"I think I became a writer because I was bad at school games. When you're never picked for the football team you're left with time to read the wrong books and take long flights of imagination.

After school, and with no prospects of getting to university, I served my time in advertising, the artist's equivalent of joining the army - where I wrote for several years in praise of dog biscuits, cough drops and women's underwear. I taught myself to write fiction by trying to emulate my heroes and, following Nietzche's advice that "Art is the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere" it was important that my first novel should not be a thinly disguised autobiography.

The Sandman, the journal of a serial killer written as a black comedy, seemed the perfect challenge. No-one would accuse me of writing myself into the story.

But I'd spent my childhood in the draughty little seaside town of Christchurch, Dorset, and seaside childhoods featured in The Sandman and my second novel Dancing With Mermaids. So fiction, perhaps, is merely the opportunity to rewrite life and try to fashion some sense from it. A struggle for order from chaos.

My own brief travels in West Africa and a passion for old-fashioned English cooking were the inspiration for Gilbert Firestone, hero of Vinegar Soup. Fat Gilbert is a romantic, a dreamer, a man who wants to eat the world and suck on the bones. He dreams of travel and adventure while tied by his apron strings to the kitchen stove of a greasy-spoon caf?. It's written as black comedy but I've always felt that comedy is just tragedy turned inside out. Gilbert's own tragedy occurs when he catches up with his dream.

Themes and dreams take shape and slowly the writer is revealed. Seven novels and a book of poetry on the shelves. But "literature is the question minus the answer" as Roland Barthes observed.

These days I like to write as I've always written, slowly and in pencil, draft after draft, half a page at a time, until I'm ready to transfer the work to computer. Language is everything. And whenever I lose my sense of purpose I turn to the perfect, polished prose of writers like Updike and Bruno Schultz. I'll stop when I've mastered it."

MG