Tom Newlands on writing neurodivergence with a light touch
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Tom Newlands on writing neurodivergence with a light touch
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Join Katherine as she talks with Tom Newlands about his debut novel, Only Here, Only Now. Katherine talks with Tom about his female main protagonist, the unforgettable Cora, setting the book in 1990s Scotland and how it offers a new way of writing about neurodivergence.
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Please note, this is an automated transcript and as a result
there may be errorsKatherine May: [00:00:00] All right. Hi everyone, good evening. Um, I am just going to sit here and chat for a second while some of you can get through the door because I know it's not always all that quick to be here. Um, but this evening we are welcoming Tom Newlands to talk about his fantastic novel Only Here Only Now. Which I di that about because I thought, first of all, I mean I loved it as soon as I read it and I thought, well, I can't feature this on the book club.
What do I do? Because it's a true stories book club. It's about nonfiction. Um, but then I decided to break my own rules. So, uh, so here we are. It feels very real to me for reasons I hope we'll be able to explore. Um, but let's welcome Tom. I need to now remember how [00:01:00] to do that. Here we go. Here we go. I'm gradually learning the ropes on this thing.
It takes a little while. Um, move to webinar. There we go. Let's hope that that was effective. Um, I think the chat. Hi, Tom. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Hello. It's lovely to see you. Um, folks, I think the chat should be working this time, so please say hello if you're here. I know loads of you will be watching later and won't be able to use the chat, so sorry about that.
But, um, it's always nice to see signs of life, um, even when people are feeling shy. And, um, obviously if we don't get any messages, we'll know it's not working again. Um, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna move on to talking to Tom, um, because We've, I've got loads of things to ask you. Um, but first of all, can you just tell us a little bit about the book?
Just describe it in your own [00:02:00] words and let us know what it's all about for anyone that hasn't been able to read it yet.
Tom Newlands: Sure. Um, yeah, it's called Only Here, Only Now. And it is a coming of age story about a young girl called Cora Mowat. And We follow her for four years, between the years of 1994 and 1998.
And it's really about her, uh, life in this very kind of, uh, masculine environment, this post industrial environment in Scotland in the 1990s, and about her journey towards an ADHD diagnosis and her journey towards building a relationship with her stepfather. Um, so I think it's quite a vivid book, it's quite a funny book or so I've heard, and it tackles things like grief, opportunity.
Obviously neurodivergence. Um, I think it's, uh, you know, it was my kind of goal to do these things with a light touch, do them with a [00:03:00] lot of humour, bring some warmth to quite difficult subject matter. So, although it tackles some weighty kind of things is quite quickly, quite vividly and hopefully quite funny as well.
Katherine May: Yeah, definitely funny. And, and as you say, kind of full of humanness, really. Um, and, and that it feels very naturalistic, I think, because of that. That mixture of, you know, there's some real tragedy in the book and then there's some ways in which it's, it's handled really lightly and with great humour. And then there's moments of real emotion.
Um, and I think it, what really struck me was, that it felt incredibly, even though it's set in the 90s, it felt like a book that could only have landed now because actually it just seems like you're a new generation of writers handling neurodivergence in a much more integrated way, you know, not the kind of [00:04:00] clang, look at this weird little person and all their quirks.
Um, I feel like I've read a lot of those books and I, and I still get sent loads of them to review. But actually, just, this is just who she is, and she doesn't have a label for it because None of us did at that time, and I, you know, and I'm the same age as her, and I didn't, um, but we can see it. And I think neurodivergent readers will have a really different relationship with the book than neurotypical readers may be.
Tom Newlands: I think so, definitely. I mean, I've seen it already from, you know, it's only been out in the world for about a week, but I've definitely seen that there are two responses to it there. The kind of response, Oh, you know, I really love the story. She's so quirky. She's so funny. She's so cool and all the rest of it.
And then there's the neurodivergent response, which is a lot deeper and a lot more heartfelt in a lot of ways, because I think a lot of people see themselves in it. Um, but you know, in writing the book, I was really keen not to make it a book of, uh, you know, [00:05:00] awareness raising set pieces. I didn't want to have her be an avatar, to move around and kind of, you know, talk people through ADHD or anything like that.
And, you know, it wasn't really, you know, my primary goal was to to write the character. It wasn't to write a book about ADHD. And if at the end of writing the story, and if at the end of creating a character who I felt was authentic to the time and authentic to the place, you And you know, if it wasn't apparent that she had ADHD, I would never have mentioned it.
Um, so it was really important that it was kind of stitched into the story in a naturalistic way and I didn't want to include, uh, clinical psychologists or hospitals or anything like that. I wanted it to be about a teenager and a teenager's life and all those teenage things that all teenagers look through regardless of whether they have ADHD or not.
