It gives me great pleasure to welcome Simon Van der Velde onto the website today. Since completing an M.A. in Creative Writing, Simon's work has won and been shortlisted for numerous awards including The Yeovil Literary Prize, The Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The Luke Bitmead Bursary, The Frome Prize, The Readers' Favorite Gold Medal and The Harry Bowling Prize. He is the author of Backstories, which the Daily Mirror described as an "ingenious idea, brilliantly executed."
Alex: Tell me a bit about yourself – what drives you to write?
Simon: Apart from some travelling around Europe and South America I’ve lived in Newcastle pretty much all my life, in a house full of books. If it was up to me they’d be piled in the corridors. Thankfully, it isn’t.
Mostly when I’m not reading, I’m writing – and for me, it’s all about character. Yes, you need a plot to hang it on, but however good the plot, unless I believe in the characters – who cares?
I’m interested in entertaining people, holding their eyes on that page, but beyond that my real motivation, in a world full of deception, is the pursuit of emotional truth. My primary concern is that as humans we expend a lot of energy in hiding our vulnerabilities, trying to send out the unlikely message that we have none. This is the psychological equivalent of all those airbrushed bodies in magazines – making everyone feel inadequate. I want to strip all that away. I want to show you our heroes as they truly are. They don’t achieve greatness in spite of their vulnerabilities, but because of them - and that is what led me to write Backstories - stories about people you think you know.
Alex: Tell me a bit about yourself – what drives you to write?
Simon: Apart from some travelling around Europe and South America I’ve lived in Newcastle pretty much all my life, in a house full of books. If it was up to me they’d be piled in the corridors. Thankfully, it isn’t.
Mostly when I’m not reading, I’m writing – and for me, it’s all about character. Yes, you need a plot to hang it on, but however good the plot, unless I believe in the characters – who cares?
I’m interested in entertaining people, holding their eyes on that page, but beyond that my real motivation, in a world full of deception, is the pursuit of emotional truth. My primary concern is that as humans we expend a lot of energy in hiding our vulnerabilities, trying to send out the unlikely message that we have none. This is the psychological equivalent of all those airbrushed bodies in magazines – making everyone feel inadequate. I want to strip all that away. I want to show you our heroes as they truly are. They don’t achieve greatness in spite of their vulnerabilities, but because of them - and that is what led me to write Backstories - stories about people you think you know.
Alex: What is Backstories?
Simon: Well it’s certainly something different, or as my publisher says, ‘the stand-out most original book of the year’.
I’m not so sure about the hyperbole – but Backstories is a collection of stories about the heroes of my childhood, back before they were famous, back when they were just another Jew or black or queer and their lives could so easily have gone down the toilet. But the real twist, the key element that makes Backstories so special, is that I don’t tell you who the protagonists are. This means that your job is to find them - leading to that Eureka moment when you realise who's mind you've been inhabiting for the last twenty minutes.
So okay, you get the fun of playing detective – but of course that’s just on the surface. The challenge, for the more mature reader, is to understand these people and the worlds they inhabited, overlaying what you learn and feel about the characters in the stories, onto what you thought you knew about the characters in, (so-called), real life. Which version of these people is closer to the truth? The air-brushed superstar, or the vulnerable human being? That’s for you to judge. But certainly, I would like to think that Backstories will take you backstage, behind the choreographed image, to meet our heroes as they truly were.
Alex: How much research do you do and what does it usually entail?
Simon: A lot, though it does vary, depending on how much I need. I tend to start with Wikipedia and go from there. I’m looking for the essential facts, but also for a way into the story, a sense of what really set this person on their path in life.
Alex: What was the first book you ever read?
Simon: Apart from Peter & Jane, which, with respect to the authors, had its limitations, the first book I remember reading for myself was a beautifully illustrated history of Norse mythology bought for me by my sister. Of course back in those days we weren’t quite so prescriptive about children’s literature, and I can still see that picture of Loki, bound to a rock by the entrails of his sons, with a serpent dripping venom on his face for all eternity.
