Andrew Hunter Murray and I talked about how he writes novels with Excel, his obsession with finding crazy facts, and why he loves Jane Austen so much.
It’s an awesome conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Transcript
00:00:26 What makes a good premise
00:05:54 Making sci-fi feel real
00:07:51 Sci-fi vs literature
00:12:50 Why fiction beats reporting
00:15:41 Writing on Excel
00:18:22 Writing real characters
00:23:47 The role of secondary characters
00:30:58 Techniques for character writing
00:33:47 Andrew’s personal mantra
00:38:06 Planning stage vs writing stage
00:40:29 How to find crazy facts about reality
00:49:25 Sci-fi actually describes the present
00:52:09 Jane Austen
David (00:26-00:32):
Tell me about making a good premise. What is important?
Andrew (00:32-01:18):
I think a good premise is one you can explain in a sentence. That’s useful when you’re trying to sell a book to an editor, a publisher, or eventually a reader. It helps the reader understand what they’re getting, and it helps you understand what you’re writing. That’s really important. Just crispness and as many concrete nouns as possible.
If you find yourself having an idea and someone asks you what you’re writing, and you say, “Well, it’s sort of...” That’s trouble. It’s fine to flail in the soup for a while. Everyone does at the start of their writing careers. That specificity is valuable when you know what you’re writing.
David (01:18-01:21):
It’s not just that, it’s also like, “Ooh, wow, that’s interesting.”
Andrew (01:21-01:33):
My first book, The Last Day, had a clear and specific premise: the world stopped turning 30 years ago. Half of it is in light, and half of it is in shadow now.
David (01:33-01:34):
Yeah.
Andrew (01:34-02:05):
Okay, you may have the reader’s attention. If they’re into sci-fi, they might be interested. People often say second books are difficult, and I think that’s true.
I struggled for a long time to articulate what The Sanctuary was about because I put a lot of different things into it. I’m very proud of it, as I am of all my books. But there’s no doubt that The Last Day has a clearer premise than The Sanctuary, and I think that made it easier to write and to talk about.
David (02:06-02:13):
If you were to write a third science fiction book, what would you look for in terms of what the premise needs to have?
Andrew (02:16-02:50):
I was thinking the other day about sleep. About a book where you rob everyone of the ability to sleep and the chaos that would take place over the following week if the world couldn’t sleep. Anyone who loses sleep starts behaving erratically after eight or ten days.
My friend Mark did this at university for a bet. I don’t think he ever recovered fully from it. It really affected him. I’d like to see people with their fingers on the nuclear button not having slept for a week and see how that scenario plays out.
David (02:50-03:10):
What comes to mind with that and The Last Day is that I can hear the premise and I can start imagining what would happen. Then I get to go along for the ride with you, the writer. You’re taking me on that journey now, having thought through that premise so much more than I ever have, and I get to see where you take me.
Andrew (03:10-03:11):
It’s really the fact that I can
David (03:11-03:12):
get both of those seems pretty important.
Andrew (03:13-03:38):
I think you’re absolutely right. I’d never thought of it in those terms, but as soon as I had the idea for The Last Day, I started thinking, “But wait, what’s happened? What’s happened to this? What’s happened to that?” I spent a long time planning it out.
As soon as anyone else had the idea, often their first question would be, “But what about this? What happens there?” When you read the book, you’re able to sometimes write to the author and say, “Oh, what about this?” I’ve had lots of lovely messages from people saying, “I want to know more about this detail of the world.”
David (03:38-03:49):
How does that work as you’re working through the premise? Are you just walking around being like, “Huh, wow, what would happen with the light and temperature and all these sorts of second, third or fourth order implications?” What is that like?
Andrew (03:49-04:49):
It’s so much fun. For me, it’s the most fun possible to have. Everyone likes different stages of the book. For me, plot is an absolute pig. I spend so much time on plot because it’s the thing I like doing least, which is very annoying.
The really fun bit is right at the start, when it could go anywhere. You haven’t got a block of marble that you’ve reduced to a statue, and you’re trying to look out if the arm should be bending like that. You have a block of marble, and you can come up with a thousand permutations of how it could be. That’s when you’re doing the most scribbling.
I start writing longhand, and I try to write longhand for as long as I can in the soup of what the book could be. Eventually, when I’ve got a pretty clear idea, I’ll switch to typing. Typing nails things down for me in a way that is very useful because you do have to come up with a book at the end of it. It clarifies things and it pins them down.
David (04:50-05:13):
How do you think about the lie? One lie, two lies, in terms of you have a premise, and then with that premise in sci-fi, you can bend reality in all these sorts of ways. The physics of your world has to make sense, but it does not need to conform to the physics of our world, and there’s a kind of lie embedded within that.
Andrew (05:13-06:42):
Suspension of disbelief has to be done carefully. It’s why I’m going to use an example from film.
The world of Alien is quite clear. There’s a creature which doesn’t exist as far as we know, but it’s clear what it is and what it can do. Whereas if you’ve got a world where everything is floating around, so many modern sci-fi films and adaptations have no clear fixed point of view. The camera is moving around in a way that is very impressive for CGI, but which actually doesn’t root the viewer. It makes things feel a little less meaningful, a little less impactful, because that’s not how we experience stories. You want to be placed down in downtown Tokyo when Godzilla has just arrived. You want to feel your scale as a human being in a world where an enormous lizard has just arrived. Making things real in the world of your story is completely vital.
I don’t know whether the thing that happens in the last day that stops the earth moving around could really happen, but I did a fair bit of research. I spoke to my sister-in-law, who’s an astrophysicist, which was quite handy, and she sent through eight different ways you could do that if you wanted to. It feels like it really could happen when you’re reading the book.
