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5 Greg Buchanan | Literary Thriller Author, Screenwriter and Video Game Writer
317 Plays4 years ago
Best-selling literary thriller author, screen and video-game writer, Greg Buchanan tells us all about writing non-linear stories for his work on No Man's Sky, graphic novels and his debut novel, Sixteen Horses which was picked up by publishers in the UK and the US off a partial and is soon to be adapted for television.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
So our podcast is called Right and Wrong.
00:00:01
Speaker
Are these your notes?
00:00:03
Speaker
These are your notes about what we're going to say.
00:00:06
Speaker
What does it say?
00:00:06
Speaker
I thought it would be a good... I didn't even get the idea.
00:00:12
Speaker
Maybe I can just ask you the question.
00:00:16
Speaker
It's going well.
00:00:16
Speaker
It's going really well.
00:00:22
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm Jamie.
00:00:25
Speaker
And I'm Emma.
00:00:26
Speaker
And today we are speaking to Greg Buchanan, game writer and storyteller who has been listed in Forbes 30 Under 30.
00:00:34
Speaker
His first novel, 16 Horses, comes out on the 13th of May 2021 in the UK and the 20th of July in the US.
00:00:42
Speaker
Hi, Greg.
00:00:42
Speaker
Thank you for coming on the show.
Early Inspirations and Influences
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:45
Speaker
Before we go into this wild and crazy ride that you've had with 16 Horses, I just wanted to take it back a little bit earlier because you have written stories across a bunch of different mediums, comic books, video games, and now a novel itself coming out.
00:01:04
Speaker
And we would just love to know where writing started for you.
00:01:08
Speaker
Did you always want to be a writer?
00:01:11
Speaker
Sure, yes.
00:01:12
Speaker
So I, in primary school, as with many writers, if you ask many writers when they started, they were sort of a kind of, I think like eight or nine years old.
00:01:21
Speaker
I quite enjoyed writing stories, often little sci-fi stories, which had character names that was suspiciously like me and my friends, which I'm sure is true for a lot of people.
00:01:32
Speaker
And I, around the time, I started
00:01:35
Speaker
I think I was perceived, it was one of the things I was seen as good at.
00:01:38
Speaker
So that was nice getting some reinforcement from my teacher and people I knew.
00:01:42
Speaker
And I started being allowed to write, like, it was the kind of thing where the teacher would tell you to write a story about like the woods or police or whatever.
00:01:49
Speaker
And she let me start doing whatever I wanted for those sessions, which was quite nice and a nice bit of affirmation and let me be a bit more creative.
00:02:00
Speaker
And then I wrote a bunch of stories around then, kept going, but it sort of died down a bit as I sort of approached secondary school.
00:02:09
Speaker
And it actually really, really kicked off me again in a very strange story, which also makes a nice little anecdote, but is actually true at the same time.
00:02:16
Speaker
I was hit by a car when I was about 12 or 13.
00:02:20
Speaker
and I was fine I was concussed so I was complete I was completely knocked to the ground I was out for a minute or two um which I didn't realize at the time because I didn't know I was concussed from my perspective I just been knocked to the ground and then got up again my friend didn't tell me till later um that I'd been lying there for ages um weirdest detail was my shoes were sort of untied and kind of thrown off me which apparently happens as a thing when you're hit by car
00:02:43
Speaker
Wow.
00:02:44
Speaker
And my father brought me to the hospital when I got home because I sort of walked... The people who hit me kind of let me walk home, which was weird.
00:02:51
Speaker
And they sort of... I didn't know they were the ones who hit me because I was dazed.
00:02:54
Speaker
Off you go now.
00:02:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:56
Speaker
They ran over to me and were like, are you okay?
00:02:58
Speaker
Do you need an ambulance?
00:02:58
Speaker
And from my perspective, I'm like a little kid.
00:03:00
Speaker
So I'm like, no, I'm fine because I felt fine, which I gather they just took my word on.
00:03:07
Speaker
So a sort of pseudo hit and run.
00:03:09
Speaker
Not quite a full run, but sort of... Polite hit and run.
00:03:12
Speaker
I know.
00:03:13
Speaker
Um, and, uh, uh, the dad very alarm took me to hospital.
00:03:17
Speaker
I was ultimately fine.
00:03:18
Speaker
Um, just kind of a bit bruised
Writing Career Challenges and Opportunities
00:03:20
Speaker
and off.
00:03:21
Speaker
Uh, but he had, I had to wait in the hospital for ages that day.
00:03:24
Speaker
And he had some Stephen King books in his car, um, on writing and, uh, the gunslinger, which is this like dark tower series.
00:03:31
Speaker
Um, and I was kind of reading through these, um, and I got super into Stephen King as a result, maybe slightly too young to get to Stephen King.
00:03:38
Speaker
especially those books, but I got like super into it and I read on writing and I read all, I read the dark tower and then I read all the thrillers and horror books and everything.
00:03:48
Speaker
And I then started just writing rip off Stephen King stories, which people seem to like.
00:03:53
Speaker
And then since then I've, I've, I've,
00:03:56
Speaker
always like that that was a sort of more adolescent I want to be a writer now with a capital w um and I I became quite pretentious for a while after that so like when I the closer I got to university and studying kind of like old old it should more I started just I think that the theme here is I just trying to mimic whoever I read um I start kind of inappropriately mimicking kind of like 17th century people uh for a bit um and very recently I I sort of got into doing good stuff again I think so that's sort of my journey uh that makes any sense from wanting to
00:04:25
Speaker
Okay, so you knew from a young age that this was what you wanted to do, really?
00:04:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:32
Speaker
And it's been strange having that as a dream from an age, I guess, because everyone has, a lot of writers will say that, you know, they always want to be a writer and stuff.
00:04:40
Speaker
But I remember it kind of almost, it's been a really kind of like, oh, I really want to do that.
00:04:45
Speaker
Like that's like a hope for the future, but that can also be kind of a depressing or upsetting thing for those moments in your life where you don't, you feel like you're very far from that in a way that's kind of strange.
00:04:57
Speaker
So sort of being about like 19 or 20 years
00:05:00
Speaker
being in my very pretentious phase, I just mentioned, knowing for seven years, for my whole formative period, wanting to be a writer and being so far from it then was a very upsetting thing as well.
00:05:11
Speaker
So it's been a good thing and a bad thing, I guess, holding onto that for so long.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:15
Speaker
Well, that's really interesting.
00:05:17
Speaker
And going on, so you then studied English literature at university?
00:05:21
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:23
Speaker
And how did you, was your first job in writing, was that for video games?
00:05:32
Speaker
Yes, so I was through my... So I did things just through undergraduate course, and then I was kind of, oh, no, I now have to enter the workforce.
00:05:41
Speaker
What do I do?
00:05:42
Speaker
I still want to write these novels and blah, blah, blah.
00:05:45
Speaker
So I was writing my work, and then I decided, oh, I'll just keep doing academia.
