Interview with Author John Mellor
About John Mellor
I was born and brought up in Liverpool, UK just after The War and went straight from school to sea as a young officer in the Royal Navy. After five years I resigned and worked as a professional yacht skipper for quite a few years before settling to full time writing. I have lived in and renovated a number of boats and houses in various places, and now share a delightful house and 10 acres of weeds near Nelson, New Zealand with wife, son, daughter and a motley collection of animals and boats. My grownup daughter still lives in the UK, although we are trying to persuade her to come here.
How long have you been writing and what motivated you to begin?
I was a professional yacht skipper in my early twenties, delivering a yacht from Jersey to Malta, when we had a fairly serious explosion somewhere off Tunisia after being hove to in a bad storm for some days. We managed to put the fire out, patch up the boat, and get to Malta a few days later, despite no food or water, no charts, compass, engine or electricity, a few dramas, and some assorted broken limbs. When I finally got back home to England a friend suggested I write a story about it for Yachting Monthly magazine. I duly did and they duly bought it, and I thought ‘This is a good way to earn money’. Doubtless if I had experienced such a dramatic event on a weekly basis it would have been, but it was quite a long, hard road before I began turning out serious technical articles that were as appealing to an editor as a major explosion in the Med!
When I had become established as a magazine writer I moved into yachting books by expanding a series of beginners’ articles and making the proposal to a publisher. I went on to publish twelve yachting instructional books. Some time during this I wrote ‘The 7 Gifts’, my only novel to date.
Was there any particular inspiration behind “The Seven Gifts that Came to Earth”
I sat down one wet, cold afternoon, on board an old Dutch Barge that I then lived aboard in Scotland, and decided to write an essay on “The Future of Britain”. I was not sure I could see the way ahead of me at that stage and thought it would be an interesting and useful exercise to explore it in print. The eventual result was ‘The 7 Gifts’. This metamorphosis of one idea into a seemingly quite different one will be familiar to many writers I am sure. Any writing that involves a modicum of thought about one’s life must invitably become a voyage of discovery, and not a To-Do list.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the book?
About three months as I recall, of almost total immersion (a rare luxury that I just happened to have at that time).
On your website you say concerning your book “The Seven Gifts that Came to Earth”: “it was turned down by a number of publishers on the grounds that it was ‘too unusual, we cannot categorise it and thus calculate the profit.’ Oh dear.” Was this a big discouragement to you at the time?
Yes. The first publisher spent a year trying to get a paperback deal to spread the financial gamble, but failed. It did not seem likely there were many houses left that they had not tried, so it was not long before I gave up. If it had not been for the encouraging words of the first editor to read the book, who very much wanted to publish it, I do not believe I would have left it in the the cupboard all these years, in the hopes that something like the Digital Revolution would one day enable me to sidestep the bean-counting naysayers and just do it myself. Doubtless, as all the self-publishing critics never tire of saying, it will be a hopeless failure, but more people have now read it than would have done had it remained in the cupboard.
Do you feel that “The Seven Gifts that Came to Earth” is a religious story or are the religious figures, such as the angel more allegorical?
Religion, by its very nature, seeks out intrinsic truths, so it provides a more fertile framework for a story like ‘The 7 Gifts’ than, say, the pragmatic explanations of science. In that general sense, it is a religious story, although, as you noted, a far from conventional one, and certainly not one that preaches.
The book simply takes the premise that our lives are not what they seem; and if readers accept that, then all their cherished, secure notions of what constitutes reality vanish, and they are, in a sense, returned to the original Void, with nowhere to go but forward. From that standpoint I would describe the story of ‘The 7 Gifts’ as perhaps more allusive than allegorical.
It is a story about seven gifts bestowed on the Earth by its guardian. Whether it is true, religious, allegorical or just rubbish is not, I feel, particularly relevant. It is simply a story, that I hope will encourage readers to question their beliefs and their assumptions about reality. And think, even just a little, about the possible true nature of their lives.
In your book modern technology and fantasy/medieval seem to mix together. For example in one story a woman is being treated in what seems to all extents and purposes to be a modern hospital. Yet at the queen’s palace the guards still use spears. Is there any particular reason why you portrayed the world as a mix of older and modern elements?
The book begins with a void and fills up with stories in which ‘everything is possible and all things have meaning’, just like the life of the little girl in the beginning. These stories are not part of our accepted, every-day reality, so I see no reason for them to adhere to its norms.
Is there one major lesson or viewpoint that you want readers of “The Seven
Gifts that Came to Earth” to walk away with?
I would like readers to close the book and wonder. I would like them to ponder: Is this true, or religious, or allegorical, or rubbish? Is what I read less real than what I see? Do the stories speak to me of anything? Am I in the same place at the end of the book as I was at the beginning?
There are some great mysteries here and I believe that each one of us is better placed to understand them than any sceptical scientist or religious zealot, simply because our Universe is not the same as theirs. We are, each of us, on our own journey; and whilst that journey continually interacts with those of others, it always remains uniquely ours. To understand that journey, because it is ‘magical’, we must look at it with the eyes of a child. I hope the essential simplicity of ‘The 7 Gifts’ will encourage readers to do that.
Do you have any specific plans with regard to writing other books?
Specific, no. Vague, yes. I am not a disciplined writer in the sense of planning out a book then writing it. I tend to drift about doing anything but plan and write, my excuse being that ideas are formulating in the back of my mind. On a bad day I am convinced I must be simply lazy and useless, but on a good day I feel quite sure that the best ideas do form and develop in the back of the mind while the front is occupied elsewhere. I have a vague idea floating about there at the moment, but whether it will ever make it as far as the keyboard I don’t know. It is certainly too amorphous to describe here.
Do you plan to continue self-publishing even if you receive an offer from a
major publisher?
I think that is a very interesting question, worthy of a better answer than ‘I don’t know’. However, that is the best I can do. There is quite a lot of discussion in blogs about this question, with plenty of opinions but few precedents as yet. The whole business of producing a book is undergoing such upheavals that it is hard to know what will come out of it. Although a good offer would clearly be tempting for a number of reasons - distribution, professional reviews, respectability, financial advance and so on - publishing is in such a state of flux at the moment that I would be rather reluctant to hand control of my book to a traditional publisher.
There was an intriguing discussion a while ago on The Self Publishing Review about the role agents can play in a relationship with a self-published author. I am inclined to think that that might be a better way forward, as it would give me professional marketing expertise without tying me to one particular house.
Finally, do you have any advice for other aspiring writers both young and older?
I would advise anyone, be they writer, carpenter or housewife, to pursue their dream. I am totally convinced that life helps us if we help yourselves, and we are more likely to regret what we fail to attempt than what we attempt and fail. There are an awful lot of paradoxes in life, and what we see as failure in our material world may well be an integral part of success elsewhere, so the fear of failure should never stop you doing what you want. Life, quite simply, is not what it seems. And neither does it have a rewind button. But it does enable all things in the Universe to interconnect, and that includes you and your dream.
Or, more succinctly, I think my writing background is a bit too idiosyncratic for me to be offering writing advice to anyone.
Books For Sale would like to thanks John Mellor for taking the time to do this interview. If you would like to find out more about him and his work please visit his official blog and website.