David (06:44-06:49):
What’s true for writing literature that isn’t true for writing sci-fi? And what’s true for writing sci-fi that isn’t true for writing literature?
Andrew (06:50-06:50):
Oh, gosh.
David (06:50-07:08):
How do you approach it? My sense is sci-fi really begins with a premise, whereas literature might begin more with characters, maybe more with themes, maybe more with plot. Or actually, maybe the premise in literature is actually the core thing.
Andrew (07:09-07:33):
I think you’re right in that my third novel started with a character, and it’s called A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering. It’s totally different from the first two, which are very gloomy, end-of-the-world stories. This one is lighter, funnier. It’s about a character called Alex who lives in empty second homes when the real owners are away.
David (07:33-07:33):
Right.
Andrew (07:34-07:44):
And that is a premise, but he’s also a character, and I very much started with him. It was as if he just arrived in my head. So the premise is…
David (07:44-07:45):
Oh, interesting.
Andrew (07:45-08:41):
Honestly, it’s a bit spooky when it happens. It’s lovely when it happens. I often find the characters who become the real core of a novel just turn up, and you slightly know how they’re going to react to anything, really. It doesn’t feel like you’re writing them. It’s very weird.
This is to come back to the thing about writing longhand. When longhand writing is working really well, you can find yourself writing a sentence that you weren’t aware was in your head. You don’t really know which bit of you it’s come from. Your hand has moved and written the words. But there’s a really pleasant and very weird sensation of being written through. Now, it’s clearly all me. I’m not saying anything else is writing through me. I’m not receiving signals. But the process of writing longhand means you can access sentences that have not fully formed in your conscious mind, and you access them with the pen.
David (08:41-08:43):
You feel like typing doesn’t do that in the same way?
Andrew (08:43-09:34):
Not in quite the same way. It’s so easy typing: Don’t like it, delete it. Easy. Where did that previous sentence go that might have led to something when you have to grind through?
I have notebooks here. This is really personal, by the way. I never show anyone the note, but I want to have a really grubby notebook that I can absolutely trash for the next book. I write all the prospective titles on the front. I see. Don’t say any of these out loud because they’re all embarrassing. But to have something you can really trash, to take notes from other writers, to have a page of loose dialogue that I want to throw in at some point. Here are a lot of scenes I’d love to write if they can work. You just have this free. It’s a soup. I mean, it’s a real mess.
David (09:34-09:34):
Yeah.
Andrew (09:34-09:38):
One potential scene for the opening because I’m writing another book where Alex is the main character.
David (09:38-09:39):
Oh, great.
Andrew (09:39-09:39):
Yeah, yeah.
David (09:39-09:40):
So a sequel.
Andrew (09:40-09:47):
Yes. In fact, the sequel is out in a month or so’s time. It’s called Bad Deeds. This is gonna be the threequel.
David (09:47-09:47):
The threequel.
Andrew (09:48-11:42):
Alex, the character, he is trouble. He’s always in trouble. He left home at a young age. He’s been scrambling around, living on his wits with whatever he can get. He’s likable, but he’s a little rogue.
This is a scene of him trying to nick expensive watches from people who’ve just stolen them outside of a nightclub. Who’s going to be in it? Are we going to have the same characters who were in the last few? He’s got a little group of friends who he hangs around with, places to put him in, trouble to put him in, crimes I’d like to see him interact with, commit. There are so many wonderful crimes that you can throw into this world. These books, the breaking and entering books, are set in a milieu of high life and low life, high society and low lifers like Alex, who’ve made their way in. He literally gets into other people’s homes.
When we’re writing something that’s not sci-fi, you’ve got a character and you’re trying to develop themes below the level of character. I’m trying to make sure that the themes I’m interested in are expressed. The main theme for these books is trying to communicate what it’s like to be young today in a world which certainly doesn’t open the doors to you readily. People have to scrabble and get by.
In a sense, this is a fantasy of a world where you can walk into any lovely house in the country and stay there for free, not steal anything, not damage anything, but just get in. You have a skeleton key. They’re everywhere. Beautiful in the country, great.
We are also leading strongly into what life is like in Britain today and the feeling that there are plenty of people who just get away with it right at the top and how frustrating that is. It’s a little bit of wish fulfillment of Alex interacting with some of these people and managing to come off better.
David (11:43-12:28):
What’s interesting is that if you look at a problem in a straightforward and direct way, there are certain things you can see. But when you’re writing literature, you’re looking at it in a very oblique way. You’re coming at it through your imagination, through a story.
You’re looking at housing, inequality, all these things that really matter to you. You’re thinking, okay, I want to explore what it means to be a young person in this world right now.
In what ways can you see the world by writing literature that are a little bit harder to see through the more rational method of just looking at it through data and statistics and whatever’s in the news that day?
Andrew (12:28-12:37):
Yes, Breaking and Entering could have been a very dry book about housing and the shortage of new housing starts in Greater London.
David (12:37-12:44):
Right. But you’re not a policy wonk about this, right? Not going to what is it? 10 Downing? Is that what people call it?
Andrew (12:44-12:44):
Yeah.
David (12:44-12:53):
Okay, there we go. Good for an American. You’re not reporting on the scene. It’s a very different way of looking at what’s going on.
Andrew (12:54-14:34):
I have a phrase that I come back to again and again, which is sugar-coated broccoli. The Breaking and Entering books have something to say about inequality and life in the UK today, the feeling that some people are getting away with it.
But it’s not my job to write that, and I don’t think anyone would be interested if I did. There are people who are brilliant at working out policies to try and ameliorate these problems. My job is to entertain, first and foremost.
Philip Pullman has this lovely idea of writing a book being like taking a walk through the woods. He wrote a fantastic book called Demon Voices about the craft of writing. For him, it is such a craft. His perspective was basically, you are on a walk through the woods. You are allowed to look off into the woods.