00:05:48
Speaker
I'll keep studying novels, and this will help me sort of...
00:05:52
Speaker
understand novels better help me understand writing better and I can feed that back to my work and that was that was my hope and I just kept doing it so I eventually did a PhD in English literature as well and in the closing stages of that I ended up doing some consulting for some companies on narrative because a lot of my PhD looked at how structure and identification and
00:06:12
Speaker
characterizational work and and the it looked at both novels and video games which is an unusual comparison but yeah i looked at issues of how control and interactivity work in lots of different types of stuff and this was interesting to some companies i worked with so i worked with an exam board who was interested in in in some of these principles um and and how to apply them to their to their kind of work how to test and train people
00:06:35
Speaker
And it was during this phase, the very end of the PhD, where I was working on that stuff.
00:06:39
Speaker
So I sort of started like earning some money at the same time as I was finishing off, where I ended up going to a games jam event, which is an event where people try and make a video game within 24 hours, just for free or for fun.
00:06:53
Speaker
And it's a nice activity.
00:06:54
Speaker
And you get a lot of people who are kind of more, what you say, amateur status, who are just trying to get into the industry.
00:07:00
Speaker
And you also have some people who are quite advanced there.
00:07:03
Speaker
And I walked in very jittery, but with the full kind of confidence of someone trying to con their way in to seeming like what they were doing.
00:07:12
Speaker
So I was like, I'm a writer without having actually written before.
00:07:16
Speaker
And it went well.
00:07:17
Speaker
Unfortunately, the team I worked with at that were a team from a company called Lionhead who used to work on the Fable series.
00:07:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:07:24
Speaker
They were all really lovely.
00:07:26
Speaker
But they shut down like a couple of weeks later after that event.
00:07:30
Speaker
So there was a kind of, oh, no, all the people I've met at games now no longer, the company doesn't exist anymore.
00:07:36
Speaker
But it gave me a lot of confidence and it showed me people acted like the stuff I produced was as good as I was claiming it might be, if that makes any sense.
00:07:43
Speaker
I
Video Game and Graphic Novel Writing
00:07:44
Speaker
did the imposter thing, but it...
00:07:45
Speaker
worked so therefore it seemed about right and so yeah and then that was my first professional writing after that because um after that i i used those skills to make some of my own games um those got picked up in publications and then it eventually kind of led towards paying work so i transitioned from that kind of consultancy to what i really wanted to do which was creative writing
00:08:04
Speaker
Amazing.
00:08:04
Speaker
Do you think delving into your literature studies really helped you for your initial approach into the writing world?
00:08:13
Speaker
Because a lot of people obviously have different approaches and you've massively, yours has been academic.
00:08:21
Speaker
And then, you know, as you said, it set up a lot of, or maybe opened a lot of doors, do you think?
00:08:27
Speaker
Or am I not right in saying that?
00:08:30
Speaker
I think so.
00:08:31
Speaker
I think the, I mean, there's obviously the skills side of things where, you know, I can discuss certain types of text or I know certain things from what I studied, but in the pure kind of does the qualification help?
00:08:41
Speaker
Like did that help open doors?
00:08:43
Speaker
I think it did in a kind of, for some companies it really did.
00:08:46
Speaker
For some companies it was irrelevant in the game space.
00:08:49
Speaker
I know that very early on the fact that I'd worked with,
00:08:52
Speaker
on a professional basis in that consulting I mentioned, and I had the PhD.
00:08:56
Speaker
So I'd been paid by a company to do stuff related to narrative and my PhD was helpful as an approach early on because it's sort of, you have the benefit of the doubt that you're someone who's paid for this kind of ideas work at the very least.
00:09:09
Speaker
So you can combine that if you're on the edge with the actual writing samples you see in front of you in terms of professionalism, I guess.
00:09:15
Speaker
And I know some people I've worked with have been really interested in that qualification and that sense of, I guess, knowledge or skills that would give me.
00:09:28
Speaker
But equally, in many cases, it's the kind of thing where I
00:09:30
Speaker
used to before I worked in games writing I used to on my CV have the big education bit in quite a lot of detail whereas eventually although I still feature my kind of core university qualifications there it's nowhere near a highlight as it once was and because it's not what people are I mean it's one of those things as well that once you have some projects in your CV and you've demonstrated you can do it that's more what people are interested in I guess that those things so it's really a gateway thing I guess
00:09:56
Speaker
And during your academic studies, your degree and your PhD, presumably a lot of that, well, you did say your PhD did a little bit on video games, but you mentioned you worked with the Lionhead team who did Fable, which I'm aware is a...
00:10:12
Speaker
is a kind of open story world.
00:10:14
Speaker
You also were named in Forbes 2019, 30 under 30 list for your work on no man's sky, which is kind of a big exploration survival game.
00:10:26
Speaker
In terms of the actual, the narrative structure,
00:10:29
Speaker
How did you find, or how did you originally learn to do non-linear stories and how different is that?
00:10:36
Speaker
Or did you, how, how hard was the transition from, from like a traditional story to a non-linear story like they use in video games?
00:10:43
Speaker
Hmm.
00:10:44
Speaker
So I think part of what made that easier in terms of what I've been studying for the last few years.
00:10:49
Speaker
So in the PhD, I looked at novels, I looked at video games, like I said, but some of those novels, some of those novels were really kind of normal standard novels, like the ones you're probably thinking of in your head, you know, like a book.
00:11:00
Speaker
with a beginning and an end.
00:11:02
Speaker
But some of them were quite experimental stories.
00:11:04
Speaker
Not exactly choose your own adventure, but almost.
00:11:07
Speaker
So one was this book in a box by this guy called B.S.
00:11:09
Speaker
Johnson.
00:11:10
Speaker
And you'd open the box and there was all these booklets inside.
00:11:14
Speaker
And one bit says beginning, one bit says end.
00:11:16
Speaker
But the rest...
00:11:17
Speaker
you can read in any sequence and the book resolves itself.
00:11:21
Speaker
And there's one that's even more experimental, but not quite as good, called Composition Number One by, I think, Mark Supporter, I think, is the author's name.
00:11:28
Speaker
And that similarly has a kind of, that's just like pages that are separate and can be read in lots of different sequences.
00:11:35
Speaker
And the more you...
00:11:36
Speaker
The more I studied those, the more I realized that we impose an order on storytelling ourselves.
00:11:42
Speaker
So even though your text and the authority of the author didn't really provide one, they were like, read it in any order you want.
00:11:48
Speaker
You'll make the same kinds of assumptions and structural work trying to go through those books as you would if it had been a defined order.
00:11:57
Speaker
The main difference is that you're aware of it and that people's readings can maybe vary a bit more wildly as a result.
00:12:03
Speaker
And so entering video games and knowing that you can encounter lots of different story pieces in different ways, to me, I knew that the end result for the player was
00:12:13
Speaker
wasn't going to be as different as I might have imagined if I'd not had that experience and I knew they were going to impose order on it.