Does make me wonder if my darling sister was trying to tell me something?
Alex: What was the first book you ever wrote?
Simon: My writing journey began in 1992, when I wrote Marco the Magician, a middle grade story about a boy bullied at school who turns out to be a powerful wizard – you know the story, (but remember this was before Harry Potter). So there were about six copies of this book in the world. One of them was borrowed by friend of mine, who told me he liked it, but ‘sorry’, he’d left on the train, in Edinburgh – home, at the time, to J.K. Rowling. What happened a couple of years later? Joanne gets a publishing deal for her book about a boy wizard. Coincidence? Probably.
Alex: Which was the last book you read that blew you away?
Simon: Hamnet was brilliant, beautiful and poignant, with the added advantage that it operated a little like Backstories - but the one that really blew me away this year was American Dirt.
We start off all safe and comfortable and middle class, and then bang, we’re propelled through this intense and terrifying journey at 100mph – always with the question at the back of my mind - could I handle this? Brilliant characters. Utterly compelling. And at the end of it all there’s such an important and powerful social message. Real genius. Well done, Jeanine Cummins.
Alex: How do you market your books?
Simon: Oh no! Even the word makes me dizzy. I don’t understand it. I hate technology. I had a dream that after publication the work would speak for itself – but of course it can’t, if nobody hears it.
They told me to go on Twitter, and after a slow start I’m enjoying it. Trouble is, it kind of sucks up too many hours. Instagram and Facebook are still pretty much a mystery to me, and Tik-Tok?? Not a bloody clue.
I do enjoy a good Q&A or podcast, after all, show me a writer who doesn’t like talking about their work and I’ll show you a unicorn - with two tails. The tricky thing here is that I can’t talk about the characters in my book because that would spoil the fun, so I’m limited to generalisations.
In the end though, the most pleasing piece of marketing advice I’ve been given, is that the best way to promote Backstories, is to write Backstories II. So – well behind schedule and riddled with self-doubt, that is the plan. There’ll be Rock n Roll Backstories and Historical Backstories, both of which are underway.
Alex: What are your interests aside from writing? And what do you do to unwind?
Simon: The writing is to unwind.
I’ve got a family that I love dearly, and who drive me crazy – and then there’s little Barney, the labradoodle. He’s no trouble, (so long as the kids haven’t given him cheese), and he comes up with some great ideas when we’re out on our walks. He’s also absolutely brilliant at catching a slavery ball in his mouth, which is harder than you might think.
Alex: Which authors do you particularly admire and why?
Simon: I was a quiet, reflective child and our house was always full of books, so I guess it was bound to happen. I grew up reading all sorts of stuff; Cheap thrillers, hard-boiled detective stories, Dickens, Le Carre, World War II / Holocaust stuff, poetry and even a smattering of Stephen King.
From that rather strange base-layer, I then moved on to finding my own books. I still remember the revelation of Hemingway as a teenager, and for all Ernest’s flaws The Old Man and The Sea will always have a special place in my heart. Then, at about nineteen I discovered the deliciously subversive Charles Bukowski, followed by Graham Greene with all his agonising guilt.
It wasn’t till my early twenties that I started to appreciate the shorter form. Cheever, of course, and Carver’s Cathedral is magnificent in the tenderness with which it approaches prejudice, ignorance and ultimately, understanding.
More recently, I always look forward to the annual O. Henry anthologies which I believe are the best short story collections in the English language. A thousand thanks to Laura Thurman for those.
Whilst in the longer form I’ve enjoyed and admired a lot of Peter Carey’s work, pretty much all of Anne Tyler’s, Philip Roth, Lou Berney, Cormack McCarthy, especially for the heart-wrenching love between a boy and a wolf, Colston Whitehead for the naked terror of Underground Railroad, Richard Flanagan’s, (slightly Hemingwayesque) The Long Road to the Deep North, Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy for illustrating how very little has changed in the last two thousand years, whilst by a short-head, my all-time favourite is probably still J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.
