Ask the Write Questions with David Nicholls
Read a Transcription of our Podcast Interview with novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls.
Your questions were answered by David.
***If you haven’t watched Us, please find it on 大象传媒 iPlayer now as there may be spoilers within the Podcast***
Hello and welcome to Ask the Write Questions with David Nicholls, a podcast from 大象传媒 Writersroom. If you haven't watched ‘Us’, please catch it now on 大象传媒 iPlayer, or there may be some spoilers. In this series, we asked you, the viewer, to send in questions for the writer about their latest show and their writing career. We collated all of your questions, threw them in a bowl and we're going to ask the writer to choose them now at random; he is not sure what is coming next. Let's meet our writer David Nicholls.
Hello, everyone. My name's David Nicholls. I'm a novelist and screenwriter. I’ve written books like ‘Starter for Ten’, ‘One Day’ (I think that’s the most famous one), ‘Us’ and the most recent novel is called ‘Sweet Sorrow’. And on screen I’ve just written the TV adaptation of ‘Us’ which has been on 大象传媒 One, as well as adaptations of ‘Patrick Melrose’, an original play called ‘The 7.39’ which was on recently, adaptations of classic novels ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, ‘Great Expectations’, ‘Tess [of the D’Urbervilles]’, a whole range of things. I'm here today to talk a little bit about writing for the screen, mostly. But I have a whole list of questions and I’m not quite sure what is going to come up, but I will pick them at random and hopefully the questions that you very kindly sent in, will make the cut - so here we go. Here's the first question.
The first question comes from Alison Carter via email.
Could you have written the script for ‘Us’ without first having the fully worked out novel to work from?
That is such an interesting question because often when I start a project I have a little discussion with myself - should this be on the page or should it be on the screen? And initially with ‘Us’, it seemed essential to me that it was in Douglas's head; that it was his point of view, that there was something about his voice that was distinctive, because this was someone who doesn't say what they mean and doesn't express their emotions, who is a little bit buttoned up, and that's his dilemma and that seems most naturally to work on the page because a page gives you access to an interior monologue, rather than just the action and dialogue of a screenplay. Having said that, I think if someone had said to me “I've got this idea, it’s about a guy, whose just before he’s about go on his last family holiday, his wife says she's unhappy, and when their son leaves she wants to leave and they go on a road trip and he tries to make things right.” I think I could have seen that on screen, I think I could of seen that as something with quite a lot of forward momentum with obviously, the benefit of all those brilliant backgrounds but I would have written it differently. I’d have written it more as an ensemble. I think I would have written scenes with Connie and Albie by themselves. I wouldn't have written such a Douglas scented version - it would have been spread between the three characters because screenwriting/filmmaking, it's obviously a three dimensional world. That very singular point of view, it doesn't really exist in the same way on-screen. I mean you could have a Steadicam and just see what that character sees, but you would go crazy pretty quickly. The inclination in screenplays is to populate the world and so it would have been a different story. But the framework itself, the motive for the story, the dilemma that the characters find themselves in, I think that could also have worked as an original screenplay.
OK, the next question comes from. IamVijayBharati via Instagram
The initial thing you need to learn before you start writing?
Well… I'm not sure there is anything that I would say is a definite prerequisite. I think there are various qualities you need to acquire – I hope I’m not misinterpreting this question, but I think you have to have a certain amount of resilience, an acceptance that people won't like your work or they may like it, but they may criticise it. And that's fine. That's actually part of the process. It would be very, very unusual if you sat down and wrote a masterpiece first time round. You are going to have stuff passed back to you with red marks in the margins and you are going to take a deep breath and do it. So you do need to learn some resilience but you also need to learn some confidence because no one has a special licence or permit to do this. You need to feel that you have as much right to show your work and to share it with people as anyone does and it can be daunting and frightening because you think if I get a bad critique, if I get a rejection letter, I'm going to find it very hard to carry on. But if you don't show it to anyone, if you don’t put it in an envelope and send it off then nothing's going to happen. And I found that very hard. I didn’t do that until very late in my twenties and I didn't make a living as a writer until somewhere into my thirties. So it took me a while to get to this stage and I'm still not quite sure that I'm very good with the resilience. I do find sending stuff out into the world quite terrifying, but those are the two qualities which I think you do have to acquire before you can really get on with things.