00:12:20
Speaker
And some of the things as well is that you, you can have certain kind of touchstones in, in a big video game term for this kind of stuff is the law, um, as in the kind of background mysteries of the games, the storytelling universe.
00:12:32
Speaker
Um, and you sort of can have various touchstones and, and,
00:12:35
Speaker
big things in the law that if you mention they'll sort of the elements you provide for those will connect up in the in the player's mind regardless of the sequence which they encounter them they'll they'll um be able to build the story of what happened in a certain way um kind of that yeah definitely and there's this there is some sequential elements to them anyway like you know you know generally where people will begin at the very least which can have a lot of big impacts on how the rest of it goes
00:13:01
Speaker
Okay.
00:13:01
Speaker
And then going on from that, you've also, I don't know how you've managed this, but you've also worked on graphic novels, which is a whole other style of writing and storytelling.
00:13:14
Speaker
Do you illustrate or did you work with an illustrator when you did those?
00:13:19
Speaker
Oh, so I work with artists and illustrators on those.
00:13:23
Speaker
The kind of biggest thing I've worked on hasn't been announced yet.
00:13:26
Speaker
So it's mostly what's available online is kind of shorter pieces that I've shared.
00:13:32
Speaker
But yeah, I, with those, I'll write a script for the team I work with.
00:13:38
Speaker
And the way it works is sort of, I'll write the dialogue and the descriptions and the layouts of what happens on each page.
00:13:44
Speaker
They're,
00:13:45
Speaker
or whichever kind of there's lots of different types of artists that can work together as a team but they'll draw layouts of that I might then edit my script as a result they'll then draw the full pages or see what it looks like I can then
00:14:00
Speaker
edit my script further so it's a kind of nice thing where unlike even with a kind of television program or film you can kind of quite iteratively build your writing and go back to it and make it better once you see what your creative collaborators have done in a way that's maybe a bit harder elsewhere but that's very fun and very loose
00:14:17
Speaker
And how did you, how did you first get into that?
00:14:18
Speaker
How did you meet the team that you, that you created?
00:14:22
Speaker
Because I imagine the relationship that you guys have must be quite important because there's always going to be, you know, you need to, you need to kind of synergize without too much pushback, but just enough, if you know what I mean.
00:14:33
Speaker
Oh, definitely.
00:14:34
Speaker
So with some of them, it was I put out an open call very early on when I was working on some of the shorts to possible collaborators.
00:14:42
Speaker
And then I'd look at their art and then I think who best fits the style I'm trying to work with and so on.
00:14:48
Speaker
As I've gone on, I've acted slightly more on a recommendation.
00:14:53
Speaker
um or um connection between other people so if you work with one person they can then recommend they work well with these other people um particularly in the relationship between people who kind of draw the comic people who color the comic um and or ink it um that's a very important relationship they'll often have someone that you know they've worked with before which is a better than clutching at straws from thin air and connecting possibly very disparate styles um
00:15:17
Speaker
Um, and yeah, and, and sometimes the relationships, cause there's other writers and other people in, for example, video games who have worked in comics as well.
00:15:25
Speaker
Um,
Journey to Novel Publication
00:15:26
Speaker
and sometimes you'll work on certain intellectual properties and video games that are also exploited or, or written about in, um, game, sorry, in comics.
00:15:35
Speaker
Um, and so those kinds of connections can lead to opportunities opening up as well, because if you've written for one kind of IP in one field, you sort of
00:15:44
Speaker
benefit of the doubt just like i was saying earlier with the um having worked on you know consulting i could then possibly do this kind of narrative idea work elsewhere it sort of helps build confidence and interest in in your work brilliant
00:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's brilliant.
00:15:59
Speaker
In regards to Stripping It Right Back in terms of going to, you know, the submitting phases and getting an agent and being published, do you feel like already being a writer for video content and obviously comics really helped you in regards to getting an agent for novel writing?
00:16:19
Speaker
Is it the same agent or how did that work for you?
00:16:22
Speaker
How did that sort of that gap, how was that gap bridged?
00:16:27
Speaker
So I have a slightly kind of strange origin story with the literary side of things and getting an agent and my publishing deal.
00:16:35
Speaker
So I remember I told you that I did that game jam with the Lionhead team.
00:16:40
Speaker
And after that, I sort of worked on my own projects and then they ended up getting coverage and so on.
00:16:45
Speaker
around the same time as this was happening and people had sort of given me that in-person validation of acting like I was a writer and treating me like I was a writer rather than the kind of thing I've talked to other writers about this the kind of thing where you say oh I'm a writer to someone and they go oh yeah and there's a kind of a bit of an eye roll because a lot of people say they are but then no no I actually am it makes it a bit different
00:17:05
Speaker
um and regardless the rightness or wrongness of that kind of snobbery that exists a lot of us have experienced it uh to our detriment um and um so that that gave me some confidence and i decided to apply for the university of east anglia creative writing ma because i'd heard it had a really good reputation um and had produced lots of good writers um and i thought if i get some training for my novel writing this will like help me do that more than
00:17:30
Speaker
or better than I was doing already.
00:17:32
Speaker
And I got in much to my surprise because I found my interviews were lovely, but I found myself oddly kind of tested in the conversation in a way I didn't expect and made me kind of examine my core of why I was writing and what I was even doing with my life.
00:17:45
Speaker
What sort of questions did they ask you?
00:17:47
Speaker
Oh, so it was, I think a question was, I think something was said that this is a very rough paraphrase.
00:17:51
Speaker
So if whoever's listening to this was one of my interviewers and you didn't say this, then it just makes a good story.
00:17:57
Speaker
But they said something to the effect of, oh, we really like your writing examples.
00:18:01
Speaker
We really enjoy, you know, we really like your sense of style and how you do it all.
00:18:05
Speaker
But we do feel there's a kind of sense of kind of emotion and core kind of presence of you on the page is missing.
00:18:12
Speaker
And it's kind of a bit cold and sterile as a result, despite the kind of how good technically it is.
00:18:17
Speaker
Why do you think that is?
00:18:18
Speaker
Why do you think you do hold back from putting your emotions and your inner self on the page?
00:18:22
Speaker
And I was like, what?
00:18:23
Speaker
That's my response of like, kind of freaked out because, yeah.
00:18:26
Speaker
It's like therapy.
00:18:28
Speaker
Yeah, the relationship between writing and the publishing industry and therapy is fascinating in that sense of how much they can resemble each other.
00:18:37
Speaker
But yeah, I can't remember fully what I said to the question because I was sort of dazed at the time from that.
00:18:43
Speaker
But afterwards, that actually drove me to do some of my games work I did at the time.
00:18:47
Speaker
The biggest early projects I did was about the then impending Brexit vote.
00:18:53
Speaker
And it was like Joe Cox had just been shot and the national atmosphere, whichever side you're on, was kind of a bit terrifying.