Katherine May: Yeah. And I, and actually, yeah, I mean, that kind of lack of medicalization, I think it's really important as well, because I've, I've, one of the tropes I'm noticing now is that sort [00:06:00] of moment of diagnosis, um, which gives the, it gives the medical professional this kind of godlike power. over the neurodivergent person and, and, you know, the assumption is that the medical person isn't neurodivergent.
And I, and I, you know, like for sure in my memoir, there's, you know, an account of that too. Um, and it, it begins to trouble me really, because I feel like there's a, a sort of, I don't know, like a mismatch of power there and a ceding of power to a source of authority who is, um, you know, who we, who is assumed to know more about it than we do.
And actually I think the truth is that neurodivergent people know they're neurodivergent all along. We may gain different language for it, but we're [00:07:00] constantly knocking on the door saying we're different to this, this isn't, And I, and yeah, so it's really, because she understands, she, she gets that she's a bit different, but she also gets that she's part of this big flow of humanity and I think that's what's so delightful about her.
Tom Newlands: Yeah, you know, I wanted to swerve the diagnosis thing. Completely, you know, for, for so many people who have perhaps not been through the experience of diagnosis, it seems, you know, it's the kind of, it's the branding, it's the stamp of officialdom that, you know, we can now treat a certain way, or, or now you can, now you're entitled, you're entitled to your, your, your benefit.
So your parking spot or any of these other things. And it's almost like, uh, disabled people are almost policed in a way by, by a lot. A lot of people in terms of, do you have your diagnosis or not? And I thought it was a lot more interesting to look at somebody who was coming to initial realization about their life.
Um, at that, at that crucial stage, you know, she's at the start of the book, [00:08:00] she's 14 by the end, she's 18. And so we do see her grow up during those years, which are formative for anybody, but especially if you feel like a bit of an outsider, or you begin to notice that you're kind of experiencing the world in a different way to your mates, uh, it's a real crucial time.
And, you know, there wasn't a eureka moment about that. It all came together, you know, the 90s, my own experience growing up, my own memories of Scotland, um, and also the wider picture of, you know, the way that ADHD was, was treated in this country at that time, because I think in America and even Central Europe, they're a little bit further ahead than I was, and I think it had been dying there for decades there, but certainly in Scotland and throughout the UK, there wasn't a great deal of knowledge about it in the mid 1990s.
Katherine May: No, absolutely not. And I, you know, that's, and hence like loads of people my age are currently understanding that they're neurodivergent in some way for the first time. You know, there was, there was just nothing to find at the time. [00:09:00] Um, tell me a bit about that. Cause you know, you, you talked about drawing on your background, but if you can, like, how much is this based on where you grew up and the life that you live?
Like, to what extent have you drawn on your writing?
Tom Newlands: This is a really pertinent question because I'm just back from being up in Scotland. And it was one of the, I was promoting the book in my hometown and stuff like that. And it was one of the things that I really wrestled with. You know, how, how much of my past do I reveal in the book? How much do I, do I draw on my own experiences?
Um, and so it really is, you know, the places, the settings in the book are, are settings I've known. Um, obviously it's setting into fictional towns, which was a deliberate decision. Um, But certainly the, the atmosphere of kind of dysfunction, the atmosphere of, you know, the economic problems, um, the kind of the violence, uh, the disrupted education, all that kind of stuff was all, was all stuff that I [00:10:00] knew growing up.
And so it's very much based on, on my upbringing, but at the same time, uh, it's not autobiographical, you know, I had a great, I had a great mom and dad, I had a great family life. Um, yeah. My story is very different to hers, but you know, once I created the character, once I got the settings, I knew, especially since Cora is such a kind of engaging protagonist, she's very funny, she's very naive.
I knew that if I created a really, kind of, vibrant protagonist, I could make the surroundings as depressing as they needed to be, because the reader would think, well, that's, you know, her opinions on it.
Katherine May: Yeah, yeah, and that's, I think I said in the, um, reading guide I wrote, like, that what's, what's sort of amazing about her is that she's, You never degrade her, like you so often see a character like Cora in a book and like they're just dragged through the mud and they, they're shown as making terrible [00:11:00] decisions all the time and that's the story and she doesn't, she makes the decisions that are She makes really rational decisions about her life, but she's not in control of it, and that's a different thing, but she's, but you don't, you don't torture her, which I was just so, I was so grateful for as a reader, like, there's no need, there's no
Tom Newlands: need.
You know, I wanted to show that push and pull. Obviously, she isn't, she's an impulsive, that impulsivity is there, and at certain moments in the book, you get the feeling that she's perhaps acting without thinking, but. She's a very young, intelligent girl. She's a very perceptive, observant individual. And you can't, if you're, if you're somebody who listens and who's observant, you can't help but make sensible decisions.