Blame my childhood if you like but I’m a Jack of All Trades in my reading, and I guess in my writing too. I hate the whole ‘genre’ thing. I appreciate the marketing industry needs something to work with, but I’m desperate to throw off that straight-jacket. Who cares what genre it is. I want to know if it’s good. If it’s true. If it makes me gasp, and think, and re-evaluate what I thought I knew.
Alex: And you are giving a share of the proceeds to charity?
Simon: I am proud to be giving 30% of all profits from Backstories to Stop Hate UK, The North East Autism Society and Friends of the Earth. Of course there are many worthy charities, but as anyone who reads Backstories will see, these are the causes that resonate most deeply with me.
I have a deep hatred for prejudice and bigotry of any kind, it is so pointlessly destructive. Which is not to say that think I’m perfect, not by any means. I guess we’re all a product of our childhoods, and we don’t have too much say in those. But what we can do, is challenge ourselves to be the best we can.
Stop Hate UK came out of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and is an organization that stands against all kinds of hate crime and prejudice. Their focus on education is something that particularly appeals to me – and I hope it is an idea that Backstories can develop, by taking the reader into the minds of these diverse characters and showing you that whilst we’re not all the same, in our fears and doubts, dreams and ambitions, we are all flawed human beings.
In all honesty, I should also admit to an element of guilt. There are criminals amongst the characters in my book, and whilst crime may be compelling on page, it is anything but, in real life - and giving to Stop Hate UK is, I believe, a meaningful way to show respect for the victims and their families.
In writing about crime and prejudice I am holding evil up to the light, but I’m also making fiction out of suffering. In doing so, I hope to contribute in some small way to human understanding and do my part in reducing such behaviour – but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, it feels right and decent to give to people who best know how to help those who need it most and in so doing, help to build a better, fairer more decent society for us all.
My second charity is The North-East Autism Society. This is more personal. My son is autistic. That’s why I feel I have to give voice to a group of people who are so badly misunderstood.
The point is, autistic people’s brains work differently to ours – which means two things:
Autistic people’s difference of approach and intensity can bring something new and fresh to society, to the benefit of us all. Bill Gates, for example, is autistic, Greta Thunberg, Daryl Hannah, Albert Einstein, Anthony Hopkins and probably Leonardo da Vinci, amongst many, many others – and I hardly need tell you how much they have given us.
Clearly, autistic people enrich our lives, but – because they are different, autistic people can sometimes find our chaotic world so stressful that they just can’t function, and all that potential can so easily be lost. So, if only for self-interest, we need to understand and listen to the autistic community. Not least, Greta Thunberg.
Which brings me to my third charity, Friends of the Earth, because whatever Donald Trump may say, without the Earth, obviously, nothing else matters.
Alex: Thank you so much Simon for sharing your writing journey with us and giving such well considered and thoughtful answers. I love the fact that Backstories is helping to raise much needed funds for three wonderful charities. On that basis, I will certainly be buying the book and will in due course review it in the review section of this website.
Simon: Thank you Alex. It's been great to talk.
Simon: Well it’s certainly something different, or as my publisher says, ‘the stand-out most original book of the year’.
I’m not so sure about the hyperbole – but Backstories is a collection of stories about the heroes of my childhood, back before they were famous, back when they were just another Jew or black or queer and their lives could so easily have gone down the toilet. But the real twist, the key element that makes Backstories so special, is that I don’t tell you who the protagonists are. This means that your job is to find them - leading to that Eureka moment when you realise who's mind you've been inhabiting for the last twenty minutes.
So okay, you get the fun of playing detective – but of course that’s just on the surface. The challenge, for the more mature reader, is to understand these people and the worlds they inhabited, overlaying what you learn and feel about the characters in the stories, onto what you thought you knew about the characters in, (so-called), real life. Which version of these people is closer to the truth? The air-brushed superstar, or the vulnerable human being? That’s for you to judge. But certainly, I would like to think that Backstories will take you backstage, behind the choreographed image, to meet our heroes as they truly were.
