Ahead of his BridLit event on Saturday 14 November, we sat down with bestselling author Tom Cox to chat about his latest novel Everything Will Swallow You. Set on the Jurassic Coast, we covered his method research in Dorset’s second-hand scene and how our corner of the South West inspired his original universe. 

Would you mind introducing yourself?

Well, I’m Tom, I’m 51, I’ve written 16 books, I’ve lived in 27 different houses, and I now live on the Dorset coast. I’m just about to start what will be my fourth novel, if I’ve counted rightly.

Have you enjoyed the move to Dorset?

It’s a really nice balance of things. As you know, Bridport’s a great town, but it’s just surrounded by such good countryside. It just has the right kind of balance for us, in terms of the rural combined with community.

What’s your favourite thing you’ve consumed over the past week?

I’m torn. I watched Elevator to the Gallows, which is a French film from the late 50s. It’s about a mix up in identity that revolves around a couple of murders. You always hear about Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless from the same era, but I think it’s a better film. It hasn’t got quite as much cool black and white smoking in it. But I thought it was a much more coherent film.

Perhaps best of all is a new writer I’ve discovered called Jess Walter. I’d never heard of him, but he feels like a writer who’s designed for me. A warm, funny novelist who takes on big subjects. Every single thing that happens just completely takes you by surprise.

What led you to write a novel that is so specifically grounded in place?

Place is very important to me. I think it was very important to my parents. They’re always, always talking about the atmosphere of places and the character of places.

When I started Everything Will Swallow You, I was coming to West Dorset and walking quite a lot. It was so quiet. I was doing these walks and thinking this is such a lost, amazing landscape, particularly as you go inland towards the Powerstock Common area. Then I started to think maybe I’d like to write a novel set here.

I was walking above Chesil Beach, and I have the strangest ideas when I’m walking. They always feel strange, but they’re the best ideas once you’ve let them just stay for a while. I often think that if you could write a whole book on a walk, somehow it’d be twice as good as any book you could write sitting in front of your laptop.

I had one of those moments. I was just above Chesil Beach and I saw a guy on the shingle, on his own. I thought, so what if right now, a creature came out of the sea that looked a bit like a dog, but that wasn’t a dog, and sat down next to that bloke? Discuss in 104,000 words. That was the task I set myself.

You give a lot of time, space, and energy to exploring the inner workings of your characters. Were your characters inspired by real Dorset people?

There’s no one that I can say is a real person. The only one being Roy from Clocktower Records in Bridport, because that’s just blatantly him. I thought that’d be fun, to put one real person in it, and I knew he’d be chuffed as well. It’s a completely alternate universe, apart from that.

I did a bit of method research on the second-hand scene, and I became an antique and record dealer for a little while just to see what it felt like. I got a bit carried away and I had to rein myself in and go, look you’re a writer here, stop this. The reason I did it is just trying to speak about the subject with more authority. It’s just one little element of the book, really, but I wanted it to seem authentic.

You started your career as a journalist, As you explored different forms of writing, did you feel tension writing purely what you want to write, versus what the readers or publishers might enjoy?

I started out as a journalist really young. I was 20. I had no degree, no A-levels, and someone took a chance on me and let me write music journalism. I’d been working in a factory a year before and in Tesco a bit before that.  Then all of a sudden I’m the Guardian’s youngest ever music critic. It was a bit of a bewildering baptism of fire. I was quite overawed, but I felt very lucky. I wasn’t very well educated, but I had a lot of enthusiasm to learn. Journalism was a very good discipline. A lot of the time, they don’t want a brilliant piece of writing. It’s just got to make sense.

But all the time I had in my mind, ‘I want to tell stories’. I think you’re too disciplined in the journalistic style. It’s so different from the free-thinking style of fiction. I had to break away from it for quite a while before I was able to find the voice. So I just quit, I said, I’m just writing books and essays on my website. 

I’d been stuck in this situation where to pay the rent, I had to write a nonfiction book that sounds sexy on a pitch, but isn’t necessarily going to be the best book. A lot of the best books don’t sound good on a pitch. The books that have the longevity, they’re too weird, too personal and too passionate to work as a soundbite.

I used to be a very more obedient writer, because I was talking to people with better educations than me, people from the southeast who don’t have a provincial Nottinghamshire background. I felt like these people from London who’ve had these private educations, they know best. But it stopped me from writing what I really wanted to write. There’s always that tension that you talked about between wanting to do what you really want to do and trying to get something published. The fight really is to have enough of an enthusiastic readership where you can say, actually, this is what I do and people like it.

I feel like that’s proof that what I’m doing has an audience, even though it might not have the potential to be massive. I don’t want to be massive, I just want to write. I want to sell enough books to keep writing until I no longer can as a result of extreme death. That’s the plan.

 

Fancy an audience with Tom Cox? Join us for a discussion on Everything Will Swallow You on Saturday 14 November, 4:30pm at the Bull Bridport.

Book your tickets here.