I mean, that's where it comes from. And so that's another thing that we get to see as the book progresses in terms of her own, uh, maturity and her own, you know, Um, [00:12:00] Cooling Up, is She Reflects, and that's really what the title is about, Only Here, Only Now. And, uh, we all have those moments in our life where you think, you know, I couldn't see this before, but now that I've got to this stage, I can look back and, you know, here and now, I know what was happening.
And that's especially powerful, I think, for neurodivergent people, because if you're diagnosed quite late in life, you get to look back over your decisions, you get to look back over the People you knew, and how they treated you, and how you treated other people, and it begins to make a lot of sense, and we see that, you know, the four years in the book are really the start of Cora's journey towards understanding herself in that way.
Katherine May: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that feels kind of, the timescale feels really pertinent at the moment, because we're just, we're just on the, you know, cusp of a general election, and I keep thinking back to the last change of government, you know, I was 19, I think, when in the [00:13:00] 1990s, no, I must have been, Yeah, I was 19 for the 1997 election and that, like, I really believed at the time that was ushering in this new era and everything was going to get, like, better and for a while it maybe even felt like that, but perhaps that's because I was young and, and now I kind of, you know, It's, it's sort of irresistible to look back at the, at the two, the late nineties, the two thousands, and realize how sort of dystopian they were in terms of, you know, gender relationships, how we, how we addressed disability, how we, how power, you know, where power resided and how we thought about what we were in the world.
And I, and it, it's, it's, it just seems so relevant to be looking back at that. Time now, for me, I, I keep, I keep casting back to it and I, I assume it's because of that cycle that's just [00:14:00] completing itself again and like, where, where are we now? Like, what will this new big change in the UK mean? But I don't know, I don't know if it's, I guess it might not be the same for Scotland.
Tom Newlands: No, I mean, it absolutely was. You know, I was 17, I was 17 when, I was born in 1980, when Tony Blair arrived and, You're absolutely right. It seemed like a revolution. It seemed like
Katherine May: the
Tom Newlands: most, uh, yeah, it seemed like the most forward thinking, uh, you know, liberal time. And it was like a, an ushering in of a, of a new generation of hope.
And it felt like that for a few years, to be fair. And it's only when you look back now and you realize, you know, it was a hugely dysfunctional time in terms of the media we consumed, in terms of the way we related to one another, in terms of. You know, it's interesting when I go back to my hometown because so many of the streets I couldn't, I couldn't walk the streets in the late 90s and in many of the areas where I came from it was just too dangerous and, um, [00:15:00] now I go back and it's complete silence.
And it's really interesting to reflect on what people of Cora's age are like today compared to somebody like her growing up in 1994. And I think, um, The way that teenagers relate to one another is such an interesting thing, they're so empathetic, they're so open with their feelings, they're in many cases far more level headed about things than some of the adults who did grow up in the 90s and who are now around our age.
Um, but back then, you know, it's exploding in Cora's handling of grief, you know, she doesn't Talk about it. She doesn't want to talk about it. And that was really, that was the national mood in a way. That was the kind of, uh, get on, get on with it, you know, get your head down, get on with it. And it's just hugely traumatic, I think.
Katherine May: Yeah. And I think, I mean, I, I just, I just recognize myself so much in, in her. [00:16:00] Partly being, you know, a working class kid growing up with a single mother, and the sort of where that placed me in the world. But, like, one of the things I really recognised was the drinking. You know, teenagers, or teenagers from my background, really drank in those days.
And I did, like, you know, and you could, it was no problem to get into pubs. It was no problem to get into nightclubs, like, it was no problem to buy booze, you know, there was no, people knew how old we were, you know, but like, that was, that was what you did, and I, like, my son is now 12, um, one of his best friends is a 14 year old girl, and, She's playing at home, you know, it's so utterly different.
And I, you know, it makes my jaw drop. [00:17:00] Like now to think about myself in that world, like it makes my jaw drop actually. It's really
Tom Newlands: true. You know, back then it was just an accepted rating. right of passage, uh, you know, to, to go out and try and get served alcohol, you know, drink it in the street or try and get into a pub or whatever it was you did.
Um, and you know, I think that was such a, obviously Scotland had that reputation anyway, but certainly in my, in my area growing up, the industry had vanished in many places which The mines, you know, the miners strike in the mid 80s. And when I was growing up at the start of the 90s, so many of the little satellite towns, um, mining villages were built solely so that the miners could live close to the mine.
When the mine shut down, there was absolutely nothing in these places. You had, you had one shop, but you were lucky you had a library, um, and, and that was it. And so there was nothing, absolutely nothing to do. And [00:18:00] I, growing up, I was lucky to have a television in my room, but I, you know, I had a lot of friends that didn't even have a television in the room, let alone, you know, a mobile phone or a PlayStation or anything else that, you know, we had in later generations.
