With the exception of actors, I think I feel more sympathy and quiet horror for screenwriters than I do for any other creative type. Reaching the goal of an actual film on a screen is nigh on impossible. The years, even decades, they go through, endlessly revising their work as directors come and go, as producers change their minds, as the trigger is nearly pulled before the safety goes back on for another few years… But when a film is actually made, even flying feels possible. Finally, everything makes sense and all is right with the world and the mystical city of gold is something you are inside, actually touching the walls. You got a key!

Staying inside is another matter altogether. But, hey, quite simply, we all want to do and be what we love and admire. It’s why so many readers now have ‘author’ after their name. I’d hazard a guess that there are as many writers now as there are readers. People have to try to do what they love.

And here we are. The Vessel was my first screenplay and is now my eleventh novel. The cycle is complete. Including the publishing of this book, The Vessel has been on my desk and in my thoughts, in various forms, for five years. So why is it so short?

The answer lies in Cunning Folk. That was a difficult book to write, even though I had a fully formed screenplay that had directors and a production company immediately attached to it. Cunning Folk I entirely transformed from a screenplay into a novel; entirely, because in the novel almost all of the story is told in very immediate points-of-view within the heads of three characters. You simply cannot do that in a film. You can suggest the inner lives and turmoil of characters in films, through what they say, how they act and react. But you don’t know for sure what’s going on inside. Not how they feel, exactly. Not what they are thinking, precisely. Flashback and prologues must be used sparingly or not at all. So it’s hard to get across what happened to these characters before the action of the film.

Reading fiction, you don’t have these problems. You go inside a character. You go deep. Nor is the writer hobbled by a 110-page limit. A reader takes a seat inside a character’s head and peers through their eyes and rifles through their back stories in ways you never can as a viewer of a film.