Talking with Liam Livings

Liam Livings lives, with his partner, where east London ends and becomes nine-carat-gold- highlights-and-fake-tan-west-Essex. He started writing at 14: during a French exchange trip, he wrote pen portraits about the teachers. He wrote for his school’s creative writing magazine and writes a diary daily. He grew up in the New Forest.

Best Friends Perfect Book One will be published on 4 June 2014 by Wilde City Press.

Tell us something about the plot of your novel.

Cover Courtesy of
Adrian Nicholas

Kieran, 18, comes out to himself then his family by going to a youth group. There he meets Kev, a cross dressing gay man with awful taste in boyfriends and Jo, a grade A drama student, at college and in his real life. Kieran navigates his way through the maze that is being a gay man in the late nineties, with help from his two new best friends, and his two old best friends; Hannah, just coming out too and trying to work out if Steps are Abba for the nineties; Grace a one woman charity shop bargain hunter with encyclopoedic pop knowledge. 

How do you fit your writing around your home life?

I am a morning person. I like to get up at 7 o’clock and write before the activities of the day take over. I get up quite early on the weekend to write for a few hours before baking/hosting/watching TV and lolling about.  

If you were to record a soundtrack to your book which three songs (or pieces of music) would you choose and why?

All the characters are into music so can I pick one to represent each of the main characters? Kieran - One For Sorrow by Steps; Jo – Do-Re-Mi from The Sound of Music; Hannah - No More I Love You’s by Annie Lennox; Grace - Vienna by Ultravox; Kev – Love’s Unkind by Donna Summer.

How good are you at planning your work? Do you prefer to wing it?

I always plan my writing. Sometimes I use bullet points on a Word document, but recently I’ve got into Post It notes. It means I can have them laid out one side of my laptop, and my hand written character bios on the other side of the laptop and then the story on the screen. It saves moving from one document to another on screen, I can just glance to the side at the Post It notes to see the next scene to write. This technique means I write first drafts as fast as possible, averaging 2000 words an hour.

What did you enjoy most about writing your novel?

I love getting to know the new characters and travelling with them on their journeys. I always want my characters to have grown, changed by the end of the story, and I like taking them to some interesting places to help with that.

Thank you for joining us today, Liam

Connect with Liam Livings

You can read his blog at http://www.liamlivings.com/blog.html

Read samples of his stories and reviews of work on his website http://www.liamlivings.com/

Connect on facebook  https://www.facebook.com/liam.livings

Or twitter @LiamLivings

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