About Vincent Tuckwood
Vincent Tuckwood is a story-teller working in fiction, song and verse. At any given point in time, he’s proud to be a father, husband, son, brother, cousin and friend to the people who mean the world to him.
He is the author of the novelsEscalation, Family Rules, Karaoke Criminals and Do Sparrows Eat Butterflies? as well as the 2010 poetry collection, Garbled Glittering Glamours. His screenplays are Team Building and the screen adaptation of Family Rules, Inventing Kenny.
Vince regularly connects with his audience at VinceT.net and at his story-teller page on Facebook, often writing poetry in response to their prompts, and encourages everyone to get in touch there.
You can find out more about him and his work at http://vincet.net.
The Interview
What is your favorite quote, by whom, and why?
I’ve been writing fiction for over 20 years, making music for even longer and I continually challenge myself to present my ideas in as accessible form as possible. There are two quotes that stick with me – I know you asked for one, but these go hand-in-hand:
“I would give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity. I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” (attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)
“In building a statue, a sculptor doesn’t keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiselling away at the inessentials until the truth of its creation is revealed without obstructions…. It is not daily increase but daily decrease; hack away the unessential.” (Bruce Lee, master martial artist)
As artists, we always have context and imagination that informs the creative work. In novel-length fiction especially, there is always a temptation to simply write too much. Part of this is driven, I think, from insecurity, that sense of “if I write more words, I must be a real writer”. I had something of an epiphany between my third novel, Jumbo, and my fourth, Do Sparrows Eat Butterflies?, when I suddenly saw that I was writing for the reader, not for me as the writer. We don’t tell the story for the telling, we tell it for the hearing.
Since then, I’ve worked hard to make my writing serve the story, and these quotes keep me focused on what the reader needs, i.e. enough guidance to inhabit the story as themselves, not as me; that my job is to simplify the landscape to the point where it comes alive for them.
Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?
I’ve been doing quite a few interviews recently, and I’m beginning to think I’m an oddball! There have been several questions along the lines of this – When did you decide to write? What made you want to be a writer? What inspired you to write?
Maybe it’s just me, but my experience wasn’t as cut-and-dried as that. I’ve been telling stories all my life. My Dad will talk about me sitting as a kid, playing with action figures, telling multi-stranded stories. And I see my own kids doing that now. Are they writers? Sure, now that they’re able to put words on paper. But, they’ve been story-tellers much longer.
Maybe it runs in the family. Both my Mum and Dad are natural story-tellers. They were born into a time and place where working people weren’t encouraged to seek artistic pursuits, so their story-telling was more verbal than written. In that sense, it feels much more like the oral tradition of wisdom-passing, and I think that has emerged in my own story-telling over the years.
Building on my family background, I was very, very lucky to go to a progressive secondary school in the UK, where positive reinforcement and pastoral care was the norm. I heard a lot of “yes” to support my emerging talents, and my teachers were mentors, coaches and guides, more-so than rule-makers and disciplinarians. I’m thankful pretty much every day for the grounding I gained at Francis Combe Secondary School.
So no, I don’t know how my interest in writing originated; it’s just always been there. I do know that my family, and the education I received, provided the grounding for the artist I am now.
When and why did you begin writing?/How long have you been writing?
I never really planned on being a “Writer”. In fact, I often find the use of that label worrying, particularly when someone who mentions they write is immediately asked: “what have you published?” A writer is someone who writes. Period. Publishing is neither here nor there.
I was an actor and musician in my teenage years, and I still adore being on stage. However when I was at university studying chemistry, I contracted a form of dermatitis that didn’t get diagnosed and treated until 14 years later. Within a few months, my hands were covered in cracks and peeling skin and playing the guitar was near impossible – though, of course, I still did, even though the fingerboard would be covered in blood.
When the disease first robbed me of my main creative outlet, I was the most depressed I’ve ever been. A couple of months in, I found myself with a pen in hand and writing the words “Once upon a time, I made a mistake”. A year later, I completed the first draft of Of The Tribe, my first novel. Part catharsis, part escapist fantasy, it got me through those dark times and, I guess, made me a writer.
In the subsequent five years, I moved to a different part of the country, met my future wife, started a corporate career that would bury me for two decades, and wrote Jeremiah Whispers and Jumbo. These first three books will likely never see the light of published day – frankly, they’re not good enough, though maybe Jumbo could be re-written.
In 1996, I started work on Do Sparrows Eat Butterflies? only to stop at page 60 and not pick up the pen again for 5 years. I lived, I learned, I gained the necessary experience and wisdom to write the story. In 1996, I could have written the novel. But it would have been nowhere near the story I told in 2001.
In a nutshell, I have written whenever I stopped distracting myself with other things. I am a story-teller, though I’ve avoided that for great periods of my life. I don’t regret that too much, I learned something wherever I was, but in 2010 I stepped fully back into my story-telling self and I don’t ever plan on stepping too far away again!
What inspires you to write and why?
