After hearing last year about Boris Johnson’s thriller, then about Saddam Hussein’s romance novels, I got thinking about why people from all sorts of backgrounds are drawn to writing fiction. Reading them, I’m struck by two thoughts, firstly by how easy lots of professional writers make writing fiction look, and secondly by how much you can come to understand a person by the way they write.
Are there any novels you know of from unexpected authors? Have you found any that are decent as books apart from their creators? What is it about novels that draws non-writers that’s missing from, say, pottery or interpretive dance?
Rupert Holmes has done virtually everything–he started as a music producer and songwriter, then took up singing himself and released a bunch of albums. He also wrote film scores. Then he wrote a smash hit Broadway musical…not just the songs, but also the libretto and the orchestrations, and with a lot more material than an average show because the audience votes on multiple elements of the show at every performance. Then he wrote a couple of non-musical plays, including one where he wrote himself into the show as a character. Then he created and wrote every episode of Remember WENN. Then he started writing novels (Murder Your Employer is his third, after Where the Truth Lies and Swing). And now he’s also an in-demand librettist for musicals that he didn’t write the scores for.
And he’s apparently the nicest man on the face of the earth.