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Episode 112—Paul Willetts Slays 'King Con'
123 Plays7 years ago
"Revision as you go along can be tremendously destructive of what you're doing," says author Paul Willetts. I’ve had quite a run of late of guests from the other side of the pond as it were. Today is no different as I welcome Paul Willetts to the show. Paul is very smart and he loves the work. He is the author of several books of nonfiction, most recently King Con: the Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Imposter.” Yes, that’s right. Hey, there CNFers, I’m Brendan O’Meara and this is my show... it’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the best artists about the art and craft of how they approach telling true stories: doc filmmakers like Emer Reynolds, narrative journalists like Susan Orlean and David Gran, memoirists like Mary Karr and Andre Dubus III, and essayists like Hope Wabuke, to tease out origins, routines, and habits, so you can improve your own work and maybe realize you’re not alone out there. Cuz it can be a lonely, desolate, hell scape and sometimes we need some reassurance that someone who has quote-unquote made it feels the same way. Hey, you know the drill. Reviews and ratings on Apple Podcasts, the app most of your are listening to this show on are gold. Would you consider taking a few moments out of your day to leave a review? And while you’re at it, visit brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for monthly newsletters. I’ve been doing that for a few years. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it. Well...Paul Willetts, everybody for Episode 112, we talk about how he struggles with beginnings, walking as writing, revision, building scenes. I hope you like it. I know I I did. Here’s me and Paul.
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Transcript
Introduction & Event Promotion
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The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by HippoCamp 2018, now in its fourth year. HippoCamp is a three day Creative Nonfiction writing conference that features 50 plus speakers, engaging sessions, and four tracks. Interactive all conference panels, author and attendee readings, social activities, networking opportunities, and optional intimate pre-conference workshops.
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The conference takes place in lovely Lancaster, Pennsylvania from August 24th through August 26th. Visit hippocampusmagazine.com and click the conference tab in the toolbar. And if you enter the keyword, CNF pod,
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At checkout, you will receive a $50 discount. This offer is only good until August 10th or until all those tickets are sold and they are selling. There are a limited number, so act now. Hippo Camp 2018, create, share, live. Got some sleepy people in the other
Meet the Guest: Paul Willets
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Speaker
room. I kind of got to keep my voice down a little bit. Hope this isn't too creepy.
00:01:09
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had quite a run of late if it gets from the other side of the pond as it were. Today's no different as I welcome Paul Willets to the show. Paul is very smart and he loves the work. He's the author of several books of non-fiction, most recently King Khan. The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age's Greatest Impostor.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Hey there, CNF'ers. I'm Brendan O'Mara, and this is my show. It's a creative non-fiction podcast. It's a show where I speak to the best artists about the art and craft of how they approach telling true stories. Thought filmmakers like Emur Reynolds, narrative journalists like Susan Orlean and David Grant, memoirists like Mary Carr and Andre Debeest III,
00:01:54
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as a is like hope will be to tease out origin through teens and habits even for your own work and maybe realize you're not so alone out there as it can be a lonely desolate hell skate and sometimes we need some reassurance of someone who has quote unquote made it feels the same way
00:02:17
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reviews and ratings on Apple Podcasts. The app where most of you are listening to this show right now are gold. Would you consider taking a few moments out of your day to leave a review? And while you're at it, visit www.brandonomeira.com.
00:02:35
Speaker
for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter. I've been doing that for a few years. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it.
Writing Struggles & Techniques
00:02:44
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Well, Paul Willets, everybody. For episode 112, we talk about how he struggles with beginnings, walking as a writing part of this process, revision, building scenes. I hope you like it. I know I did. Here's me and Paul.
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And is Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry as popular over there as they are over here now? Yes, they are. Yes. I'm a king cook, but I've never seen the program. I've seen his recipes. OK. Yeah, because on Netflix over here, the Great British Baking Show is like a phenomenon, I think. My wife and I are pretty hooked on it. So I was wondering, just to what extent, like how big their celebrity is in the UK, I wonder.
00:03:35
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I think it has been enormous, really caught on. Something I found particularly heartwarming about that show as opposed to American food competitions which are often rooted in sometimes false drama and also a lot of money is on the line so people tend to get pretty catty and competitive.
