David King

About Me

I migrated to Australia in 2007 from Norfolk, England. My work has been broadcast on BBC Radio and has appeared in print and online magazines, including Amarillo Bay, Carve Magazine, Eclectica, Cadenza, Southern Ocean Review, The New Writer, 7th Quark, and World Wide Writers.

For many years, I was Fiction Editor of the UK literary magazine BuzzWords. (www.buzzwordsmagazine.co.uk)

Why do you write?

I write because I have to, the need to do it is ingrained in me.

To me, one of the great joys of writing fiction is in not knowing how the story is going to unfold, the surprise that comes when the characters do not go the way I might expect.

I would never deliberately plot, because then nothing could hold any mystery for me. Frankly, I could only write that way if someone held a Smith and Wesson to my head, and maybe not even then. Some things are worse than death.

I love the re-writing more than the initial draft. Like Carver once said, it is often in the re-writing that I find what I was actually trying to write about.

Any favorite authors? Books?

The first book I actually remember was Treasure Island, which somebody gave me when I was seven. I still have that copy, along with other classics on which I sharpened my reading teeth: Masterman Ready; The Three Musketeers; Ben Hur; Moby Dick.

I moved on to boarding school and discovered Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons in the library there. I have been an avid Ransomite ever since. Like many claim, reading Ransome inspired me to get on the water and sail boats for myself. I have all his books, fiction and non-fiction.

University (although I majored in history and geography) made me rediscover writers I’d refused to appreciate before: Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy. I began to enjoy poetry – Shakespeare and Hardy, Swinburne, and modern(ish) poets like Philip Larkin.

My tastes now are pretty catholic. Some novels I admire are: Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time (I have all 12 volumes); Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being; A.S. Byatt: Possession; Georges Perec: Life: a User’s Manual. In a lighter vein, I like anything by P.G. Wodehouse.

I used to feel cheated by short stories but then I read those of A.E. Coppard and realised what I’d been missing. Now I devour shorts as if they were chocolate bars. I still admire Coppard but I’ve accumulated other literary heroes: Raymond Carver, William Trevor, John Cheever, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and so many more.