00:19:03
Speaker
And so I ended up doing a piece related to that.
00:19:06
Speaker
It wasn't a kind of dogmatic kind of...
00:19:12
Speaker
preachy piece.
00:19:13
Speaker
It was more kind of using the emotional mood of the time to kind of tell a little dark horror story about a politician and a cafe and this kind of dark, murky argument.
00:19:22
Speaker
But I did that.
00:19:22
Speaker
So I was like, I'm going to write, what do I care about right now?
00:19:24
Speaker
I care about what's going on.
00:19:25
Speaker
I'm going to do that.
00:19:26
Speaker
And that actually really helped me.
00:19:27
Speaker
So that kind of set me up in games, that conversation directly.
00:19:30
Speaker
But I got in to the course, but they said I got in for like a year and a few months.
00:19:36
Speaker
So I had a lot of time until the course began.
00:19:39
Speaker
And that I sort of started my work in games whilst waiting for the UEA course to begin, weirdly.
00:19:43
Speaker
So I sort of knew I wanted to do the novel course and try and get the opportunities from that whilst I was doing a lot of the games work.
00:19:49
Speaker
And whilst on, it was good I did because it helped fund the course when I was doing the course because I could do part-time games work.
00:19:57
Speaker
But whilst on that, there's an anthology of pieces by people who are studying on course.
00:20:05
Speaker
that is handed out to agents and publishers towards the end.
00:20:09
Speaker
And my piece I had in that was the beginning of my novel, 16 Horses.
00:20:14
Speaker
And that got the attention of a bunch of people, of agents, who then contacted me instead of the other way around.
00:20:20
Speaker
Oh, amazing.
00:20:22
Speaker
Yeah, which is an unusual kind of almost freakish occurrence.
00:20:27
Speaker
That's wild.
00:20:27
Speaker
That's the first we've had on this podcast.
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:20:30
Speaker
Agents contacted them.
00:20:32
Speaker
It was really nice, but kind of terrifying at the same time because you don't really know.
00:20:35
Speaker
Like all the advice that everyone else gives you is for totally the other direction around.
00:20:39
Speaker
So you don't really know what to do.
00:20:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:41
Speaker
But yeah.
00:20:42
Speaker
And so, so it sort of, although some of them kind of found out about my games work and some of them brought that up in our conversation, some of them didn't, it wasn't like the primary kind of starting point of it, but it did, it did give more, more stuff for us to talk about.
00:20:55
Speaker
And I must admit that I did kind of pay attention to how people kind of discuss that element, like whether they, cause you know,
00:21:02
Speaker
games are viewed a bit of a certain way culturally by a lot of people whether they were curious about it or whether they were dismissive about it was interesting to me not not a deal breaker but kind of it was a topic of kind of how are people going to respond to this and me and what my interests are and so so yeah well um moving on to the novel like obviously 16 horses what were your inspirations behind writing this
00:21:25
Speaker
So the novel started as almost a completely different thing, and it didn't originally have horses in it, which surprises a lot of people, considering the topic is that 16 horses are found kind of buried in a field.
00:21:36
Speaker
So how would it possibly start without that?
00:21:40
Speaker
So when I was in UBA, it was in Norwich, I went to Great Yarmouth, which is just a bit to the side, I think half an hour train, 40 minutes away.
00:21:50
Speaker
um and i spent some time there completely off season when it was very kind of gray rainy totally empty um huge rows of amusement arcades with absolutely no one in them um which felt kind of bizarre um in terms of like why are they even switching the lights on if you know no one's using them surely the electricity costs alone would make this not make any sense um for the day and but i spent a lot of time around there and the mood and atmosphere of the place really made me want to write about a place like this um and i wrote these kind of short
00:22:18
Speaker
pieces and kind of vignettes about people in an imaginary kind of decaying UK seaside town.
00:22:24
Speaker
Um, that was a bit dark and some of the depictions of such towns I'd seen on television and recent fiction where, although you're told that the place isn't doing very well, you, you know,
00:22:34
Speaker
you see that the town has like a functioning newspaper department with multiple people working there.
00:22:38
Speaker
You see loads of visitors.
00:22:40
Speaker
Whereas this place I was, at least the time of year I was, was completely empty and void of anyone.
00:22:45
Speaker
Like some of the streets were completely empty.
00:22:48
Speaker
And that idea of disappearance became really key to what 16 Horses was about at the beginning and what it still is really about now in many different ways.
00:22:57
Speaker
In a kind of almost a big film I saw around the time that was a big inspirational novel as well was Peter Weir's Picnic Hanging Rock.
00:23:06
Speaker
which just has this great moment of, for those who aren't aware of what the film is about, it's a group of schoolgirls go missing in the Australian outback or in this rock, hanging rock of this place.
00:23:20
Speaker
And although, you
Writing Process and Creative Growth
00:23:22
Speaker
know, it's about their disappearance and what it does to the community, you sort of don't really get full answers to a lot of the questions you might have while I was watching the film.
00:23:28
Speaker
And it was a very kind of mysterious, eerie, almost science fiction horror thing without ever actually having any science fiction or horror in it.
00:23:36
Speaker
but this kind of really intense atmosphere.
00:23:38
Speaker
And I was just kind of enchanted by that.
00:23:39
Speaker
And thinking about what I was trying to write about with this, this fictional town, I started kind of imagining what if various people in that town just started going missing and disappearing from their life and being forgotten about.
00:23:54
Speaker
And that element,
00:23:55
Speaker
that plot, the way I was using those characters is not present in the final book.
00:23:59
Speaker
That was almost my way into it and imagining these people.
00:24:02
Speaker
Um, and I, but before that plot line that I was working on where it was going to have always a sense of mass disappearance, um, I wanted a kind of opening that, you know, had an, an inciting event of kind of almost weirdness that would, would sort of lead to events occurring or at least our way into those events as in the fiction.
00:24:21
Speaker
And I wrote about, uh,
00:24:23
Speaker
a policeman walking across a farmer's field with a farmer and they were going to come across something.
00:24:28
Speaker
And when I was working on that, I didn't actually know what they were going to come across.
00:24:31
Speaker
So I was just sort of writing a conversation between these two men walking towards something that was going to be quite eerie.
00:24:36
Speaker
And I hoped I was writing it good because I didn't know what I was going to write at the end of it.
00:24:40
Speaker
And I actually was almost tempted to use some kind of other animal and I decided I resolved I was going to have some kind of animal discovery, almost in that sense of kind of, you know, in the horror genre, kind of the discovery of dead animals or something wrong with nature was often a kind of omen or portent of larger social collapse to come.
00:24:57
Speaker
um like lambs um have been born misshapen and so on um and in the end i they came across horses um and um i sent in that whole piece to the class um and the reaction to that was much stronger than anything i'd sent in before by by miles um and the um seminar leader who was giles foden who wrote last king of scotland to
00:25:18
Speaker
He was a huge supporter of it.