00:03:59
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But the great British breaking show is just so, everyone is just so sweet and happy to be there. And I wonder if that, is that like, kind of like a cultural thing that something you've noticed as well? I think it probably is because I, I knew there was a very vague acquaintance of mine. I remember who, who was teaching at the art school here, who ended up on, I knew his wife a little bit and he ended up on another of those
00:04:25
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quite I mean it wasn't as popular as the bake-off but it was a thing called master chef and you'd get these sort of very serious amateur cooks cooking and I remember this guy got into the latter stages of this competition and his wife was complaining that she was sort of getting fed up of these incredibly rich dishes he was trying out on her you know it was always involving masses of double cream and things oh yeah
00:04:51
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Yeah, because yeah when you hear about these people that going going back home during the week and practicing I just I just picture the the vast amounts of butter Just bestowed upon family members and it's like a blessing and a curse at the same time Yeah, yeah, so but I think there is this sort of collegiate feel I think about a lot of those program the British programs and actually one of the things that always surprised me about
00:05:21
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getting involved in non-affection was how, again, to use that word, collegiate, how helpful people were, really, which is very, very not.
00:05:33
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Yeah, for sure, for sure. That's something that just kind of resonated with us watching it. It's just kind of for bragging rights. All they win is a cake plate that we know of. And it's just for the love of baking. But over here, everything is just so rooted in just this almost vitriolic competitiveness, which can be a bit off-putting.
00:05:59
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I suppose they encourage that as well because they like, I mean, you get that a little bit on British things, trying to think what, but I've certainly come across that where they're obviously trying to create tension for drama, dramatic purposes. What's the challenge in creating suspense and narrative drive with something that is nonfiction based and you cannot use your imagination?
00:06:30
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Well, I think there are, I suppose you can, primarily when I'm looking for a story, I'm looking for one that has as much narrative drive as possible and as much potential to extract every drop of that kind of drive. And there are obviously ways in which you can
00:06:55
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without distorting the facts, you can impose a certain amount of drive on it. For instance, you can say on the book, I wrote two books down the line from the police procedural. That was a multiple character story. And you can then start cutting from one character to another. So you can get a certain amount of propulsion, even when there's not a massive amount going on. Just that sense of cutting can create some movement.
00:07:24
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And you can create movement, I think, through quite short sections or short chapters, that kind of thing. But obviously, as you say, you are dependent on the material. So I'm obviously always looking for things that have not just a strong narrative, but maybe twists within it. Just inbuilt, odd twists where you can blindside readers.
00:07:53
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And when you're in the throes of a project, and maybe you can tie this into King Khan, what is your daily ritual around the work so you feel like you're accomplishing what you want to set out when you wake up in the morning? Well, it depends at what stage. I suppose I'm very driven by... I've just found a method that just works for me, really. So I tend to...
00:08:24
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I'm always dying to be writing. That's the thing I most enjoy. Though often when I'm involved in the writing, I'm not enjoying it so much. And I think the bit I really enjoy is the revision, which I think in the end is the bit that's most pleasurable for me. But if I was starting, once I put together a book proposal, and obviously as the books have become
00:08:51
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as I've become more and more involved in the world of agents and that kind of decent advances or good advances, that's determined a certain element of this so that proposals for books now are pretty demanding. So you end up having to do quite a lot of research and you need to get quite a sense of the structure of your book even before you've started properly researching it.
Research in the Digital Age
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So these proposals can easily be 50 pages long and you can end up writing thousands of words in these sample passages which are
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It's a sort of daft idea in lots of ways because you're producing samples for a book you haven't researched and you've got to kind of create these mock-ups. And as a writer friend of mine said to me very wittily, she said, oh, it's a bit like someone saying to you, well, I hear you cook a fantastic lasagna, but look, I don't want to put you to the trouble of cooking the whole thing. I'll just try a spoonful of it.
