reading

Images

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to How To Be A Writer, which is a kind of a sequel to my previous writing book, How To Write Everything. I say ‘kind of’ because if you claim to have written a book that tells the reader how to write everything, then you’ve not really left yourself much room to manoeuvre. So, to save myself the embarrassment of writing a book called How To Write Everything 2, which might as well be called I Am A Liar, I decided to write not about writing, but writers.

Writing is a process, a talent that can be improved with practise. Everyone can write, to some degree – but not everyone is a writer. There are people who write every day, and what they write affects people’s lives, but they would not consider themselves writers. You can be a decision-maker or a politician or even a commentator, writing constantly, but your life and work are not defined by your writing. And you can be someone who barely composes a sentence once a year but is most definitely a writer. (Philip Larkin, for example, had a day job as a librarian, and towards the end of his life produced a new poem infrequently, but he was clearly a writer.)

The thing that differentiates someone who isn’t a writer from someone who is, I would venture as bold as thunder, is this: a writer is someone whose life turns around writing like the Earth turns around the Sun. I don’t mean someone who puts on a dressing gown and a little silk cap with a tassel on it and sits at a writing desk with quill pendant in hand and all that. I mean someone whose daily life, whose routines and whose calendar all revolve around the fact that they write. Writers are often people who are infected with the need to write like a vampire needs to drink blood. It sounds absurd, but if I don’t write, if I don’t get the ideas out – whether the idea is a full-length script or a short gag on Twitter – I don’t feel well. It’s got nothing to do with being visited by my muse; it’s more physical than that.

A writer – a Proper Writer – is someone who doesn’t just lie awake at night thinking of ways to make Act II less boring or to explain how Captain Mathers died in the conservatory (he was allergic to orchids). A writer is someone who can’t stop thinking about the work they’re doing and the work they’re going to do. Writers often spend days in a fugue state, unconsciously assembling huge arrays of prose or dialogue and then will suddenly sit down and let it all come out in a huge but beautifully-structured torrent. Writers are at the mercy of their subconscious, which is a massive Satanic factory belching out ideas which someone has to put together and make coherent. And they’re often left empty afterwards. The novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd once told me that, when he has finished writing a book, he instantly forgets everything he learned researching it. Similarly, columnists say that when they write a piece, they often have no idea of what they’re going to write until they’ve written it.

And that’s just the writing. Very few writers enjoy financial security. So a writer is also someone who lies awake at night wondering how they’re going to pay their bills from a job which is, to use the deadly accurate cliché, ‘famine or feast.’ Writers, who are often bad financial self-managers, careen from debt to debt like overdraft-ridden pinballs, only preventing themselves from wondering where the next payment is coming from by spending the last payment on red wine. The constant pressure to earn money from a job which, for many people, is never going to be a high earner means that every day writers are forced to choose between doing work which might be emotionally and artistically satisfying but not lucrative, or doing work which is hackery but pays the bills (which is why many writers dream of being in the middle position of having hack jobs to literally buy them time to do the work they want to).

Then there’s the question of organization. Very few writers have the time or the opportunity to write all day. They may have family commitments (if you work from a home that you share with other people, those people will be compelled to interrupt you because, as far as they can see, they’re doing loads of chores and you’re playing Scrabble on your computer) or they may find, as many writers do, that you literally cannot write all day. For a lot of writers, writing is more like a series of mad sprints than a sustained marathon. You may painstakingly craft 300 words a day or you may blurt thousands of words every morning, but either way it’s unlikely that you’ll do this over five or six hours. So writers worry that they’re not working at the right time of day to let creativity in, they worry that they’re not writing enough, and they dream of a white-painted office, possibly in a disused lighthouse, with nothing in it but a laptop and a magic pot of self-refilling coffee.

There are, super-obviously, thousands of jobs which are much harder and nastier than writing (which is another good reason to be a writer) but there are very few jobs which claw their way into your brain and constantly nag at you like writing does. Writing doesn’t go away. I don’t want it to go away, either, but at the same time I have to admit that it might look odd to other people seeing me walk through the park and suddenly shout, ‘Yeah! That works!’ and laugh like a weirdo because I’ve just realized that Captain Mathers was allergic to orchids.

