Introducing: Anthony Ferner

Anthony Ferner is the author of the brand new novella, Inside the Bone Box, published on 11 July 2018.

Anthony started writing fiction back in the 1990s. His first novella, Winegarden, was published in 2015 by Holland Park Press. Anthony’s been a member of the Tindal Street Fiction Group in Birmingham since 2010.

With a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Oxford, and a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Sussex, Anthony had a career in academic research. He was a professor of international business until his retirement in 2014, and has published numerous research articles and monographs on the behaviour of multinational companies.

Anthony is married, with two sons. He now lives in the Midlands. His interests include skating, Spanish and Latin American literature, and languages.

A short Q&A with Anthony can be seen below:

How did you start writing?

Sometime in the early 1990s, a friend and I decided to write feature film scripts. We wrote several. Nothing ever came of them, but learning how to craft them was a valuable apprenticeship for writing fiction. Maybe twenty years ago, I twigged that the chances of getting a script made into a film were virtually zero, so I started on novels instead.

Did you always want to be a writer?

Not really. I wrote stories as a kid, then barely anything more until my forties. From about the age of thirty I felt the need to do something creative alongside my academic research job. For several years it was art. Then I ran out of artistic ideas and turned to writing.

How is academic writing different from working on your own fictional writing? 

Academic writing is highly structured. I always used to say to my graduate students: in the introduction, tell the reader what you’re going to do. Then do it. And conclude by summarising what you’ve just done. Some creative writing – e.g. film scripts – shares a lot of this highly structured approach: the classic three-act structure, and so on. But fiction I find more flexible. Rather than telling the reader what you’re going to do, you often want to conceal your true intentions, and make sure the nuts and bolts of your fictional techniques are not too visible. Whereas in academic writing everything is (should be) spelled out and transparent, including your methods. In fiction, you also want stuff to be going on ‘under the surface’ – the deeper themes, if you like – and there’s no real equivalent to this in academic writing.

But I did learn basic writing discipline from my academic work: the need for structure and flow, the idea that one element should be linked to the next, the overall ‘arc’ of the story you’re telling, the notion that you’re trying to communicate ideas to a reader.

To find out more about Anthony, read his interview here, or follow him on Twitter.