00:25:19
Speaker
And he actually just said, as did various other people, why are you sort of writing about this kind of plot with the disappearances?
00:25:25
Speaker
Why don't you just write about the horses?
00:25:26
Speaker
That's way more interesting.
00:25:27
Speaker
And I kind of, when I'd written that initial bit, I kind of had an explanation in mind for what that plot of the element, that bit of the novel would relate to.
00:25:35
Speaker
But that then became the novel.
00:25:36
Speaker
And I sort of jettisoned some of the other kind of weird elements that I was going to use.
00:25:40
Speaker
And, you know, I mentioned that I did the anthology and some of the agents asked me for the novel.
00:25:46
Speaker
um having read that beginning chapter um i sort of around the time i decided to jettison the rest of the novel was around the time people started expressing interest so i sort of was like oh uh wait another month or two please um and then just hurriedly hurriedly chocked most of the novel started again realizing that this other thing was much better um and um and lots of other things then contributed to to the rest of it but i sort of almost uh
00:26:09
Speaker
wrote a totally different novel that one bit I think was very good of.
00:26:12
Speaker
And then I took that bit out and then wrote a whole new novel just based as a spinoff of that chapter from the original version.
00:26:18
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:26:18
Speaker
That's great.
00:26:19
Speaker
And then you ended up, the novel itself ended up being picked up in the US and the UK just off the first 16,000 words.
00:26:27
Speaker
Is that right?
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yes.
00:26:28
Speaker
And that was a complete, I mean, since that's been said, it feels almost coincidental, like a marketing thing, but it was 16.
00:26:34
Speaker
Um, but I was actually, I was told by some of the agents to send in 15,000 words and I just sort of overshot.
00:26:38
Speaker
So it was a sort of unintentional, uh, but yes, it did.
00:26:42
Speaker
And, and, um, uh,
00:26:43
Speaker
That was a big surprise to me because I'd sort of chosen my agent and I was going on a work trip to Canada.
00:26:50
Speaker
So there was an idea that we were going to meet for lunch when I got back from the strip to discuss the future and what we were going to do with it all.
00:26:56
Speaker
And then I found at that lunch that, oh, by the way, a publisher has actually already expressed interest.
00:27:02
Speaker
And that was very unexpectedly exciting and kind of weird compared to what I thought it would all be, which was great.
00:27:10
Speaker
Did you feel a bit nervous going from game writing into novel writing?
00:27:14
Speaker
Or was it something that you kind of felt that was seamless for you?
00:27:19
Speaker
Like you felt like because of obviously going to do the course and your style of writing, it was easy.
00:27:27
Speaker
So I think I had...
00:27:30
Speaker
It was interesting what game writing gave me that I didn't have before and really valuable is partly a sense of writing experientially.
00:27:37
Speaker
So in game writing, you're writing for someone to do something in that space.
00:27:42
Speaker
They're going to move things around.
00:27:43
Speaker
So you have to think a lot about experience, which is true of novels.
00:27:46
Speaker
Novels are an experience as well.
00:27:47
Speaker
Just you don't think of them in that way when you're often when working on them.
00:27:50
Speaker
And also dialogue is very important in video games in that games are such a kind of multifaceted and huge field compared to what a lot of people I think imagine who don't play a lot of games.
00:28:00
Speaker
Some of them might as well be interactive novels.
00:28:02
Speaker
Some of them look like films.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:04
Speaker
You know, it's a huge variety.
00:28:06
Speaker
So sometimes when you write for them, you have to write dialogue for actual actors, which sort of hones how you're going to write because you can
00:28:12
Speaker
there's the kind of thing I think Harrison Ford said about George Lucas's script that you can write this stuff.
00:28:18
Speaker
He didn't say stuff, but you can write this stuff, George, but you can't say it or something to that effect.
00:28:22
Speaker
And so you sort of have to really hone dialogue and experience.
00:28:25
Speaker
And remember I
Advice for Aspiring Writers
00:28:26
Speaker
mentioned before that I was a bit, I'd gone really pretentious in my late teens.
00:28:29
Speaker
This was the sort of great antidote to pretension and what I was trying to do and that it added the exact elements my work was lacking.
00:28:37
Speaker
And so I think that made it a lot easier.
00:28:39
Speaker
And sometimes even when I'm drafting, I'll,
00:28:42
Speaker
write a very rough draft of a dialogue heavy chapter just as pure script.
00:28:46
Speaker
Um, and then, and then we use that when I'm doing my polish draft, if you know, as a way of doing, doing it in a more easy fashion, you get the, you feel the rhythm of the conversation more if you don't think about the other elements, um, for some of those bits, or at least for me.
00:28:58
Speaker
Um, so, so that gave me a lot of skills and confidence in some areas.
00:29:02
Speaker
Um, in other areas, it was a bit, it was weird because I,
00:29:07
Speaker
because I really liked game writing, but I never... Remember I mentioned when I was young, I kind of always wanted to be a novelist.
00:29:13
Speaker
It's not like I always wanted to be a games writer, despite enjoying games and really liking to play them.
00:29:18
Speaker
So when I was game writing...
00:29:20
Speaker
you know, you have your fears and your doubts and you're wondering if you're good enough and so on.
00:29:24
Speaker
But because I sort of kind of almost happened into it, I didn't quite have some of the psychological baggage I think I had when I started, you know, I was finally achieving my dream with the novels.
00:29:33
Speaker
And there was this whole thing where I think I was talking to my fiance about it and she said sort of, it's almost like I put,
00:29:40
Speaker
the novel on a pedestal at an early stage in terms of like, this must be completely perfect 100%.
00:29:45
Speaker
Whereas with my games, I do my best and I work really hard, but almost any imperfections of what I'm producing are accepted as a natural part of any creative process and possibly as a strength in that sometimes when you're forced to do something or something doesn't quite work, that can actually open up new opportunities and you see it for what it is.
00:30:03
Speaker
Whereas I couldn't...
00:30:05
Speaker
So I could apply some of the more tangible skills to my novel writing, but in other ways, even though I was a perfectly kind of mentally healthy game writer, to some extent, I was sort of a gibbering wreck at various stages of being a novelist.
00:30:18
Speaker
I think that's quite a common thing where people put a lot of pressure on themselves with their novel and just with their writing generally.
00:30:26
Speaker
And they come out and they think this has to be perfect.
00:30:29
Speaker
Like every single sentence must be perfect.
00:30:31
Speaker
Otherwise, you know, I have to get rid of it or delete it.
00:30:34
Speaker
And I just wondering, so you did always want to be a novelist back when you were writing your sci-fi with characters that were named very similar to your friends.
00:30:45
Speaker
How many books have you written before 16 Horses?
00:30:49
Speaker
So there was the beginnings of one very, very pretentious novel, which was recently discovered in a box of my possessions and then destroyed very quickly along with some poetry.
00:31:00
Speaker
But there was another novel that I wrote when I was about 21, 22 that had a lot of very interesting ideas and there was a lot of interesting style there.