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and it's that that does express the ludicrous nature of this and and your book proposals can be i will come on to answering what you were you're asking me about in a sec the book proposals can even be they tend to be treated more and more it seems as if say the chapter summaries as if they're summaries of an existing book rather than just this vague idea of what you might do or what you might find and that would be
00:10:23
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a bit frustrating, but beyond producing these sample things, once that's done, and say the advances, I've managed to get an advantage of something, I then start pretty methodically over maybe a year just researching, and I'm not doing any writing other than researching, jotting down, well it's more than jotting, I'm copying down chunks of things,
00:10:51
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I tend to be a bit paranoid about just somehow using, letting someone else's phrasing sink into my subconscious and then finding surfaces in my book. So I just copy out chunks and I tend to lay out everything chronologically in files and just work my way through maybe
00:11:13
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the case of King Kong, I just hoovered up everything I could find and then I systematically look for obviously stuff about the person I'm writing about, all the story I'm writing about might involve multiple people and I try and find out as much as I can about all the people that cross paths with the person. I start cross indexing it, then I start building up files about the places, the locations through which they move at that particular time. I use
00:11:43
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I mean, one of the blessings of, it's not a paradox, I think, from my kind of writing, is that you often find that, well, that the digital world has opened up amazing opportunities to portray the analog world so that I can do searches of newspaper archives that I couldn't do when I started writing nonfiction. So that, say, for instance, I'm looking to find out about
00:12:13
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trains or buses in a certain city. I can just do a word search with a very limited key words and a limited time span and you can then pull out all sorts of things that you're looking for. I'm often very attentive in the research. I've got to know the sort of thing I want. Opens up the possibility of you just being buried beneath stuff. So with King Khan, I was
00:12:42
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a bit more tightly focused, I hope, in trying to follow those leads. And so I'd work my way through them. I get to the point where I not only, well, the deadline obviously bears down on you say, if you've got it being given a couple of years, I really am dividing it up. A year's research and then a year's writing. But towards the end of the research, I'm starting to put together a breakdown, really, a kind of
00:13:15
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for the book. So I'm looking for a way, I'm looking for scenes. I've heard guests on your programme before talking about exactly the same thing. Excuse me. And I'm always looking for scenes. And I'm looking for elements of the story that will provide you with that physical detail and a bit of drama.
Crafting Compelling Beginnings
00:13:38
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And then you start looking for where you will begin the story. And that's when things start to get very exciting.
00:13:45
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something that might be helpful to your listeners, is that I always find the beginnings tremendously hard. Just because there's so much at stake at that point, you're conscious that in beginning the book you want to hook people, you want to really carry them along, but you've got to introduce, say, with something like King Kong. You've got to give a sense of the person you're dealing with and the period in which it's happening, because I'm always writing
00:14:15
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historically. So they're often, well, they're always alien worlds. So you need to give a sense of that world. But you've got to do that without plotting the narrative. So I tend to quite often just start writing somewhere else. And with my first book, I started writing, I just thought, I'm going to start writing somewhere
00:14:38
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that feels easiest, that's going to be most fun, and it's just unproblematic. And then I started spreading backwards and forwards through time in that biography. And with King Khan, I didn't write the beginning for quite a long time. Then I wrote various different beginnings and wasn't sure about quite where to begin it, how to pace it, how to spring the various
00:15:05
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story surprises in the narrative. Yeah, you just learn about these things. And I wish I, I've had a lot of pleasure out of helping people I've met on route. Not because I'm not a writing teacher, but every now and then I've come across people and who've been very serious about writing nonfiction, a couple of them who've become friends, have had things commissioned and
00:15:32
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It's nice to be able to make things easier for them than it was for me because I spend a lot of time rattling around trying to get an agent not knowing how it worked all that kind of thing and you can just save people a lot of bother with these sort of tips really and about how you when you find material and it's a lot of this stuff's common to all nonfiction writers and I find nonfiction writers are so
00:16:02
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Generous. I'm 99% of them. Wow. With the research and doing all that research for so long, sometimes you can lose yourself in it so much where you feel like, I'll start writing as soon as I get this bit of information. And you find ways to replace action with research or replace writing with research.
00:16:30
Speaker
So how do you, at what point do you feel like I'm done? It's now time to start writing. Well, it's it. I mean, yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that, because the research is quite addictive as well. That's something I never ever anticipated, especially that depth of research. It's because it's often think it is tantamount to running a police investigation.