Philip, if you’re watching, I’m sorry, I am botching your position here. It’s a great book. I’m simplifying and forgetting it as well. But his position is basically, as you take the path through the wood and make your way through the woods, feel free to look around at the scenery. That’s a vital part of the book that you end up writing.
But do not leave the path and spend a while just noodling around having a picnic. He’s talking about the importance of plot and direction, and for the reader to feel like they’re going somewhere.
I could absolutely throw in pages and pages of research about housing, and it would make it an unreadably bad book. So a core part of writing is to resist the urge to show your research. You’ve done the research; don’t tell it to us.
David (14:34-14:44):
How do you think about pacing? Do you feel that your early draft is paced too slowly or too fast? Do you see consistent themes there? What are you trying to work towards in your editing?
Andrew (14:44-14:58):
I’m a bit technical about it. The first draft is a really rough version of anything you’ve written. If you go through and I will do it, I’ll put it in a spreadsheet. Microsoft Excel is actually the novelist’s most important friend.
David (14:58-15:02):
Said no one ever. You use a spreadsheet when you write?
Andrew (15:02-15:02):
Of course.
David (15:02-15:03):
What do you mean?
Andrew (15:03-15:52):
I look at my scenes, I look at who we’ve got, and I look at what we’re learning along the way. Because the Breaking and Entering books are thrillers. They’re fun, but they are thrillers. You’ve got to keep them thrilling.
Every single scene, I ask: have we learned enough here? Does this scene need to be here? It can’t just be, “oh, let’s have a great scene set in a fireworks factory and we won’t really learn anything.” It has to move things along, there has to be a reason to be in the fireworks factory, and something has to come out of it that pushes us into the next scene.
If you look at your spreadsheet, it’s embarrassing that I write novels on Microsoft Excel. If you look at your spreadsheet and you think, I’ve got four chapters here and there’s nothing, there’s not the pace in any of them to propel the reader forward, then I gotta fix that.
David (15:55-16:03):
What is happening in the spreadsheets? Number of pages? Here’s what’s going on, here’s how it connects to the plot. Help me visualize it.
Andrew (16:04-16:43):
I’m not gonna show you my spreadsheet; some things are sacred.
It’ll be: here’s what scene we’re on, here’s what characters we need in each scene, here’s how they need to be interacting, here’s the main thing we’re learning plot-wise because this is a plot of discovery. It’s uncovering some kind of crime or some kind of conspiracy, and here is the personal story that’s leading through it. Where is Alex in himself? How’s he doing?
You have to lard all these things together. I think I would be quite good at braiding because...
David (16:43-16:47):
We’ll dye your hair gray, we’ll curl it, and dude, you will let it rip.
Andrew (16:47-17:15):
Great. That’ll be my Gandalf era.
You need to be able to combine those things. There is the plot, but it is a personal story, and there are other characters involved as well. I really don’t like getting to the end of a draft and thinking that character hasn’t really had a moment of achievement or satisfaction or development.
You want that for almost everyone, everyone who isn’t just running a street kiosk and selling the main character a chocolate bar.
David (17:15-17:36):
Talk to me about the development of Alex over the years. Where you started with Alex, what you know about Alex now, and your own relationship with Alex. How Alex has come to feel real for you internally, and then how you’ve come to make Alex feel real on the page externally.
Andrew (17:39-19:44):
There’s always a risk when you write in the first person that the character is just going to be a proxy version of you. I don’t think I’ve fallen into that trap with Alex because I’m very law abiding, and he was really not. He’s probably the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll.
I think having a character who’s able to have this wonderful life is obviously a dream, but you have to show the consequences. The consequence of Alex’s life, living in beautiful second homes by himself, making his way in, getting out, is that he’s lived a pretty friendless life. It comes with consequences. His best friend in the first book is probably a glazier who he occasionally calls on to fix up the little break-in job he’s just done. Is it friendship if it’s cash in hand? I’m not sure it is.
In breaking and entering, and in fact in the first two as well, I keep coming back to seeing characters thawing out, seeing a character who in some way has been held back from fully engaging with the world and forming proper relationships, and seeing them begin that process. That just comes up again and again. Ellen Hopper, the heroine of The Last Day, has exactly that journey as well.
I feel like I’ve grown up and formed proper relationships. You’ll have to ask my wife, but that’s clearly something I keep coming back to again and again.
The challenge is when you want to write more of Alex, we’ve seen him thaw out a bit in the first book. You can’t have a character just go through exactly the same journey time after time. Well, you can. There are plenty of brilliant series where people make the same mistakes again and again, and we love them for it.
David (19:44-20:06):
Jack Bauer kind of stays today in every single season of 24. Season six was my favorite season. Somehow you know he’s going to do it, and yet it’s still thrilling and suspenseful. But you’re right, something does have to change. The premise has to change.
Andrew (20:06-21:33):
I’m a huge fan of the Slow Horses novels by Mick Heron. He’s written nine of them now, and I got heavily into them a couple of years ago and just tore through them. His characters are all losers, screw-ups, misfits. They’re the dregs of the Secret Service, and they’ve been basically put in a cupboard.
They stay dregs. They always manage to insert themselves into a situation and often make it worse before making it better. But they’re very recognizable, and they stay the same. Maybe it’s the fact that you spend more time with them that your relationship with these characters deepens as you read more stories about Shirley or River or Jackson, or whoever it is. It’s wonderful, proper old-school spy stuff.
Every story has deep roots from decades ago. The failures and errors of the Secret Service come back to haunt it, inevitably. Things never stay buried. But you see inside almost every character’s head except the antihero of the whole series, the head of this grim crew who’s called Jackson Lamb. We’re never really granted access to his way of thinking, and I find that very interesting and powerful. You don’t get everything.