And so there was really, there was no option but to go out and make your own entertainment. Um,
Katherine May: You just go and wander around.
Tom Newlands: Yeah, you went and wandered around and certainly if somebody had a car or something like that, you'd get in the car and you'd drive and the streets were, on the weekend, the streets were absolutely alive.
Um, and it's, it's something that, At the time was outrageous, it was scary, it was harmful. There's a certain romanticism looking back and certainly when I wrote the book I was in lockdown and I was thinking a lot about my, my home. I was thinking a lot about my upbringing and thinking back to those days it was a, it was an absolutely unique time, you know.
Drink, drugs and rave music had kind of swept my town and [00:19:00] I've poured all that into the book.
Katherine May: Yeah, definitely. It really shows. And so did you, did you do research on that era? Like, or, or did you feel really close to it in your memory? Like, what did you have to do to bring it to life so much?
Tom Newlands: Yeah, well a little bit of both.
I used Google Maps a lot. And like I say, you know, What did writers
Katherine May: do before Google Maps? Yeah,
Tom Newlands: I did, um You know, I did, I did write the book in lockdown, so there was nothing else to do. I couldn't, I couldn't leave. I couldn't, I couldn't visit these places. Um, I used Google Maps. I also purchased a Little Woods catalogue from 1995 from eBay.
If you go on eBay now, there's a little drop down menu and you can get a PDF of like any year's Little Woods catalogue. Um, so I used that for a lot of the clothes. I used that for a lot of the details in terms of a female perspective. And I used that for a lot of the kind of interiors and stuff like that.
So there was a bit, there was actually more research than I thought there might be. Yeah. You know, it's something that, that people associate with, you know, books about [00:20:00] Jack of White Period or the Second World War and stuff. But, um, despite the fact that I've actually lived through the nineties, I still needed to, to check up on a few things.
Katherine May: Well, it's the, it is the precision. And I, like, I now find that like the sort of late eighties and nineties of kind of a lead together for me, and then the kind of late nineties and two th like, I'm not sure what happened when, and yeah. And I. like, genuinely struggle to imagine the world without the internet now.
Like, I really, I can't, I can't imagine, I can't picture it anymore. Like, I can't think about what we did. I'm so, yeah. I mean, I didn't get the internet till I was like 18, I think.
Tom Newlands: Yeah. Yeah, certainly. Like, I remember. When I used to walk home, you know, I'd go and visit my friends or whatever, and I'd walk home at night, and, you know, I was having the same experience in 1996 as somebody in 1066, or, you know, 1566.[00:21:00]
It was you, the countryside, and the star from the moon, and that was it, and you were alone. And it's interesting now that the kids will never experience that. There's never going to be a time where you're just out, you know, Living on your wits again, and that's something again that you're, you reflect on about the 90s, that we did take risks.
There was a lot of risk, but there didn't go to time. It was, it was, it was more, uh, it was more raw, and it was more free, and there was, there was more kind of, like, I came across some scraps of paper with some phone numbers written on them, and I just remember, and it was, people's grandmothers and people's aunties work and stuff like that.
And that was, you used to have to ring around and try and work out where people were. And sometimes you would just have to go and go and knock on their door and find them. And it was a lot, a lot more difficult, but it was a lot more satisfying when you did manage to pull together back then and, and you found friends and you found allies in your small town.
It was, it was a very powerful feeling. [00:22:00]
Katherine May: It was very powerful. And, and, I mean we, um, in our little village, um, the, the electricity was really dodgy and so every, like, once a month the electricity would cut off for a day and, um, and then we'd all have to go and queue at the phone box, like the whole village would be queuing at the phone box on the main road.
like writing over it and it just, I mean it makes me sound so old but that's what you did and you'd queue at the phone box to like ring some random person whose phone number you got on the bus because it felt like a possibility that you might make a link with this person and it might turn out to be exciting and I, yeah,
Tom Newlands: I mean, phone boxes are right through the book as well and it wasn't a conscious decision but obviously reading, reading through at the end you see they become such a symbolic thing for Cora.
And certainly growing up, it was something that I'd never even thought about, but looking back, we spent so much time in phone boxes, and they held so [00:23:00] much hope, as you say, like, there was, there was no feeling back then, like having a phone number and trying to ring it and trying to get in touch with somebody.
Um, or even I can remember walking past people's houses and glimpsing up and seeing like certain posters in bedroom windows and wondering about who lived there. And there was something about, Yeah. Even walking past somebody in a town centre and noticing that you dress similarly and wondering who they were.
It was
Katherine May: like a signal, yeah.
Tom Newlands: And trying to pluck up the courage to make that connection and it was, it was difficult and it was hard but, you know, it was. If you did make that step it became a very profound thing to phone somebody that way.
Katherine May: Definitely. It was like you were flying a flag all the time, just trying to say like, this is, this is what I'm like.
