A Q&A with Daniel Caine
Do you have any daily routines that help with the creative process of writing?
I’m sure I do, but I write when I have no choice but to write – there and then, in the moment. I admire writers that are disciplined and sit down to write at set times of the day. That’s just not me. I meditate, workout at the gym, spend time with my dog and stare inanely into space for longer than I perhaps should. It all seems to work for me, despite there being no structured routine.
Do you find the writing process difficult or easy?
I’d say it’s challenging most of the time, if I’m being honest. Beginnings and endings are easy. You effortlessly open a new page to begin writing in the same way that a reader opens the book to begin reading. And your final full stop at the end is the same full stop that the reader sees before closing the book. It’s the 400 pages in between that can be frustratingly hard to write to ensure the reader remains hooked enough to see that final full stop.
That’s the difference in songwriting. The first 90 seconds are spent beginning the song – throw in a quick middle eight – and the last 90 seconds are spent ending the song with refrains of how you started.
So you see parallels between being an author and a songwriter?
There are parallels, for sure. But in writing lyrics, having to evoke a protagonist in a word, their life in a line, and their fate in a verse does present its own challenges. The entire story has to be told in a few short lines on a single page. On the other hand, having 400 pages to fill is a luxury that is daunting in its own way. Writing novels and writing songs are both creative equals. I think of a song as being just one chapter of a book. And I think of each chapter of a book as the next song I am writing. It helps me get through those 400 pages.
And what inspired you to write Matter of Time?
The initial inspiration actually came from one of the unconscious scrawling passages I’d written across my maths homework when I was eleven. I suppose that opens up the question of where creativity itself comes from. We’ll never know – not in this realm of existence, at least. But on a more conscious level, I’ve always been intrigued about where the lines between the paranormal and normal blur and where the supernatural and natural collide to become one. There truly is no distinction between these things. The idea that everything in our global scientific knowledge base is real and true, and anything that science does not yet have an answer for is unreal and false is a ludicrous and limiting unscientific approach that’s adopted too often by science itself. I can’t think of any better words than supernatural and paranormal to describe the quantum phenomena scientists are observing daily in their labs as they struggle to fully explain them. Those quantum phenomena are far more unbelievable than the psychic phenomena people describe. But the words supernatural and paranormal will remain descriptors of psychic phenomena until new scientific knowledge finally renders them natural and normal. Matter of Time is as much a crime thriller as a work of science fiction, and it’s only natural for me to embed some reference to the science vs. paranormal impasse because it interests me so much.
