How did you become a writer?
I’ve loved writing since I was a kid growing up in France — since before I can remember, really. I remember sitting on the floor all throughout Christmas holidays at my grandparents, writing, and I remember one of my teachers in primary school giving every pupil a book with a personalized inscription as a gift the year she left to move to Canada, and the inscription in mine was a request to send her a signed copy of my first published book whenever I did publish one. I remember writing a really terrible adventure novel when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, a rip-off of the video game Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, and my parents faithfully getting it printed and bound and sending it out to every publisher I’d selected as appropriate out of an industry guidebook. All I got out of that was a stack of very kind personalized rejection letters, probably much kinder than the material deserved, but the French love a teenager who wants to go into books, and they’re very encouraging about it.
So I was kind of on that path from the get-go. I went to college to study political science, and I did an internship at Le Monde, one of France’s big newspapers, my first year. That experience really disillusioned me to the idea of being a print journalist. It seemed to be meetings, rephrasing press releases, upholding the status quo. My other great love was movies and around the same time I got sort of side-tracked in that direction. I left my university and went to film school instead, first thinking I’d be a director, then thinking I’d be a producer. I moved to London after I graduated, falling into working on film crews and in production offices and occasionally writing my own short films to make. But it didn’t pay very well and the work wasn’t very steady. One New Year’s Day I was in the pub with my girlfriend, and I got to talking about this story I’d read in the paper years before — about this South Korean filmmaker who had been kidnapped to Pyongyang in the 1970s. We got to looking up the details over our pints and I found those details fascinating, and it just occurred to me that, wow, this could make a great non-fiction book, and maybe writing a book would give me a baseline for when I’m not finding film work. People have told me my whole life I’d probably write a book one day, so I can probably handle it — right?
The next day I spent several hours writing a forty-page proposal and drawing up a list of agents in London who rep’d those kinds of books and accepted queries. I emailed the proposal off to all of them and made a note in my calendar to check in with them in six months if I hadn’t heard back — every bit of advice I’d read said it could take that long for an agent to read something for the slush pile. To my surprise, I had two agents email me back enthusiastically before the end of that very business day, and a half-dozen more within the week. And that proposal turned into my first book, A KIM JONG-IL PRODUCTION, and not only did it fill the gaps in between film work, writing became my primary occupation, and it turns out, just as everyone said when I was six years old, it was probably what I should have been pursuing all along.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
It’s changed over time and I think it will keep on changing. When I was younger, during what most people would think of as formative years, I suppose, my influences were very traditional-canon people — Dickens, Hugo, Mahfouz, Twain, Hemingway — and the writers a lot of teenage boys like: Ray Bradbury, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alan Moore. For a time I wanted to write, and maybe be, like Budd Schulberg. In my mid-twenties I properly discovered James Baldwin and that blew my mind — the way he thought about writing as much as his writing itself. Growing up in France we read Molière at school but we never read Shakespeare, so I only know Shakespeare from watching it live, when I moved to England, and I’m obsessed with how Shakespeare structured his work, the five acts and the way every act change is not arbitrary but driven by character.
When I started writing narrative non-fiction, I’d devour Erik Larson books and look up interviews where he discussed his process. His books are so dense yet so clear, rigorous page-turners, kind of the gold standard. And as far as film books specifically, I’ve always picked up everything written by Mark Harris, Jeanine Basinger, Neal Gabler, and as a French cinephile, Truffaut.
Lately I’ve been devouring multiple books by the same novelists — Jennifer Egan, Pola Oloixarac, Sarah Perry, Sophie Mackintosh, Colson Whitehead, Hanif Kureishi, Ottessa Moshfegh — and I’m very consciously trying to grow my craft from that reading. Also from the playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch and how she thinks of marrying form and content, which I think about a lot. I don’t want to call these writers influences because I’m sure I’m not nimble or creative enough a writer to be changed by them, or to be able to take on any of the skills they have, but I’m trying.
The way Pixar think about story — there’s a Michael Arndt video about it on YouTube — was really helpful to me, because I’m an outliner and a re-outliner and a strong believer in structure. I’m the wanker who brings up hamartia and anagnorisis into conversations down the pub.
There were teachers who were really key to me when I was a kid — I can remember two particular French teachers when I was in primary and middle-school — because they encouraged my writing and had a high standard for my writing and treated my ambition to be a writer as if it were an utterly reasonable one. And that gave me a lot of confidence.
When and where do you write?
Anywhere, anytime. I have an eight-year-old and I think there’s also some kind of leak in the bottom of my bank account. And I’m a slow writer. I prefer my desk by the window at the back of the house, but I’ll get words in wherever I can — dinner table, airplane, train, tube, coffee shop, park, hotel bed, on the couch.
What are you working on now?
