Deon Meyer mails me to say he’s going to be in Joburg, Cape Town and then Loxton. For an award-winning writer, his spelling is atrocious. Surely he means London? How on Earth will I be able to afford to phone him there?
Lesson 1: Famous authors do a lot of jet-setting.
Lesson 2: They often get tired of jet-setting.
Lesson 3: After jet-setting they like to go somewhere quiet.
Lesson 4: Loxton is a very quiet place.
“We’re here for three months,” Deon says. “Just hang on one second.” I hear him bid someone goodbye in Afrikaans. “Baaie dankie, hoor.”
Loxton, a tiny Karoo town in the Northern Cape, is a place of ooms and seuntjies; a place where the plumber knows everyone and the butcher keeps aside your favourite wors. It has bouquets of windmills, a whitewashed church and fields of sheep – and for three months a year, it hosts South Africa’s most successful crime writer.
“Nice for some,” I joke.
But for Deon, whose books have been translated into 25 languages and who has won a slew of local and international awards, the Karoo break is not all about stoep-sitting. He’ll take a month off and then start his new book in January. When I ask what it’s about, he laughs: “There’s not much to tell yet.”
Contrary to the belief that authors lounge around in leathery studies, occasionally launching into a frenzy of inspiration, writing is hard work. Meyer says he usually spends three months doing book launches abroad, and even when he has afternoons to himself, they are often filled with business.
“You’ll be surprised how many meetings and other stuff authors have to attend to.”
Deon is workmanlike about his writing. “Writing is not so much an art, but a craft,” he says. During his time as a transport reporter with Volksblad, he sought out ordinary people doing extraordinary things - “people who made steam trains work, people who put together engines”. What he found was that creativity is more ubiquitous and less rarified than we think. “So many people are creative - I bet there’s even creative bookkeeping,” he says, “anyway, it’s a bit scary to think of myself as an artist.”
He says writing doesn’t come easily. He sits, he smokes, and every morning he edits the work he did the day before. “It’s a hard slog - every paragraph and every page. I just have the urge, the desire to tell stories. Most authors are never happy with what they have written.”
When we’re all tucked up in duvet land, Deon starts his working day at 5.30am. While he prefers to write in his own study, he has learnt to write in hotel rooms and on trains. “I write until lunchtime – which is about six or seven hours – and then in the afternoons there’s the admin.” After all that, the reward is sweet: “I love chocolate. It’s my payment at the end of the day.”
Deon penned his first “proper story” at the age of 14. “It was 15 pages long. At the time, I was obsessed with World War II, and the story was about a South African fighter pilot and all the adventures he had.”
In his mid-30s, he started writing short stories. “I’d always planned to write a novel, and started out writing short stories. I wanted to learn the craft, to start at the bottom. I’m glad I did. Short stories were a good school.” He says the jump from writing 5 000-word stories to a full-length novel was tough. “It’s like going from a 100m to running a marathon.”
While he’s tried his hand at writing other types of stories – a science fiction piece for Die Burger and the rom-com screenplay Jakhalsdans, which did well on the local circuit – he says he’s naturally drawn to crime fiction and thrillers. “Most authors have a natural niche. I don’t think in genre, I think of stories.”
And for Deon, story is everything. “It comes before the characters. It’s always the starting point.” To keep track of the complicated plots, he relies on technology. He assigns his characters to an Exel spreadsheet to ensure timeline continuity, and uses Microsoft One Note to log his research. “It’s a really cool program.”
Research is one of Deon’s favourite processes, and he invests a lot of time in it, interviewing everyone from cops and detectives to prostitutes and game trackers. “The research only ends when the book ends,” he says.
“It gives me more creative options. Even though I only use a small amount of the research in the books, it’s vital for drawing on. It allows me to pick and choose what I need.”
With universities and colleges increasingly offering creative writing courses, does Deon believe writing can be taught?
“It can – to people who want to write. The difference between authors and non-authors is that authors write. They have an urge.”
When he’s not hatching new characters embroiled in shady dealings, Deon takes off on his BMW adventure bike, riding as far afield as the Rockies in the US. However he counts Baviaanskloof in the Eastern Cape as his favourite ride.
Even though he has the enviable position of being a full-time writer and he’s recognised across the globe – from London to Loxton – Deon is still overwhelmed by his success.
“I pinch myself all the time. It’s unbelievable. When I started writing in Afrikaans, there was no hope of getting published overseas.”
And he’s still humble, committed to his craft. “Fame is a relative concept. I’d rather hide behind my books, but the modern publishing industry doesn’t work that way.”
Does he ever worry that he’ll run out of stories? “No, my greatest worry is dying before I’ve told all my stories,” he says, laughing. - Sunday Tribune