How to Be a Writer

David Quantick

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781350258020
• eBook ISBN: 9781783199044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

How To Be A Writer is a collection of interviews with famous writers, performers and industry insiders that takes the reader through a writer's day, from getting up to giving in. And, along the way, asks: When do you get ideas? When should you write? How do you deal with your money? Who do you have lunch with? And how do you keep going? Featuring JON RONSON, EMMA DONOGHUE, DENNIS KELLY, CAITLIN MORAN, JASON HAZELEY, JOEL MORRIS, SUZANNE MOORE, CATHERINE ROSENTHAL, MARK ELLEN, JOHN PANTON, JO UNWIN, MARTYN WAITES, MARK BILLINGHAM, ISZI LAWRENCE David Quantick is an Emmy-winning television writer and the author of the best-selling writing manual How To Write Everything. He has written for television in the USA ( Veep ) and the UK ( The Thick Of It, Brass Eye, Harry Hill's TV Burp ), and is also a radio broadcaster ( The Blagger's Guide, 52 First Impressions ), author ( The Mule, Sparks ) and a journalist who's written for over 50 different publications, from the Daily Telegraph to The Dandy.

CHAPTER ONE

JON RONSON

– ‘The Fun Is When You’re The Idiot’

Jon Ronson is an extraordinary man. An unblinking social commentator in books like The Psychopath Test and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, his book The Men Who Stare at Goats was made into a movie starring George Clooney, and Jon also wrote the superb film Frank, loosely based on his life playing keyboards for Frank Sidebottom. He is also an excellent radio broadcaster, as I discovered when he interviewed me for an hour on his radio show about why I once hid behind a car rather than say hello to him.

Despite hiding from him (I had a hangover and wasn’t feeling very chatty), I like Jon a lot. He is an unusual mixture of investigative journalist and deceptive personality writer, one of those writers who you often end up telling all your deepest secrets. Conversely, even though he writes in the first person (and, in both Frank and The Men Who Stare At Goats, has been played by Domhnall Gleeson and Ewen McGregor), in his writing Jon reveals very little about himself – other than his powerful insights into other people. He is as much a journalist as he is a personal writer: he interviews, he researches, he refines and he edits: he is The Man Who Stares at Quotes.

Jon and I met for coffee in the bar of the London hotel where he was staying on a flying visit from his home in New York and, after we had got through a weird moment when one of the hotel staff asked him to take his hat off, I began the interview at the point where I wanted this book to start – at the beginning of the writer’s day.

DAVID: You’re awake. What time is it and what are you thinking about?

JON: I tend to wake up between half six and seven. I used to be really superstitious. I used to think that the first four to six hours of the day from when I wake up was the only time I can write, so I can’t be interrupted during that time because it’s eating into my only productive time of day. But then I started to realize that’s not true. I think it is true that I can only write productively for four to six hours a day, but that can be at any time during the day. So if I have to do other shit, like stuff that doesn’t stress me out or tax me, if I have to do a whole bunch of that first thing in the morning and the four to six hours starts at one in the morning, that still works. It took me years to work that out, I was running to my desk at half six in the morning thinking, ‘Christ, I can’t waste a minute of this only time that I can work.’

DAVID: You sit down, it’s seven o’clock…

JON: Well, that’s when I’m at my best. I love it. I can look at a piece of writing that I did the day before and completely effortlessly know what’s wrong with it and how to change around a sentence or how to move a quote from there to there. I just know how to do it. It’s perfect and I feel totally like a writer.

DAVID: And you’re a very clear writer. Short sentences. You’re very fond of the, ‘I looked at Derek. He didn’t say anything.’ kind of sentence.

JON: Yes, but unfortunately that clarity only lasts a few hours a day, and I’d do anything to be able to have that clarity for a few more hours a day, but I just can’t.

DAVID: Are you fast when you actually write? You’ve obviously done a lot of preparation before you start writing.

JON: No I’m really slow. I’ll turn down any type of writing where you have to write in, like, two hours. I want months. The shortest thing I write is 3000 words and there’s no way that I can guarantee anybody that I can do that in less than two weeks. And that’s excluding the actual interview. Let’s say you interview one person for an hour and it’s a 3000 word article. I really need at least a week and most often two weeks to make that 3000 words work. Do you think that’s like unusually slow? Or is that about normal?

DAVID: I think I would probably take about a week. What do you do that takes so long? Do you just look at the computer?

