Richard Milward interview: Smokestack writing

The local author – Middlesbrough's JD Salinger, if you believe the hype – is standing outside the town hall at the appointed hour, a long drink of water in turquoise ski-jacket, skinny jeans and white trainers with pink laces. A scarf in the red of the town football team is tied over his mouth, cowboy-style, and giant snowflakes are melting on his prominent nose, then shooting off the tip as if it were a ski-jump.

Richard Milward – author of the acclaimed coming-of-age novel Apples and now Ten Storey Love Song, the tale of a tower block and its hedonistic, hellzapoppin' occupants told in a single, 286-page paragraph – loves Middlesbrough very much.

He's keen to show me the sights, but in the whiteout I can't see them, and with pink laces flapping he's struggling to keep his feet, so we slither into a pub. It's part of an ersatz olde worlde chain where the only permitted regional variations are the sepia prints. "Beautiful," says Milward, who's still just 24, as we plonk ourselves under the most representative image of 'Boro – those spewing chimneys.

"Our dad worked for ICI for 25 years and ended up in the labs, testing the plastic for lemonade bottles," he explains over a Guinness. "'Boro is dead proud of its industrial heritage but I was always going to write. When I was 11 the Trainspotting film was everywhere and I pestered our mum to buy me the book. She had to check if it was suitable, and it fell open at the page where this lad was injecting smack in his cock, so then I had to find where she'd hidden it. It was dead different from the books in the mobile library we got force-fed at school, these American horror stories set at slumber parties."

So what appealed? He laughs. "Basically I wanted to get wrecked like the Trainspotting guys."

First, though, Milward wanted to write like the Irvine Welsh guy. "My first Trainspotting rip-off was called Insane Doubts, set in Edinburgh, though I'd never been, with no drugs, no sex but a fair bit of drink. I sent it to Canongate. They wrote back saying: 'There's no way you're 12!', so I fired off my birth certificate. That was really encouraging, so I wrote another book, and another. I got stacks of rejection letters but I kept writing. As a lad I was quite reclusive. I liked football but I liked writing better, and I've never seen the point of computer games."

At 15, Milward was tall enough to get served in pubs – all for the purpose of writerly research, you understand. Student life introduced him to drugs and, with a perfectly straight face, he says Middlesbrough began taking on a decadent aspect similar to Weimar Berlin. He was two months into continuing his art studies at St Martin's College in London when Faber and Faber told him that after six failed novels they were going to publish his seventh.

Apples is about 15-year-olds who are into pills, watermelon Breezers, Kappa trackies and so much shagging it's the random mentions of Newsround and Tigger mugs that shock. In Ten Storey Love Song the characters are a bit older and they've got flats, cars, jobs (well, one has), relationships, affairs and issues, as well as stronger booze and better drugs. There's extreme violence in the book but also a rare sense of community, and I don't just mean the queue of girls from the high-rise keen for Bobby the Artist to paint them in the scud when London's culturati garland him as 'Boro's Klimt-like genius.

Bobby is hugely disappointed by London, the sprawl and rudeness of the place and its impersonal, insincere and grasping nature, and to some extent these were Milward's experiences with Apples: "I hated London to the back teeth. It's so anonymous I would have killed to have a drink with a Geordie, and things have to be bad for a 'Boro lad to say that. And London can really twist you. You find your accent changing because no one understands you, and you end up dead paranoid like everyone else.

"Before Apples I didn't know what was what, so when it started being hyped I was really out of my depth. There were these literary parties, and don't get me wrong, the free drink was cracking, but I can't schmooze to save myself and most of the time I'd be sat on me tod until I'd get introduced to someone who was (gushing voice] simply dying to meet me, only this bloke hadn't read my book either and he'd be pointing at me in my tracky top and going: 'Look at him – a genius!' So yeah, sometimes I felt just like Bobby, this lad who's been discovered in the grim north-east."

Milward has since moved back to Middlesbrough, to his own flat overlooking a kebab shop, and while he now tolerates London in small doses, like when he visits his girlfriend who's studying fashion there, it's made him appreciate his home patch even more. Lots of things in Milward's life are "beautiful", for instance: "The dole is beautiful for being creative." But none is more beautiful than his dirty old town, which may have Costa Coffee and Carphone Warehouse like everywhere else, but claims a language of its own. A "parmo" is a 'Boro delicacy of chicken swamped in cheese and deep-fried, and an Ecstasy can be many things: "prawn", "little fella", "Gary Gurner".

Milward admits he was slightly uncomfortable cast in the role of the Wayne Rooney of Brit-lit and is much happier now there's a second book to his name. But Ten Storey Love Song wasn't the difficult second novel, more the fairly straightforward eighth, because whatever the quality of the rejected ones, they've helped him develop a failsafe writing process involving no Gary Gurners: "My pencil has to be dead sharp, my hands have to be clean, my sounds have to be at volume two and I have to be lying on my bed. I'm quite obsessive/compulsive, you see."

About 'Boro as well. As my train heads north and I look back at the smokestacks, it's hard to disagree with the local author: they're beautiful, too.

• Ten Storey Love Song (Faber and Faber, 10.99) is published on February 19