It’s not inspiration as much as curiosity. Usually, I’ll see or hear something, quite often in a dream, that makes me go “Hmmmm… I wonder what would happen if…” Then that initial question will collide with a secondary idea and in the friction the story will emerge.
For example, with Karaoke Criminals, my wife and I were on holiday in Spain, in a karaoke bar – with me people-watching as usual. And I got to thinking about a girl being discovered singing karaoke. Only there’s also a history of gangland criminals fleeing Britain to Spain, so there was the collision/friction: Roxi is discovered singing karaoke by Brian, an exiled mobster, who decides to use his connections back home to make her a star. And there you have it, the bastard offspring of The Commitments and Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.
In Family Rules – an alternative take on fatherhood: can a former child star with little concept of reality find redemption when he decides to play Dad to a child he accidentally abducts?
In Escalation – a police officer placed in a high school becomes increasingly isolated, until she finds a teenage boy in the sights of her police-issue revolver, and the singular decision as to whether or not she will pull the trigger.
What genre are you most comfortable writing?
I write contemporary fiction, usually with a philosophical edge.
My earliest novels were horror-based, as is the case for a lot of young writers. That mixture of confronting mortality – which a lot of teenagers are doing for the first time – and the fact that horror archetypes – vampires, zombies, werewolves, demons, etc. – allow for easy suspension-of-disbelief, which is essential for writers learning their craft. My first novel, Of The Tribe, was a take on a vampire story, my second a meta-physical homage to Clive Barker, Jeremiah Whispers.
I moved away from horror because the stories took me in that direction. And, much like I don’t play the blues because Stevie Ray Vaughan did it too well before me, I don’t do horror now because Stephen King and Clive Barker, both huge influences on me as a developing writer, have already claimed that territory.
I like delving into quirks of psychology, and how that shows up in the everyday. So, you’ll find my books populated by characters who, while sometimes stereotypical, have some twist that makes them compelling. Usually, you’ll find these characters seeking connection and belonging, and learning something of themselves in the process.
In Family Rules, for example, you have two characters who are living invented lives: Kenny who runs away whenever reality comes too close, and his junkie soul-mate, Ivvy, who is attracted to normality like a moth to a flame. They are a warped mirror image of each other and the tension this creates makes their relationship pretty compelling.
These complex characters are in all my books, and I think it’s why so many readers tell me they can ‘see’ the movie when they’re reading the book. So, I guess the specific answer is: I am most comfortable writing complex-character-led contemporary drama.
Have you developed a specific writing style?/What is your greatest strength as a writer?
Somewhere along the way, I picked up a tid-bit of advice: write like you’re sitting in a bar telling someone the story. For me, this goes back to the quotes I mentioned earlier – finding the simplicity beyond the complexity. And it also touches on the notion of being a story-teller more-so than a writer.
I’m an avid student of neuroscience and psychology – the biological and behavioral components of why people do what they do – and in the past couple of decades there have been findings about sense-making and cognition that have brought this even further into perspective. My learning? We don’t need to write it all – as writers, we are guides, our readers populate more of the landscape than our ego would have us believe.
I only really began to challenge myself with letting readers inhabit the story, and populate it with their own vision, in my fourth novel, Do Sparrows Eat Butterflies?
A simple example from that book: the first sentence is “There is a picture in their hallway.”
You already see a hallway. You already guessed at the picture. If I take a paragraph describing the hallway, I waste your time and upset your cognitive processes. I’ve read stories where that hallway would take a page and a half to describe, and as a reader I’ve just tuned out. It’s the same with characters; I don’t need long, drawn-out descriptions – give me a sense and some specifics and I’ll fill in the blanks! As it is, I only take one further sentence to position the picture in the hallway. The rest of this section is about the picture, because the picture has meaning for the story, as metaphor and introduction to Ray’s mindset.
Do I have strength as a writer? From feedback it’s this simplicity – cut away the inessential, focus only on what’s necessary, guide the reader through the journey. I get told my stories are lean, focused and compelling. I get told that people can see the characters. Actually, I love asking readers what a character looks like, quite often it’s not as I see them or even how I described them in the book. And that’s fine, because it’s the reader’s experience that matters.
And when that happens, I know I’m living up to the spirit of simplicity.
About Family Rules
New York. In this city that never sleeps, anyone could make a brand new start of it. Or so the song goes.
For some people, starting again is no option.
Kenny is adrift in the city, tormented by the scars and memories of his unique upbringing as a child star in the UK, chasing any addiction that can fill the void he carries at his core.
Increasingly unable to paper over the cracks, to numb himself with street corner narcotics, or build an abiding relationship with his junkie soul-mate Ivvy, he turns to stealing cars to provide momentary escape from his increasingly desolate life.
Estranged from his parents, Kenny has no hope or vision of a better future.
Until one night he steals a car from a gas station in New Jersey and is offered an unexpected, final opportunity for redemption; a radically different role to play.
Family Rules is an intense personal account of an invented life, where all the rules of family life are inverted, and of the damage done when the boundary between reality and television is truly no boundary at all.
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