Fiction Scribe

Some people ask me how I made the transition from writing fiction to writing non-fiction and here’s how I did it. In hindsight it just seems to have evolved nicely.

I began writing financial fiction thrillers about ten years ago when I saw a space in the market. I had seen an explosion in the genre mostly in the USA with authors such as Paul Erdman and Stephen Frey, but I was aware that there was no one in the UK or Europe writing the same type of books. I had been doing a very time consuming and demanding job in the City of London but later I returned to live and work in Dublin.

Soon afterwards I heard of a London author who received a large advance for a financial thriller so I set about my first book with an added greedy impetus. Nick Leeson and the timely collapse of Barings Bank helped us both I think! My first four financial thrillers; Square Mile, The Dealer, The Frontrunner and The Headhunter, were published by Hodder Headline in London and also in the Netherlands. At the time it seemed I could go on ‘churning’ out financial thrillers at my ease but that wasn’t the case.

I hit some initial problems with Hodder Headline since they were bought by a French company, my editor left, a new editor arrived and they bought less books. Hodder Headline declined my fifth book, which in hindsight was a great thing for my writing. I was less enthused by finance and in any event world stock markets had collapsed! I didn’t write anything for a year as I toyed around with the fifth thriller. It is called The Missing and so it is to this day!

I think what you write depends very much on your interests and I have always loved travel and flights and trips to new places. I had read some travel books by the usual suspects such as Bill Bryson, Tim Moore, Charlie Connelly, Tony Hawks and Pete McCarthy and I enjoyed them all. I had a vague idea that the glamorous countries like Spain, Italy and France had been done to death but Germany was a blank canvas. I took trips to Germany and wrote some but it didn’t work for me. I hit a dead end.

Then salvation came. Being abandoned in Malaga airport for 10 hours waiting for a €300 flight home on an alleged Irish low-fares airline called Ryanair can be a fruitless experience for many, but not for me. Whilst spending the time reading all known English language newspapers and the text on my boarding card, I plotted revenge and I decided to see 15 European countries for the same price as my holiday fare, thus extracting my retribution. Ruinair was born in a departures lounge and it was fantastic.

I knew immediately that I had a non fiction topic that I was greatly interested in, that was topical and news worthy, that was ‘Irish’ and that was more commercial and mass market than my financial fiction. Ruinair is a travel book with a difference. It’s not like some other travel books about the weather forecast at sea, towing a fridge, playing Moldavians at tennis, visiting surname bars, driving over fruit or converting a rustic farmhouse. It’s about getting there.

So here is my key to changing from writing fiction to non fiction - if you have a deep genuine passion to write a book, you can write anything, be it fiction or non fiction.

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