Which is what this book is about. Understanding what a writer’s life is really like. Sharing the joys and the miseries of writing for a living. And with luck enjoying it. It’s called How To Be A Writer not because it’s a guidebook for writers – I hope I wrote that with How To Write Everything – but because it’s a book about being a writer, as in existing as a writer, living your life as a writer, and so on. (If I was more insistent about these things, I’d have called it How To BE A Writer, but that’s just weird.) So this is a book about waking up in the (early hours of) the morning and remembering that you’re a writer. It’s about how it feels to always be worried about how you’re going to make any money. It’s about when you might want to do your writing, and the occasions when you feel good about what you’ve written.

It’s based, almost entirely, on interviews with other writers. Not just to save me work (which is definitely a core aim for many writers) but because I wanted, as with How To Write Everything, to display the connections between different kinds of writer, to show how comedy writers and columnists and novelists and playwrights may engage in different kinds of writing but in the end are all writers and so have more things in common than not. So I’ve gone out and had lunch with them, or emailed them, or talked to them on the phone, and harvested years of experience and ability far beyond my own. As you race joyfully through this book, you will encounter conversations with the writer of Channel 4’s Utopia, with two of this country’s best newspaper columnists, with the author of the astonishing novel Room, with the writers of the most successful book parodies books of this millennium, and many other talented and knowledgeable people.

I haven’t limited myself to talking to writers, though. To get something of a bigger picture, I spoke to my accountant, Catherine Rosenthal, whose knowledge of writers and their issues with money is both illuminating and entertaining. And I spoke to literary agent Jo Unwin, who knows everything about writers and was fascinatingly informative on the details of an author’s life. (I did also go to lunch with my own agent, the marvellous Kate Haldane, but we forgot to do the interview. It was a very nice lunch, though.)

As far as structuring this book goes, there is a very vague attempt at rigorousness, in that the book’s framework is loosely based on the notion of a day in the life of a writer, a notion it cleaves through like melted butter cleaves to a jelly.

So there we go. This book is called How To Be A Writer, with the emphasis on the ‘Be’, and it’s all about writers, and it’s full of writers, talking about being writers, and our first writer is –

Images

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 afternoon. There’s just a certain amount of pressure you can put on your brain each day. It can be just as good in the afternoon. Maybe I’m wrong about that because I think everyone’s a bit more sluggish in the afternoon.

DAVID: So you’ve worked from seven until noon. What do you generally do next?

JON: I go to the gym. By then I’m like a pent-up fucking lunatic and if I don’t go to the gym I feel like I’ll start shaking. It’s weird but that’s just the truth.

DAVID: Because your brain is overwrought?

JON: Or maybe I’ve just been sitting around for too long. I’ll have five or six cups of coffee in that period and maybe I’ve been snacking a bit too. I feel totally pent up so I’ll either go for a really long walk, a six or seven mile walk for two or three hours or I’ll go to the gym for like an hour and forty-five minutes.

DAVID: Then what?

JON: Then there’s the next problem, which is, ‘What the fuck do I do now? This is the afternoon and what am I going to do? Just sit there?’ So I try and think of things to do like research or admin or chores or something.

DAVID: That’s the thing about being a self-employed person, it’s all part of the process.

JON: Even resting, because resting is what you need to do to your brain so that you can write.

DAVID: You seem to be quite healthy.

JON: Yeah, I think that’s true. I used to smoke me arse off in the Nineties. It’s all to do with writing. My whole life is basically to do with work. It takes it out of me so much that I tend not to do very much in the evenings. I won’t go to parties very much and I don’t even really like going out for dinner with my wife, which pisses her off. Just because I’m fucked, because if you do four or five hours of concentrated writing, you’re kind of fucked. And also I don’t want to stay out till late because that means that I’m not going to be able to write well the next day. So you’re right, I think my whole life is about work.

