What I read while writing The Salt Line

People ask what I read for research and expect a list of novels. It is almost never novels. While a book is open I find fiction contaminating — I start borrowing cadence without noticing — so the reading goes sideways.

Engineering and its reports

Coastal defence literature is written by people with no incentive to be interesting, which makes it strangely good on consequence. A shoreline management plan will describe managed realignment of a parish in the register of a parking scheme, and the gap between the register and the fact is exactly where a novel lives.

If you read one thing: any local authority’s published shoreline management plan for a stretch of coast you know. They are free, they are long, and the section headed “Do nothing” is always the one that stays with you.

Agricultural economics, mostly from the seventies

Because the debt in the book is a 1974 debt, and I needed to know what the interest on it would have felt like to somebody with three hundred acres of reclaimed grazing. Farm management handbooks of the period are dry and precise and full of assumptions their authors did not know they were making.

Oral history collections

The best single source for how people talk about work is a transcribed oral history, because the interviewer is not shaping the sentences. Regional archives and university projects publish these and almost nobody reads them.

The three novels

I did read three, all late, all deliberately unlike the book:

• Something comic, to remember that a page can move fast.
• Something in translation, to hear English as a choice rather than a default.
• Something I had read before at twenty, to find out which parts of my taste were mine and which were borrowed.

The thing about research reading

None of it appears in the book. What it does is make the world in your head denser than the world on the page, which is the only reliable way I know to stop prose sounding thin. The reader should feel that you stopped writing, not that you ran out.