David (21:34-21:38):
There’s always a mystery that keeps you holed in.
Andrew (21:38-21:49):
Yeah, and you hear little bits about his life. You hear a little bit about why he might be the way he is. I’m a huge fan of resisting the urge to say everything about a character.
David (21:49-22:00):
What’s going on with this extensive series amongst English people? Child, J.K. Rowling, Pharaoh, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis are all people.
Andrew (22:00-22:01):
Agatha Christie.
David (22:03-22:09):
Walk the lands of Great Britain. Successful series, though. It’s not just novelists; it’s series.
Andrew (22:10-22:14):
Clearly, I’m a fish who can’t perceive water. Is this unusual outside of the?
David (22:14-22:19):
No, I just realized this, but I’m just thinking of all these great series. British, British, British, British, British.
Andrew (22:20-22:40):
We know what we like, and we’ll keep doing it. Thank you very much. I really don’t know. That’s interesting because I’m now starting to write this breaking and entering series. I’ve just fallen into it. I’m going to do some national soul searching now. I think that’s really fascinating. I don’t have a good answer.
David (22:40-22:41):
Secondary characters.
Andrew (22:41-22:49):
What matters is making them as real as they can possibly be. Can I give you a bit of Edith Wharton on this?
David (22:49-22:49):
Bring it on.
Andrew (22:49-23:01):
Great. I just read a fantastic book. I will allow myself to read one or two manuals of writing every year. Oh, there are rules? Actually, I’m not convinced there are.
David (23:02-23:10):
Don’t listen to any writing podcasts. Those are even worse. If there’s a podcast that teaches you about how to write, turn it off.
Andrew (23:11-23:11):
Absolutely.
David (23:11-23:12):
Very unhelpful.
Andrew (23:12-23:13):
Off it goes.
David (23:13-23:25):
This, I actually think, is the right level of resolution. I actually find writing books to be kind of insufferable. There’s something about a writing book that I think gets too much. It almost imposes logic and rationality.
Andrew (23:25-23:26):
Yes.
David (23:26-23:35):
Without having a little bit more of the energy that a conversation has, which is why I basically don’t read writing books. But I do find these conversations to be far more informative.
Andrew (23:36-23:53):
I think that’s bang on the money, because after a certain while, when you’re having these rules, you’re basically getting into comparing diaries and saying what’s most effective. If you overlay every single great novelist on a big Venn diagram, there’s no point where they all intersect.
David (23:53-23:53):
No.
Andrew (23:53-23:54):
Except that they wrote.
David (23:54-24:13):
My number one lesson from doing how I write is you can succeed with every single kind of process and every single kind of style. But the thing that has surprised me is no matter what you choose in terms of your approach, you have be so, so, so much better at that thing than I ever thought possible.
Andrew (24:13-24:14):
Oh, that’s interesting.
David (24:14-24:16):
That’s my number one lesson from doing the show.
Andrew (24:17-25:15):
I like that.
Edith Wharton wrote this brilliant book about 100 years ago about the writing of fiction. I think that’s what it’s called, and I’ve just finished reading it. She’s amazing. Anyone watching this or listening who hasn’t tried The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, they are stunning. I’m a huge fan of Jane Austen, and to me, it’s as if the action of Jane Austen has moved on 100 years and things are even crueler.
She was writing about a brilliant world, a world that is really right for fiction, where personal feelings frequently clash with social codes and norms. These days, it’s a bit harder to write a forbidden love story if you’re setting it in a free, liberal Western democracy. It’s not quite as...
David (25:15-25:16):
The tension isn’t as strong.
Andrew (25:17-27:01):
Exactly. Whereas in Wharton’s world, Golden Age New York, those social codes were real and devastating to individual lives. She’s writing about that world, and she’s just fantastic.
She wrote this book really, not as a manual exactly, not saying, “Here’s the 25-minute process by which I’ve written my Pulitzer Prize-winning works,” but about how to make people real. When you ask about secondary characters, a far more profound effect is produced by the penetrating study of a few characters than by the multiplying of half-drawn figures. Neither novelist nor playwright should ever venture on creating a character without first following it out to the end of the projected tale and being sure that the latter will be poorer for its absence. That, I think, is so important for secondary characters.
They need to feel as real as your main character, and they can be drawn in a few lines. We all remember people from our own lives, and we remember one shining jewel. There was someone my father met once who had a very specific method for folding his shirts, and this was his big thing. He was a traveling businessman, and he would tell everyone he knew about this. Like, “I’ve actually cracked it. This is how you do it.” That is an illuminating moment of character. It could be something physical, a preoccupation of theirs, but it doesn’t have to take up 20 pages.
David (27:01-27:08):
Yeah, well, I just had the author and director of this movie called Train Dreams on the show. There’s this scene in the movie where...
Andrew (27:08-27:09):
Yeah?
David (27:09-28:37):
This guy comes up to a bunch of loggers who are sitting down, and he says, “I’m looking for insert guy’s name.” Everyone goes completely silent. Then, one guy stands up and starts running. This guy takes out his gun, shoots him, walks up to him, and shoots him again.
He looks around, wearing this cowboy hat, and says to everybody else, “That man killed my brother 25 years ago. If anyone has a problem with this, state your case right now. I don’t want to have to be looking around behind my back for the rest of my life.” Pauses 10, 15 seconds. “All right, I’m sorry to interrupt you, gentlemen.”
It’s a good example of how that’s the only time when this guy shows up in the movie, and yet the character was so vivid and so pure. It’s like an abstract painting; it did not take a lot of lines to clearly create the form of a person.
