A personal friend of mine and a simply incredible writer. Alfie Tobutt describes his crime-plagued worlds with such vivid imagination, you're transported between his words on the page. Such a funny, lovely guy, and I cannot recommend his work highly enough!

       


When did you start writing? And why did you pick up the pen?

If I remember correctly, I wrote my first "book" when I was about seven or eight. I loved reading as a kid and really wanted to write my own stuff, but obviously, with me being incredibly young, it wasn't great. It was a book called 'The Man Who Wanted To Join The Army', and the title says it all really. I used to fold pieces of A4 paper together and then staple them on the sides so it looked like a proper book, which was rather inconvenient because I always either ran out of space, or had four or five extra blank pages. From there, I continued writing as a kid, including a superhero adventure book which I actually put on the bookshelf in my primary school classroom for all the other kids to read. As I got older, I still really enjoyed writing, and obviously it became a bigger part of my school life, so I embraced it a bit more. I wrote a few short stories for my English classes which my teachers always loved and they often told me I should pursue writing. I remember one called 'Frozen', which, funnily enough, was not about a princess with ice powers, and another one I wrote about an old lady with Alzheimer's who kept returning to a public pond to feed the ducks. I have no idea where the digital copies of these stories are but I hope to find them one day! I also tried to write a full length teen fiction novel called 'Burilda', which was about an Aboriginal kid who tried to connect with her missing parents. But I didn't really have a plan for where that was going, and I think that the whole concept was quite heavy and hard to understand.

I'm not sure what motivated me at first to pick up the pen and put it to paper, but I've just always loved consuming stories, whether they be books, television shows, films, or video games. So I wanted to create my own characters and share their world and their stories.

How long have you been on Wattpad, and what drew you to it?

I joined Wattpad in December of 2012. I was 16 and I had been recommended to it by a friend from school who really enjoyed writing fantasy stories. At the time I lived in Sydney, but I was in the UK for Christmas and staying with my grandad. However, my grandad didn't have an internet connection, and we had to share one internet dongle between the six of us, so I couldn't spend much time online. But there was nothing else to really do, so I took advantage of the time offline and started writing a book, which I called 'The Eyes Of A Child'. It was a typical story about an FBI agent who was investigating a series of murders and was trying to track down a serial killer who she believed was a psychologist. I really enjoyed writing it, and even had a sequel planned out in my mind. I had a few committed readers who seemed to like the story and were always desperate to see where it would go next, but after a while I realised that I didn't really know where it was going either. That, combined with the fact that I was writing a story set in New York, despite never having visited the city, meant that I eventually retired that story. I took a break for a few years and returned in 2016, and I've been on there ever since.

What does Wattpad mean to you?

I think Wattpad is such a unique and wonderful opportunity for writers. Writing is not something that one can just do for a living willy nilly. If only it were that simple! But by uploading your work to Wattpad, not only are you sharing it with an audience, but you're also sharing it with a community who love reading and writing as much as you do. They're essentially there to act as your editors, proofreaders, reviewers and general readers. What more could you want? There's a lot of stuff on Wattpad that I have never had any interest in reading, such as fan fiction, romance, or teen fiction, but that doesn't mean that other people don't like it, and it's a great opportunity for people to get to know like-minded people.

What was the thinking behind the name Wild Simple Things?

The trouble with Wattpad is that you need to have a title for your book before you start uploading your work, whereas normally this is something you could do at the very end of writing. I like to have a working title at least before I start writing anyway, but this is something that can take me a long time to think up. My favourite book titles are the ones that don't really make sense until you actually read the book. For example, my favourite book ever is 'The Silence of the Lambs', yet if you haven't read the book (or watched the film for that matter), the title would make absolutely no sense to you at all, yet once you reach about half way through, it all unravels and you begin to understand. The same goes for another great book, 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. I wanted to come up with something like that for 'Wild Simple Things', but after a lot of thinking I just couldn't really. So, instead I took the title from a poem called 'God's One Mistake' by an Aboriginal poet named Oodgeroo Noonuccal. The poem refers a lot to racism, which plays a big part in 'Wild Simple Things', and basically starts off by saying that all of the "wild simple things" in the world are happy and have worked out how to be content and fulfilled. The only thing that hasn't mastered that is mankind.

