Writer Niall Griffiths is the author of six novels, radio plays, numerous travel articles and lives in Aberystwyth, Wales.

AMERICYMRU: How did you start writing?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: I picked up a pen. Honestly; it seems to've been that simple. I don't know why. There was never any books in the house, but it was full of stories, especially from my grandparents, of the old countries, the war, ghost stories etc. I don't remember the very first thing I wrote but it happened as soon as my motor functions were developed enough to hold a pen. I wrote novels at a very young age, about giant crabs and man-eating wolves, etc. My mum still has them, I think, somewhere. The world seemed less dangerous and threatening when I was writing about it. It seems like writing is always a thing I've felt a terrific compulsion to do. Don't know why, and don't care why, either; I don't question these things. Just accept them.

AMERICYMRU: What is your process as a writer? do you write every day, write in fits and starts, carry a notebook or voice recorder around with you? What's your creative flow?

NIALL GRIFFITH: Well, if I'm working on something big, I let it dictate itself. I'll work every day on it, yes, but if it's not flowing, I stop trying after a couple of hours. If it is flowing, then I can be at my desk for ten hours or so. The average, I guess, is about five hours. I carry a notebook everywhere. And I must write something every day, even if it's only a scribbled free-verse poem or an entry in my journal; I feel wretched if I don't. A blemish on the earth. Catholic guilt perhaps, but so what? It makes me feel worthy, and happy, and alive. Oh, and first-draft always longhand. Probably something to do with being brought up working-class. A proper job gets your hands dirty, even if it is just with smears of ink.

AMERICYMRU: One thing you're fantastically good at is staying in your character's voice throughout a story. Your first-person narrative in Runt, not a simple or easy character, is flawless. Do you base your characters on people that you've met or just develop them wholly yourself?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: Runt was kind of lucky, really; I wrote it in Sweden, when I was writer-in-residence at Lund university, a very flat part of the country. Where I live in Wales, as soon as I step out of the door, I'm bombarded by mountainous words, but in Lund, I wasn't surrounded by high ground, so it was relatively easy to stay within the 700-word or so lexicon that the main character possesses. Call it serendipity. In answer to your question, tho, I guess I'd have to say I don't know. Some parts observation, some parts imagination, and the ratio shifts for each character.

AMERICYMRU: Are your characters built before or as you write them of the things you're writing about, like the description of Kelly with the lamb in her dinosaur's teeth in Kelly+Victor ?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: Again, a bit of both. That particular episode was autobiographical; I actually put shreds of meat into the mouth of a plastic dinosaur, although my dinosaur was a triceratops, which, as we all know, is a vegetarian. I painted his beak blood-red, too. Characters grow as I write them, often exponentially so, and they don't really come to life for me until they open their gobs and speak or do something to surprise me. That sounds horribly precious, and I apologise, but that is kind of how it works: the character becomes rounded when they act out of character. I don't have any time for the kind of writer who says things like 'I love turning my laptop on in the morning to see what my characters have got up to overnight', but I understand what they mean. Sort of. And I'd never tell them that.

AMERICYMRU: The protagonist in Runt is such a beautiful, unusual character - what was your inspiration for him,how did you produce this person and his life?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: Sheer genius. And see the answer to question 3. Also, I wanted to write a book with a restricted vocabulary. I love words, and love being ravished by them, and love creating storms with them, and I wanted to do that in a way other than simply unblocking a torrent, so if I deliberately restrained myself, I'd have to be linguistically creative in a new way. As for the character, he's kind of like the sweeter twin of Ianto in Sheepshagger . He's natural innocence. Ianto is too, in his way, but I wanted to write a simpler innocence versus corruption story. Plus do some delving into shamanism. More than that, of course, but let's leave it there.

AMERICYMRU: The protagonist of Stump retreats to Wales after a disastrous experience in the Liverpool drug underworld. He seems to find the very place names soothing and reassuring. Is he returning to his "roots" and if so is Wales still a place where you can seek refuge from the urban maelstrom?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: In a way, yes, but don't confuse that with Wales being peaceful; it's kind of like finding a God - it's got everything to do with calm, and nothing to do with comfort. Rural Wales is a place of mud and death and shit and bone but it's also a place where connectedness is freely available and notions of re-birth declare themselves openly, and in that way, I find it immeasurably hopeful. Stump 's character retreats to a place that he remembers fleeing to as a child with his family, from his violent father. It's Alistair, in a sense, who rediscovers his roots; notice that he finds an inner strength to deny Darren as soon as they cross the border. It doesn't last long, but there's a flash of it. Alistair, in his way, saves the world - he's a placating influence on Darren, even tho neither of them know it. At least in Stump he is. There's great comic mileage in that double-act, I think.

AMERICYMRU: In Stump there's a violent denoument but it's not the one you expect - did you start this story with that in mind and with its resolution in mind? Were Stump and Wreckage originally one story in your mind or did Wreckage grow out of Stump?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: I wanted Stump to have a happy ending, so had a strong idea of what that would be, yes. And Wreckage did grow out of Stump although I knew that I wanted to explore those characters in greater depth. The first draft went much further; I was planning a section called something like 'Darren, His Antecedent', describing a fish climbing out of the primordial ooze. I didn't write it, on the advice of my editor.

