Listening In - Scott Preston talks Westerns, writing playlists, and thinking outside of the world of books
Listening In is a series of author interviews, featuring authors whose works have been transformed into audiobooks! Scott Preston is the author of The Borrowed Hills, a debut novel "set in the rugged, rural landscape of northwest England where two sheep farmers lose their flocks and decide to reverse their fortunes by stealing sheep from a rich farm in the south—for fans of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy." The Borrowed Hills is narrated by David Crellin.
Scott Preston is from Windermere in the Lake District, where his father was a drystone waller and his grandparents were national park wardens. He studied philosophy at the University of Sheffield before working as a copywriter. He is a graduate of the University of Manchester's creative writing program and received a PhD in prose fiction from King's College London.
Scott on Instagram | Twitter/X
Please tell us more about The Borrowed Hills! Why should we listen to it?
The Borrowed Hills is a neo-Western set in the hills of northern England. It tells the story of two sheep farmers who lose all of their flocks in the apocalyptic 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease, then decide to reverse their fortunes by stealing sheep from rich farms in the south. Soon after, everything spins out of control.
The novel was written to feel like the thorny ramblings of someone lost in a pint of beer at a country pub. It’s inspired by folk ballads and traditional storytelling and, I think, hearing it read aloud adds another layer of drama. It lets people feel the full of weight of the language with all its rhyme and rhytmn and curious words.
Could you please tell us about your career as an author? What first drew you to writing?
My career as an author began with The Borrowed Hills. Before that, I spent around eight years doing two-bit writing gigs: a year writing CVs, two years writing marketing emails, three years of catalogue copy, and more time than anyone should spend writing about the wonders of ceramic water filters. I had three short stories I kept reworking but could never get them published, and I had given up on fiction until the Covid pandemic when I suddenly had a lot of free time.
We’d love to hear about your writing process. Please elaborate!
On writing days, I usually spend too long in the morning making music playlists that fit with the scenes I’m planning on writing that day, then I circle around those scenes for forty minutes, playing with the sentences nearby before actually writing something, writing for about three or four hours, however long I can keep focus, and I’ll stop then till about midnight which is when all the best writing gets done. I don’t like sitting on a manuscript filled with terrible writing, so I tend to edit a section two or three times before moving on to a new chapter.
What was the research process like for writing this book?
It involved watching a lot of Westerns, a lot of Howard Hawks and John Ford, getting an ear for the razor-sharp dialogue, and thinking about how the dusters, shootouts, and tumbleweeds could be brought to life in the Cumbrian fells without it feeling too much like a Desperate Dan comic strip. But more than anything, it involved listening to people talk, the dalesmen and mountain people I knew, and really trying to capture how they tell stories and create poetry.
Describe your writing style in five words or less.
Sing-song northern gothic.
Any advice for emerging writers?
A lot of young writers start out with a head full of Chaucer, Dostoyesvky, Virginia Woolf — all those great writers taught in schools — or, worse, years and years of undergraduate post-structural gobbledygook. It all needs to be scrubbed out and replaced with the things that really speak to you as a writer. Ideally, things outside of that world of books.
What has been the most exciting part of having your novels transformed into audiobooks?
Many of my friends and family don’t read books but they do listen to podcasts or the radio when they’re out driving or cutting back hedgerows. So, it’s been great to have this audiobook, that’s been narrated so faithfully and so powerfully by David Crellin, to share with them. I doubt they would have experienced the story cover to cover otherwise.
This audiobook is narrated by David Crellin, did you have any say in his casting? What made Crellin the right fit?
The novel is written in Cumbrian dialect and it’s a dialect that is little-heard outside that part of the UK. Many people assume it sounds like a booming Yorkshire accent or a Durham or Lancastrian one: often without having spent much time listening to Cumbrians speak. But it’s a softer, grumblier dialect — at times it has more in common with voices from the West Country, Norfolk or even Wales. I had four fantastic narrators to choose from but David Crellin’s performance immediately reminded me of a few people I knew growing up in the Lakes, perhaps thanks to the influence from his Cumbrian mother, and he brought all the grit, tenderness, and humour the audiobook needed.
Please recommend an audiobook you absolutely adored!
Crow by Ted Hughes. It’s read by the man himself and his voice is somehow stark and warm, wobbly and precise at the same time, and you can hear how much his poems are built around that voice.
What are you reading (or listening to) right now?
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. I’ve been on a classic sci-fi bender recently.