JON: I imagine myself pompously a bit like a sculptor. For anything from a 3000 word piece to a 70,000 word book, I look at it the same way. And this is what I’ve been doing the last few years. I’ll do all of the research, all of the interviews, so I’ll go off and have the adventure – and that’s sometimes just sitting down with somebody or sometimes it’s getting chased by men in dark glasses, whatever it is, the actual field work – and then the first thing that I do after that is transcribe it. I always transcribe it myself, I’ve never sent anything out to be transcribed. It just feels like part of the process. So I’ll transcribe it, but I’ll never do a full transcript, I’ll just listen to the bits I might use and I’ll transcribe those. Once in a while I’ll then go back like a couple of weeks later and listen to it again…

DAVID: So you’re editing in your mind as you go. If you’re leaving stuff out, you’ve got an idea in your mind already.

JON: Yeah, I think so. I think I have an instinct for what’s boring and what’s good. Also if I remember the way somebody looked when they said that or some funny joke, some little funny aside, I’ll put that in bold. So then I’ve got like five to six thousand words, some of it’s quotes from the person, some of it’s my jokes and asides – and then, let’s say I need to do some other research, I go to Wikipedia, and I’ll put those notes in bold too to remind myself that that’s not my thoughts, it’s Wikipedia. And if that person says something that leads me to go off on a different journey, I’ll do the same again and then I’ll add that to the bottom of the piece.

So it’s a mix of my thoughts and jokes, dialogue between us, independent research and other people’s research. And if it’s a book you maybe repeat that twenty times and then you suddenly realize you’ve got 150,000 words. If it’s a 6000 word article you’ve maybe got 20,000 words, 25,000 words. I feel like the 25,000 words is like a block of marble, and then you start to chip away at it. The second part of the process is structure and narrative arc, just like a dramatist would have.

Most importantly of all, it’s the whittling, it’s like, ‘At what point is that sentence finished?’ Every morning you go back to it and you can see things that aren’t working and change them. But then one morning you’ll go back to it and you’ll realize that that paragraph just doesn’t need changing anymore, and that’s when you know it’s done. And when the whole thing doesn’t feel like it needs changing anymore, when you’re looking at it at your most clear headed at seven o’clock in the morning and you think nothing needs changing – that’s when you know it’s finished.

DAVID: That is what makes writing different to, particularly, film and television because a film’s never really finished, it’s just what you hand in. But if you’re sculpting something like a human face, you don’t think, ‘Maybe another eye.’ Your writing, when you’ve made it, it’s done.

JON: Yeah, exactly.

DAVID: Do you ever think, ‘Why didn’t I say that?’

JON: Sometimes a year or two later you look back and you think, ‘Five years ago I thought that was a funny joke. It’s not.’ And sometimes I go back to the tape six months later and realize that there was a whole thing that they said that I didn’t transcribe that’s actually really fucking good.

DAVID: When you’re transcribing I suppose you’re looking for specific things. Like you might be looking for somebody to talk about pianos and then you hear the tape and they go, ‘Oh and by the way I shot my aunt.’ And you’re thinking, ‘I didn’t really get that the first time’.

JON: Like the person in the gorilla suit in the video. Have you seen it? There’s a video on YouTube where they say, ‘You’re about to see a basketball game, and what you need to do is count the number of times the team dressed in white bounces the ball.’ So you watch it and you’re counting. And then at the end of the video, it says, ‘Now go back and watch the video again and this time look out for the woman in the gorilla costume.’ And sure enough you’ve missed it. A woman in a gorilla costume comes in and walks off again and you totally don’t see it. It’s an amazing way of showing how weirdly your brain works.

If you’re writing non-fiction, it’s best not to have any preconceived notions, because quite often the fun is when you’re the idiot, when the thing that you thought was true turns out not to be true at all. But if you’re too stick-in-the-mud about your thesis, then you might lose a whole comic narrative thing when you realize you’ve been a terrible twat and you aren’t the world’s best psychopath spotter and then the book becomes richer for that.

DAVID: Have there been moments when you stopped in midstream and realized that you weren’t looking where you thought you were looking?

JON: It’s always the best moment – and it’s never something you can fake. In The Psychopath Test, I genuinely got totally drunk with my psychopath-spotting powers and I was spotting psychopaths everywhere. There was a period of time when I was completely convinced that I could spot a psychopath. I mean I know more about psychopath-spotting than other people, but my confirmation bias was going through the roof and my lust for revenge and all these other things and I wasn’t noticing it. My friend Peter said to me, ‘You’re losing your mind.’ And when he said that I started to unpick what had been happening to me, and that made the second half of The Psychopath Test good. But you can’t pretend to think one thing just for the comic narrative of realizing that you’re wrong. It has to be authentic.

DAVID: Non-fiction is the same as fiction in that you can structure it like a novel.

