{"id":326,"date":"2015-02-01T17:26:49","date_gmt":"2015-02-01T17:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/?p=326"},"modified":"2015-02-02T11:10:26","modified_gmt":"2015-02-02T11:10:26","slug":"david-nicholls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/david-nicholls\/","title":{"rendered":"David Nicholls"},"content":{"rendered":"

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David Nicholls kicked off the Creative Writing Reading Series for the Spring term, reading and discussing his novels and screenplays to a room packed to standing room only. David started the evening by reading the first page \u2013 and the first chapter \u2013 of his latest novel Us<\/em> (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014): Douglas Petersen, Nicholls\u2019s narrator, is woken in the middle of the night and told by his wife that she is leaving him. A grim end to start with, though the tone was resolutely comic \u2013 the way shocking news can often fail to register, being so outside daily experience that it can be incomprehensible, was deftly observed: Douglas at first thinks his wife is, as she often does, asking him to check for burglars, and so dutifully checks the house for intruders before she has to repeat herself to get the message across.<\/p>\n

This beginning puts us in rather different territory to Nicholls\u2019s previous novels which, though they similarly often focus on relationships, track the beginnings of romance in younger couples \u2013 as was the premise in One Day<\/em>, which followed the protagonists\u2019 relationship over twenty years from university into their early forties. Us<\/em>, said Nicholls, is an older book \u2013 citing a mixture of parenthood and the fact that he didn’t feel as confident, now in his mid-forties, in\u00a0writing as convincing a contemporary twenty-something as he could when he was twenty-something. This was the first time, he said, he had tried to write someone older than himself: Douglas is in his mid-fifties, and not only the birth of Nicholls\u2019s children, but the death of his father \u2013 which occurred some months into the writing of Us<\/em> – have clearly had their impact upon it, the novel\u2019s emotional core turns, with a turn in point of view, to the father-son relationship between Douglas and his son Albie.<\/p>\n

Pressed on this potential correspondence between life and art by Alex Preston, Nicholls talked in some depth about the relation of his father\u2019s death to the final shape and focus of the novel \u2013 which is dedicated to him. Whilst insistent that his relationship with his father \u2013 though difficult and troubled \u2013 was not identical, or even particularly similar in fact to Douglas and Albie\u2019s relationship, this did raise the question of whether it is possible to write something you haven\u2019t thought or felt. Nicholls\u2019s conclusion on this was to say \u2018there isn\u2019t a single moment [in the novel] where I could say \u2018that happened\u2019, yet [his relationship with his father] overshadows the writing\u2019. He also pointed to his use of incidents, thoughts or emotions in his own life which he has used in his novels, but transposed, projected onto other characters, scenarios and relationships \u2013 if one cannot write something alien to one\u2019s thoughts or feelings, those emotions are always twisted, or disguised, by the operations of fiction. Although his characters, he said, were hardly ever based on people he knows, \u2018little bits of myself come through\u2019. When he does use others, he said, it is often actors \u2013 because what he takes in trying to create a character isn\u2019t so much incidents or personalities but performance, mannerisms or rhythm \u2013 a physicality. He gave the example of Rafe Spall, who inspired some aspects of Ian in One Day<\/em>, then later played him in the film.<\/p>\n

Despite this being in some ways an older novel than his previous books, this distinction is not altogether straightforward \u2013 Great Expectations<\/em>, Nicholls pointed out (Nicholls\u2019s referents and roots are in clearly in the nineteenth century realist novel, which can be seen not just from his content and style, but his epigrams \u2013 James, Hardy, and his screenwriting CV \u2013 adapting, among others, Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles<\/em> and Far from the Madding Crowd<\/em> for television), is always thought of as a book of youth, but it\u2019s narrated by a 55 year old man. Similarly, Nicholls described Us<\/em> as \u2018a travelogue in place and time\u2019: it has two presents at once. If we start in a point of time and space \u2013 Connie telling Douglass she is leaving him \u2013 we then get two stories, one about this break up, and one about their relationship, from when they first met.<\/p>\n

