Tony Parsons’ Writing Routine

“You have to trust your own voice. You have to earn the right to be read, and then you have to fight to keep every reader.”

Tony Parsons grew up in the 1960s in Billericay, Essex, the son of a Royal Navy veteran and a school dinner lady. The house was full of books and music, but never money. He worked his first jobs in factories and warehouses, once bottling gin at the Gordon’s Distillery. “My dad was a greengrocer,” Parsons said. “There was never any money, but they were creative people who loved music, books and culture and they passed that on to me.”

He was barely out of his teens when he landed a job at the New Musical Express, the music paper of record for a generation. Parsons arrived in 1976, just as punk was detonating across the UK. He covered The Clash, hung out with Sid Vicious, and shared a desk with Julie Burchill. “You’d go into the office and might find one of the Sex Pistols or the Rolling Stones overdosing in the stationery cupboard,” he told The Times. It was a front-row seat to the cultural revolution — sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, in deadline form.

But it was fiction that stayed with him. His first novel, The Kids, was published when he was 21. It was overwrought and earnest, the kind of book a young man writes with too many feelings and not enough form — but it got him out of the gin factory and into the newsroom. He kept writing, working as a columnist, TV critic, and novelist for decades. In 1999, his seventh book changed everything.