And are you like that too? Like now I suppose you're dating. But also I remember, and it's really, God, I just sound incredibly old the more I talk, but I remember, Hearing, like reading about records in the NME [00:24:00] and not being able to hear them, but buying them, like ordering them from one of those lists in the back of the paper, because I thought I'd probably like them based on the review.
That's just, Bewildering now, isn't it? Like, in the world of
Tom Newlands: Spotify. Possibly even more frustrating than that, we had a, we had a branch of Herb Price three miles away. And so, if we read about a band of her, we would walk the three miles to Herb Price and pray that they had it on, like, one of those listening posts where you could put your headphones on and hear it.
And so we would all huddle around and listen to the track on the We had absolutely no money. And so even if you did like, you couldn't afford to buy the CD single, you had other priorities. Um,
Katherine May: yeah.
Tom Newlands: And, you know, I don't want to romanticize it too much because it was a hellish time as well. I think we make it sound
Katherine May: terrible.
Tom Newlands: It must sound terrible to people that didn't live through those things, but, um, yeah. And, you know, I, I don't, [00:25:00] I wouldn't consider myself a particularly nostalgic person, but I think it was just, um, um, Everybody felt a bit dislocated during lockdown, and I think a lot of people, for the first time, are coming out of their jobs and sitting in their house for a while, and all of a sudden you begin to think about things that maybe you haven't turned to in many months or years, and all those things that we've chatted about were just, on my mind and my mum was actually quite ill at that point.
I couldn't travel up to see her and I didn't feel it at the time. I didn't feel like I was processing anything by writing. I was frightened but when I look back at the book now and see it as a whole, I can see that there was a A lot of kind of longing for the old days, a little bit. Yeah. Oh, that's it.
Yeah, because however bad, and you know, I've seen it described as bleak in the Guardian and stuff. That's not bleak to me. You know, that was my life. You know, you don't walk around going, Jesus, this is bleak. You just live your life. And it's, that's something [00:26:00] else I really wanted to get in the book that, that Cora doesn't have a lot, but she's dreaming big.
And she is, uh, you know. Trying our best to enjoy what you have.
Katherine May: For sure. So, so how did you, I mean, how, like, the, the question that everyone must ask is how did you approach writing it? Because actually, received wisdom at the moment is that you, you write exactly what you know, you know, you don't write outside your gender, you don't write outside your race.
How did you, how did you approach that? Did you, did you worry about it?
Tom Newlands: I didn't worry about it. The thing is, you know, I, when I sat down to write the book, I hadn't done a word of creative prose since high school, since I was 18. You know, I'd done a couple of poetry courses and I was becoming vaguely interested in poetry and also vaguely aware that I couldn't do it.
Um, and so I don't, I don't know what struck me in lockdown, but I just thought I'm going to sit down and have a go at writing some prose. Uh, if I'd been involved in a lot of [00:27:00] discourse on Twitter and, you know, if I'd, you know, I'd have read up extensively about it. industry and about how to publish a book and all the rest of it, I probably wouldn't have done it.
Um, so I was extremely lucky that I just got to sit there on a laptop and start writing. And before I had, you know, Googled how to get an agent or Googled any of that stuff, I'd already entered it into a competition and I came forth in the competition, which was completely unexpected. It told me that, you know, there was something going on there.
Um, It's really when I, when I look back to my, my, my school days, the girls in my class were very driven and the boys were, um,
Katherine May: you
Tom Newlands: know, my little group of friends, we were kind of artistic. We, we had cameras, we had guitars, that kind of stuff. And we identified a little bit more with the girls because the girls were, you know, getting prospectuses, they were doing the driving tests, that kind of stuff.
So they had one eye on the future They didn't really want to grow up to be their mums. [00:28:00] The boys The culture was kind of built around the boys needs and whatever the boys wanted for themselves. That's why it was already there and it would be quite easy to just lay it out in front of them. And so when I thought back to those days and I thought about the kind of character I wanted to write, a determined character who was not necessarily aware of what she wanted but just wanted to get somewhere else and, you know, get out of it at all times.
Yeah, it made complete sense for me to be a girl. It was completely natural and I just sat down and I just tried it and it just worked. And it kind of, it kind of worked. Um, but I think reflecting on it, working class storytelling has so often been about young boys. Um, books, unfilmed, Kez, all the way up to Belfast, Kez Branagh.
Um, and what we get out of it. is bystander women over and over again either in pubs or in prison waiting rooms or making packed lunches or young [00:29:00] girls like Cora who quite often grow up to be like the glue that holds a dysfunctional family together or the glue that holds, um, you know, a neighborhood together with our community.
And as I wrote, I thought, well, I'm going to Create a character who's the opposite of glue. I want somebody who is, um, not interested in staying, staying where they are and, and being an assistant to a man or, or, or even a son or anything else. Um, but who wants something better than what they've been given.