00:16:57
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It's a similar sort of process, and you're working on tip-offs about here and there, and you've evolved funny ways of trying to extract material from subjects that are seemingly resistant to that kind of investigation. But for me, because I'm writing these books, and generally you're given a couple of years, I do approach that halfway point in the deadline period and think,
00:17:26
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God, I've got to stop writing. Not only because of the sense that the deadline will be bearing down on you. And if you overlap it, your advance doesn't go up. So you're potentially creating cash problems for yourself for a two year period.
00:17:46
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potentially really severe problems. So I've always got that breathing down my neck. But at the same time, I realize now that you can still do the research while you're writing. So that, say with King Khan, I was still researching right up to late in the process. And the glory of that really is that you can find out what you need.
00:18:13
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There are certain things that I think I've learned that I don't necessarily need to research. I just know that I can say, for instance, your character rolls up in, like the protagonist in King Kong, he rolls up in, say, 1919
00:18:33
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Vancouver, you don't necessarily know at the point when you're researching that you will use that material. So now I'd be inclined not to research everything I can find about 1919 Vancouver till I'm damn sure that I need it. Otherwise you really do enter into this sort of multi-layered type of research. And there's all beneath all the
The Story of Edgar LaPlante
00:18:59
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say, researching the person, the locations. There's also another sort of layer, a bit like some music production operation, this kind of another track for me is the general social history of the period. I will research that so that the person can be tied in as in as light a touchway as possible with things that are happening. For instance,
00:19:24
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Edgar Lapland, the very, very strange impostor at the center of King Khan, he gets together in Salt Lake City in 1918 with a genuine, he has reinvented himself as a Native American. He's a guy of a French-Canadian background, well, his parents are French-Canadian, and he's from Rhode Island. And he reinvents himself as a Native American, most famously as
00:19:54
Speaker
the supposed leader of the Canadian Cherokee called Chief White Elk and he rolls up in Salt Lake City in March 1918 and within a very short space of time he meets a rather glamorous and genuine Native American woman named Bertha Thompson and Bertha
00:20:14
Speaker
is where this keys in with social history research. His birther is what would, I mean, I was unaware of this until I started doing the background reading. She was what was known as a new woman at that stage, this feminist type of woman who was appearing at that point, who was independent and living by herself. And so it was interesting to see
00:20:38
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that side of things and in the case of just to carry on with this because it's just a fantastic, it gives you a taste of the material I had to work with. When the self-styled Chief White Elk is in Salt Lake City, he's so very good looking at that period and charming and just charismatic. Within the space of a mere week he's
00:21:04
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ingratiated himself with the bigwigs of Salt Lake City, among them the mayor of the city and the governor of Utah. And he's proposed marriage to Bertha, who accepts, and the governor of Utah has allowed them to stage their public wedding ceremony on the steps of the Salt Lake's equivalent of the White House, the state capitol, and 5,000 people witnessed this ceremony.
00:21:32
Speaker
And it's just extraordinary the way this guy can novelist like impose his imagination on the world. Yeah. Yeah. That's what really struck me about this guy, how opportunistic he was and willing to willing to do anything to to keep up the facade. It kind of reminded me of Mad Men. I don't know if you've seen Mad Men.
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, it was terrific, wasn't it? Yeah, just kind of like how Don Draper, I forget his real, his actual name, but he had an opportunity. He knew that his own birth identity was a dead end, but he had this opportunity to assume another man's identity and ran with it and made himself
00:22:19
Speaker
who he was. And I kind of got that sense through Edgar LaPlante here that it was like he needed to reinvent himself, which in a sense is a very American story in a way. Yes, in trying to encapsulate it, I remember saying to someone it was a bit like he's a bit of a cross without risk of exaggeration.
00:22:43
Speaker
cross between Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley. And he's even got a dash of kind of David Bowie about him in the sexual ambiguity and the sort of shape-shifting theatricality. And he's definitely a Ripley-like figure. And he's, yeah, as you say, he's quintessentially American. And there's also something very topical about him, about that kind of identity theft.
