London is your hometown, and you have a deep connection to it. This allowed me to write my first scripts and novels and thus saved my life from the misery of having to work for a living.
It ran a WP called Locoscript and immediately I had access to onscreen editing and, most importantly, a spell checker. The Amstrad PCW was the first affordable word processor to come on the market in the UK. I’m a terrible speller and a fast but inaccurate typist.
I watched a video where you said, “my life was saved by a PCW in my early 20s.” How did a PCW save you? I just had to write the next 90,000 words…plus come up with a plot. Peter’s voice came alive and at that moment I knew I’d got hold of something that would sell. More importantly I sat down and wrote what become the first five pages of Rivers of London. I knew where he lived, where he’d gone to school and how he came to join the police.
Then into my mind came Peter Grant, jazz junkie father and Sierra Leonean mother and all. I knew he was a Londoner and I knew he was mixed race and a police officer but that was it. Thus Magic Cops(w/t) was resurrected as a prose project and I started thinking about a protagonist. But the beauty of writing a novel is that in the first instance you are writing for just one person – yourself. Can you tell us about that moment?Īfter casting about and reviewing old ideas I settled on a crime/fantasy hybrid that I’d been developing as a TV pitch before common sense caught up with me and I recognised that no British TV company was going to make it. You said in an interview that you had an epiphanic moment for who Peter Grant is. The question was – what kind of novel would I write? Faced with penury or worse- moving out of London, I turned to prose to make my one and only talent, writing, pay. When my career as a scriptwriter fizzled out I found myself working in Waterstones and going slowly bankrupt. After a few more tie in novels for Virgin and Big Finish I was confident I could write well to that format. Once I’d done a 40,000 word novella I knew I could do a full length book. I started as a script writer but after my first Doctor Who I was offered the chance to novelise my story which is like someone saying they’ll pay you good money to learn how to write prose. How did you become a novelist? Can you tell us about Waterstones and how Rivers of London come about? Years ago, on my quest to read the world of urban fantasy, I came across Bestselling urban fantasy author Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels and was immediately hooked.īen kindly sat down with us and chatted with us about writing, his start, and his newest novel, Amongst Our Weapons.
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