'Someone had once said that I live my life like a novel. This was a fair criticism, because even from an early age it was natural for me to step back and view things in a fictional kind of way, for a number of reasons.'

Percy Stewart used to write non-fiction, but now revels in the freedom to conjure an emotional response from his readers. His first published poem was written in the late sixties, but he much prefers the broader canvas of a novel.

'A few years ago a very good friend who had known my work since the eighties said that I ought to write novels. I had sketched out ideas for some children's stories, produced three nîche-market non-fiction books and written technical articles for photographic magazines. Since my teens I had hand-written long, thoughtful letters, followed by thousands of much longer typed emails in recent years, but for some reason I had never seriously thought of writing an adult novel.'

'My friend's words sank home when I realised that in the course of a few weeks, the emails to her already amounted to a large book covering a wide range of topics. Typically, I was writing all morning and again later in the day, seven days a week. Invisibly, the writing had become a full-time job.

'It was obvious to both of us that I was applying exactly the same skills and critical judgements which had won me a scholarship to Cambridge in 1975, but with the objective detachment of a much older man.'

'A pause in the distance-relationship left me with surplus writing-energy, which channelled itself into the first part of Tunesmith.

'I knew that it had to be effortless to read, like a well-crafted poem. I realised that to achieve this, I had to allow the main characters to breathe and grow, as D.H. Lawrence does in The Rainbow. They would need space, like the golden eagle at the start of Tunesmith, the family of ospreys in Pilgrim and the vultures in the final volume. It was obvious from the first page of Tunesmith that it was the start of something bigger, probably a trilogy.'

'People have asked me if writing is therapeutic, but I don't view these books this way at all.

'From the very beginning, with Tunesmith, I was writing for other people, largely for readers much younger than I am. This gave me the idea of addressing the narrative to some kind of fictional 'you', which might perhaps be the reader now or at some time in the future. There is a feeling that a lot of Jacques' narrative might be letters, or journals, or thinking aloud. This magical question runs through all three books.'

'Yes, the very process of creation gives me a deep satisfaction, because it is all I have ever wanted to do with my life and it began at such an early age, with a plasticine model of the rocket which took John Glenn into orbit, complete with separating stages and capsule.

'My father was there encouraging and guiding. I assume that he first showed me how to roll a piece of plasticine between my hands to make a sausage, then to flatten the ends on the kitchen table before joining them, but I have no recollection of his intervention...only of the encouragement.

'Since we only had a radio, I have no memory of how I came to visualise the rocket so accurately...perhaps my father made his own model first, to explain how the rocket put a man in space. I can remember the sense of pride in building something interesting by making separate parts, complete in themselves and then assembling them into something more complex..not unlike the way I now write.

'For me, writing these novels is all about creating something beautiful, something elegant which can express complex ideas and real emotions as economically and simply as possible...just like the little boy's plasticine vision of pioneering space-travel. The excitement we felt in the early sixties shaped our characters...open to all kinds of new possibilities!'

All three novels in the Tunesmith trilogy take us through a deep emotional journey. Most of the paragraphs are set so that a crucial emotional high or low-point is seen effectively against the whole page, much like a key detail in a painting.

'Most of the time I edit each sentence as I write, just as I have done since my teens. My French teacher once complained that he found it difficult to read all of my changes in some exam-pieces, but that when he had succeeded in this, he saw that the end result was very good. 

'I have no interest in long psychological explanations. Nor do I see any reason to fill chapters with tedious, mundane dialogue purely in order to say that some of the characters are tedious and mundane.

'In a novel for the twenty-first century such devices are not needed, because anyone who has listened to a great novelist, actor or film director talking about their work realises that a complicated emotional journey can be conveyed very simply.

'Economy is after all one of the key differences between a work of art and a dry undergraduate dissertation or self-justificatory PhD thesis, in which every little detail has to be hammered out and safely anchored in pages of obscure bibliography.'

'It is more interesting to leave uncertainty, to allow space on the page for the reader's own imagination to start working. I was never cut out for academic life...I find it much more fun to make something new!

'Yes, of course I am aware of what lies behind the writing, but there is absolutely no need to justify or explain my ideas in the narrative. This is precisely why I am stating such things here, filling a dusty attic with a huge assortment of items, knowing that one of these might come in handy to someone somewhere some day, but safely well away from the life which goes on downstairs, in the imagination of a reader turning the pages of the books.'

'Half-way through writing Pilgrim I drafted a set of study-notes which might be useful to an A level or university student.