00:23:11
Speaker
And I love those stories which make you think, or the stories that develop themes which you think are distinctively modern, say, distinctively 21st century, like the obsession with celebrity that you said brilliantly exploits, that's there in 1917. We don't really change, do we, as people. Our costumes change, the technology changes, but basically,
00:23:39
Speaker
person in 1920s much like a person now. I had a high school English English high school history teacher who said I don't know if he made this up or he quoted it from someone else but he said that times change technology changes but people don't. Yeah yeah I think he's absolutely right and so there's something enduring about these stories and he yeah just the way I think the
00:24:09
Speaker
One of the things that's really fascinating I found about him is the fact that he's not just one of those imposters. There are lots of impostor stories, but this is on an altogether more grandiose level, but also he's someone with incredible talent. Lots and lots of witnesses describe about how he's the greatest singer they've ever heard. He's a sort of sweet-toned baritone, and he clearly
00:24:39
Speaker
He had a good vaudeville career that would have got better and better and better. And he was capable of filling up 2000-seat auditorium. And so he was getting a fair amount of that star thrill of people applauding him and the acclaim he wanted. Yet it was never enough. He later became addicted to cocaine and morphine. And he was an alcoholic.
00:25:07
Speaker
And there's a sort of drug-like drive to his craving for acclaim, that he just wants more and more and more of it. And he's not as straightforward to call him a con man would be a misnomer, because he's not really a con, I mean, he cons people, but he's not a con man in the sense that it's about the money. It's never about the money.
Transition from Research to Writing
00:25:30
Speaker
So that even at the earliest recorded
00:25:34
Speaker
period of him committing crimes, which was when he was 14 and he was conning people even then. He was going around local shops in central force, Rhode Island, going in saying, I'm from Mr. Jones down the road and he needs some spare change. Can we have a bag of it? And he was pulling this con, but he wasn't spending the money. He was giving it to his dad and saying, this is from my spare time job. It's my pay. And it was just about the thrill.
00:26:03
Speaker
And obviously, once he gets away with it once, he's not quite enough. He doesn't want to just repeat it. He wants to do something a bit bigger. And so there's an inbuilt trajectory within the book that it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, as you know, totally ludicrous levels.
00:26:22
Speaker
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, maybe in the process of writing a book of this nature that has so much research and just its own heft to it. So what do you do to get back on track so you can adequately approach the work and get yourself moving again? Well, I suppose I found
00:26:50
Speaker
Just as on a purely practical level, what was always a tremendous godsend to me was that as soon as I started writing on a computer, I could make deals with myself to just say, right, I'm not rereading this till I've written 10,000 words. I'm just going to let it disappear over the horizon of my screen and just plow on. And sometimes if I've hit particularly difficult sections,
00:27:18
Speaker
I always want to just bang in something, a bit like a painter, so just putting in some marks. I'll just put in what I can and move on. And if I know, I'll realise even the best, even what seems like the best stuff, you reread and think, why did I think that was good? And then you reread the right, re-write and then you think,
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, I was pleased with this at the time, but I don't like it now. But gradually, it's just a process of going over and over it. And I find, I think the thing that the best advice I could give is to just plow on, just keep going, just keep because you can always revise it. But I think revision as you go along can be tremendously destructive of what you're doing.
00:28:04
Speaker
and you can become too focused on the minutiae, on producing lovely sentences. I think you just need to concentrate on telling your story and then you can start thinking about the structure that will tell it. Well, ideally you've mapped out the structure beforehand, that's a silly thing, so I should have said that first, but you can go back over this stuff and you can rewrite and rewrite and I was rewriting it until really
00:28:31
Speaker
you know, two weeks before King Kong went to press and we were still finding. I mean, that's the thing about these things. A lot of stuff you don't notice on screen, it gets printed out, and then you think, why didn't I notice this? And even after 25 people have read something and it's been proved, things sneak past. It's just the way of the business.
00:28:53
Speaker
And what's your endurance for a writing session? How long can you go before you have to go for a walk or just unplug from it altogether? I think going for walks is just a great thing to do because you can still work, but you're just getting a bit of exercise, fresh air away from a screen if you're using a screen. I tend to just my hours
00:29:17
Speaker
I probably, I get up early, not necessarily out of particular choice. I've just been trained into it, because my other half takes so long to get ready to go to work. And it often, and always wants the radio on, and just listening to the news and things. The only way to cope with that was always to get up before her. And I used to happily sleep in to a quarter to nine or something. And often in the past, I was working on jobs where I was working in the evening.
