On How the Novels Began

I did not begin writing novels by plan. It happened gradually.

For many years, as a visual artist, I was preoccupied with space and pressure. I was interested in how environments shape behaviour, how silence carries weight, how structure can contain or quietly restrain what unfolds within it. These concerns appeared first in drawing, in the balance of a page, in the placement and pressure of a line.

Over time, without any formal decision, that same inquiry moved into fiction. The themes did not change. Only the form shifted.

Fiction allowed the pressure of a space to extend inward, into perception, into hesitation, into those small recalibrations that occur before they are recognised. A room could become psychological. A system could reveal itself not through force, but through adjustment.

I do not write novels to deliver a message. I do not feel that I have something to say in a direct sense. Instead, I construct conditions. Rooms. Atmospheres. Working groups. I observe what unfolds within them.

If meaning appears, it does so indirectly.

This approach is central to The Inclination. Set in West Berlin in the early nineteen seventies, it follows a small group of artists rehearsing a play in a borrowed flat. Nothing is explicitly forbidden. There is no dramatic rupture. Instead, attention shifts. Language tightens. Curiosity narrows into efficiency. What begins as exploration becomes containment.

The novel is concerned less with censorship than with scrutiny. Not visible restriction, but the subtle way permission itself can become pressure. The room remains unchanged, yet its atmosphere alters. Behaviour adjusts before anyone names the change.

That gradual movement, from provisional freedom to quiet containment, is what continues to interest me. How systems account for themselves. How individuals adapt within them. How endings arrive without spectacle.

The novels published under Circle Line Press continue to explore these questions. They are concerned with structure, discipline, and the fragile balance between control and presence. The events are restrained. What shifts is alignment.

Writing is not explanation. It is a continuation of the same investigation that began in drawing. How space holds us. How we respond once we begin to recognise its pressure.

Further reading:

Fiction published under Circle Line Press

Drawing and creative tutorials at Circle Line Art School

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