Then, there are other characters in other movies where there’s so much dialogue, and you’re just like, “I have no connection to this character.” Something about them either lacks depth or doesn’t feel real. More is not better when it comes to character.
Andrew (28:37-29:50):
It’s that it’s slightly back to that floating perspective thing. Put us clearly in a room. Show us what is around us. Show us what’s on the table. Show us how a character’s feeling. They’re suffering indigestion because they had too much of the breakfast buffet again. “Why do they always do this?”
There’s a little germ of something, and you don’t want it to descend into pointless noodling. You don’t want to be wandering off the path to have your picnic, but you can do things clearly and crisply and show people as real.
The points where I have failed have been where I’ve treated characters as a vehicle for plot. There are a couple of moments, I think, in the first Breaking and Entering which, if I read it back now, I think I’ve not given them their reality. I’ve not made them physical enough. I think that’s a big thing, remembering how we all experience the world, and then just putting down a tiny bit of that on the paper. You have the freedom to write anything you like about this person, but just give us a little bit of their reality before we do the revelation of detail.
David (29:51-30:06):
So, if we’re talking about making a character physical, what are the different instruments you can play? You can play with their clothing, their looks, their skin color, how they talk, and what they smell like. What are the different instruments that are really helpful to play?
Andrew (30:07-30:26):
How they move, how they react to things. You can do so much with gesture, and those are the things which express a person’s reality clearly.
Edith Wharton has another great line in this book, and I think I might get it made into either a tattoo or a neon sign because he writes...
David (30:26-30:27):
What?
Andrew (30:28-31:56):
Well, no tattoos yet, but there’s a first time for everything. I’ve got a neon sign, which I keep above my writing desk, which is very useful. I’ll tell you what that is in a second.
What she says is, her line is, “Real drama is soul drama.” I think what she’s trying to get at is that the really exciting thing is not that there’s a freight train thundering down the tracks to where the hero and heroine are tied up, and they’ve got 30 seconds to escape. That is dramatic, but the much more important thing is what one of them is going to turn to the other and say when they think it’s all up: how we relate to each other.
People struggling with themselves, people who cannot resist their own vices, people who are always thinking back to that one conversation they just wish they’d done differently—that’s soul drama, and that’s the real stuff.
It’s terrible to be talking about books, but there is a moment at the end of Die Hard. The watch, which symbolizes so much, is the thing that comes loose and frees John McClane to save his wife. That’s a moment. It’s a shining jewel. It symbolizes a whole lot about this relationship between the two of them. I know Die Hard is a big, silly action film, but there’s a reason
David (31:56-31:58):
that it’s so popular.
Andrew (31:58-32:40):
It’s so popular because it manages to say something about this relationship between a husband and wife, which has not worked, and they have another chance to try again. It’s powerful for that.
It’s also saying Holly McLean has been very silly to go off and have a brilliant career while her alcoholic husband was doing such a tremendous job at home in New York. But it’s trying to say something about a relationship between two people, and they didn’t need to throw that in. The writers of that film could have had it on an even higher skyscraper, or they could have had the flames being even bigger, but they find a way of expressing character through a wristwatch. I think that’s very impressive.
David (32:40-32:41):
What’s on the neon sign?
Andrew (32:42-32:47):
It says, “This is not the cake,” which is my personal mantra.
David (32:48-32:48):
What does that mean?
Andrew (32:49-33:11):
It means when you’re writing something, it is incredibly tempting to look at other people’s books and say, “Look at this, I’m holding a 10 and a two, and they’ve all got four kings,” or whatever it might be. You’re comparing your flour and eggs with finished cakes.
David (33:11-33:12):
Yeah.
Andrew (33:12-33:19):
Don’t do it. This is not the cake. You have not finished. You’ve barely started. Keep going.
David (33:19-33:35):
So I presume you’ve struggled with that feeling early on you’re writing, “Oh, this is not Edith Wharton level. This is not Jane Austen level. This is not the level I want to be. I’m early on.” It’s just like an internal chaos of, “Why am I not there yet?”
Andrew (33:35-33:36):
Absolutely.
David (33:36-34:00):
That also isn’t just true for a specific book. It’s also true for a career. One thing that makes writing so unique is that you can get better and better and better at it throughout a life. You could be four, five, six, seven books in and looking at the cake of somebody else’s book 16, 17, 18, and it can be a reminder over not just specific books, but over decades as well.
Andrew (34:00-34:42):
I have to learn again every time I do it. I always forget, in between writing books, how to do it, and I do have to start again. I trust that some layer is being set down and the next time I’m able to stand up a little bit higher. I hope so, but it doesn’t feel like that always from inside.
History is littered with unbelievably great writers who... Graham Greene, I don’t think anyone reads his first book these days. He got cracking about four or five in. Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey first, and that one is not great. Obviously, all six of her books are timeless works of genius, but Northanger Abbey is definitely, as the floodwaters rose higher, definitely the one you say, “Okay, that one can go first,” you know? Leave that one and stand on that one to try and get out of it.
David (34:42-34:47):
Why take reading so seriously? You track your books. You clearly...
Andrew (34:47-34:48):
Another spreadsheet.
David (34:48-34:57):
Another spreadsheet. You clearly have a certain diligence and dedication to the process of consumption as well.
Andrew (34:58-35:48):
I like tracking what I’m reading, and I track what I’ve read, when it was published, the author’s sex. I’m just curious. I want to keep myself reading more women. Sometimes I get into a rut of not doing that, and I try and write an impression of the book, or sometimes just one sentence from it.
I think it’s good to track reading. You don’t have to do it in a spreadsheet, but for me, it works very well. I think it’s good to track it. Not really because I’m going to go back and reread them, although that’s a very good thing to do, and I do sometimes.
