Doug Wiggins

Doug: Yes, “Branscombe” was the first novel I attempted. I had written some short pieces before that, mainly for Theatre Restaurant shows and a few short stories but never anything of length.
I had been visiting my mum and step dad as I had just been informed by my wife that our marriage was over and I was in a fragile state of mind. I had taken to walking along the pathway that runs along Largs Bay in Adelaide's port district. That started me making notes about a storyline I was thinking of developing, then I started going to the local RSL with my step dad and entered into conversations with a few sergeants of police that were my dad’s acquaintances.
So as actors do I tuned in to their conversations and stored away snippets for future use. One of these police officers taught at the police academy at Fort Largs and there I saw the link between the lonely man walking in the wind and rain when suddenly his life is changed; on the one hand the character by the phone call recalling him to active service and on the other the writer by finding the impulse to create the character of John Branscombe.
As a writer I am interested in how a person reacts when his life is suddenly changed and how he or she reacts to this change. Brancscome goes from being a retired detective to being plunged into personal and professional whirlpools where he has to sink or swim and this was the basis of the story.
I found that as the great playwright Harold Pinter said, once you have the characters in place they in effect write the story and this is what I have found with my stories. If the characters are interesting enough and believable then you have a story. Most of the elements in the story although entirely fictitious are taken from real situations I have heard about or personally come across and have as an actor/writer stored away to be used at the right time in the right novel.

Doug: I don't see a lot of difference between acting and writing novels. I am a character based novelist, and as an actor your job is to get inside another person’s head space to see how they are and what they are. No difference in writing except that you have no audience to tell you if you're on the right track or not. So fortunately I had a life of experience as an actor to give me my parameters.
I have always written whether it be poems or sketches for reviews or just short outlines. However as a working actor who was rarely out of work there wasn't a great deal of time. I was what we call a ‘bread and butter actor’, never a star or leading man so it was important to work as often as possible and to do all the extra jobs outside of the business that I could. Then my wife gave me my ‘redundancy notice’ and there I was emotionally bereft! So acting was out of the question but as I had the time and pension age was dramatically close, after a short period in the employ of a big telco with suit and tie solving problems for the high end of the business, (one of my longest acting gigs!) I decided to write full time. So with the aid of my pension and my savings I moved to Europe for part of the year and here I am, three novels completed and three almost ready with a number of outlines waiting, three months in the UK two or three in Venice and the rest in my Adelaide home.