I live in Manchester and was brought up in Cleator Moor, West Cumbria in the seventies.

If you want to know what West Cumbria was like in the seventies, pay it a visit now. My day job is working for the Arts Council – but not involving literature projects. I began writing my first novel Never Never, a few years ago when I was working as a debt counsellor. I guess all the stories I heard when I was helping people out of difficult financial situations gave me some inspiration. I am a musician and used to write a lot of songs so I guess the words part kind of took over. I still play piano and guitar.

The phone book limited, (www.the-phone-book.com) a Manchester based short story publisher, read my novel and asked me to try my hand at a few ultra short stories. Each story had to be exactly 150 word long, to fit on a mobile phone screen. I used to write them on the train when I commuted from Manchester to Liverpool every day.

You can distill an awful lot into a few words. I think micro fiction can have a real narrative arc and real character development. You have to ask the reader to do quite a lot work filling in gaps now and again, but think its worthwhile. It’s like jumping on cardboard boxes to squash them into a small space. You’re always surprised how tiny you can get them.

There are a few unwritten rules to writing ultra short. Not too many characters, a lot of use of first person, not much time for names, unless they also say something about the character. Not much time for figurative and descriptive writing, so your adjectives end up bleeding on the floor, and if the wind whistling through the trees sounds like an old wheezy kettle your granddad used to have, well, frankly we haven’t got time to hear about too much of that sort of thing in these stories. I remember reading that Elmore Leonard’s editor reduced three pages of his writing to one line – ‘they tied him to a chair’. That’s really the principle here.

People say my work appeals to a fragmenting world of short attention spans- there’s an element of truth to this I think. The theatre was the Elizabethan form, the novel is a Victorian form, and screen-based media is the twentieth and twentyfirst century storytelling medium. So I think with text-based narrative you have to really persuade people to invest their time. With things like the Simpsons and the Sopranos to compete with, any storyteller has a fight on their hands to get their voice heard.

A few stories are based on real occurances - the one about a t-shirt with a Swahili swear word on it happened to me almost word for word in a curry hours in Disbury in Manchester. The story set in a barbers is based on Max Headroom in Afflecks palace, Manchester, and there’s a lot of things I’ve picked up from people I meet on trains and places like that. I spend a lot of time travelling on trains for work, and that helps me get ideas. These very short story’s eat up your ideas very quickly though, so there’s an endless need to feed the little monsters.

It took me a while to get anywhere when touting around the novel, but the ultra-short stories really seem to have hit a nerve, and the discipline of writing short improved the final edit of my novel. I’ve found a lot of success getting them in magazines, in all sorts of weird places, like a skater magazine in San Diego. And now there is my current collection, sawn off tales, and my newest collection, Aromabingo.

I tend to write my ultra-short stories long first, to find out where the story might go and uncover what’s in that’s worth exploring, then its a case of the finding the right parts which will make a good sawn-off tale. I do have longer versions – up to 1000 words of some of the sawn-off tales – a few of which have been published.

After spending a year or two on a novel you get no sense of the thrill of ending and completing something that you get every few days when you’re writing these little stories. Getting a high from writing a novel is like trying to get drunk on chocolate liqueurs; very slow, messy, and your parents are furious when they find out.

My novel Never Never is out in the autumn of 2008 on Tindall Street Press, and I’m writing a suite of mini operas with contemporary classical composer Ailis Ni Riain, one of which went out on BBC Radio 3 in April this year. My project Destroy PowerPoint, a set of short stories written to undermine the Microsoft’s PowerPoint presentations system, and using the PowerPoint system to tell the stories, can be seen at Manchester Literature Festival and at Birmingham Book Festival in Autumn this year, and my next project, Live Masked Story Wrestling, where a set of writers read a story about wrestling in a series of wrestling bouts, wearing Mexican wrestling masks, and the audience votes on who will continue the story, is in development.

(1) Who is your Muse? May we borrow or rent her/him/them/it?

My muse is the public transport system of the UK. All of my stories are conceived and written on public transport –usually on trains with a laptop, though I do some editing and handwritten work on buses, but it’s more difficult. They sway about. For those looking to emulate this system, timetables for trains in the north west of England can be found on www.GMPTE.co.uk


(2) Have you written something, crumpled it up and tossed it across
the room, then rescued it and smoothed it out - - only to spill
coffee/tea/Koolaid on it? (If so, did you write about that?)

No – I write bits of rubbish down on scraps of paper, post it notes, napkins, and stuff all day and at some point write them all up into a file on my computer called ‘stuff’ and I recycle stuff when can, so my writing workshop (if here was such a thing) would be like that bit in toy story where the boy sticks all the different toys together. That’s what I do with any bits that don’t fit – make monsters out of them.


(3) How does your daily life affect your writing, and vice versa?

I travel on trains and buses a lot for work, and so I get time to think stuff and write stuff, and to see and hear things that people in cars miss out on. The writing affects my work in that I’m never bored in meetings or at events – I always have something to think about, a problem to solve. My work affects my writing though in that I come up with more stories in a work setting than in a social setting, possibly? I’ve never analysed it. I wouldn’t want to stop work and write full time – each aspect feeds the other.


(4) How has your own writing been affected by the "rules" (whichever
list you use), and by teachers, programs, seminars, etc?

I did read a lot of creative writing text books when I started out, and I now run writing workshops, and I find most of the practical stuff helpful. I’m also working as a mentor to another writer, which helps both of us focus on what we are trying to do. But the answer I was always looking for when I read creative writing text books was how do I write this particular story? and that’s an answer that’s always hard to find. I found Robert McKees ‘Story’ very helpful.


(5) When did you start writing, and why?

I started when I found that I couldn’t get anywhere as a songwriter or in a band and needed somewhere to put the ideas I used to use in songs.

(6) Best rumor about yourself?

I once heard a rumor that I taught Tai Chi in my spare time and it turned out that this was someone else with the same name. My names not that common in England -  there’s more David Gaffney’s in Ireland and the states. Someone else called David Gaffney emailed me the other day and said, "hey dude we have the same name!" and that was it. I think it might be a good thriller plot for someone to seek out all the people with the same name as them and kill them.
 

(7) Where are the best and worse places you've ever been?

I loved Berlin, that’s my favourite place at the minute, and my worst place is a little town in Shropshire on the borders of Wales and England called Ludlow which is all antique shops, olde worlde pubs, retired colonels, charitable ladies and flower baskets, where I have to go for meetings some times. I hate that place. Another favourite place is a town called Workington on the West Coast of Cumbria which has the first permanent outdoor 3D sound system installed in the shopping centre and a cool town clock with a camera obscura in it.

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