I think I’m doing it because I’m an obsessive nerd who needs to have metrics of things in his life that he’s achieved. Other people have a smartwatch, but it’s very hard to put down The Count of Monte Cristo in a smartwatch.
David (35:48-35:50):
So you got a Strava and Microsoft Excel.
Andrew (35:50-36:59):
That’s that. It is nice at the end of a year, seeing what you’ve read and thinking, “Ah, yeah, that was fantastic.” I think everything you read, you draw something from.
I learn more from books I read, and I don’t really enjoy about the craft of writing than I do from brilliant books, which I think are works of genius. It’s quite hard when you’ve finished a perfect book, or a book that you think is absolutely tremendous, to pry it apart and see how it was done. It’s almost like a stone temple where every block fits together perfectly. You can’t get a knife between the blocks.
When you’ve read something that you haven’t really enjoyed, I think it’s really useful because you can see, “That’s where the author lost me. That’s where that third act didn’t work. Why not? And why didn’t it grip me?”
Always when you’re writing, you’re writing for yourself, you are writing for a reader, but when you’re actually writing it, there is a perfect version of this book as you see it, and that’s the thing you’re trying to get out.
David (36:59-37:17):
How much of that perfect version for you, because you are more of a planner... how much of that perfect version shows up in the planning and construction phase before you actually get down into typing it, versus the sense of, “Okay, I’m writing this book. It’s unfolding. I’m now along for the ride.”
Andrew (37:18-38:05):
Well, the writing bit is so much fun for me because it’s where I’m expressing myself in a fun way. I’m not putting the jokes into the planning stage or the little observations about character. Those are mostly happening when I’m writing in the morning because they’re emerging. It’s a wonderfully fun bit.
I’ve done the awful bit of the plotting and the structuring. Oh, no, but that can’t work, can it? I’ve done all that; that’s out of the way. Writing the book is the treat at the end of it, basically. And the initial bit is also the treat where you’re in the soup.
David (38:06-38:08):
I feel like you should just write a book without a plot.
Andrew (38:08-39:01):
I’ve done it, and I had to throw it away. It was unreadable.
My first book, The Last Day, I wrote 30,000 words, and I had written the world for about six months. I’d been researching and thinking, what happens to the tide? I was having a whale of a time, and I thought, the first half is going to be almost like a guide to this world, and the second half is going to be a crisp, clear plot of an exciting conspiracy unveiled within this world. I wrote 30,000 words of this first half, and it wasn’t good. It was nothing. It was a bit like those endless Tolkien guides to Middle Earth, where you think, I’m not sure I need to know about this generation of the ancestors of the protagonist.
David (39:01-39:04):
You definitely don’t.
Andrew (39:05-39:21):
Yeah, and that’s what I’ve been writing, and it is of interest to me, barely. But at some point, it’s not enough to be doing that. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t think anyone would enjoy reading it.
David (39:22-39:26):
What is the key to finding crazy obscure facts about reality?
Andrew (39:28-39:28):
Just read everything.
David (39:29-39:30):
This feels like your core competency.
Andrew (39:31-40:25):
I’d say so. Everyone knows really interesting things that they don’t realize are interesting anymore. Everyone has a line of work, a hobby, something they’re fascinated by, and you know the basics about your own field, and you have forgotten how interesting it is.
So when you talk to anyone about what they do, they will end up telling you things. You think, oh God, I didn’t know that’s how you made Chrome or whatever it might be.
It’s just a matter of being open to those when they happen, and reading as widely as you possibly can. There are these little jewels in news stories, on the backs of cereal packets, in amazing nonfiction books. Someone’s written a whole book about cod. Well, that actually sounds pretty good.
David (40:25-40:26):
It says the fish or Call of Duty.
Andrew (40:28-40:31):
Sorry, the fish. Sure, there are brilliant guides to Call of Duty.
David (40:31-40:39):
My brain just went into a crazy divergent world there. I was like, are we going into the PlayStation Xbox world, or are we going into the oceans?
Andrew (40:39-40:40):
I’m a big fan of both.
David (40:40-40:41):
Okay.
Andrew (40:41-40:58):
Yeah. The podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish, we just cover these facts every week, and we’ve been going for 12 years now. We haven’t missed a week. We remember podcasting before all this. It was all fields when we started out.
David (40:58-40:59):
It must be just microphones.
Andrew (40:59-41:41):
Back in the day, we used to set the four of us around one microphone. I’m not gonna get too misty eyed because the sound quality was atrocious. It was really bad. This is better.
But we’ve kept going for 12 years, firstly, because we keep finding facts, and we love talking about them. And also because we keep finding new jokes, and the thing you’re listening to with the podcast is a relationship as much as it is the stuff of. We’re doing a whole section about William Hazlett a few years ago, the 18th-century writer. I don’t think anyone has ever done 10 minutes of comedy about William Hazlett, but we managed it.
David (41:41-41:43):
Do you remember what you talked about?
Andrew (41:43-42:08):
He hid under the bed at one point to hide from his creditors or pretended to have died.
This is the thing, I remember the first episode, and I remember last week between. There’s a bit of a gap, but people do listen partly for the relationship, especially when it’s four of you making the show week in, week out. These in-jokes develop; they rise and fall. It’s like any long-running relationship; we have kept it fresh; we hope we’ve kept things spicy.
David (42:09-42:12):
Why haven’t you taken to writing comedy?
Andrew (42:14-42:44):
Breaking, entering, and bad deeds are both a lot funnier. That was the pivot I had. I looked after my second book at everything I did because I write for a funny magazine, Private Eye. I make this podcast, which is pretty funny, we hope, No Such Thing as a Fish. And I’m writing these quite gloomy end-of-the-world thrillers. Is that sustainable? But I think I found my way back to that groove now.