Um, and so that was really the reasoning, but it took a lot. Once I'd, once I'd finished the first draft and I got to speaking to, to people, agents and things like that, it did then struck me that I'd done something I don't know the word for
Katherine May: it.
Tom Newlands: Unusual, uh,
Katherine May: Yeah, I mean, almost transgressive. But
Tom Newlands: not in that way, yeah.
But, you know, there's Almost everybody involved in the publishing of the book is female. You know, my [00:30:00] agent is female, my editor's female. Hundreds of women read the book before it even got to the stage of, of, of proofreads, and many of them were neodivergent, neodivergent poets, neodivergent writers, uh, editors.
Uh, and there wasn't really a single dissenting voice, and if I had been, I wouldn't have gone any further. Um, yeah, and so I think it's really a question for, for publishers. Um, I think we can write whatever we want. I don't think anybody would want to limit what you can write in the privacy of your, of your office, in your bedroom, whatever.
Um, it's really a decision for the publisher to make, and certainly I've been given a lot of confidence by my, by my publisher, my editor, in terms of, of doing that. And I'm pretty, knowing that it's out there and people are reading it, I'm pretty confident in it.
Katherine May: Yeah, definitely, you should be. I mean, it's about approach, isn't it, I think, and about what is motivating you to write in the voice of that [00:31:00] person.
You know, I think quite often, I mean, I was talking about books about autism earlier, you know, like when you read books like Curious Incident, for me now, I just think the intentions actually aren't good around writing that autistic subject when the author isn't themselves autistic, you know, they're, they haven't actually done any research into the lived experience.
experience and perspective. They've, they've sort of isolated this set of traits that seem curious and weird and quirky and written a book that is about being curious and weird and quirky, you know, um, and like very entertaining book, but it sort of ends up doing harm because People believe that, you know, and the number of times when I first started telling people I was autistic, that they were like, well, you're nothing like the kid in Curious Incident.
And I was like, well, that wasn't science. And you know, part of that problem is us as readers and what we [00:32:00] take from it too. But yeah, it's, it's different motivation, isn't it?
Tom Newlands: Yeah. And I think so many people have asked me, you know, did you work hard on the ADHD part? And I did and I didn't, in a way. You know, I don't think, I don't think somebody who is neurotypical could just sit down and work hard on it and produce this book.
I think,
Katherine May: you
Tom Newlands: know, I've had four decades of experiencing the world the way I do, which I know now is very different from other people. And that's woven intrinsically into the way I write any character, whether they're neurodivergent or not. And. One thing I've learned is that, you know, being autistic, being an introvert makes you a very good writer because you're often very observant, you're often aware of all your senses, you're often, um, kind of, uh, hyper empathetic and tuned into other people's moods, uh, and so I didn't force the ADHD thing, you know, it wasn't a checkbox situation where I was Taking off certain [00:33:00] things for her to do or ways to behave.
I wrote it naturalistically and trusted that enough of my own experience would bleed onto the page in terms of Flora's experience. There was a little bit of research in terms of her being a girl, um, but I left it and I think as I said earlier, if at the end of it, it wasn't apparent that she had ADHD, it wouldn't have been mentioned at all.
I felt that I'd been brought to a kind of point where it was obvious enough for it to be a plot point and obvious enough for it to be a guiding kind of factor in her life and in the decisions she makes without being, as I said before, you know, a kind of awareness raising thing.
Katherine May: Yeah. How is this your first book?
How did you manage to do this in your first book? It's like magic. It's like, I don't know, I feel like I've slugged my way to get to this understanding. I
Tom Newlands: do, I do know. I do know. I do know how I've done it, but it's very boring and technical. [00:34:00] It's, uh, it's a lot of work, you know, the first draft, I got the, you know, I learned so much, but I got the first draft down very quickly, um, it was a bit like driving the train and laying the tracks at the same time, um, and then a lot of work after that.
And certainly the first months of that creative part, I was able to hyper focus. I wrote 120, 000 words in three months. And I thought, well, hey, this writing malarkey is dead easy. Here we go. Right. I'm going to be banging out, you know, five different pseudonyms or whatever. I'll be the company that books it.
Um, what I didn't realize is that the editing part and the redrafting is much more difficult and it doesn't hold that same appeal for somebody with a brain like me. And so what I had was three to six months of really exciting, creative stuff. And And then three and a half years of forcing my ADHD self to sit down at a laptop and get it finished.
So it was, yeah, I've learned an [00:35:00] incredible amount, so.
Katherine May: It's a real apprentice piece, isn't it, that first, that first novel, like you really, I mean, I know that, you know, my first novel, I just, I had to like exercise all these demons, like, the first one was like, you can never write anything long enough, you don't know how to, and then I wrote something way too long, because I'd got so paranoid, and I basically like doubled up every sentence, so that I said everything twice, because I was just trying to get word count.
