’s all story.

And the second part of that one is that we’re born with storytelling brains. It’s how we share our experience with others. We all tell stories, the only difference is that writers write them down. If you’re ever stuck, just think about how you’d tell the story to someone in a bar, or in the street. You want to hook them (“Listen, this crazy thing happened the other day...”), you want to draw them in (“...and the weird thing is...”), you want to keep them involved (“And it could happen to any of us...”), and at the end you want them to both get it and to have come to trust you to the extent that next time you have a story to tell them they’ll want to hear it.

And the final piece of advice? Be persistent. Finish what you write. Improve it. Write something else, and in the meantime think about how you’re going to get that thing you’ve just written in front of people who might enjoy reading it. And then when a publisher rejects that piece of writing, don’t over-think it; there are lots of very dull reasons why a publisher rejects work, and only some of them are because it’s actually bad. So send it somewhere else.

What projects are you working on right now that you're especially excited about?

I’m always juggling lots of projects, but I’m nearly always reluctant to talk about them.

I have a great ghostwriting project on the go at the moment, the autobiography of a respectable person with a surprisingly colourful past, about which they’re being surprisingly candid. But tell you any more than that and I’d be breaking contract.

I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel that I’m really excited about, a contemporary psychological thriller under my own name. Some of my favourite times when I’m writing are when the writing pulls me along, and then throws in the occasional twist I hadn’t seen coming, or when a character who had existed only as an “xx” placeholder in my notes just walks into a scene and I think, “Oh, so that’s who you are!” (Did I mention that I really love writing?) Well this novel is full of moments like that. Writing the first draft was just a process of watching the story unfold, and writing it down as quickly as I could manage. And now I just need to fix those words. I won’t talk any more about it, though, because it will have changed shape by the time I’m done, and then will come the process of trying to find someone to publish it, and there are so many unknowns that I’d rather just wait until things are definite.

As well as writing books, I love short fiction, both as a reader and as a writer. When I decided to commit wholeheartedly to crime fiction as me, I had a couple of bucket list items that I wanted to achieve: sell a short story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and sell one to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I had my first story in the former last year, with another lined up for later this year, and I have another waiting to appear at the latter. To say I was thrilled to achieve these two is a huge understatement.

I’m also excited about working as part of Dead East. It’s nice to be part of something that goes beyond just me sitting at my desk, and one thing I’ve always loved about the writing community is that writers are genuinely keen to help each other out. I just like finding good writing and helping get it out there.

Where should people connect with you?

Dead East can be found on Substack, and I’m at nickguthrie.co.uk – where you can find my various social media links.

1. That’s actually true: when my school year had a 25-year reunion, people posted some old photos on Facebook, and a bunch of comments attached to one started with “Who’s that guy on the right?”, followed by a string of people saying they couldn’t remember. Yes, that was me.