'Within a few days I realised the stupidity of this, because even though there are many little details of great symbolic significance to Jacques, Hetty, Maggie and Percy as participants and narrators, as well as many cultural references which will no doubt be missed by most readers, this doesn't really matter too much.

'If anyone wishes to study these novels as literary, historical or anthropological texts, it is up to them to read and re-read, just as I did when studying all of those lovely books which helped win me a place at university.

'There is little joy in being spoon-fed. The real delight is in discovering hidden flavours for ourselves.'

'If I'm writing about Cambridge, or satirising a political situation, there is natural scope for longer sentences which bring together a variety of ideas.

'If I'm writing about a seaside chip-shop, I can evoke familiar smells with very few words. A detailed sociological survey of a fish-and-chip queue might be very entertaining to certain sectors of our society, but only in the appropriate plaice.'

'We either fall in love with Hetty as Jacques does, or we don't: this is the freedom of the reader, for which I have great respect. I have no wish to bully or brainwash anyone into liking or disliking a character who only really exists in some mysterious shared imagination.

'When I see an unfamiliar actor in a film, I enjoy that process of discovering their talent for myself. When I first saw her, I didn't need to read a review to know that Alicia Vikander is utterly captivating in Jason Bourne and Anna Karenina, because the depth and subtlety of her two characters is there on the screen and in her voice. The same holds true for a well-written character in a novel.' 

'Internal family rivalry is there in print in King Lear in 1608.  It's there in the Book of Genesis and the Ancient Greeks knew all about it.

'In spite of all our squeaky-clean technology, and our rather hypocritical notions of justice, that basic brutal competition hasn't gone away...the only major difference being that we have learned that in our industrial, bureaucratic society it is more acceptable for most adults to avoid drawing blood.  We leave that particular pleasure to moving images, so that we can experience the animal adrenaline-rush without having to mop up the gore.'

In the second part of the Tunesmith Trilogy, Hetty is seen as an idealised young woman, the near-perfect sister, child and lover who has no hatred, no greed, no jealousy.

'In fact Hetty is a composite of a number of people who made a deep impression on me at various times, probably starting with a kind, gentle older cousin who cared for me when I was a toddler in the late fifties.'

'While I was writing Tunesmith, I briefly met a young woman whose straightforward, kind, intelligent manner seemed exactly right for the romantic interest in Jacques' story...a truly courageous, thoughtful individual rather than someone who merely follows the stereotype-thinking of a crowd.  Her character quickly grew into a driving force which powers the whole trilogy, someone Jacques would gladly give his life for.

'In Pilgrim I placed Hetty's birth in Amble in Northumberland, by the working quay where boats unload catches of North Sea fish much as they have done for generations.  I love the feeling of continuity in Amble and Alnwick, both of which I first came to know in the eighties.'

'On the corner of one street there is a wonderful fish and chip shop which connected directly with my own happy childhood memories, so writing Maggie Stiggle's tender portrait of Hetty was incredibly quick and easy, with not a single significant edit between the first draft and the final printed version.'

'That continuity of the place and the community expresses itself beautifully in Hetty's personality. She has a serenity which is increasingly hard for us to find nowadays, but which many young girls and women used to have when their community was truly local, when pressures on them were natural family concerns rather than something manufactured by advertisers and opinion-makers operating from within some kind of plastic bubble located hundreds or thousands of miles away.

'Sometimes I find that same feminine serenity in ladies older than myself, who have never greatly changed.  Perhaps growing up with very limited finances in the years after the war, they learned real values rather than being brainwashed by superficiality!

'Of course we all have our prejudices and limitations, but into Hetty's character I have poured all the love and kindness which I have known from many women, so that any woman can find something in her with which to identify.  Yes, she is an idealised figure...quite intentionally so...but she is also someone to aspire to...perhaps Eve offering us a different kind of apple.'

'When I meet an interesting young man of Jacques's age, I feel the same paternal warmth which is there in his father's character.  I don't appear to have any children, but there are a couple of unanswered questions from my early years in France, which sent my imagination on this quest of Jacques' to find his parents.

'Jacques' quest is a pure invention, but most of the details in all three books are factually correct and emotionally true to life.  Even the most unlikely events may have actually occurred, which gives a nice sharp edge as I write the fictional characters.  Being truthful, I can be economical, with no need to embellish or over-dramatise.'

'In the beginning, a year or two before I started writing Tunesmith, I was considering various options for using a collection of unpublished music which I had been building for many years.  A musician I used to know spoke of someone being a 'tunesmith', which gave me the idea of a fictional composer coming towards the end of his life in obscurity, even though he has written thousands of tunes, some of them extremely good.'