An anonymous email. I can see why you're anonymous. It's the age old question.
Cats or dogs?
I’m wary of saying this out loud - I have a cat, but I'd like a dog. That's all I'm going to say.
This is a very interesting question from anonymous via email.
Do I have a writing playlist?
I don't have a playlist that I use to write to. When I started I did. I mean, when I started I could write with anything blaring out but something's happened to my brain and I can't do that now. And I tend to put on Bach to be honest, keyboard music, nothing orchestral, nothing with a vocal and my hope is that the music will stop and I won't notice and I will lose the self-consciousness that I feel every day when I sit down at the desk. But I also had another kind of music, which I call on a lot, which is a kind of mood music, a kind of mood board for each novel and so every book I've written has a kind of informal play list, which I might not make into a formal place until after the book is written, but what I want the novel to feel like. So with ‘Sweet Sorrow’ it wasn't just nineties Britpop. In fact, it's very little Britpop, but it was a kind of earnest student music, the kind of music you listen to when you're that age and you suddenly want to share your great taste with people. So there's a lot of things like Nina Simone, Nick Drake and a lot of a lot of kind of rather gentle old music, that a cool seventeen year old would know about. Part of the inspiration for the novel came from a song. That happens quite often as well. With ‘Sweet Sorrow’, the inspiration for the novel was a Pulp song called ‘David's Last Summer’, a brilliant song which is, coincidentally, from the nineties, but also seemed to capture a feeling of late autumn days and that love affair that was going to fade with September. And that seemed to me to be a brilliant encapsulation of how I wanted the novel to feel.
This next question comes from Chloe Monty on Instagram.
How do you begin writing if you're lacking confidence?
I think maybe there are writers out there who have huge amounts of confidence. I mean there are, I’ve met a couple of them at festivals. But, most writers are riddled with self-doubt and really unsure that they have this thing that all the other writers have. It's natural to feel that. It's fine to feel that you can’t do the job. Every day I sit at this desk and think “Oh, this is just awful”. I'm constantly embarrassed at every stage of the process. Even when things are finished and made and well received, there are times when I have to get up and leave the room because I can see what a lousy writer I am. It's part of the business. It's part of the process, but if there are bits in there that you recognised sincerely as being good and worthwhile and original, that’s what you have got to hold onto.
This question comes from NicholsFletch, on Twitter.
Hi, David. What did you change for TV from the novel and do you always have the ending mapped out?
All the novels I read there’s a terrible part of me thinks “Could this work on-screen” and one of the alarm bells that sounds is a first-person point-of-view. Because so many of the pleasures of the novel will come from the disparity between what the character thinks and feels, and what they say and do. And so when you sit down to adapt a first-person point-of-view novel, the first thing you have to do is cross out all the “I thought”, “I felt” - it doesn't really have a place in the screenplay which is much more about what people say and do. So I had to take a deep breath and lose all of Douglas's brilliant jokes because the only way to do it is through voiceover, which wears thin pretty quickly or by having the character be uncharacteristically outspoken - saying what they think and feel or making that little joke, or mocking themselves in a way that doesn't quite fit with the character. So that's the biggest change and it's a terrible sacrifice. Various things that work very well on the page like metaphors and similes and description, don't really work on-screen because it’s there before your eyes. Other things I had to change – well the ending, the novel has a punch line and the punch line is a typographical punchline. It's something that only works right written down and typing doesn't really work written down, typing doesn’t really work. It’s not very cinematic to see someone type something. So the ending of the screenplay is a kind of again, a kind of a stand up version of what's on the page. It makes it physical and real and active and dramatic, whereas on the page, it could be a little verbal joke. Other things that changed - in the novel Albie is gay and comes out to his dad and it’s mentioned in a throwaway line, it’s literally a single sentence - Douglas just says “and when some years later I discovered that Albie was in a relationship with another man, I felt fine”, and that's it, and the shortness and the straightforwardness of the way Douglas gives the information to the reader is the point. You know, what you can tell from that is, he's cool about it; any prejudices, any anxieties he might have, he has overcome and the absence of a scene, the absence of dialogue, the absence of a confrontation or an encounter in the novel tells you what you need to know. Now on-screen, there's no version of that, that doesn't really make sense, you can't have him throw it away because the viewer needs to see it. So again, you have to stand it up and you have to turn it into a scene. So there was a character who came in in the very very beginning who was a friend, an ex-boyfriend of Connie who also comes in again later in the novel. Now, on-screen you have to remember there’s going to be four hours and it may be a month between the first episode and the last episode, and you're not necessarily going to recognise this person and you especially are not going recognise them because they’ll have to be played by a different actor. So you're going to have to put in a hell of a lot of exposition, it’s going to be awful and awkward and terrible. And also I think there was a sense even in the novel that it was a slightly unpleasant punchline, it slightly undermined the affection and the love between Connie and Douglas, so I was very happy to jettison that. And finally - again, I don’t want to go on too long - but there are a couple of other comic set pieces in the book that seemed to me only funny because Douglas was describing them and if you acted them out they might seem broad and coarse and slapstick and so they also had to be cut. Oh one more thing that question – the ending…. Yes, I do always have them mapped out. I always have to have a pretty strong idea of the ending, though things along the way will be different. For me having a destination, having something to aim at just means that there's a kind of forward momentum to the process of writing.