Where did the inspiration for the Aussie outback setting come from?

When I was in high school, we did a four week class trip through the outback. We started in Sydney and made our way through places like Broken Hill, Coober Pedy, Uluru (Ayers Rock), Kings Canyon, Mataranka, Alice Springs, Katherine, and Kakadu, before flying back home from Darwin. Along the way, we also stopped off in a town called Tennant Creek, which was hours away from any other big town. It was a fairly ordinary town with nothing much going on, but it ended up being one of the most memorable and eventful parts of the trip. We were staying at a campsite in a caravan park in the town, but in the evening, a couple of my friends appeared out of nowhere, grabbed their bags and ran. A few minutes later, the woman who owned the place pulled up and starting shouting at people, accusing them of smashing a car on the property. My teacher at the time had a heated row with the woman, but eventually she called the police. Two very friendly Northern Territory cops came along and said that the owner had asked us to leave, and so we had to obey her orders. So, late at night, we had to completely pack up all of our swags, tents, and camping gear, and move to another campsite. I later found out that one of my friends actually had smashed a car window, but it was an accident and the car was old and falling apart. After that trip, the name 'Tennant Creek' stuck in my mind, and so when I got back and decided I wanted to write a crime novel, it was the first place that popped into my head. It was extremely remote, so had this element of lawlessness and isolation to it, which is perfect for crime fiction. It was also, like the rest of Central Australia, suffering an extreme drought, and so I wanted to write so that the heat almost came across as some sort of antagonist in the book. When conducting research, I also discovered that the town's police station only had two detectives, which meant that I could write a story about underdog investigators who are given a case that is way out of their league.

How does it make you feel when you see a message from a reader or fan?

Whenever I get a notification or an email about a comment, I always rush straight onto Wattpad. It gives me such a rush of excitement, and it's always good to know that there actually are people out there reading the work that I've spent hours working on.

Why crime? What do you love about that genre?

Crime is such a versatile genre. Even when books have similar aspects or concepts, they can always be adapted or changed. In a lot of crime books, location often plays a huge part. A crime novel can be set in the fjords of Norway, or on the streets of New York, or perhaps in the middle of the Australian desert. I also love playing around with typical crime fiction tropes such as red herrings and plot twists. Leading the reader to expect something to happen, only to throw them in a completely different direction that they didn't seem coming is such a rewarding experience.

If you could ask the likes of Stephen King one question, what would it be?

How on Earth do you come up with so many incredible ideas? Well, perhaps that's not the best question, since I have a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head too, but the trouble I have is with expanding on these ideas into a full length novel.

What is the writing dream?

I would love to one day write a full length crime series. I have been reading a lot of Michael Connelly's Detective Harry Bosch series lately, and I just love the way he links his books together by referencing past events, or having previous characters make an appearance. I hope to continue writing and create a whole sort-of universe in which all of my characters live. So perhaps in ten years I write a story that references the events of Wild Simple Things, or maybe one of the characters pops up unexpectedly to help out?

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I've just graduated from university, so at the moment I have a lot of spare time while I apply for full-time jobs. At the moment, writing is what I do in my spare time. But I also read, play video games, go to the cinema, and watch television. I don't lead an overly exciting life, but I love to go outside and travel whenever I get the chance.

What is your writing process? Where do you write? When? How long for? Noise or silence?

In regards to my writing process, I spend a lot of time planning. This may be overkill, and I know that some people like to just throw themselves into a story and see where it takes them, but I like to know exactly what's coming next and where the climax and endgame is.

I have two main writing places. If I'm writing during the day, I will sit (or lie) on the comfy sofa in my back living room. It has a lot of windows and lets in a lot of light, so I still feel like I'm connecting with the world in some way. But, if I'm writing in the evening, then I will write at my desk in my bedroom with a few lamps on and very little light. This often gets me in the mood for writing stuff that's of a darker mood.