'Twice when I was playing in George Street in Oban, during the summer of 2010, I met a fisherman who was young enough to be my son. He had once been a very successful fiddler, but gave it up for reasons of his own.

'The following year I played in Rose Street, Edinburgh, with another marvellous young Scottish fiddler.  I also once played with one of the greatest traditional fiddlers in the world, a man who takes the violin to a whole other level, sparking flames through his fingers.  He liked what I was playing and invited me to join him for an evening.

'Many years earlier I had met the brother of one of my great heroes, Django Reinhardt.  He was playing jazz manouche in a back-street bar with some friends, in a southern French town where I had just begun a new job.  Without realising his identity, yet well-aware of his brother's enormous importance in the history of world music, I bought the band a bottle of wine so that they would play a few more tunes...apart from the owner, there were just four Gypsy musicians and an English teenager in that bar.

'It was over forty years later that Joseph Reinhardt's identity was confirmed for me by a friend. It also seems likely that I first heard Django and Joseph's music on record before I was born.'

'This kind of first-hand contact set my imagination alight.  These books are all about contact with real people who have taught me something special, the kind of things which we are unlikely to learn from an app or even a good tutorial video.   Fictionalising this face-to-face human learning-process has felt as natural as riding a bicycle.

'Because reading a book is thoroughly interactive and remarkably natural, perhaps a reader might learn something interesting too, through the fiction.

'I hope that the most interesting thing any reader can learn from these novels is the richness and value of their own memory. If a detail or emotion conveyed through the page conjures a fond recollection or touches a sensitive nerve, then the story has done its job.'

A broader theme of 'the artist in general' runs through all three books.  Percy Stewart grew up watching his father paint, and in his childhood he knew many musicians who are now long-forgotten outside of their own families.

'One of my favourite songs from the last quarter of the last century is Mark Knopfler's In the Gallery, in which he refers to the vultures coming down from the trees.  The song is bitter and clever, like fine dark chocolate, subversive in the way that really good songs can be.  The song was a considerable inspiration to all three of these books, a vindication of one of my chosen themes.'

'Since that first Dire Straits album re-opened our ears to something more complex and subtle than the Punk and Disco which came just before it, in the really important respects, the global art world has hardly changed.  It is largely just as blind, just as superficial and pretentious, just as driven by money packaged with unoriginal words from the mouths of vacuous people...or perhaps even more so.'

'Over forty years later, every line of Mark Knopfler's song is as relevant today.  Many of them are subconscious influences behind details in the Tunesmith stories.

 'Sometimes when I'm writing, I realise that In the Gallery has been playing in my head, reminding me of my father painting and giving its special energy because it links directly with deep, painful personal memories.  In the case of the next book, Feeding the vultures, the direct reference to the song will be obvious to anyone who knows it.

'Some of the most courageous artists die without their work being acknowledged, simply because they will not play the self-promotional games which society expects them to play.  Many of them cannot afford to promote their work, because they are too busy struggling to reach the high standards which they set themselves.  When they die, sooner or later someone sees the sales-potential of their work and within a generation or two, they might become a household name.

'Success in the art world is largely a question of money.  Even when we think of some of the most successful artists, much of their most interesting material is largely unknown, while the tracks which made it to the top ten receive airplay decade after decade, simply because they are already so well-known that they are bankable...though almost certainly not the ones which the artists themselves preferred.

'Listening to Jimi Hendrix on the whole of Electric Ladyland, I realised how little I understood the full spectrum of his work...or just how much he, Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding were influenced by Cream.

'The Beatles' White Album is a marvellous collection of diverse and thought-provoking material, some of it deeply unsettling...yet most people think they know The Beatles because they can sing the chorus of Yellow Submarine!

'Vincent Van Gogh was another obvious historical example.  As a child in the sixties, I had the good fortune to live in a house where there were two books of his paintings.  I knew of his letters to his brother, Theo.  In our sideboard there was a set of postcards and a letter written to my mother by his nephew, who was setting up the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.

'This first-hand knowledge adds a certain weight and authority to the writing, so that when Jacques speaks of his father, or of Vincent Van Gogh, he does so with total confidence and conviction.  In my childhood, most people still seemed to see Van Gogh merely as a crazy, failed painter who shot himself, but then prices of his canvases went through the roof, and millions of people bought reproductions of his sunflowers.

'Who would have thought that a bunch of sunflowers would become one of the most famous and valuable of all images?'

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