Alex: How much research do you do and what does it usually entail?
Simon: A lot, though it does vary, depending on how much I need. I tend to start with Wikipedia and go from there. I’m looking for the essential facts, but also for a way into the story, a sense of what really set this person on their path in life.
Alex: What was the first book you ever read?
Simon: Apart from Peter & Jane, which, with respect to the authors, had its limitations, the first book I remember reading for myself was a beautifully illustrated history of Norse mythology bought for me by my sister. Of course back in those days we weren’t quite so prescriptive about children’s literature, and I can still see that picture of Loki, bound to a rock by the entrails of his sons, with a serpent dripping venom on his face for all eternity.
Does make me wonder if my darling sister was trying to tell me something?
Alex: What was the first book you ever wrote?
Simon: My writing journey began in 1992, when I wrote Marco the Magician, a middle grade story about a boy bullied at school who turns out to be a powerful wizard – you know the story, (but remember this was before Harry Potter). So there were about six copies of this book in the world. One of them was borrowed by friend of mine, who told me he liked it, but ‘sorry’, he’d left on the train, in Edinburgh – home, at the time, to J.K. Rowling. What happened a couple of years later? Joanne gets a publishing deal for her book about a boy wizard. Coincidence? Probably.
Alex: Which was the last book you read that blew you away?
Simon: Hamnet was brilliant, beautiful and poignant, with the added advantage that it operated a little like Backstories - but the one that really blew me away this year was American Dirt.
We start off all safe and comfortable and middle class, and then bang, we’re propelled through this intense and terrifying journey at 100mph – always with the question at the back of my mind - could I handle this? Brilliant characters. Utterly compelling. And at the end of it all there’s such an important and powerful social message. Real genius. Well done, Jeanine Cummins.
Alex: How do you market your books?
Simon: Oh no! Even the word makes me dizzy. I don’t understand it. I hate technology. I had a dream that after publication the work would speak for itself – but of course it can’t, if nobody hears it.
They told me to go on Twitter, and after a slow start I’m enjoying it. Trouble is, it kind of sucks up too many hours. Instagram and Facebook are still pretty much a mystery to me, and Tik-Tok?? Not a bloody clue.
I do enjoy a good Q&A or podcast, after all, show me a writer who doesn’t like talking about their work and I’ll show you a unicorn - with two tails. The tricky thing here is that I can’t talk about the characters in my book because that would spoil the fun, so I’m limited to generalisations.
In the end though, the most pleasing piece of marketing advice I’ve been given, is that the best way to promote Backstories, is to write Backstories II. So – well behind schedule and riddled with self-doubt, that is the plan. There’ll be Rock n Roll Backstories and Historical Backstories, both of which are underway.
Alex: What are your interests aside from writing? And what do you do to unwind?
Simon: The writing is to unwind.
I’ve got a family that I love dearly, and who drive me crazy – and then there’s little Barney, the labradoodle. He’s no trouble, (so long as the kids haven’t given him cheese), and he comes up with some great ideas when we’re out on our walks. He’s also absolutely brilliant at catching a slavery ball in his mouth, which is harder than you might think.
Alex: Which authors do you particularly admire and why?
Simon: I was a quiet, reflective child and our house was always full of books, so I guess it was bound to happen. I grew up reading all sorts of stuff; Cheap thrillers, hard-boiled detective stories, Dickens, Le Carre, World War II / Holocaust stuff, poetry and even a smattering of Stephen King.
From that rather strange base-layer, I then moved on to finding my own books. I still remember the revelation of Hemingway as a teenager, and for all Ernest’s flaws The Old Man and The Sea will always have a special place in my heart. Then, at about nineteen I discovered the deliciously subversive Charles Bukowski, followed by Graham Greene with all his agonising guilt.