And then I had to like go through and take out all the weird repetition and then it was like, oh, now I've got to think about the story and how the characters, you know, and like you, you just, but there's no, there's no shortcutting that, like
Tom Newlands: you have to do the
Katherine May: slog. Yeah.
Tom Newlands: And I was exactly the same, you know, I was obsessed with word count, I was obsessed with all sorts of things and, um, my editor Francesca is absolutely fantastic and she just says it'll be as long as it needs to be and you don't have to think in [00:36:00] a numerical way, just write, write what needs to be there and whatever length I want to
Katherine May: think in a numerical way, it's safe!
Tom Newlands: But I'm thinking, you know, how long is this book going to be, or how short is it? And I was just desperate to kind of put some sort of limitation on it, so I think that's just the way I think, um, but. Yeah, so learning about learning, not only learning how to write on the page, but learning how the discipline of sitting down and learning even the kind of way to structure your book in terms of.
Your file system on your computer, your folders, how to name files, how to keep track of all your
Katherine May: IPs.
Tom Newlands: It's something that never gets talked about. And so the past four years have been like gold dust for me. Not that it makes a second one any easier, but it's certainly going to save me a little bit of bother.
Yeah.
Katherine May: You'll just make a different set of mistakes, trust me, sorry to tell you that. There's like a whole new world of mistakes you can make instead this time. [00:37:00] Um, I'm really, I'm really curious to ask about the connection in the book to the art world. Um, because I can see from your Instagram that you've got this huge connection to visual art as well.
Um, tell me about that, I'm fascinated.
Tom Newlands: I was a painter, like, uh, that's all I've been interested in, uh, my whole life. You know, I wanted to be a painter when I was at school, and I've done oil painting, and, uh, screen printing, and drawing, and all sorts of visual art stuff. Um, and I ended up, when I came down to London, I worked in the art world for ten years.
So, I ended up working at Sotheby's, and worked at various other galleries. So I've done art handling, and I've been around that forever. Um, But I didn't get anywhere with the painting, you know, I thought I was quite competent, but it just never happened. So, uh, this, this writing thing just seems to have landed on my lap and, uh, I've gone with that instead.
It's like, what you're saying, but, what you're saying before, I mean, one of the things that really held me [00:38:00] back about writing was, you know, and held me back for several decades was I just could never picture how to how to hold the idea in your head and kind of I'm going to try and figure it out from start to finish, but one of the things that I did learn in that four year period of writing is that you just don't need to do that.
You just go straight to the bits that are relevant and that are hitting you and that you feel the most, or certainly that's what works for me. Write those bits down and by the time you finish writing those bits, More of it will have come and more of it keeps coming. Yeah, it grows and there's no need to see the bigger picture much further down the line.
If somebody had told me that when I was 18, I would probably be a multi millionaire writer by now. But instead I just told myself I couldn't do it and it wasn't for me. And so, you know, it's taken me till the age of 43 to actually do it.
Katherine May: I think that, you know, that autistic desire for me to have Rules to work within and to like know the structure and boundaries of everything [00:39:00] can be really positive because it, it lets me build my own framework.
And I, I know I need to do it. And so I do it, but at the same time, I think it can be really oppressive because sometimes I just build the wrong framework or I start, I make, I invent rules that don't need to exist and then follow them to the letter for years. And I find it harder to break out, I think. of the sort of boxes that I make for myself.
Tom Newlands: That's exactly it for me. It's, you know, it's autism versus ADHD. And in autism, you want it to be very ordered. You do want to have that kind of complete framework to hang your ideas on. And yeah, I do have ADHD. I'm an extremely creative person. I've got too many ideas and the ideas are coming at such a rate that I can't contain them and I can't order them onto this frame that I need.
And, um, I find that. It just got to the point where I, like I say, I just had to go to the bits I knew and I wrote them and eventually they expanded to the extent where they were, they were [00:40:00] joining and I thought well hey wait a minute I've got a third of a book here and then I've got half a book and at that point the momentum was going and I just thought if I keep going who knows what might, what might happen.
Katherine May: But I'm, I was asking about the art world stuff because actually I, um, like early in my career worked in the art world too. And I, um, I think I learned most of my important lessons a bit about not, not directly about writing, but about creativity and how you produce something, how you create something and how you find that balance of like discipline and desire and, you know, I don't know, all of that stuff.
I learned from working with artists because I always felt like I had. a much better vocabulary about it than, than I did from my more like academic background. You know, they, like art school looks like it's amazing, frankly. And, but it, but they're taught [00:41:00] how to be practitioners. And I watched and learned really carefully as I worked with them, because I, I knew that there was nothing in my world that was going to teach me to practice.