Silence. Always silence. I can't properly immerse myself in the story if it's too loud.

If you could design the perfect writing room/spot, money no object, what would it look like?

If money was no object, I'd probably have more than one place. I'd have a creepy house in the forest, near some country village, and then I'd have a townhouse in the city. And then I'd go to whichever place I felt more like writing!

Which genre is your favourite to write, and is there one that you wish you were better at?

Unsurprisingly, crime is my favourite genre to write (and read). But I'd love to become better at horror. I've just started to get more into horror novels, after watching horror films for many years. I've been reading some of Stephen King's work, as well as William Peter Blatty's 'The Exorcist'. And I'd love to write a story similar to that, related to exorcisms, and demons, and the Catholic Church, etc. In a similar vein, I've had another idea in my head for a while now. As a child I was absolutely obsessed with Scooby-Doo. In fact, I still love it now and will always watch it if I see it's on the TV. I had this idea that a group of kids who used to solve crimes together (like Mystery Inc.) would meet up again as adults, after years of being apart from each other, and they'd have to solve a case that's related to their old cases. Imagine if Mystery Inc. split up and didn't speak for twenty years. What would they all be like? Would Fred be a cop? Would Daphne be a fashion journalist? Would Velma be a scientist? Would Shaggy be a drug addict?

What are your favourite and least favourite book to screen adaptations?

My favourites are basically all of the books I've mentioned before. 'The Silence of the Lambs' is equally an incredible book and film. Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter are absolutely outstanding. I also think that the second film 'Hannibal' is decent. While Julianne Moore wasn't as amazing as Jodie Foster, the film has a different ending from the book. Usually this would be a major problem, but I personally thought that the book's ending was awful, and much preferred the film's ending!

Although it's old now and in black and white, 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is still brilliant, with Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch and really bringing to life some of Finch's empowering speeches from the book.

It goes without saying, but 'The Exorcist' is suitably creepy and terrifying and really does the book justice.

In regards to bad book-to-screen adaptations, it's got to be 'The Cat in the Hat', right? That film was so awful and cheesy that I'm fairly certain Dr Seuss turned in his grave. Even if he didn't, his widow certainly wasn't pleased.

If you could have lunch with one character from any fiction book in history, who would it be and why?

Ooh, there's so so many to choose from! There are a lot of characters in books that I find fascinating because they're just so complex. Two of my favourite characters ever are Inspector Javert from 'Les Miserables' and Horatio from Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. But lunch with either of those two might be a bit depressing, so I'd definitely choose Elmore Leonard's modern day cowboy Raylan Givens from his series books and short stories.

What are you working on right now?

I'm working on a few things. Mainly 'Wild Simple Things', which will be my first full length novel. I'm about half way through writing the second draft at the moment, and I'll be posting chapters on Wattpad on a weekly basis. But, I'm also working on a few short stories. 'Kuebiko' was largely inspired by 'Fargo' and follows four men: a police detective, a mob boss, a hitman, and a gangster. When the gangster wants to escape his life of crime, the mob boss hires the hitman to kill him, but instead the team up to kill and rob the mob boss. So it's basically a story of how the lives of these men intertwine.

I'm also in the early stages of writing another full-length novel set in the English countryside. Basically, one little girl goes missing and two are found dead. So it follows the investigation into what could possibly be a serial killer?

What are your writing goals for the next year?

Next year I want to have finished 'Wild Simple Things', and hopefully finished the aforementioned 'Kuebiko'. I would like to be into my other novel, but I'd also like to have a clearer vision for a possible sequel to 'Wild Simple Things'... We shall see how it all goes.

What advice would you give to any writers just starting out?

It's so cliche, but it's also so true. But just write. It's so easy to procrastinate and delay, but your ideas mean nothing until you put them down on paper and actually incorporate them into a story. Starting a book is the hardest part. It doesn't matter how awful your opening line is, you can always come back and change it. In fact you probably will anyway.

And if you want to write but are struggling to find inspiration, then read other people's works. And as you're reading be critical of it. Do you like the way they've written certain parts? Or would you do things differently? Hopefully that should motivate you to get working on your own writing.