Interview: SpaceTM's Joe meets Graham Rawle [002]

If we had a look round your home, do you think we could tell it was yours? 

Oh, I think so. An art collector once visited and said it was like walking into one of my pictures. I took that as a great compliment. Of course, my wife has all her stuff here as well, but she’s an artist too and we share a lot of the same interests so there’s a good degree of overlapping. Mine is much messier and possibly more arbitrary, while her collecting seems a little more discerning and refined (though she does have a collection of ‘things that have been flattened on the road’ and one of ‘bits of twisted wire’).

How would you describe your studio?

It’s a big open warehouse space in Shoreditch, bought in 1994 when property was cheap round these parts. It was just a shell, with nothing done to it. Apart from the basics, a kitchen space and bathroom, we haven’t done much else to it since we moved in. I think about it sometimes, but we’re always so busy and don’t seem to find the time. Work takes priority. It’s a working space that we live in, rather than a living space that we work in.

What's inspiring you the most at the moment?

I’m writing a novel at the moment and trying to work out the details of my plot. The second act is all over the place, but it takes a long time to get these things to work. It will go through many drafts before it’s done.

I think my writing is more influenced by cinema than anything else: the economy with which good stories are told. I watch certain films over and over again, analyzing the story structure to discover how this has been achieved. This affects the way I construct and edit my writing. It can be a little thing like starting scenes as late as possible and getting out of them as soon as their objective is reached, but overall I think it gives my stories a more cinematic feel, which seems appropriate to their content.

Graham Rawle's book The Wizard of Oz, a visual reinterpretation of L. Frank Baum's original text, is out now. His critically acclaimed Woman's World, a novel created entirely from fragments of found text, is being made into a feature film and his weekly Lost Consonants first appeared in the Weekend Guardian in 1990 and ran for 15 years.