00:31:11
Speaker
At the time, I couldn't.
00:31:12
Speaker
So some people really strongly liked it amongst my kind of friendship group and some people kind of couldn't stand it.
00:31:18
Speaker
And it was not exactly experimental, but it wasn't very easy reading.
00:31:22
Speaker
And I felt very fondly and almost protective of that work long after I decided, you know, I'm not going to,
00:31:28
Speaker
not going to go forward with this.
00:31:30
Speaker
Um, but I, I read it a few months ago again, and I really understand almost both sides now.
00:31:37
Speaker
And I see a lot of stuff to like, especially stylistically what I was trying to do, but I also see completely why it wasn't working in a way I couldn't have understood years ago, which I feel like was almost a tangible sign because I was talking about loss of confidence.
00:31:50
Speaker
Um, I think it was almost a tangible sign of growth and seeing it.
00:31:52
Speaker
And I saw that I was better than I was doing then, um, which was nice.
00:31:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:56
Speaker
That's good.
00:32:17
Speaker
Don't we all?
00:32:18
Speaker
I think people also get really caught up in terms of how to get the words on a page.
00:32:25
Speaker
And I was interested to know, Greg, how that works for you and how you just get the words on the page.
00:32:32
Speaker
What's your style?
00:32:34
Speaker
So I'm working on another book at the moment.
00:32:37
Speaker
And I totally thought that when I finished my first book and I went through the editing process that I sort of steam out as a brand new writer where I knew now what to do.
00:32:47
Speaker
And I had all that kind of sense of confidence.
00:32:49
Speaker
And unfortunately, lockdown hit at the exact time of that transition.
00:32:52
Speaker
So I don't know whether that was due to...
00:32:56
Speaker
the weirdness of early lockdown or it being difficult to work on a second piece.
00:33:01
Speaker
But I, it's all going very well now.
00:33:03
Speaker
But I've been thinking a lot lately about how I write and the approach I'm taking right now.
00:33:08
Speaker
And I sort of iteratively move between planning and free writing, like whatever I want for a chapter.
00:33:17
Speaker
And I find I definitely have creative ideas because of that flexibility.
00:33:24
Speaker
And because of suddenly writing something on a page that excites me, because it excites me or it sounds, oh, what's going on with that?
Desert Island Book Choice and Conclusion
00:33:30
Speaker
And provokes curiosity in me that I try and put on the page.
00:33:34
Speaker
But also, for a lot of, especially for the kind of, you know, at least last two thirds of a novel, you need to kind of very heavily plan various elements of that for it to work.
00:33:41
Speaker
Otherwise you're just going to go off into the distance.
00:33:45
Speaker
And I think that's a big lesson I learned with 16 Horses was,
00:33:52
Speaker
it was actually a lesson I learned in game writing.
00:33:54
Speaker
This was a more tangible thing that I applied from game writing to partway through 16 horses because it really helped me with a little bit of block I was experiencing at various points and it helps me now.
00:34:03
Speaker
It's to think about
00:34:04
Speaker
the constituent elements of a kind of a scene, so to speak in a novel will often involve dialogue.
00:34:10
Speaker
I think I said before, I will sometimes just free write the dialogue alone by itself.
00:34:15
Speaker
Um, if it's a very dialogue heavy chapter.
00:34:17
Speaker
Um, but also certain elements like description of the environment and the atmosphere, um, physical motions people might engage in, um, those things sometimes like pre plan or I jot very short vignettes, uh, and short paragraphs about in isolation to the chapter itself.
00:34:33
Speaker
and have that with me when I'm writing, not as a prescriptive guide.
00:34:37
Speaker
So I can completely ignore that if I want to.
00:34:39
Speaker
But it's almost like putting my paints on a palette, I guess, and I can use them if I want to.
00:34:46
Speaker
I've never really had problems with kind of –
00:34:49
Speaker
or any kind of hesitation about any other elements of writing and the glue between those things.
00:34:54
Speaker
It just stops me from staring at a blank page and being a bit terrified.
00:34:58
Speaker
And yeah, and I'm doing a lot of that now.
00:35:01
Speaker
I'll also sometimes watch films, listen to songs, read books.
00:35:06
Speaker
If I know that they had a strong feeling
00:35:09
Speaker
um ideally not the same kind of plot realm as what i'm writing about because then that's a problem but if they have a similar kind of vibe to what i want something to have um if i feel we'll watch something that's got that atmosphere and that creatively excites me i find it much easier to write the chapter i'm working on so you know the other day my new book is no way sci-fi but i watched the beginning of 2001 a space odyssey um and listened to the music and that kind of big black screen at the beginning and then the apes coming out and that whole kind of
00:35:35
Speaker
scene and and that made it so much easier to produce what i was working on right after that um in and likewise sometimes even to produce those kind of initial notes some stuff like that will help help me get there and the more kind of it's almost like i guess accumulating these kind of paints or layers of sediment and different materials together in a way that they eventually become more than some of their parts and and they eventually start feeling like they have some kind of
00:36:00
Speaker
existence independent to you just kind of making something up like if i go to write i was like i need to write about someone you know i need to write about funeral and someone feeling sad at funeral versus i need to write about funeral where a bunch of photographs are being taken inappropriately of certain elements of the funeral like that immediately you know even if that's not the big plot thrust that chapter that immediately casts such a kind of
00:36:22
Speaker
heavy weight.
00:36:22
Speaker
It's a different angle, right?
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah, and it excites, yeah, and gives you, you almost, if you know what you're doing as a writer and you suddenly have that kind of almost hook on your own scene,
00:36:32
Speaker
you then you can do the rest yourself.
00:36:34
Speaker
You don't need to pre-plan beyond that sometimes.
00:36:36
Speaker
So yeah, it's assembling those materials in advance, but also being willing to, if I'm writing and it's going well, just keep writing.
00:36:42
Speaker
Who cares?
00:36:43
Speaker
I haven't planned the rest.
00:36:44
Speaker
So yeah.
00:36:44
Speaker
That's a great piece of advice.
00:36:45
Speaker
I think that's really, really helpful.
00:36:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:47
Speaker
I think free writing seems very much like what improv is for an actor, right?
00:36:52
Speaker
It's just sort of the, you take away the constraints of having rules and regulations and
00:36:57
Speaker
you're free for a little bit to kind of see what happens.
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:37:03
Speaker
And speaking of advice, Greg, I wanted to ask in three parts here, because you have done very impressively, you have done three different forms of storytelling, all with their own toolkits and challenges, I'm sure.
00:37:18
Speaker
If you were speaking to your younger self or other people looking to get into these stories,
00:37:23
Speaker
kinds of writing.
00:37:26
Speaker
How would you, for each, for video games, comics, and now a novel, what piece of advice for those three different things would you give to people looking to get into those industries?
00:37:40
Speaker
So as a kind of blanket, this is an initial blanket piece of advice.
