Pete Langman

This week I interviewed a fascinating and humourous author Pete Langman, he certainly ran circles around me! Come and read about Pete and see what secrets I managed to pry out of him!

Confession time, who encouraged you the most to write?

​I was never really encouraged to write, it just began to happen. I never harboured dreams of being a writer when a six-year-old (and I suspect many of those who say they do are guilty of a soupçon of self-mythologisation), never invented stories or imaginary worlds. Part of this was doubtless my handwriting was so awful even if I wrote something good no-one would have been able to read it anyway (it’s so bad now that I can’t even read it, and I’m a trained and quite adept palaeographer). My mother was told by my (future) headmaster after an interview for school I had when I was about 7 something along the lines of ‘it’s a pity Pete doesn’t read’, to which she indignantly answered ‘what on earth are you talking about?’ The headmaster, rather confused, replied ‘well, I asked him what he thought of Biggles (cue people of a certain age nodding sagely) and he said he didn’t know who he was …’ I read history books and encyclopedias, very rarely fiction. Nowadays, my partner is my greatest cheerleader and poker-in-the-backside. When I lose faith in my ability (which is most of the time), it is she who spurs me on. It’s probably just to make me stop whinging, mind, but I try to look on the bright side.

​Pete, are you saying you’re henpecked! It’s funny how teachers shape our lives. Are you as avid a reader as a writer?

​Not any more. From the age of 22 to around 40 I didn’t stop unless I was playing music, teaching or otherwise working, but now I spend most of my time either writing or editing (I edit academic articles and books), and the Parkinson’s leaves me with a quite limited window in which I can work or even concentrate, so if I do pick up a book and try just to read I generally wake up a few hours later feeling rather confused.

​What’s your favourite genre?

​Once again, I don’t (or didn’t) really have one. In my avid reading days, and before books became objects of study for me, I tended to read a lot of one author: Iain Banks, then Dickens, then Hardy, Forster, Crace, McEwan, and so forth. I also went through more generic phases, reading ‘the Russians’, the ‘magical realists’, Moby Dick, and so on … As a writer, I have no generic affiliation. I write academic essays, historical fiction, speculative fiction, literary fiction, and short stories. I’ve written a cricket murder mystery comedy for the radio, a pilot for a community radio soap opera and a stage play based on the Shakespeare authorship ‘question’ called Shakespeare Must Die (originally called ‘If you want a conspiracy theory, I’ll give you one’) 60 or 70% of which is drawn from Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and a short comedy film. Oh, and a kids’ book. About Pirates. And Father Christmas.

They’re all words, and I write what the story demands (at least, I hope I do).

I think I prefer the title ‘If you want a conspiracy theory I’ll give you one’! Do you listen to music when you write?

Mostly not, and if I do it’ll usually be instrumental music picked for its atmosphere — I find that it can help get the brain cells aligned with the heart cells, so to speak, if I match the music to the scene or theme. I sometimes use background noise as an aid. In the days when we were allowed to do such things, I would often go to the pub of an evening, have dinner and write for three or four hours — I found the random hubbub of a moderately noisy pub an excellent way of forcing myself to look inwards. Sometimes, of course, the pub forced its way into my writing. One short I wrote, Sanctuary (the only one that’s ever won anything that also has been performed a few times on stage as a monologue) featured an argument over a pub quiz, and there may have been an incident in Killing Beauties where I’m not sure whether my characters were eating pie because I was, or whether I was eating it because they were … and I know for a fact that I wrote a fairytale called The Princess and the Pie because of a rather fine example of the piemaker’s craft that had graced my palate.

​To find out more go to https://www.elizabethnharris.net/post/pete-langman