Interview with Doug Johnstone

BooksfromScotland.com caught up with Doug Johnstone, author of Tombstoning, after his reading at the 2006 Edinburgh International Book Festival.

BooksfromScotland.com: Why Arbroath? It's refreshing to read a novel set outside of the major cities or rural countryside, but it could have been any small town in Scotland?

Doug Johnstone: The simple answer on one level is that I grew up in Arbroath, so apart from Edinburgh it’s the place I know best, although it had been a while since I had been there before I wrote it. On another level, I was indeed keen to write about smalltown Scotland. A lot of Scottish fiction (but by no means all) is set either in cities or the rural countryside, and I wanted to examine life somewhere in between, which is where a huge number of Scottish people (indeed, people around the world) live. There is a distinct vibe to places of Arbroath’s size that’s very different from urban or rural Scotland, I feel, and I wanted to examine that and try to get that feeling across.

Arbroath hasn't changed in David's eyes, but is this fair? I'm curious as to why you picked a real town, rather than create a fictional place, like Alan Warner's west-coast town of 'Port'. David and Nicola always retreat back to Edinburgh in the end...

The book is meant to be about the past, and to what extent everyone’s past makes them who they are. I was interested in what effect revisiting the past would have on David, which is why, I guess, the place hasn’t changed in his eyes – he hasn’t been there for the last fifteen years, so he has no concept of the place as a living, breathing town in the twenty-first century. Nicola, I think, has kept more in touch with the place, and her view of the town seems more realistic. I chose a real place simply because I felt it would give it a more realistic flavour. I understand Warner’s decision to create the ‘Port’ (which is really just Oban), but I felt that wasn’t right for me, or this story. When I was writing it I didn’t think Tombstoning painted Arbroath in a particularly bad light, and so far reader response from the area seems to have more or less borne that out.

David constantly gets warnings and reprimands at work – he’s a loveable, human, humourous and reprobate hero. Is he based on you? And where did Nicola come from?

Ha! Are you calling me a loveable, human, humorous and reprobate hero? Cheers. No, he isn’t really based on me. He’s more funny and slackerish than I am. For a while, I did an office job that I really didn’t give a toss about, and I basically slacked terribly at it for two years, while also drinking quite a lot and drifting a little through life, so that much is based on my own experiences, but not much else in his character.

As for Nicola – she’s pretty much from the imagination, although I do know plenty of strong, sassy women in their thirties (not least my wife!). I have a feeling (which is probably crap) that a lot of male writers don’t write very strong female characters, and from the outset I wanted Nicola to be the cool one, the courageous one, the sorted one, and very definitely a stronger and more independent character than David. I didn’t want David to be too much of an arsehole, but I definitely wanted that distinct contrast between the two of their characters, as well as their point of view about the importance of the past.

Your background is in nuclear physics and radar guidance systems... How did you make the transition to journalist, and then published author? Did you start with short stories, or plunge right in with Tombstoning?

I spent years writing, both fiction and non-fiction, while I was doing all that science and engineering stuff. For a while, me and some mates ran a ‘pub-based chatzine’ in Edinburgh which was offensive and certainly libellous. I’m a musician as well, and I started sending off gig reviews to various publications, some of which got published. I decided that I’d never make a career of it unless I went for it full-time, so I packed in the reasonably lucrative desk job and did a post-grad in journalism, as well as starting as a freelance arts journalist. All that time I was also writing short stories, all of which were crap, and are now in the bin. After a few years of submitting stories to competitions and hearing nothing, I decided I needed a bigger project, so started writing a novel. My first novel got rejected by a lot of people, but got some good feedback, so I started a second. That was Tombstoning, which got picked up by Penguin pretty quickly.

There's certainly no nuclear physics in Tombstoning, so what sort of research did you have do for the book?

I didn’t really have to do too much in the way of research in terms of the plot or the characters (although I know people who do both the jobs that David and Nicola do). But I did go back to Arbroath quite a lot, revisiting old haunts like the cliffs, the Abbey, Gayfield Park, the pubs and clubs and all the rest. It was strange being back there (in fact, the first time I went back, I caught scarlet fever! Yes, really). I guess a lot of that weirdness at being back fed into David’s experiences in the book. I took hundreds of pictures and pinned them up above my desk when I was writing. I did all this for the Edinburgh scenes as well – the pubs, the museum, the Meadows etc. I think having images of the physical places in front of you helps you to get into the spirit of the place, although I know other writers who would disagree.

You've said elsewhere that the idea of 'Friends Reunited' discomforts you. Have your feelings changed since writing Tombstoning?

Maybe I’ve softened on it a little, but not entirely. I’m sure the vast majority of people who log on to the site and get back in touch with old school friends do so with purely innocent motivations, but I still have this nagging feeling that a lot of people are doing so because they’re unhappy in their current lives, and are trying to recapture something they think they had a school, which probably never really existed in the first place. And there are plenty of people who just want to show off, I suspect. At my very first Tombstoning book reading, I appeared with an author who had met her current partner through Friends Reunited, so she certainly had a positive experience out of it, so who knows? But it’s not for me.

David and Nicola start with very different perspectives on how history shapes your life, but they come to an understanding in the book. Is that a question you've resolved for yourself, or are you still wondering if it is possible to reinvent yourself?

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. When I was younger I was convinced that the past has no bearing at all on who you are, and I firmly believed that you could reinvent yourself in any way you pleased every morning when you woke up. But as I grew older I came to think that there really is no escaping your past and where you come from. The writing of this book forced me to think a lot about my past, obviously, and I think that has made me come to realise that even though I don’t sit about thinking about my childhood all day, those early experiences certainly contribute immensely to who I am today.

What next for Doug Johnstone? Do you have a new book planned?

I’ve been extensively rewriting that first novel that got so politely rejected by a lot of publishers and agents, and I’ve more or less finished it. It’s a very different book to Tombstoning. It’s about an indie band that fall apart on a tour of the Highlands, and it’s packed to the rafters with boozy, drug-fuelled, rock ‘n’ roll mayhem. Hopefully it’ll see the light of day sometime soon. After that, I have a few more ideas for novels, although nothing that’s past the planning stages.