00:29:45
Speaker
So I could have done that, but eventually I just ended up getting up sort of 6.30 and I'm more generally at my desk by about with a cup of tea, maybe 20 to eight, something like that, half by seven.
Cinematic Storytelling & Film Adaptation
00:30:02
Speaker
And I sort of potter away, do some things.
00:30:06
Speaker
brush my teeth, get back to work, and I'll work till 12 o'clock, have some lunch, I'll work a bit more, go out and get some shopping, work a bit more. I don't generally these days particularly like working in the evenings. Sometimes, say with King Kong, I had a period when I was getting very blind and I thought, I've just got to have a run of, say, three, four weeks of working a lot of evenings.
00:30:32
Speaker
And I did really feel like I was in the material. It gave a certain sort of obsessive thrill to it. But I'd rather not work all the time. But I do tend to work quite a bit at weekends. And yeah, I just plow away. I mean, I don't do stretches of eight hours writing. I do bits and pieces, take a break or go for a walk.
00:30:57
Speaker
And I'm not averse to meeting someone from a coffee every now and then and during the day. So it's a reasonably kind of casual routine. I put it in the hours, but they're not in the end when you really, if you're strictly honest about what hours I'm doing, they're not freakishly long. They're just spread out over most of the week. And over the course of your body of work from book to book,
00:31:23
Speaker
What would you say you've improved with over the course of the body of work? Things you do very well now that maybe you didn't do as well early? I wouldn't necessarily claim to do anything very well. Just this, like, I can do things better than I did to start with, really. With all of us, there are things we like doing. You know, I like descriptive passages.
00:31:50
Speaker
And so I've always got to be wary of just overdoing it. And I like passages where you can inject a kind of sardonic humor into it. But I think it's the storytelling, I think, that have improved a lot. Just an awareness of
00:32:07
Speaker
how stories work best and how about revealing things, holding them back. And I suppose some of that, what helped with that quite a lot was the, what would it be? It would be my third book that was actually, it was a bit of a departure from the track I was following because although I thought I was going to keep writing these narrative nonfiction books that weren't biographies,
00:32:34
Speaker
I was persuaded to do a biography of this Soho in London, a very loose guy who was a pioneering in England, strip club owner in Cabaret.
00:32:47
Speaker
owner. His club featured in the Beatles' magical mystery tour. He was interesting because he pushed at the boundaries of censorship in theatre and all sorts of areas. He wasn't someone I was actually necessarily drawn to, but my agent, knowing I was interested in Saha and had a lot of family connections with that area, my agent suggested this. I started rather grudgingly doing some test research on this guy, Paul Raymond.
00:33:17
Speaker
and found that I liked it, and then got going
Advice for Aspiring Writers
00:33:21
Speaker
on the book. But at a later stage, the book got picked up to be made into a movie, and I ended up working on as an advisor for the script writer. And the movie ended up being made with Steve Coogan, the comedian, as Paul Roman. And by British standards, it was on a very big budget. We had quite a lot of time
00:33:45
Speaker
say we, I wasn't that involved, but it gave me a chance to sort of think about the process of storytelling and probably I've become more cinematic in the way I approach it, in the way I sort of structure scenes. And I think that having got to the end of King Kong, I would approach, the thing is, I'd approach that book
00:34:09
Speaker
quite different. Well, subtly differently if I was to start again now. The thing is, there's a temptation, isn't there, when you look at these books, to think that that's the only way they can be.
00:34:21
Speaker
And also, say if you're an apprentice writer, I'd just backtracking to some of the things we were talking about before. I'd really advise people not to try not to get intimidated by favourite writers, because you can look at books, you can start flicking through books and you see, oh, so-and-so does this descriptive business 500 times better than I'll ever be able to do. But what you don't think about in that moment of self-flagellation is the fact that
00:34:51
Speaker
book you've just looked at, fine, it may be written by someone who's immensely talented and far more talented than you or I will ever be, but that book is nonetheless the product of collaborative work with an editor, a copy editor, friends, fellow writers, it's been gone through about 500 times and the thing that you ought to comparing it to, this descriptive passage you've just
00:35:17
Speaker
written that morning shouldn't be compared to this finished piece. So I think you've got to try and be fair on yourself and not make those kind of comparisons, that your rough and ready piece was probably similar to that published writer's rough and ready piece maybe, you know, a few years earlier before his had gone through this endless draft. So yeah, I try and I'm aware of things that
00:35:45
Speaker
I can do better than other things and I suppose you want to play to your strands. How did you cultivate a sense of patience with your own work to put down enough bad sentences and bad words to get to the good stuff?