And to, to do stuff like failing and experimenting, you know, rather than writing linear stuff on a page. So I just, it just struck me that you translated one language to another when you started writing. It wasn't maybe such a leap as it, as it seemed on the outside.
Tom Newlands: Yeah, it definitely, it definitely teaches you, you know, it teaches you that discipline of turning up every day and turning up to the eagle or whatever it is and just, and just continuing to work.
Yeah, for me, a lot of it comes from. As a painter, that thing about failing and that thing about rescuing, trying to rescue something and Knowing when something's finished, it really sharpens your sense of what you're looking for. And I think what I took into writing from art was the idea of perfecting it for my [00:42:00] own sake.
That was the one big thing that I took away from painting and visual art was that you have to forget reality. You may be doing a still life or whatever it is, or you might just be doing an abstract thing, but you do have to have a very clear idea in your head of what it is that you want to achieve.
Because if you don't, then you'll just be there forever, like turning it to mud. And so when it did come to writing, I think so many people have talked about the book being very vivid and fast paced and compressed and quite easy to read. And I think, for me, that was, that was that discipline that I had from art, which was to get in and out very quickly, to have a very clear picture, to black out all our voices, all of our, you know, ideas and just, uh, work on the people's dialogue, work on the paragraphs, complete it and move on.
Um, about halfway through the process, I did go on Twitter and I did start entering competitions and being an agent and all of a sudden [00:43:00] there's 10 opinions. Um, we need to see more of this character, we need to see less of this character, we need to see more of blah, blah, blah. I, I tried to stay on my own kind of path, which was that discipline I went for.
Katherine May: Yeah, that's, it's such a, I, you know, like I've, I've, I had a long conversation, I've got a few like autistic writer friends and we, we get together to talk writing and we're having this long conversation the other week because she'd been given this set of edits that she felt was really intrusive and it made me really think about how I deal with edits and I realised I've got this rule which is that I take edits but not rewrites, you know, like I, I'm really happy to listen to suggestions, but my agency in the process is so important.
Like I, I cannot have someone else, I can't be second guessing someone else in my brain all the time. Like it has to, it always has to be my work. Like that is, that's central to me. I, otherwise I'd feel [00:44:00] like it was pointless. I'd feel like it was fake. It's got to be. it's got to be absolutely mine all the time.
Tom Newlands: 100 percent it's got to be it's got to feel concrete and it's got to feel like it's yours and it's got to feel like um I don't want to say meddling it's not probably not the right word but I don't you don't want them you don't want to necessarily muddied in a way, you know. I'm such an open person, you know.
It's a real collaboration with both my agent and my editor, and I've really enjoyed listening to them. Um, but at the end of the day, every single word and piece of punctuation on there is mine, and it is where it should be, so. If there's any problems, they can, they can, uh, it's my fault. But, you know, I like that and I, I, I enjoy that because, you know, I wouldn't want something out there that is fudged, you know what I mean?
I don't want something out there that is a half measure. It's just, there's no point in doing it. I would rather fail on my own terms than, than, [00:45:00] you know, take on a load of ideas that weren't necessarily, uh, you know, in my initial thinking.
Katherine May: Definitely. I think that's a fantastic place for us to end. That's just been, it's been so nice to talk to you about creativity as well as your book.
It's always like lovely to understand how it filters through for other people. But um, but Tom, thank you so much. It has just been a joy and I'm going to wave your book for people watching. Um, it's out now in the uk. It's out a little later in America, I think. Isn't it? Is that November?
Tom Newlands: November, yeah, November of 13th, I think in the us
Katherine May: Yeah.
So, so us people listening have got a little while to wait, but it's, it's really worth it. It's fantastically good. And, um, yeah, thank you so much. I will, um, see you all very, very soon and uh, next month we have another. Kind of, we're sticking with the neurodivergent theme for next month, because we're talking to Daniel Tammett about his book Nine Minds, which is [00:46:00] back to nonfiction, back on safe ground for me.
But yeah, I hope to see you all there then. Alright, I'm gonna see you later. I'm gonna try and remember how to finish this, this thing, which is not traditionally my Strong point. Uh, and there we go. No, I didn't manage to leave. Ah, did you see that? I sounded so competent then. I pressed the leave meeting button.
Okay, we're going to try again. Bye, [00:47:00] [00:48:00] everyone.
Show Notes
Join Katherine as she talks with Tom Newlands about his debut novel, Only Here, Only Now. Katherine talks with Tom about his female main protagonist, the unforgettable Cora, setting the book in 1990s Scotland and how it offers a new way of writing about neurodivergence.
She also explains the thinking behind choosing Only Here, Only Now for a non-fiction book club, and why it captivated her enough to break her own rules.
Links from the episode:
Tom's Instagram
Tom’s book, Only Here, Only Now
Other episodes you might enjoy:
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