So, the next question is from anonymous on Instagram and it is very to the point. It's a very good question.
Is there such a thing as a bad idea?
Yes, I think there is. I mean, I’ve pursued a couple of things and in the back of my mind thought, “No, there's something fundamentally wrong with this. It's not going to work, don't do it”, but I've kept going, and then eventually just hit a wall and realised why! After ‘One Day’ came out I spent a long time on a kind of strange version of ‘Us’ where the dad was horrible and irresponsible and the son was a kind of Goody Two-shoes who never did anything wrong, and for very contrived reasons they were going on a trip together but there was no real reason for them to be together, but he was estranged father and there's no real reason for him to come back. Nothing in it made any sense, it didn't make sense for these people to spend time together and the time they spent together was unpleasant because their faults weren't redeemable. They were fixed and there was never going to be any comedy or joy in it. It was always going to be sour and the little voice in the back of my head that says “this isn't going to work” just got louder and louder and louder and it took me a year to write these forty thousand words - which has also a bad sign. The fact that getting the words onto the page was such agony, and that was the definition of a bad idea. I think sometimes if that voice is there you need to examine it, which isn't to say that you won't have moments of self-doubt, or think “this isn’t really working”. I mean you definitely will have that, even with the best ideas you’ll want to throw it across the room, but I think if there's a problem you just will never fix, then you should put it to one side and go looking for good idea.
OK, So this is from Pippa on Facebook.
How much editing does it take to keep the extraordinary level of restraint and avoidance, or undercutting of sentimentality that you achieved so perfectly in ‘Sweet Sorrow’, your last novel. How many drafts?
Well, thank you very much, Pippa. I mean, I am very wary of sentimentality. At the same time, you know, I want people to feel something. That’s why you write, isn’t it? I mean, you want people to feel, to laugh, and feel frustrated at times and upset and joyous and all of those things. But at the same time, particularly in early drafts, sometimes you strain to achieve that and you do too much and you overwrite and you push things so they're a little bit corny. And I think it helps to have a little bit of time, and then go back and ask yourself – “Is this a bit lush? Is this bit much? Is this straining for effect? Is this too corny? Is this too sad? Is this too mawkish? Am I manipulating the reader?” And being quite ruthless about taking those things out. If I had to criticise my own writing and you know, of course I do, everyone does, or should! I think the undercutting of sentimentality, sometimes is a problem that I tend to reach for a kind of… if something is too emotional, I tend to reach for a bit of a glib joke in a way that perhaps is quite British. There are other better writers who kind of go with it and don't get flip and ironic all the time. It’s just my inclination I think even in the most dark and emotional scenes, is to search up something that's not light-hearted but perhaps is going to just take some of the strain off that moment. When I adapt other writers, then I'm much less inclined to do that - Thomas Hardy, you have to go with the tragedy. In my own writing I'm sort of looking for a detail that will prevent it feeling too much. It's not conscious, I think, it's just an inclination and a tendency and one day I'll write something that doesn't undercut sentimentality or emotion and just goes for it. But I haven’t done that yet. But thank you for saying that about ‘Sweet Sorrow’ Pippa. I really am very fond of that book and I'm pleased that it doesn't, even though it deals with quite big emotions, issues of depression and loss and unrequited love and family break up, but I'm pleased that it doesn't feel mawkish or overdone so thank you. And there's an additional question. How many drafts? I think the whole notion of a draft has changed with the way we write now. If you were asking about how much has a sentence