Anger, Coffee and Creativity

Dan Halloway is currently working on an interactive novel that he's writing online. He's quite the innovator. Here, he describes how anger and coffee kick-started his first book-length work:


I remember seeing a documentary that explained why we get our best ideas in the shower – apparently the water flushes the impurity from the air and increases the purity of oxygen you get. Well that’s fine, but as a writer I get my inspiration from the grime and soot and seediness of life. I need the smoke and pollution and vibrant filth of the city.

My last novel, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, is a coming of age story set in post-communist Hungary. It started life as a hissy fit in Caffe Nero in Manchester, the one 50p metres down the hill from Piccadilly Station. I was fed up with being told to make my narrative more linear and my structure less complex, and I had half an hour before I had to get the train home, so I went into Caffe Nero, ordered 3 double espressos and fired up my laptop. Within twenty minutes I had the complete outline of a 6-narrator labyrinth called Late Harvest (a wine pun). Set in Hungary and England, it was related by: 50 year-old Marko, the proud Hungarian vintner; Jenny, his English ex who left the day the Berlin Wall came down only to have a breakdown but re-emerge as a scholar studying Hungary; Claire, who works for Jenny and whose life is in a rut after a breakdown cost her her own academic career; Sandrine, Jenny and Marko’s daughter who dreams of following her mother to the west and spends her life hanging out in chatrooms and somehow fell in love with Claire; Istvan, the boyfriend Sandrine keeps for show who’s a racist thug by night and mechanic by day; and Michael, Claire’s brother and a rock star and anticapitalist protestor.

Nine months later the novel had been through 24 drafts, and was a single narrator story about Sandrine’s search for her place in the world. But it all started in a grimy station on a grey day when I was in a strop. Last November I gave a paper “The Deflowering Duet: A seventeenth century theologian solves a dilemma for two fictional 21st century lovers” at a conference back in Manchester. The opening sentence: “In March this year I sat, waiting for a train in Caffé Nero in Manchester.” It’s always courteous to acknowledge your inspirations – even grubby, bizarre and inanimate ones.