DAVID: I imagine if you work in a bank and you leave the desk that’s it, you turn on a different switch in your head.

JON: Yeah. Also I think a lot of it’s to do with whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. I think introverts probably get tired more easily. They say about extroverts that the more they socialize, the more they want to socialize. But that is the most foreign sentence I can ever imagine. I cannot imagine socializing leading me to want to socialize more. Socializing leads me to want to go home and sit alone in a room.

DAVID: Like a lot of writers, your socializing is related to work in that you go and interview people. You’ve met hundreds and hundreds of people, but largely with a tape recorder or with a view to extracting information from them.

JON: Also the other thing I don’t mind at all is being onstage talking to an audience. I have no problem with that at all. But the signing afterwards when I have to talk to people one-on-one knackers me.

DAVID: I like being onstage but it’s not socializing. When you come offstage it’s still not you. People talk about your book or have you met somebody famous?

JON: Or they have their picture taken with you.

DAVID: And tell you that they’re a psychopath… One of the things I wanted to talk about is that you are well known for being you as well as for writing books.

JON: Which is sort of partly my own fault because…

DAVID: Is it a hindrance to a journalist?

JON: I think it’s more of a help than a hindrance. I think it’s probably gained me more stories than it’s lost me. It’s not so much that I’m trusted as that I’m well known so people think they’re talking to an important writer. And an important person is more likely to say yes to me because they see me as an important writer. It just works for me in terms of narrative and structure for it to be about me going to somebody’s house. I don’t know if it means I’m sort of more narcissistic than other writers.

At this point the conversation veered towards Jon’s favourite singer, Randy Newman, and how he had recently rerecorded several of his old songs with some lyrics removed. As Jon had revised some of his journalism for book publication [Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness] I wondered if the two were comparable and if ‘remixing’ your writing was worth it.

JON: I think the bubble is sort of sacred. You’re definitely in a bubble when you’re writing. When I was writing So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test – when I was writing all of my books, everything reminded me of what I’m working on. So I’d be in this bar and I’d see something that’s relevant to my book; you’re in this incredibly intense bubble and that’s what writing a book is. When you’re out of the bubble, you lose interest in a way sometimes. You’re out of the bubble and the bubble should be sacrosanct. You shouldn’t go back and reconsider it because it mattered so much in that moment.

DAVID: Peter Ackroyd told me once he’s written a book he forgets all his research.

JON: That’s what Lynn Barber says. You become a world expert in something for a period of time, then you just forget it all.

DAVID: Our writer’s day progresses. It’s the middle of the night and you wake up – are you thinking, ‘What’s the point of this? What have I done with my life?’ And are you thinking, ‘It’s all right, I’m a writer,’ or, ‘I can do better’?

JON: Good question. Well a bit of both… I’m always surprised at how easily your confidence, it all goes. Like when I first moved to New York and I didn’t really know anybody, all my confidence just drained away. I remember one time I was at my lowest ebb, standing in Riverside Park and I thought, ‘I am just a man standing in a park and nothing else.’ It sounds funny but it was really depressing. But then other times I think, ‘Yeah, there’s a body of work.’ If I can get a really good talk, 600 people come. And at the very least I’ll get 150 people turning up and that’s pretty much any town now. So I think it shows I’ve got a body of work there. The fact is, you’re fucking killing yourself when you’re writing these books, and you’re miserable, and your brain is exhausted, and you’re confused and you feel like you’re in a maze. The thing to remind yourself about is that if you do get it right, in a couple of years’ time, someone’s going to be sitting on a beach giggling at what you wrote. It’s really easy to forget that when you’re in your room alone for two years. It’s really hard to remind yourself of that sometimes, but that is actually the truth. It is worthwhile because it is touching people, or will do if you don’t fuck it up.

So there we have it. The interview does actually end at this point, not because Jon jumped to his feet and stormed out, but because I like to end interviews literally on a good line. This isn’t always possible – some interviews end with an inchoate trickle into silence – but you can’t beat a flourish.