or a line of dialogue changed, it's sort of an infinite number. But in terms of me thinking “that's done for the moment, I'm going to send that off”, there's a lot of planning – a scene plan, a chapter plan and then I start writing and I will revise every day, not just move forward, but also do a little bit of the previous day's work. So that's not quite a draft but it is revision. I'll get to the end and then I'll try and put it to one side and go back to it and read it and possibly do, or maybe a ten or twenty percent rewrite before I send it to someone. Then that comes back and again I do another ten or twenty percent rewrite and then we're getting close to the finished book. Perhaps I've added a chapter, or passage, or taken something out. The next draft will be kind of paragraph by paragraph full attention to make sure there's no repetition, to make sure each of the sentences are rhythmically right and then after that we get into the whole business of copy editing. In terms of documents that I submit to my editor – I would say five or six, but each of them getting more and more refined.
OK, the next question comes from Rachel Cole.
What's your best advice for someone starting out writing?
I think it's great to have contact with other writers and when I was a writer, I really didn't have that you know. I didn't do a creative writing course, I’m kind of self-taught. I didn't really know any other writers. There was no community. No one to show my work to you. It was quite solitary, lonely and I don't think that needs to be the case now. I think there are all kinds of institutions, organisations societies, workshops. There are places where you can hear writers talk about their work and that's great. And I think you need to roll up your sleeves and get involved in that, because writing is solitary, but the world of writing can be social, and there's a certain amount of networking involved in that, but I think it's great to have the support of people who are in the same position as you and with the same passion as you. But a couple of pragmatic sort of craft things - for me these work and I don't want to be too dogmatic about it, but you should always revise on paper because looking at a screen is hypnotising and you will miss things. You have this thing in front of you and it looks great, it looks like the finished product, it's very impressive, but there's something about reading it on a page that causes you to look at it afresh. Even though, it seems rather old fashioned to sit there with a pencil and a piece of paper, you will notice things that you won't notice on the screen. So that's one practical tip. Another practical tip, and this applies particularly to fiction, is read the thing out loud because you'll know when you're getting bored. You'll hear it when you said something before and you'll know when something is too much. So even if you're not a great performer, just hearing the rhythm out loud will again, draw attention to things that you might miss on the page. And you will feel foolish but you will spot stuff. Finally, my third tip is - this one sounds a bit pompous, but I'll say it anyway. Don't send out work with the expectation of collaborating on a good draft. What I’m saying is: send out your best work. If someone were to send me a script and there was a covering letter saying, “this needs some work and I’m not sure if the ending is there yet”, I sort of think, “Well, no, I'm OK, you send it to me when it's finished”. It won't be finished, there will still be lots of things that need fixing and changing and I've never written anything that hasn't undergone just endless rewrites, but I don't show it to anyone until it's as good as I can make it. And then I'd take on board all the other voices and either accept them or reject them. I’d try not to send out things that aren’t pretty well polished, because you don't get another chance of someone reading your work and you need to create the best possible impression, which is why all that stuff that seems pedantic and boring like spell checking and presentation is actually important and worth doing.
OK Next question comesvia Instagram and it’s from Travelling Andrea.
In ‘Us’, did you travel to all the destinations? Do you think you could write it from your desk?