I’m in the early stages of my next non-fiction book, for Celadon in the US and Faber in the UK, about the early careers of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. I’m halfway through a novel I’ve been chipping away at for a couple of years and that I’ve only just shed enough self-consciousness to talk about. And I’m always beavering away at a screenplay or other. Writing those is a series of sprints, for me at least, so they make for a nice change — books are marathons.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
No. I have days where writing is a real struggle, the same way I have days where going for a run or going to the gym is a real struggle. My writing legs will be heavy and I won’t want to do it and I’ll see no fun at all in putting on my writing shoes and hitting the writing trail. When that happens, I usually don’t write, because self-discipline is an… area of improvement for me, and I’m very good at making excuses. But sometimes I push through it and sit down and write and on those days, like on the days I force myself to go on a run, it’s rough for the first few minutes and then it gets better very quickly, and I’m glad I made myself do it.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
It’s advice about advice: all advice is suggestion. Take what works for you, leave what doesn’t. A lot of people will tell you there are ways you must write. There are no ways you must write.
What’s your advice to new writers?
I still feel quite a lot like a new writer. Some things that work for me:
Write every day.
Write in the morning, or whatever part of the day your brain is at its best.
Read poetry to start your day, as a reminder of what language can and should do.
Find a writing group or workshop.
Set yourself deadlines. I have to finish my first draft by May 1st. You’ll miss almost all of them to start with, but if you’re honest with yourself, that’ll help you figure out how much time you do need to set realistic ones.
If you set yourself a daily goal: word count when writing, page count when rewriting.
If and when you can, block out a week in your calendar where you take on fewer meetings, no social engagements, fewer phone calls, and then use that week as a little stay-at-home-residency.
Plot and story are two very different things and most people confuse them. Story is what happens, plot is how it happens.
This is a paraphrase of Ann Patchett, but: ideas are like butterflies. Writing the idea is like catching the butterfly and pinning it under glass. You kind of have to kill it to hold it. Don’t block or berate yourself because the butterfly no longer flutters as you pictured it. That’s the price of getting it out of your head.
This is something I noticed Jennifer Egan doing, so I took it: think of your writing as strong or weak (in the sense of tea, let’s say, not as a value judgment), or as alive or dead, rather than thinking of it as good or bad. “This writing is bad” is going to make you feel bad. “This bit is weak” is something you can strengthen.
This is from Neil Gaiman: finish everything. You learn things from finishing work.
This is from Sydney Pollack: going for a walk is work. Taking a shower is work. Thinking is a big part of writing. John Cleese talks about TV producers always wanting to hear the clicking of their writers’ typewriter keys, because to the producers, that meant the writers were being productive. But, Cleese said, all the good stuff needs to bake in the “intelligent unconscious” for a while — and then you can get the words down much quicker than if you’re just sitting at the keyboard or notebook, trying to muster it all out cold. Your brain’s always working. There are days where writing won’t include putting many or any words down on the page. You’re probably still working.
This is from Stephen King: get rid of the adverbs. If you’ve chosen the right, strong verb, then you don’t need an adverb. If you haven’t chosen the right, strong verb, then you don’t have the right, strong sentence.
This is from Anthony Bourdain: if your mise-en-place (your work station) is messy — “littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, bread crumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station” — then that’s what the inside of your head looks like, too. Your whole office doesn’t have to be a minimalist masterpiece, but keep the space you work at clear and organized, so your mind can be clear and organized. I say this as someone who spent most of his life protesting he thrived on creative chaos. Turns out I was wrong.
This is paraphrasing Jesse Armstrong, who created Succession and co-created Peep Show: if a line is good or funny in one character’s mouth, but can be lifted and put into another character’s mouth and remain pretty much as good or funny, then it’s probably not specific or true enough to either of those characters.
This is from the comedian and memoirist Alan Davies: go towards the pain. Whatever you’re writing, the good stuff is in the stuff that hurts or angers or confuses or frustrates you. (Or, from Sarah Polley: run towards the danger.)
This is from Duncan Jones: when you set out, or if you’re stuck, imagine your work in different art forms. What would it look like if it were a ballet? Or a painting? Or a song? Or a play? What is constant throughout all those iterations — that’s probably the heart of what you’re writing. What is exciting in the work in those other imagined forms, and how could you express it in writing?
This is from Robert De Niro: the talent is in the choices. There’s no magical good or bad. You make one choice and then another choice and any creative work is an accumulation of thousands of choices. Instead of worrying about the whole overall thing, worry about making every choice the right choice, and the whole overall thing will (almost) take care of itself.
I could go on forever — I pick up shiny rules and guidelines and suggestions like a magpie — but this last one’s from me: again, only listen to whatever works for you. Maybe you’re a master of the adverb. Maybe you know yourself enough not to finish things that lead nowhere. Build your own toolbox.
Paul Fischer is an author and film producer based in the United Kingdom. His first book, A Kim Jong-Il Production, was published by Penguin in the UK and Flatiron Books in the US in 2015 and has been translated into sixteen languages. It was nominated for the Crime Writers' Association's Non-Fiction Book Award, as well as chosen as one of the Best Books of 2015 by NPR and the Library Journal. His second book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, is out now. Paul’s writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Independent, and the Narwhal, and he has co-written two feature films for Blumhouse and Hulu.