David (42:44-42:56):
As you went into bringing humor into your novels, how is that different from the kind of humor that you would do in other places?
Andrew (42:57-42:57):
I’m not sure it is.
David (42:58-42:58):
Oh, really?
Andrew (42:58-43:17):
I think it’s pretty much the same. In a novel, you have the chance to be structurally funny where someone’s life is a big joke, as opposed to just an individual joke you’re making in a podcast. You’re just going second to second, and if an opportunity occurs to you for a joke, you make it.
David (43:17-43:21):
Like it’s a different kind of wit. The wit is based more on speed.
Andrew (43:22-43:28):
I think comedy is all connection-forming. You’re yoking together two concepts that are
David (43:28-43:29):
Not, ah, that’s what you mean.
Andrew (43:29-44:23):
In Breaking and Entering and the sequels, people are funny. People are writing, people are making jokes all the time because that’s how most people talk to each other. Most people are quite funny, and I think most people are at their absolute funniest when they just go to the pub with some friends and have a chat. All comedy is an attempt to recover that pure Garden of Eden state of comedy, which is you in the pub with friends or family having a chat. Most people are pretty funny under those circumstances.
Novels are weird because you’re having to be everyone around the table. You’re having to fill all the roles. You’re making the jokes with yourself, but you can go back and improve them, which is wonderful. So many times in a podcast you make a joke and you think, “Ah, could have got that a bit neater.”
David (44:23-44:58):
Now I get a chance to read. Okay, so this is from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I know that you read that and it influenced you, so I was looking through it, and this really stood out: “Maybe not you, buddy, but the rest are even scared to open up and laugh.” That’s the thing that got me about this place, that there wasn’t anybody laughing. I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door. Do you know that?
But this is the line that really got me, man: “When you lose your laugh, you lose your footing.” Yeah, banger.
Andrew (44:58-47:21):
I think that’s so true. I think you very rarely meet someone in life who doesn’t have any humor or comedy inside them. Most people do. Comedy is a pure expression of humanity because you are connecting things together. There’s a lovely old line: “A joke is like a horse jumping across some kind of canyon,” and you’ve got to pitch the distance of the width of the canyon just right for your audience. If it’s too near, no one’s impressed by the jump. If it’s too far, the horse falls into the canyon and dies. That’s what you’re trying to do. Everyone will be at different points on this. Everyone will have a different optimal canyon width of the jokes that they like. Some people will like really avant-garde stuff and more abstract comedy, and some people will like much closer, tighter, conversationally based or very concrete stuff. There isn’t a right answer at all, but always there’s a moment of connection.
This is a rant now, but I think that is what links together the art of comedy and the art of writing in general, because when you read anything, any book, but in particular fiction, there is this moment of connection between you and the author, hopefully. The most wonderful thing is that it doesn’t matter that Edith Wharton has been dead quite some time. We are forming a link across 3,000 miles of ocean and 100 years of time, and she is saying to me, “This is how it is,” and I’m saying, “My God, I see it.”
Comedy is the same. It’s a shorter fuse. It’s faster and it’s more immediate, but it’s the same thing. A comedian is saying to you, “This is how the world is, isn’t it? This is how this aspect of the world is. Isn’t it weird when someone does whatever?” The connection is formed and you say, “Yes. I never thought of it like that.” It’s refreshing the world every time, because you see things in a sudden, slightly new way, and everyone carries around with them lines from comedy shows that they’ve seen and loved.
David (47:21-47:30):
They really live in you. Like the one I always come back to is this great YouTube video from Louis C.K. called “Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy.”
Andrew (47:31-47:32):
Oh, the plane Wi-Fi.
David (47:32-48:11):
The plane Wi-Fi one. I think about that all the time. You’re on an airplane and you land and you ask someone, “How was your day?” and they go, “It absolutely sucked.” You’re like, “You have traversed space and time.” Few people in all of human history, like Sir Francis Drake, would be absolutely amazed at your day. People used to go up in hot air balloons. It was like the highlight of their life. You’ve basically done the equivalent. You’ve gotten a nap on the dang thing, you’ve woken up in another continent, and then you just had this moment when you turned on the Wi-Fi.
Andrew (48:11-48:11):
It was.
David (48:11-48:18):
And then it stopped working. All of a sudden you’re just so angry and, to your point, that bit lives inside of me.
Andrew (48:18-48:18):
Yeah.
David (48:18-48:20):
Ursula Le Guin.
Andrew (48:20-48:23):
I think I’ve always said Le Guin.
David (48:24-48:29):
She said, “Science fiction doesn’t describe the future, it’s a way of looking at the present.”
Andrew (48:30-49:17):
Yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t have put it better myself. The Last Day is basically a climate novel masquerading as future sci-fi. The Sanctuary is really a book about the power of billionaires and the way in which extreme wealth warps the human mind and the minds of everyone exposed to it.
They’re both set in the future, but they could just as easily be set today. I think that sci-fi in a way makes it easier to think about and discuss these things because you’re putting things at one remove. You’re literally getting a bit of perspective.
David (49:17-49:17):
Right.
Andrew (49:17-49:27):
You’re able to be a bit freer in what happens, so it’s a very useful genre for thinking about all sorts of things.
David (49:27-49:41):
Right, exactly. It’s like a tool for escaping. Depressing. Go back in time, see it differently, go forward in time, see it differently. It’s not a coincidence that Tocqueville is the best commentator on America as a Frenchman.
Andrew (49:42-49:42):
Okay.
David (49:42-49:51):
I look at a lot of people who are the best American writers, writers about current American culture. When they’re American, they’ve always traveled a bunch.
Andrew (49:51-49:51):
Right.
David (49:51-49:55):
It’s when you’re somewhere else that you can see where you are.