Nicholls talked about how he had consciously attempts to keep himself on his toes following the successes of his previous books \u2013 if you have a success, he said, the temptation is either to do the same again, or to do something entirely different \u2013 the trick is to try to do something in between. In order to avoid predictability, and this was a point as much to do with genre as his relation to his other books, he has to play games with structure, to misdirect \u2013 which he often does with time structures and point of view. Point of view is clearly something that preoccupies him:\u00a0Us<\/em> is his second novel written in the first person, the first being Starter for Ten.\u00a0<\/em>Nicholls\u2019s aim in Us<\/em> for this point of view is the exact opposite of his previous use of it: whilst Brian in Starter for Ten<\/em> has similarities to Nicholls, Douglas is rather different, Douglass\u2019s character and occupation as a scientist allowed Nicholls to challenge his ability to write in the first person \u2013 he was interested, he said, in writing, in the form of fiction about someone who didn\u2019t value fiction, in writing about art through someone who wasn\u2019t confident doing so. In some ways, also, Nicholls said, he wanted Douglas to be an anti-Dexter, the male lead character in One Day<\/em>, and writing him in the first rather than third person helped him create those distinctions. Nicholls talked too about the difficulties in narration of One Day<\/em> – a narrative written in the third person past tense, which put pressure on his writing. In the first person, banality is allowed; the narrative is a reflection of a character\u2019s personality. Third person doesn\u2019t allow for this. A first person novel, however, requires a getting into character, the assumption of a voice. Tellingly, Nicholls said this was his quickest novel to write \u2013 nine months, but that it took him four years of writing to get to those nine months. The novel started out, he said, as a much more spiteful and angry book about father and son.<\/p>\n

The book is written rather differently, too, from his previous novels, comprising of 180 short chapters- Nicholls said he wanted to aim for a series of vignettes, or snapshots, creating an impression like flicking through a family photo album. This particular form would seem to be heavily influenced, not only by the content of the book, but by Nicholls\u2019s background as a screenwriter \u2013 your average screenplay, he said, comprises 180 short scenes, ruthlessly edited: in screenwriting you are constantly being asked by others \u2018do we need this scene?\u2019 \u2013 it is clear that he sees screenwriting as something which has given him concision. And plotting too \u2013 Nicholls talked about how, in adapting his books into screenplays, he would immediately give his team a scene-by-scene, chapter-by-chapter breakdown of action, something they seemed surprised to get from an author. But these plot-breakdowns seem to be essential to Nicholls\u2019s writing: he can\u2019t, write, at least well, he said, without having first prepared structure and plot – which also goes some way to explaining the time proportions of the planning and writing of this novel!<\/p>\n

It was clear that Nicholls credits screenwriting with developing much of his ability and style as a novelist \u2013 he claims to be influenced by Woody Allen as much as Dickens \u2013 and he sees many of his authorial techniques as equivalent to filmic devices. He described his epigrams, for example, as equivalent to captions in a movie \u2013 suggesting a tone, creating a distance from the action. His dialogue, he said, is also more immediately sharper, improvisatory, and requires less editing than other aspects of his writing. However, he also talked about the difficulties he had in adapting his own books into films. Asked by a student what the goal is in adapting a book, he agreed that often fidelity is the enemy of a good adaptation \u2013 that you need to make something that works with the potentials of its own medium. For example, he said, during a scene where Emma and Dexter have an awful dinner in One Day<\/em>, in the book, one can access Dexter asking himself why he\u2019s acting like this. In a film, of course, this is unmanageable \u2013 you have to rely on the actor to do the novelist\u2019s work, and if the screenwriter is too tied into the novel they perhaps won\u2019t see how to make the transition work. He also expressed discomfort around genre \u2013 saying that initially he found it uncomfortable that he was pressured into changing the ending of Starter for Ten <\/em>for the film into something that more closely resembled the genre of romantic comedy \u2013 in his novels, he said, he always tries to avoid, or play with, the expectations of genre. However, he said that the also feels the film needed to end that way, the expectations and structure of film demanded a different ending to that required by the novel. He\u2019s wary, for example, he said of someone making a speech that changes someone\u2019s mind, of the last-minute airport dash \u2013 no-one\u2019s mind, he said, is ever changed by this in real life, but then, he said, this isn\u2019t quite real life. Novels, and films, give meaning and structure to a life that doesn\u2019t have that \u2013 one of the reasons that he often tries to undercut the reader\u2019s expectations \u2013 sometimes, as in One Day<\/em> and Us<\/em>, very dramatically. We didn\u2019t get to find out, in the case of Us<\/em>, how dramatically, so we were left, as I now leave you, on a cliffhanger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Nicholls kicked off the Creative Writing Reading Series for the Spring term, reading and discussing his novels and screenplays to a room packed to standing room only. David started the evening by reading the first page \u2013 and the first chapter \u2013 of his latest novel Us (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014): Douglas Petersen, Nicholls\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39849,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39849"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}