It wasn’t till my early twenties that I started to appreciate the shorter form. Cheever, of course, and Carver’s Cathedral is magnificent in the tenderness with which it approaches prejudice, ignorance and ultimately, understanding.
More recently, I always look forward to the annual O. Henry anthologies which I believe are the best short story collections in the English language. A thousand thanks to Laura Thurman for those.
Whilst in the longer form I’ve enjoyed and admired a lot of Peter Carey’s work, pretty much all of Anne Tyler’s, Philip Roth, Lou Berney, Cormack McCarthy, especially for the heart-wrenching love between a boy and a wolf, Colston Whitehead for the naked terror of Underground Railroad, Richard Flanagan’s, (slightly Hemingwayesque) The Long Road to the Deep North, Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy for illustrating how very little has changed in the last two thousand years, whilst by a short-head, my all-time favourite is probably still J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.
Blame my childhood if you like but I’m a Jack of All Trades in my reading, and I guess in my writing too. I hate the whole ‘genre’ thing. I appreciate the marketing industry needs something to work with, but I’m desperate to throw off that straight-jacket. Who cares what genre it is. I want to know if it’s good. If it’s true. If it makes me gasp, and think, and re-evaluate what I thought I knew.
Alex: And you are giving a share of the proceeds to charity?
Simon: I am proud to be giving 30% of all profits from Backstories to Stop Hate UK, The North East Autism Society and Friends of the Earth. Of course there are many worthy charities, but as anyone who reads Backstories will see, these are the causes that resonate most deeply with me.
I have a deep hatred for prejudice and bigotry of any kind, it is so pointlessly destructive. Which is not to say that think I’m perfect, not by any means. I guess we’re all a product of our childhoods, and we don’t have too much say in those. But what we can do, is challenge ourselves to be the best we can.
Stop Hate UK came out of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and is an organization that stands against all kinds of hate crime and prejudice. Their focus on education is something that particularly appeals to me – and I hope it is an idea that Backstories can develop, by taking the reader into the minds of these diverse characters and showing you that whilst we’re not all the same, in our fears and doubts, dreams and ambitions, we are all flawed human beings.
In all honesty, I should also admit to an element of guilt. There are criminals amongst the characters in my book, and whilst crime may be compelling on page, it is anything but, in real life - and giving to Stop Hate UK is, I believe, a meaningful way to show respect for the victims and their families.
In writing about crime and prejudice I am holding evil up to the light, but I’m also making fiction out of suffering. In doing so, I hope to contribute in some small way to human understanding and do my part in reducing such behaviour – but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, it feels right and decent to give to people who best know how to help those who need it most and in so doing, help to build a better, fairer more decent society for us all.
My second charity is The North-East Autism Society. This is more personal. My son is autistic. That’s why I feel I have to give voice to a group of people who are so badly misunderstood.
The point is, autistic people’s brains work differently to ours – which means two things:
Autistic people’s difference of approach and intensity can bring something new and fresh to society, to the benefit of us all. Bill Gates, for example, is autistic, Greta Thunberg, Daryl Hannah, Albert Einstein, Anthony Hopkins and probably Leonardo da Vinci, amongst many, many others – and I hardly need tell you how much they have given us.
Clearly, autistic people enrich our lives, but – because they are different, autistic people can sometimes find our chaotic world so stressful that they just can’t function, and all that potential can so easily be lost. So, if only for self-interest, we need to understand and listen to the autistic community. Not least, Greta Thunberg.
Which brings me to my third charity, Friends of the Earth, because whatever Donald Trump may say, without the Earth, obviously, nothing else matters.
Alex: Thank you so much Simon for sharing your writing journey with us and giving such well considered and thoughtful answers. I love the fact that Backstories is helping to raise much needed funds for three wonderful charities. On that basis, I will certainly be buying the book and will in due course review it in the review section of this website.
Simon: Thank you Alex. It's been great to talk.