Well, this is really interesting. The idea for ‘Us’ came on a publicity tour, I was publicising my book ‘One Day’ and I was suddenly going to all these incredible cities and spending a very short period of time there trying to see the whole of Stockholm in 36 hours and running around Milan and absolutely loving seeing all these European locations, but not really being able to relax or taking anything like a break. And there's something about this frenetic pace that seemed to me to be comical and I also wanted to write about these extraordinary places and I've spent a lot of holidays stomping around art galleries, often with children and so I had a kind of insight into how exhausting and stressful that can be. And I wanted to write about that as well, write about it in a way that was both kind of picturesque and full of praise for those wonderful experiences and works of art, but also took on board how stressful and tiring it can be, especially when you want the experience to be perfect when you straining to make it good. So I have been to pretty much all the places, except for Bologna airport. I had never been there, so I sat at my desk and I clicked through on Google Maps – it’s a journey that Douglas takes from train station to the airport and I just wanted to check that I wasn't going to make any mistakes. So you drop that little figure into your map view and you just click along your way along the streets and that was the only glimpse I had of Bologna. Everything else, yeah, I knew where the restaurants were, I knew the train timetables, I knew every hotel, I knew every street corner. I didn't go to those places and make notes because I think that makes for boring writing. You just end up writing the notes; you do too much. But I did have a sense of sights and smells and tastes and experiences as well as just the physicality of the place. I think you can make mistakes if you don't go to the place. But, sometimes yeah, if the scene is quite pragmatic and there's nothing too dramatic happening, I think it's OK to bluff it. And that's always been the case with my novels, except for ‘Sweet Sorrow’ which exists in a kind of ‘every town’. I've no idea where that place is, I just know how the high street feels. It's a sort of composite town. I don't do that very often, usually I need to know the postal address before I can write something.
So, the next question comes from Miles via email.
I loved your adaptation of ‘Patrick Melrose’. (Thank you Miles) I'd love to know how you approached adapting novels to screenplays and also how you approached adapting your own books?
I don't want to use up all my time because I could talk about this a lot and really don’t want to bore you all. But for me the first things, some people say you know that you should only adapt bad books, and that good books make terrible films or television, which I strongly disagree with. I've only ever really adapted things that I love because you spend so much time in that world and with those words, you really have to feel strongly about them and want to convey that to a whole new audience. So, ‘Patrick Melrose’ were novels that I’ve loved for long time. There are five novels and I read the first one when it came out and then I waited for them like I waited for the next instalment and loved them all. Again, there were lots of things about them that are terribly difficult to adapt and extremely dark, but also very funny and that's a hard thing to pull off. It’s a very rarefied world and very harsh new world. There's not much in the way of love and compassion in the novels, so, how do you stay with this rather sad and at times rather unpleasant unsympathetic character? How do you make that work? So there were all these questions, but I felt I knew how to do it and I went to meet the producers and I gave my pitch - both pragmatically what I'd cut, what I’d develop, what I’d change and also emotionally, which is that I felt that even though the world was very dark and cynical, that there was something about redemption in there that could provide hope and forward momentum for the story. So, I gave my pitch and then when I got the job, met Edward St Albyn and he very kindly allowed me to proceed. When I got the job, the first thing I had to do was learn them. So I did two things: I annotated the books and I read them, read them, read them and then I had them on audio book. No exaggeration for years, if I was walking round London, I was listening to ‘Patrick Melrose’, because it just meant that I could find my way round the material, that I knew the rhythm of the voices. It was a very good audio book adaptation read by Alex Jennings and that I could, not recite the dialogue, but if there was a point that needed making and it wasn't in the dialogue, well, perhaps it was buried somewhere in the prose, I would know where to find it so that it wasn't just a case of copying out the best of the dialogue. That I would know, perhaps in a passage of description or a passage of interior monologue there was something there that I could use, in dialogue, in action, in the screenplay. I've done that would pretty much any book that I’ve adapted. I've done my best to learn it in every respect - in not just its dialogue, but its rhythms, its details, its descriptions. And I've tried to do that both before I start writing and alongside the writing. Adapting my own books I’m much looser because if you get too possessive then you're just going to get hurt. Adapting your own book is like being your own dentist. You have to rip things out and throw them away and it's horrible because not only did it take you years to write the thing, but you also know the underlying story. You know your motivation for including that passage of a character's back story or that descriptive passage. Well, none of that is any good, and you got to get rid of it and it's tough and I always swear that I'd never do it again, but the pain of adapting your own books is second only to the pain of having someone else adapt your book. And I didn't want to do that, and I felt that I had enough insight and knowledge as a screenwriter to be able to carry out that kind of brutish and callous surgery and I've done it many times now and every time I think “not again” because it's much, much, much, much easier to adapt someone else's.