00:36:02
Speaker
I think it's a bit like being a kid and doing so. Yeah, it's no different from things you do as a kid where some teacher will say to you, ah, you're really good at tennis or whatever it is. And that bit of praise will encourage you to do more of it. Then you get better, you get more praise, which everybody likes some praise. And it's with writing, I think if you just have some encouragement, you can
00:36:31
Speaker
But it's easy to think as well, say, if you're unpublished, you look at published writers and you think they're immune to self doubt. And yeah, they just contend with different sorts of criticism that it's much more public. So you get a terrible review. And I can understand, I well understand why a lot of published writers just don't read reviews, because you
00:36:55
Speaker
is a good idea in lots of ways because you're not swung by praise and you're not crushed by criticism. So I think you've just got to get a sense that if you find someone who can help you, encourage you enough over that period when you're beginning to make you keep on and
00:37:23
Speaker
I think, yeah, you're really dependent a lot on other people. Obviously, you've got to have a core of self-belief to keep going, particularly as you inevitably get a lot of rejections from all sorts of quarters. Let's face it, anything that's written isn't going to be to everybody's cup of tea. There's always going to be people that hate whatever you do and you've just got to
Conclusion & Where to Find Paul's Work
00:37:49
Speaker
feel that, well, there are some people who are going to like it, I'm going to do it. And you're doing it for yourself as well. They're not to the point of self involvement, especially with nonfiction, which has this nice feel about is looking out at the world, which I think there's something very healthy about it.
00:38:07
Speaker
I remember novelists saying to me I was doing a lot of interviews for they were kind of transcripts for a book magazine for quite a long time. I remember interviewing a very nice novelist who said to me at the end of the interview we were just chatting and I said to him that stage I just started writing non-fiction. I said God I'm surprised about this non-fiction business that it's expanded my social circle
00:38:32
Speaker
And this guy said very dryly, he said, well, you'll find that writing fiction shrinks your social circle. And one of the lovely things about writing nonfiction is you meet people and you get out and it's not, it's less self-involved. I mean, it's probably an unfair thing to say about writing fiction, say it's self-involved, but it could be and nonfiction is
00:38:55
Speaker
by its very nature, a lot of it, unless you're writing with your biographic play. You're looking outwards. Right. So Paul, where can people maybe find you online and get a little more familiar with you and your work? And then where can people find the book if they want to go buy King Kong and devour it and hopefully buy another copy for their friends?
00:39:22
Speaker
Oh, thank you. I've got a website that's www.paulwillits.com and that has a lot of stuff on all sorts of things.
00:39:37
Speaker
bonus pictures are rather like that DVD type bonus extras concept that I've tried to put on the website. So for each book, there's a lot of extra stuff. There's a filmmaker and I did a sort of spoof movie trailer. A guy actually, I mean, say, casually a filmmaker, he ends up as the British entry for the Venice Film Festival. He directed a terrific trailer for the last, yeah, it was the last book.
00:40:03
Speaker
And the King Con, there are some bonus pictures online, that sort of thing. And the book itself, which is a lovely production, The Crown, who published it in America, Canada, and they've exported to Britain, have done an amazing job. It's available in all bookshops and online on, yeah, just all the usual places, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indie, Band, I think it is.
00:40:30
Speaker
I'll excuse my ignorance about the book selling scene. Well, I hope your listeners like it. It was a great amount of fun to research and write it, so I hope that actually comes through in the book itself.
00:40:50
Speaker
Well, what else can be said? Thanks to you for listening and thanks to Paul for coming on the show. Thanks also to our sponsor, Hippo Camp 2018. Today, as in August 10th, is the final date to cash in on the $50 discount by using the coupon code CNFPOD at checkout. And last call for reviews on Apple Podcasts, formerly known as iTunes.
00:41:16
Speaker
And to head over to brendanomera.com to sign up for my groovy newsletter. I can't think of anything else to say, except thanks for listening. I gotta go now.