AMERICYMRU: Wreckage is one of the funniest and most poignant books I have ever read. It seems to me that you created two of the finest comedy characters in literature since Falstaff (in Stump ) and wrote a sequel because we all wanted to hear more from them. Obviously the work has a more profound purpose. In what sense does Wreckage represent Liverpool today?

NAILL GRIFFITHS: Liverpool has just come out of it's European Capital of Culture year, so it's a changed city, in many ways, for both good and bad. The most noticeable change is in the general attitude; there's a renewed energy, an optimism, a new kind of buzz. But it's been the by-word for social and political decay for decades, and, given that it's Britain in miniature, what does this tell us? The UK's histories of colonial oppression and multi-culturality and slavery and defiance and everything else can be seen in the microcosm of Liverpool. In writing Wreckage, I didn't want to foreground any one of those narratives, but to look at them all, or as many as I possibly could. It's part of the fight against cliche, and neatness. A war in which each of us must play our parts.

AMERICYMRU: Does Sheepshagger represent a conscious attempt to undermine Anglo-Welsh literary stereotypes?

AMERICYMRU: Your characters are very "warty" and real, unpolished and smelly like real people really are, and you write them doing awful things and full of failings and weakness but also respectfully, as though you're presenting them whole but not to be ridiculed. Would you agree with this and if so, is it intentional? Why?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: Yes, and yes. Why? Because I believe that dignity is not a conferred quality; it's innate in human beings. It's one of the most valuable traits we have, and is, sadly, crumbling. People aren't simply vessels for a single act or outlook, nor are they simply the results of linear causation, yet they're often perceived to be precisely that, none more so, in today's tabloid culture, than the kinds of people I write about. I don't agree with everything they say and do, nor do I always like them, but I believe that they should be allowed to develop free from authorial censure. That's not my job. I write against reductionism, so it's imperative that I write my characters in all their moods, explore all their loves and perversions and tendernesses and guilts. One review of my first novel, Grits, said that 'each episode recounted bears the stamp of authentic experience, and is driven by angry love', or something very like that. Couldn't've put it better meself.

AMERICYMRU: Your endings fit your characters so well - Runt has a "happy" ending, Stump suffers enough, Kelly+Victor and Sheepshagger are inevitable, Wreckage is also inevitable but very neatly avoids the morality tale. Do you have these in mind when you start writing or do they develop with the characters?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: Again, a bit of both. Sorry, that sounds like a cop-out. . . I have a strong sense of what the ending should be - Victor would die, Stump's feller would escape, etc. - but no concrete notions of how I would get there. Plastic notions, yes, amenable to moulding, but nothing rigid. A crap analogy; you have a blank wall, several different tins of paint, brushes of several sizes, a roller, a spraygun, etc. All of them are means towards a painted wall, but you don't know, before you start, how precisely you'll do it. See; told you it was a crap analogy. But it illustrates my point. I hope.

AMERICYMRU: Is there one thing you've done that you're more proud of than others, one that you love more than the others? What is it and why?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: Well, Grits saved me from myself, I guess; I was in something of a mess, before I wrote it, and, in fact, during much of it's writing. I was living as my characters were, but the writing about my experiences gradually overtook the 'homework', as it were. It's my most autobiographical, so I'm very fond of it. Stylistically, I like Sheepshagger , technically, K+V and Stump , linguistically, Runt . . . I don't know; the answer to the question 'what do you think is your best book?' is always 'the next one'. It needs to be. The one I'm about to start writing, called A Great Big Shining Star , will be better than all the others put together. I have to keep telling myself that.

AMERICYMRU: Do you have anything in particular you want to achieve as a writer, a particular goal or goals?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: Just to write and write and write until I die at a very old age. When I was younger, I used to think that the likes of Thomas and Behan and Fitzgerald and Byron and Shelley had it right; burn out, don't fade away, blaze half as long but twice as bright. Now that I've reached my early forties, miraculously it sometimes seems, I admire those who stoked the fire until the very last moment; Johnny Cash, Hardy, Bukowski, Burroughs. Funny that, innit?

AMERICYMRU: Who do you like to read? Who are you reading at the moment?

NIALL GRIFFITHS: America's producing the best writers now, in my opinion: McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Dan Woodrell, loads more. Much British stuff is parochial, dull, smug, irreparably middle-class, but of course there are exceptions. I read voraciously, always have; constant bedtime companions are religious tracts, volumes of nature writing, Renaissance and Jacobean tragedies. At the moment I'm juggling [Roberto] Bolano's 2666 , [Micheal] Braddick's God's Fury, England's Fire (a history of the English civil wars), Interrogations [ Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 by Richard Overy](a collection of interviews with the Nazi elite), an anthology of Gothic horror stories, and a book about the DeCavalcante Mafia family of New Jersey. It's becoming increasingly difficult to navigate my way around my house; there are towers of books everywhere.

Books by Niall Griffiths

Grits Cape, 2000 Sheepshagger Cape, 2001 Kelly &Victor Cape, 2002 Stump Cape, 2003 Wreckage Cape, 2005 Runt Cape, 2006 Real Aberystwyth (with Peter Finch) Seren, 2008 Real Liverpool (with Peter Finch) Seren, 2008 Ten Pound Pom Parthian Books, 2009