This comes from Jason in Eastbourne via email.
When starting a new project do you begin with the structure of the story or do you start with the character and let the dialogue establish the structure of the story you are telling?
That’s a very good question.
Jason goes on to say when I write every time I go in and develop a character's dialogue it's totally changing the structure and I'm wondering whether I've started in the wrong way or that this is simply how a script develops…
It's very interesting. Let me talk about this in relation to fiction because often with a script, certainly the last few projects - I haven’t written an original screenplay I’m ashamed to say for five or six years. So a lot of the structure is already there in the screenplay if it’s an adaptation but with a novel, I have both. And you know, people talk about planning as if planning is just working out the story beats, for me it isn't. It’s about knowing all kinds of other things. I want to know the affect the book is going to have on the reader. I want to know the biography of all the characters. I need to know the architecture of the book. For instance, a book like ‘One Day’, if you've read ‘One Day’, I couldn't have begun to write that book without knowing the conceit -the idea that it was a love story told in twenty days, one on each year and it was always going to be the same day. That's a structural idea. I wouldn't have started to write dialogue or situations without knowing that structure, because for me, the process is rather like filling in boxes. I need to know whether it's a script or a book. I have a series of compartments and within those compartments, something will happen. It will either describe a world or it'll establish a character or it’ll contain a confrontation or it'll be a little self-contained piece of back story or a flashback. I sort of need to know where the boxes go before I fill them in. And so there is a certain amount of both conscious and unconscious structural planning before I can let the characters loose because I know the stuff I love doing is writing dialogue. And if I haven’t done the planning then the dialogue will be floating unattached to the characters and the situation. I'll come up with a joke that I love and I’ll then realise that actually it's not a joke that the character will necessarily make, but still, it's a really good joke but how can I get the joke in and so you build a whole scene around the joke and it doesn't work. I need to know my characters and my structure before I’m able to think for a second about writing dialogue, because good dialogue comes from character and situation and you have to resist, resist, resist the temptation of writing chapters or scenes around a really, really good line of dialogue. I'd say one other thing, I talk about this a lot, I used to be an actor and I was a lousy actor, but I did see other good actors creating characters and I heard a lot of that language, which revolves around “what does my character want?”, and “what my character need?” and “what did my character have for breakfast?”, all of that stuff. And it's all good. It's all very, very good stuff and skills and techniques to apply to the business of writing. So even if you have no actor training, there's stuff that actors do, which is incredibly helpful, particularly for instance, the difference between what we say and what we mean. You know, what do I want/what do I need, and what lies beneath the lines and it's good to apply that to your characters before you start giving them words to speak. What are their aims and what are their objectives and what are the things holding them back and the more we think about that, then I think the easier, and the dialogue will flow.
What is my TV guilty pleasure?
Well, I don't feel guilty about any comedy or drama because it's all stuff to learn from and enjoy. I like cookery programmes. I'm a very pretentious cook myself and I like just sort of…. that's my only relaxation, because it's something that I have no connection with whatsoever professionally. So I'm not, I don't feel that there's anyone to be jealous of or anyone’s a rival. I can just enjoy the mindlessness of watching people chop onions. That's the nearest I get to a TV guilty pleasure.
Describe your writing style in three words.
I don't know. See, I'm reaching for things like bland and straightforward. I've always known that I’m not a poetic writer and I’d find it really hard to produce, to go through my own work and find a passage that I think is as at the kind of levels of the writers I love. I'm always, always, always reading other writers and thinking, “Oh, what's the point you know, this is exquisite writing”. I suppose if I had to pick three. I would say Wry, I suppose there's a kind of humour to it, maybe Sincere. More and more, I try not to be flip or glib and write in a way that's heartfelt. I hope it's funny. I don't know if I could ever write something that was completely devoid of humour. So maybe there's no shame in Funny and maybe that's the third word.
This questions from Sarah Jane Coyle, on Instagram.
Does being a screenwriter mean you approach your novels in a more structural way?
