When Less Is More
What Author Mike Leaver Can Teach Us About Writing from Life
What would it take for you to strip your life back to almost nothing, and find that what remained was enough?
Mike Leaver has lived in a static lorry in Porthmadog, North Wales for 30 years. No electricity, no mains water, and no internet. Mike spends around £15 a week on groceries, writes by candlelight, and has published five books since 2021. Incredibly, a YouTube video about his life has now exceeded one million views, and it seems that people can’t get enough of Mike’s unusual way of living. He didn’t seek any of it out. He just kept living the way he wanted to live and writing about it honestly.
I spoke with Mike on the Writing with Purpose podcast, and while his life looks nothing like conventional creative wisdom, there’s something in his approach that cuts right to the heart of why we write at all.
Writing from What’s Happened
Mike’s two autobiographies, ‘Yeti Seeks Mate’ and ‘English, Solitaire, Cowboy, Cuckoo…’, were written from contemporaneous notes he kept across four decades. The notes weren’t reconstructed from memory years later but were recorded as life happened and returned to when the time was right. This is one way I would describe a journalling practice, and a great approach to keeping a life log. Yet Mike doesn’t journal, and that’s not why he writes about his life – it’s more on purpose than that.
“I tend to think of the narrative when I’m in bed, just lying down, going over and over again and making up the story, seeing where it’s going to go or just remembering what happened and recording the facts. And then the following day I will get up and write that section.”
There’s something a bit radical about that because most of us wait until we feel ready, or until we have enough distance, or until the story makes sense. Mike’s approach suggests that the notes themselves are the practice. The thinking happens first, in the dark, before the page, and the writing is the last part.
Mike’s autobiographies cover a life that most people would find unimaginable: years of homelessness after his boat sank and took everything with it, job loss after he stood up against unequal pay for women at work, a series of romantic adventures that went wrong in increasingly memorable ways, and a midlife crisis at 40 that ended with him driving a lorry to Africa and never quite coming back. These incidents aren’t dramatised for effect – they’re what happened in reality for Mike.
When Fiction Lets You Go Further
Alongside his autobiographies, Mike has written three novels: ‘Nork From Nowhere’, ‘The Ice Cream Terrorist’, and ‘Newspaper Curtains’. The novels let him do something the autobiographies cannot.
“Where other people are involved who I can’t actually tell their bit of the story, then sometimes I will put them situations into a fictional situation because then I’m free to go with thoughts that they might be having.”
This is a distinction worth noting as a writer. In an autobiography, you can only report what you know, what you witnessed, what happened to you. The inner lives of other people remain opaque, yet fiction can dissolve that boundary. Mike uses his characters not to invent experience, but to honour it by giving voice to perspectives he couldn’t ethically claim in his own name.
He’s also not precious about where the material comes from. To write convincing female characters, he reads widely outside his own experience. He studied at a school where he was the only boy in a class of fifteen girls. He pays close attention to the people around him. “I deliberately read fiction, or some serious books as well, that will give me insight into other people’s characters.” Writing authentically, for Mike, means doing the research, even when the research is being curious about other people’s lives.
A Life Stripped Back to What Matters
The off-grid life isn’t incidental to Mike’s writing either. It is, in many ways, the condition that makes it all possible.
When people visit him in the lorry, Mike notices the effect it has on them. “I’ve got about four or five people who, when they get stressed with life, they just want to come round to the lorry, sit in the armchair by the fire, candlelight at night, maybe have a cup of coffee.” To me, Mike seems to offer simplicity for people who are overwhelmed. They take some time out in a space free from notifications, distractions, and the background hum of technology. It’s just the fire, the candles, and whoever has come to talk.
Mike writes on a battery-powered laptop in word processor mode, not connected to anything. In winter, he takes it to the library to charge. When a piece of writing is finished, he hands it to his agent on a memory stick. The process is so stripped back it almost sounds like a different century. But it works for Mike and enables him to produce roughly a book a year.
There’s a lesson to be learnt here for anyone who believes they need more, better, or different conditions before they can write. Mike has none of the usual infrastructure and has written five books – so the conditions were never the problem.
Living the Adventures, Then Finding the Story
Mike’s publicist describes him as a Walter Mitty figure, someone who lives the stories rather than imagining them. Mike’s response to that framing is characteristically practical.
“Ultimately, writing is just about having a fantasy, but you then have to go back and rewrite it and edit it probably 50 times, so it makes sense to other people.”
The adventures come first: a flooded pothole; a climb up the back of a cinema wall; a drive to Africa at 40; a love story conducted underground. These experiences provide the raw material. What turns them into books is the patient, repetitive work of returning to them, thinking them through, and writing them down until they hold together for a reader sitting in an armchair and being whisked away to somewhere they’ve never been.
Mike doesn’t experience his life as material. He experiences it as life. The writing comes after, as a way of making sense of it, passing it on, and occasionally giving voice to emotions that were too difficult, or too close to other people, to name directly.
“More things happen in my life than I can write about at the moment,” he says. And that’s not a complaint from Mike – it sounds like contentment.
Your Turn: Writing from Life
Mike’s approach to writing offers an invitation to take your own life more seriously as source material.
The technique that fits this episode is what Mike does instinctively: he thinks through the narrative before committing it to the page. He lies in the dark, turning events over, and only writes the following morning. This is a form of reflective processing that works in journalling, making a deeper, more profound and intentional practice.
Try this sequence across a few sessions:
Begin with observation. Choose one real incident from the past few months, something small is fine. Write it down exactly as it happened, just the facts, no interpretation. What do you notice when you remove the editorialising?
Then write from inside it. Return to the same incident and write from the perspective of someone else who was present. What might they have been thinking or feeling that you couldn’t know at the time? Let yourself imagine it honestly.
Finally, ask: what can only fiction say? Is there something in your life, an emotion, a relationship, an experience, that you’ve never been able to write about in your own voice? Try writing it as a character who is not quite you. Give them a different name, a different town, and see what becomes possible.
You don’t need perfect conditions, a particular journal, or a quiet room to write and benefit from that process. Mike wrote some of his best material lying in the dark in a lorry in North Wales. The story was always there, it just needed unpicking or piecing together and then somewhere to go.
Listen to the full conversation with Mike Leaver on Episode 74 of the Writing with Purpose podcast.