Young writer relaxes in Malta and thinks of his next book

Having a break from a host of book signing sessions across the UK, Tariq Goddard, a young British novel writer who has already had three books published and who is working on his fourth, was looking forward to a holiday in Malta.

"People have this wrong notion of authors raking in a lot of money but it's becoming an increasingly tough job where you have to become a salesman as well as being an author if you want to succeed. I am trying to be careful how to balance the two because it's easy to get engulfed into speaking about your work rather than sit down and actually write," he said.

Mr Goddard's first novel, Homage To A Firing Squad, was one of the four to be short listed for the 2002 Whitbread First Novel Award. He did not get the award but being nominated was already a great boost. A film is about to be made based on his first novel.

The Whitbread Awards were established in 1971 by the UK's leading leisure company and the prize aims to celebrate the most enjoyable British writing of the previous year.

Both Homage To A Firing Squad and his second novel Dynamo are set against a historical backdrop: the Spanish Civil War and Stalin's Russia. But all his novels are fiction and not meant to give historical accounts. The epoch just sets the setting for him.

The genre Mr Goddard writes is not the type that sells huge amounts when launched. They sell copies every year and keep on selling, "hopefully for the rest of eternity".

"It's unrealistic to try to compete with Harry Potter or the Da Vinci Code. But I write stuff for people to enjoy. Most people read to divert themselves from their lives and then want to return to them. I chose to set myself for long haul by writing quality work that will last," Mr Goddard says.

Like most authors, Mr Goddard started from very humble beginnings, writing his first novel in long hand and dictating it to a friend who typed the first draft for him, before he could present it to a publisher. But then he learnt how to juggle with a keyboard and never looked back.

He started writing when he was 16. "I could not help starting to write. There were things I felt I had to share with people that I could not share in a conversation. There are things you can say in literature that you can't say when speaking and writing fiction gives you more freedom. On the other hand, I feel fiction embodies reality. It makes reality more real."

Mr Goddard says his first writings were "love-sick poetry which most teenagers indulge in".

"The poems grew out of themselves. They were too restrictive. Poetry is restricted by space and time. I wanted something bigger, so I started writing stories. I chose fiction as I did not want to be bound by subject matter. Fiction increases your borders. You can invent the world and you have total control. In real life drama you have too many imponderables whereas in fiction you can engineer reality. In a way, you are like a politician, you feel in command, on the saddle."

It was a bit of a dilemma when starting to write as, though he had the ego to be a writer he wanted to go beyond himself so as not to let his ego get in the way.

In plotting his novel, Mr Goddard knows how the novel will start and how it will end but does not know which road the plot will take between the two points.

"I like a strong but simple plot. The story suggests itself as you go along. You have to listen to it, guide it, write it, re-read what you wrote and edit along the way. Something inside you guides you.

"At most, I spend some four hours writing every day. One might say it's too little but if people were to be honest they'd realise they probably do not put more than that in terms of work in a whole day. And there's another thing. When I'm not writing, I'm often thinking about the plot, being influenced by what I see or read. Then you sit down and the voices inside your head tell you what to write. The cliché of working in bursts of energy is true but bursts of energy are nothing unless they are arranged."

But his works are not "autobiographical".

"In my novels, every character is me, but none of them is the real me. There is no favouritism. I think it would be a mistake to be entirely autobiographical. No matter how guarded you are, some of it will creep in but I do my best to construct a totally believable world that is not me and my life," he says.

He is now working on his fourth book, set against the background of England in the 1980s. He thinks the book won't be out before another two to three years though.

"I don't want to rush with it. I want to let the subject matter settle, to let the material choose its own speed. What I found most amusing here is that I think the best place to write a book about England in the 1980s is actually to be in Malta. I have seen the Red Arrows, which were very much part of British landscape then, I have tasted ice creams that reminded me very much of the England of the time as well as heard a lot of music from that epoch while I've been here. It's been simply great," he said.