Andrew (49:55-50:03):
Bill Bryson is one of the great chroniclers of what Britain was like in the 90s, and he’s from Des Moines?
David (50:04-50:05):
Des Moines, Iowa.
Andrew (50:05-51:02):
I think one book starts with that. I grew up in Iowa. Somebody had to. But he came here when he was 19, and his description of what this vanished Britain of the 70s was is amazing.
There’s a section where he describes going to the beach and seeing an elderly couple having a picnic. It’s not a nice day; it’s a bit drizzly and chilly, a bit windy. They have a selection of small Tupperware containers in which they’ve packed various, not incredibly appetizing, foods. They’re struggling with the elements and having to put up this windbreaker thing. They’re having a blast, they’re loving it.
That is quite a British characteristic: the careful measuring out of small pleasures and the ability to take great pleasure in small pleasures is something we certainly pride ourselves on.
David (51:02-51:14):
I like his book on Australia quite a bit. Tell me about Pride and Prejudice, because you’ve read the book so many times and then also done the improv based on the book.
Andrew (51:14-53:30):
For 10 years, I was in a group called Ostentatious. I’ve stopped doing it now, but they’re still trading very successfully. They’re brilliant.
Ostentatious is an improvised comedy show set in the world of Austin. The premise is that Austen didn’t write six novels; she wrote four or five hundred, and these are slowly coming to light. The audience suggests a title. It might be Path to the Future, Pride and Extreme Prejudice, the Vietnam One, Godzilla versus Mega Darcy. It can be pretty out there, or it can be a lot more restrained, but whatever the title we get, we then go into a full show of that novel as if it were real.
Obviously, we’re horsing around because it’s improv and things get pretty strange, but it’s in that world. It came from the fact that three or four of the original cast of six had studied Austen in some way at university. Joe Morpago and I had both spent a whole term of our English degree studying Jane Austen, which was a real treat and a privilege. So you get to go a bit more under the surface.
What did you find? I get a bit misty-eyed about Austin. She’s just had the 250th anniversary of her birth, and it’s hard to describe how good she is and how much she changed the novel without sounding a bit histrionic. The fact that she was able to write works which are still funny today—there are really funny lines on every page. If you read a page of it out, it gets even funnier because she’s put extra jokes in that as a casual reader, you’ll miss. When you read them out, you realize every sentence is working hard.
They’re still funny, the characters are still relevant. We all know someone who’s a bit like a Ms. Bates or a Frank Churchill. They’re universal human types, but they’re also specific. The relationships that she draws out and forms are just so crisp and real, even in a world which has changed unrecognizably.
David (53:30-53:32):
Do you have a sense for what she’s doing tactically?
Andrew (53:33-55:14):
I think so, yeah. After a lot of readings, you get to see a bit more of what’s going on, and you can look a bit under the surface. It’s a little bit like that thing of sci-fi: she’s restrained herself to a specific, quite narrow field and achieves great depth within it. She’s able to make even the very minor characters very real. Even if they’re absurd, you’ll have a heroine and everyone who is the core. Around that core character, you have concentric circles of increasing comedy and decreasing reality. The very furthest out characters are the most absurd, and they appear a bit less. They’re the least real, but they are also the most eccentric and funny.
Closer to the heroine, often including the main love interest or the close family, people are a bit more real, and they’re not played for laughs as much. That’s one thing she’s doing technically.
She never met another author. I find this so extraordinary about her life. She never saw her own name on one of her own books. The first ones were “by a lady.” I find it incredibly frustrating that she didn’t realize how it would go for her. Her reputation’s been through a lot of ups and downs. It’s now probably trading at all-time highs. There’s so much Austen around, and I think it’s all deserved.
David (55:14-55:19):
Right. She knew that she was Jane Austen, but she didn’t know that she was Jane Austen.
Andrew (55:19-55:50):
She couldn’t possibly. She would have sounded absolutely insane if she’d said, “You see the ten-pound note? I’m gonna be on that one day.” She’d have been sectioned immediately, but she really is that good.
The reason I mentioned Jo and I having both read them at university, my counterpart in Ostentatious, is that I think she’s much less read by men than she should be. I mean, you will know a lot more about this than me. There is a bit of a split in terms of men are less willing to read fiction.
David (55:50-56:11):
Certain genres are more than 90% women, more than 95% women. It’s crazy. We can put up a chart on the screen here of different genres, male versus female splits. There are many more genres that are hard skewing female than genres that are hard skewing male.
Andrew (56:12-56:22):
There is an odd stat that something like 96% of candles are bought by women. A huge number of literary genres should not be in the candles section of literature.
David (56:23-56:25):
And Jane Austen is one of those.
Andrew (56:25-57:53):
She’s writing about women who have to either marry or live with their relatives forever—a fate worse than death. Marriage is existential to Austen’s heroines, and the path is littered with women who didn’t make it.
In Pride and Prejudice, there’s Charlotte Lucas, who does make it, but by marrying an incredibly creepy and irritating cousin of the Bennett family called Mr. Collins, the Reverend Collins. She’s one of the book’s failures, if you like, but she has made a choice. She wants security, and this is her route to a life of security.
That’s not a choice that women today have to make. It’s much less relevant to life in the 21st century in plenty of countries.
Fiction and literature are great when they show you people making difficult choices and communicating to you that things are not easy. Life presents us with choices we make, and sometimes they go wrong, and all the time, they’re compromises. There are no perfect choices to make.
Making that real is as important as making the room real, making the characters physically real. Real drama is soul drama, and Austin is the queen of soul drama.
David (57:53-57:54):
Let’s close there.
Andrew (57:54-57:55):
Okay.
David (57:55-57:55):
That was good.
Andrew (57:55-57:58):
That was so much fun. Thank you.