JON: Good non-fiction. Some people love the other sort of non-fiction like Ben Goldacre. Ben Goldacre’s thing is, ‘I am an expert at this and I’m going to start my book by telling you what the book’s going to be about and then I’m going to do it.’ And people love that. He’s smart and he’s a good writer, so I’m not dissing that, but it’s not for me, I much prefer to think of journalism with the structure of a movie or a fiction.

DAVID: Somebody once said, ‘A story is just an explanation’ and that’s what your books are. ‘Stay with me and we’re going to find out about this together’.

JON: Mystery and not knowing something is what fuels me. Not understanding the world is like the wind behind the sails. If you understand the world I don’t know how you’d write it. That’s what makes Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything so entertaining, because you really get the feeling that you’re learning with him as he goes along. I’m quite often surprised that more people don’t write in that way. There’s a weird fetish amongst a lot of journalists to want to be seen as unimpeachably smart, so they don’t want the joke to be on them…

DAVID: So… what’s your working environment? Is it full of busts of Shakespeare or is it a blank wall?

JON: It’s a blank wall. I used to be able to work in busy offices and I can’t anymore. I can’t even work in cafes anymore, I need total quiet. My wife goes out with the dogs for about three hours in the morning and I sit in the front room which has got a nice view of the Hudson. So the first three hours I sit where she sits, and then when she comes back with the dogs I move into this little boxy office and close the doors. For some reason I need silence. I really envied Stanley Kubrick. When I was making the documentary Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, his daughter said to me that he could concentrate totally, but then if somebody came in the room and interrupted him he could break concentration and chat away and then when that person left he could go back to concentrating. I can’t do that at all. I need total silence and not being interrupted for those few hours when I can write with clarity.

DAVID: Fiction writers often like to play music because it affects their mood whereas I just find it gets on my nerves.

JON: And distracts you. The one thing I do do is that when I feel my brain’s starting to shut down a bit, I’ll maybe go on Twitter or something like that as a way to give my brain a break, get its energy back again. I do feel that a massive amount of my life is maximizing my dwindling amount of energy. I sort of think this is what death is like. But other days I’ll suddenly notice that it’s four in the afternoon and I’ve been working since seven in the morning and I’ve barely taken a break and I’ve been incredibly productive. So I think I’m probably describing the worst days to you when I’m talking about my energy sapping after two hours and I need to do something to get it back up again.

DAVID: I do that as well. I walk the dog in the park. Just being away from the working environment.

JON: That happens to me sometimes. What I’ll do because I’m worried about my memory is I quite often email stuff to myself.

DAVID: Would you say that your ideas time is when you’re not at your desk?

JON: No, actually I think it is when I’m at my desk. If I am out walking, I won’t try and think of ideas. Has anybody that you’ve interviewed for this book said something that’s totally surprising that’s the opposite of the way you do things?

DAVID: The trivia are different. Some people play music, some people don’t, some people work in the morning, some people work in the afternoon. But essentially it seems that writers work best for short periods of time early in the morning.

JON: I do think that I might have spotted a flaw in the early in the morning thing because I was so convinced for so many years that that was the case and then a few times I was unable to work first thing in the morning and I realized I worked just as well a few hours later. My view is that you definitely have a short period of time when you can work well and you think it’s first thing in the morning but actually it may not be. It could be at three in the after...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Jon Ronson – ‘The Fun Is When You’re The Idiot’
• 2. Emma Donoghue – ‘The Crazy Stitching Of The World’
• 3. Suzanne Moore – ‘I Kind Of Eavesdrop A Lot’
• 4. Catherine Rosenthal – ‘Lovely Interesting People Who Are Great To Work With’
• 5. John Panton – ‘I Want To Make Big Films That Will Be Probably Be A Bit Odd’
• 6. Jo Unwin – ‘I Read Through Endless, Endless, Endless Crap’
• 7. Dennis Kelly – ‘I Mean This’
• 8. Martyn Waites and Mark Billingham – ‘Darkness Seems To Suit What We’re Writing’
• 9. Iszi Lawrence – ‘Stand-Up Is A Conversation’
• 10. Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris – ‘We Like To Take The Piss Out Of Things That Already Exist’
• 11. Mark Ellen – ‘Enthusiasm Is The Most Important Thing’
• 12. Caitlin Moran – ‘Write The Weird Stuff, Write The Shameful Stuff’
• Afterword
• Appendix 1: Mark Ellen’s Favourite Things
• Appendix 2: Some More Thoughts From Jason Hazeley
• Appendix 3: Just how Stoned Was Caitlin Moran?
• By the same author