This is a very interesting question and the answer I think is yes. Yeah, I think I do. Sometimes I talk to novelists who you know, make it up as they go along - start with an image or a line of dialogue, or piece of description and just improvise and the script editor in me is just mortified at that. You know, how do you know you're going to get to the end if you don't know where you're going? So I do think in a structural way, and I think you know, I did all those Robert McKee courses, I do think in terms of A Plot and B Plot, and I do think a lot about point of view, whether or not other characters should be allowed their own chapters or whether you stick with a single point of view, which is something that screenwriters wrestle with a great deal. Yeah, I tend to write in the three acts and I tend to dot the novels with set pieces which I know will give the story a little bit of a boost, a bit of kind of comic or dramatic energy and push the story forward. So all of that stuff, I didn't learn through courses, I just learnt through watching five films a week for most of my life and it has infected fiction in the way that I sometimes think is a bit of a failing. You know, there's no reason why a novel should have a three act structure, or an A Plot or a B Plot or a kind of resolution, or pay-off or callbacks. All of those techniques that I associate with screenwriting. But for me the two have always been intertwined. They have always been my two great loves - prose and writing for the screen - and they have become interwoven and I suppose the best thing I can say about that is it sometimes gives books the kind of economy and forward movement that books don't necessarily always have.
SugarBusterFrankie on Instagram.
Best advice for a graduate trying to start their writing career in a pandemic?
I don't know if there's ever a good time to start a writing career, but I can imagine that this must feel like a particularly tough time because you know it's a bad year. It's a bad time, and even people who have long established careers are jumpy and nervous and I would just say that it is also a career that takes a while. It's very rare for a recent graduate to go and have an immediate success as a writer because what will you write about? I don’t mean that personally, there will be things you can write about, but none of it is going to go away and it's only going to be enriched by the experiences you have right now. My advice would be to keep writing, to hold your nerve. It can't go on forever. Things will get better. Things will start again and to try and use this time as usefully as you can and by working on your own projects and reading as much as you can and watching as much as you can, because that is as much a part of a writer's education as putting words on the page. Just sucking up stuff – books are fuel, films, television, it's all fuel. Keep writing, but also use the time to absorb and think, and soak up the stuff because it's frightening and anxious, but everyone's in the same boat. We're all kind of on hold at the moment. I haven't written much at all for the last six months, which is very unusual and it makes me very unhappy as well. I just haven’t been able to concentrate. So it's natural to feel anxious and to feel concerned and to feel a little bit stuck.
Do you have any hobbies?
I really like walking. I love walking long, long, long distances by myself. The longer the better and more desolate the environment the better. It just helps me think and I get very excited by Ordnance Survey maps and solitude and the countryside. So that's my big passion, at this stage anyway.
What keeps me going when I feel like giving up?
Well I do often feel like giving up, if something's going badly and I'm not feeling it, and it seems just dead on the page. Two things… the first, isn't very poetic, it's a bit utilitarian. If I have a deadline, I do feel obliged to meet it. I think you know that I suppose you'd call it a work ethic. I think if someone's asked for something, particularly if they're paying you for it, then you ought to deliver the best work you can. So, that is a motivator for me. It's the same motivation that meant that I was always handing in homework when I was at school. I haven't quite lost that. More helpfully, I suppose is, it's a real privilege to write and I'm very, very lucky to be able to do it and to have people who are going to read my work, and I felt that even when I was starting out and, it's exciting, you know, what an opportunity, to show your best work to someone else and share your innermost thoughts and feelings and preoccupations with someone is a privilege and it would be crazy to throw it away and not get up and sit up and get the words on the page.
And the last question is the hardest question.
What have you got coming up?
Writers get very defensive about this because there's always the fear - and this has happened to me, that someone would say, “what are you doing next?” And you say, “well, it's about this guy who turns into a seagull” and they look at you in complete horror and suddenly the novel about the guy who turns into the seagull, which you've written eighty five thousand words, doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore. So it's not that, and I don't want to say too much about any fiction ideas or original Screenplays. So the only answer I can give is that I am currently writing a script of ‘Sweet Sorrow’, my last novel and I'm enjoying it very much and I’m thinking a lot about great coming of age films like ‘Four Hundred Blows’ and ‘Gregory's Girl’ and trying to capture some of that spirit and put it on the page. So that's my current project.
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