00:37:43
Speaker
You can do one for each is what I meant.
00:37:46
Speaker
I think I phrased that really weirdly.
00:37:47
Speaker
Oh, sure, sure.
00:37:50
Speaker
I meant like initially just doing something in each form.
00:37:53
Speaker
So more than anything, like so many people say they want to be a game director.
00:37:56
Speaker
So many people say they want to make a comic.
00:37:59
Speaker
Um, and you ask them, have they ever done anything?
00:38:02
Speaker
And they'll be like, no.
00:38:02
Speaker
And they're waiting for some kind of opportunity to be offered to them where they'll be allowed to do this, where the tools exist and are democratized now to do these things yourself at some level.
00:38:11
Speaker
Um, no one can stop you doing a script to yourself.
00:38:13
Speaker
Um, no one can stop you.
00:38:14
Speaker
There's loads of tools online, um, for games that you could just do something.
00:38:17
Speaker
And since you've done something, you are that, and that's going to cut so many people off from ever doing it, um, in a, in a really surprising way.
00:38:24
Speaker
Um, so there's, there's that initially.
00:38:26
Speaker
So for games, um,
00:38:29
Speaker
I'd say make something short.
00:38:33
Speaker
Don't bother trying to make your magnum opus.
00:38:35
Speaker
Don't bother trying to make some kind of like hours long piece.
00:38:39
Speaker
Use something like, so if you want to make a text-based game, it's a great way of starting because they're easy and they don't require, at least they've got a lower barrier of entry to other forms.
00:38:48
Speaker
They don't require a lot of outside involvement.
00:38:51
Speaker
Doing a piece using something like Twine, which is a line tool, you can make something about, and this is really what I wish I'd done, something about a particular event that's got some kind of dramatic scope to it.
00:39:01
Speaker
So like two people talking in a cafe or, you know, even something like a heist or,
00:39:09
Speaker
um, two people breaking up or something that's going to be a contained event in a contained place that isn't going to last too long, but that has some kind of element of activity to it that you can play around with the interactivity and choices of a game.
00:39:21
Speaker
And, and so, yeah, just, just, just, just making something.
00:39:24
Speaker
And if you're going to make something, make something like that, um, would be my advice for, for games, um, for comics.
00:39:30
Speaker
Um, to some extent, it's a similar piece of advice.
00:39:32
Speaker
Do, do a short, do something that's five to 10 pages.
00:39:35
Speaker
Um, with this, um,
00:39:39
Speaker
The biggest barrier to comics versus these other fields is money, to be honest, because if you can't illustrate the comic yourself to a great degree, you've sort of got that barrier of being able to make it.
00:39:50
Speaker
So if you know anyone who's in any way good at art, you can try and work with them.
00:39:55
Speaker
Or to be honest, sometimes it's saving up a bit.
00:39:58
Speaker
and being able to collaborate with someone or coming up with a way of, of, of planning something with someone where they'll get as much profits or if they want a portfolio piece or whatever.
00:40:06
Speaker
But, but that is a huge barrier, which I'm not quite sure how, how to see my way around.
00:40:09
Speaker
Um, if you, if you're a pure writer and you're not an illustrator, um, getting started in the field, um,
00:40:15
Speaker
But certainly as well, trying to get hold of a comic writer scripts is a really good thing as well for that purpose.
00:40:22
Speaker
And there's a few online websites and classes you can join.
00:40:25
Speaker
And that's what I did, where you can work with others who make comics.
00:40:28
Speaker
You can learn about how that's all done.
00:40:30
Speaker
You can actually read real examples of people's work and even kind of critique each other's.
00:40:35
Speaker
So working on a short piece, but with others and seeing what they're all doing is a really good idea for comics and filling in those gaps and
00:40:42
Speaker
and getting a sense of how that's all done because it's a very cooperative field, um, in that regard.
00:40:47
Speaker
Um, and with publishing or at least writing a novel, um,
00:40:53
Speaker
It's difficult because, as I mentioned, I sort of weirdly fell into this in a way that wasn't premeditated.
00:40:59
Speaker
Very few people have had the experience you've had, I think, going into publishing.
00:41:03
Speaker
Which is in some ways terrifying because you always wonder, am I going to be the story held up as a reason where that doesn't happen?
00:41:09
Speaker
Or am I going to be the, oh my God, that's a great reason for hype.
00:41:12
Speaker
That was amazing that that happened.
00:41:13
Speaker
And you never know, although hopefully well in this case.
00:41:16
Speaker
And I think what changed for me
00:41:21
Speaker
even throughout the course and even recent, even in the last, even working on the full novel is thinking about, and people used to say this to me even when I was younger.
00:41:30
Speaker
And it's one of those things you can tell someone, but you sort of have to almost understand it yourself.
00:41:33
Speaker
You have to relearn that lesson yourself.
00:41:35
Speaker
Just like your parents telling you stuff, you have to sort of sometimes learn it.
00:41:39
Speaker
So is writing for the reader and thinking about the reader and what they are going to find important in what you're writing is
00:41:47
Speaker
you have to write for yourself as well to some extent.
00:41:49
Speaker
You have to write about things you're legitimately interested in that you care about.
00:41:52
Speaker
And there's a sort of bend there between that and what the reader will care about.
00:41:56
Speaker
But even more specifically is, and this is really ironic that it took me so long to learn this lesson, considering my PhD was about stuff like sequence and structure, is not overloading the reader with information in the novel that is extraneous to the dramatic situation that is not important.
00:42:13
Speaker
Like it's interesting.
00:42:16
Speaker
to know that about that character and maybe you could have a kind of online section of stuff you could learn about that character that's not there.
00:42:21
Speaker
But, um, you, I, I even read in some published novels, um, just so much information and, and, and flash, I find that a symptom of this.
00:42:30
Speaker
So this, this isn't always bad.
00:42:31
Speaker
And I, I do flashbacks a bit of my novel as well, but,
00:42:34
Speaker
A symptom of this I find in my writing and in others is way too many flashbacks early on or way too many movements back and forth in time, particularly the beginning of a novel.
00:42:44
Speaker
And on the UBA course, I saw that a lot as well.
00:42:45
Speaker
And I feel like if you're listening to this and you're someone who's sort of trying to get published or you're early on in your writing,
00:42:51
Speaker
Just think about how much you sort of move the dramatic plot line forward.
00:42:55
Speaker
You can have those flashbacks and those explanations in the past if they serve the upward movement of the drama.
00:43:01
Speaker
And a really good thing I found for this, you remember I mentioned I iteratively plan, so sometimes I do planning, sometimes I do free writing.
00:43:08
Speaker
One thing I do throughout the novel is I go through, read what I've done so far, and I try and translate each chapter into a sort of sentence or two of what happens in the plot.
00:43:17
Speaker
um like or what the function of this chapter is so even if it's not a plot thing like what does it do and then once you've written that list just maybe take a few weeks off read that list again and does that list make sense in terms of the way you've moved that and sometimes it really doesn't or you read a chapter and you struggle to say what that has to do with the dramatic what the point of this chapter is
00:43:38
Speaker
Yeah, and sometimes you can fix that by thinking, I can add this point and you can use that raw material for a rewrite and you've got all that kind of texture and flavor you've generated in your sort of writing stew, but you've now actually got some meat in there and it's going to do something.
00:43:51
Speaker
And one thing I really like doing is, you know, there's kind of GCSE study guide websites where kind of...
00:43:57
Speaker
secondary school uh study websites where you can see the kind of summaries of what happens in each chapter of book it's really interesting to like for books that you you kind of really like or that in your genre kind of reading some of those if you find a good one and seeing like it's it's a way that you know English literature course never looks at a story or the way in the establishment you never talk about a story like this but like how many clues were in that chapter of that classic crime novel like it's a really interesting question if you see that you can then say well how many clues did I have and
00:44:23
Speaker
You can really diagnose a lot of pacing problems by thinking about stuff like that.
00:44:27
Speaker
And it's not that hard to fix, but can really be to increase momentum.
00:44:31
Speaker
So, yeah, I think it's just thinking what you want to do for the reader.
00:44:35
Speaker
And things I just said, I guess, are ways of diagnosing or trying to attack that problem.
00:44:39
Speaker
But I think once you understand that, you don't really go back to writing the way you did before.
00:44:44
Speaker
And that's been a huge difference in my writing career, I think.
00:44:47
Speaker
That's great.
00:44:49
Speaker
Such great advice.
00:44:50
Speaker
Thank you so much, Greg.
00:44:51
Speaker
And we're going to move on to our last question now.
00:44:53
Speaker
Last, but by no means least.
00:44:56
Speaker
And the question is, drumroll, if you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring one book, what would it be and why?
00:45:07
Speaker
Uh, so it's always very difficult.
00:45:08
Speaker
I'm the kind of person when I'm asked what my favorite food is or sort of collapse in indecision, like GD from the good place, like not knowing what to do.
00:45:16
Speaker
Um, but I think, I mean, one, the thing that immediately first comes to mind, which I guess is the best answer to this kind of question, um, is a book called Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.
00:45:25
Speaker
Okay.
00:45:25
Speaker
Um, it's so good.
00:45:26
Speaker
So I, I looked at it a bit for my PhD, um, as, as one of my books that I looked at, um, but I, I sort of enjoyed it before and enjoy it since, um, it's not one of his kind of better known, uh,
00:45:37
Speaker
Text, you know, stuff like Lita and stuff is far better known.
00:45:40
Speaker
But it's so weird in a really fun way.
00:45:43
Speaker
And if I could ever write anything like this, I'd sort of be glad.
00:45:47
Speaker
And various other people have tried to.
00:45:48
Speaker
So the novel is about a poet, John Shade, who's died.
00:45:54
Speaker
And part of the novel is just a poem.
00:45:56
Speaker
So 100 pages or so of this novel is just a poem.
00:45:58
Speaker
And you also get a preface to the poem and you get a big commentary on the poem.
00:46:02
Speaker
And that's it.
00:46:03
Speaker
The commentary is longer than the poem itself.
00:46:05
Speaker
And you can tell from the back cover, it's really fun, the whole thing.
00:46:08
Speaker
It's presented as if you've got this dead guy's poem and you bought this in the shop.
00:46:12
Speaker
But the commentary and the preface even reveals this in the back cover is that the guy who's edited this book and put commentary together may have possibly killed him.
00:46:21
Speaker
the poet or at least something something bad has happened between the two and it mentions that the the widow of the poet is engaged in a legal dispute to try and get the rights back and maybe he's not being allowed to publish this edition and the commentary is barely about the poem it's mostly about the guy writing the commentary and so it's a it's got this kind of funny playful product kind of uh quality to it where especially if you study literature it kind of makes fun of study of literature almost in some ways but it's it's kind of
00:46:47
Speaker
even though it's really playful and got all that stuff, it's in many ways very, it's very dark.
00:46:53
Speaker
um and it's very emotionally moving as well um and that ability to be kind of playful experimental and emotionally moving and dark is a kind of unusual it's hard to do all those things at the same time and and i try and have a sense of playfulness and darkness in my own writing but i i just love that kind of formal experimentation and one as a kind of highlight of a particular reason i like this novel is so you read the
00:47:18
Speaker
how do you read this do you read the poem first in the whole thing and then do you read the commentary or do you read the poem and then you see there's a note to line 22 and then do you read that note and then you go back to the poem like in what way do you do this and you will find out experience yeah and you find out the central twist of this novel in a totally different sequence depending upon whether you read whether you do that
00:47:37
Speaker
um and so it's you either find out pretty much in the beginning if you follow all the notes or you find out at the very end and so it's i love that and it never tells you that and and i think in the preface he tells you how to like you almost he's black napkins winking at you about this is a thing and he says the ideal way to read this novel is to buy two copies cut them all up and then put the pages next to each other and it's just like it's like a kind of finger up at the audience sort of like what you're supposed to do and and some stuff has been inspired a bit by it like um
00:48:04
Speaker
I don't think you've heard of House of Leaves by Mark Danielski.
00:48:08
Speaker
That's got a similar kind of element in that.
00:48:10
Speaker
It's got a kind of book and then there's a book about the book and it's a bit more horror than that.
00:48:14
Speaker
But so there's a kind of sub-genre of things that are inspired by this kind of weird experiment.
00:48:18
Speaker
And I don't know what I'd ever do for it, but I just love to do something like that.
00:48:22
Speaker
And it's such fun.
00:48:23
Speaker
I've got to get my hands on that.
00:48:24
Speaker
That sounds great.
00:48:25
Speaker
That sounds really good.
00:48:26
Speaker
And especially if you're on a desert island, it's the kind of sort of job that you want to do to piece together this novel from different angles.
00:48:33
Speaker
You can read it from every different angle while you're stranded on the desert.
00:48:38
Speaker
Definitely.
00:48:40
Speaker
That's great.
00:48:41
Speaker
Oh, thank you so much for your time, Greg.
00:48:43
Speaker
It's been absolutely wonderful having you on and speaking to you.
00:48:46
Speaker
You've been so insightful and
00:48:49
Speaker
And we wish you the best of luck for Four 16 Horses and we can't wait to read it as well.
00:48:54
Speaker
That's very exciting.
00:48:55
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:48:56
Speaker
No, it's been lovely talking.
00:48:57
Speaker
Thank you.
00:48:59
Speaker
To keep up with everything that Greg is doing, you can follow him on Instagram at Greg Buchanan Writer or on Twitter at Greg Buchanan.
00:49:06
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss an episode of this podcast, follow us on Twitter at Right and Wrong UK or on Instagram at Right and Wrong Podcast.
00:49:12
Speaker
Thanks again for listening and we'll see you in the next one.