David Quantick - How to Be a Writer

Another damnd, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon? William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, upon receiving a volume of Edward Gibbons The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire from the author.

I dont want to be a soldier

I dont want to go to war

Id rather stay at home

Around the streets to roam

And live on the earnings of a lady typist.

Anonymous World War One lyricist

About the author

David Quantick is an Emmy-winning writer and broadcaster. He has written for many TV shows (Veep, The Thick Of It, Harry Hills TV Burp), radio (The Blaggers Guide, One, Broken Arts), and comics (Thats Because Youre A Robot). He is the author of the novels The Mule and Sparks. How To Be A Writer is the sequel to the chart-topping writing guide How To Write Everything.

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First published in 2016 by Oberon Books Ltd

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Copyright David Quantick, 2016

David Quantick is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

PB ISBN: 9781783199037
EPUB ISBN: 9781783199044

Cover illustration by Steven Appleby

Chapter illustrations by James Illman

Printed and bound by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd., India.

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Contents

This book is dedicated to the memory of my brilliant friend, Joss Bennathan.

INTRODUCTION

W elcome to How To Be A Writer, which is a kind of a sequel to my previous writing book, How To Write Everything. I say kind of because if you claim to have written a book that tells the reader how to write everything, then youve not really left yourself much room to manoeuvre. So, to save myself the embarrassment of writing a book called How To Write Everything 2, which might as well be called I Am A Liar, I decided to write not about writing, but writers.

Writing is a process, a talent that can be improved with practise. Everyone can write, to some degree but not everyone is a writer. There are people who write every day, and what they write affects peoples lives, but they would not consider themselves writers. You can be a decision-maker or a politician or even a commentator, writing constantly, but your life and work are not defined by your writing. And you can be someone who barely composes a sentence once a year but is most definitely a writer. (Philip Larkin, for example, had a day job as a librarian, and towards the end of his life produced a new poem infrequently, but he was clearly a writer.)

The thing that differentiates someone who isnt a writer from someone who is, I would venture as bold as thunder, is this: a writer is someone whose life turns around writing like the Earth turns around the Sun. I dont mean someone who puts on a dressing gown and a little silk cap with a tassel on it and sits at a writing desk with quill pendant in hand andall that. I mean someone whose daily life, whose routines and whose calendar all revolve around the fact that they write. Writers are often people who are infected with the need to write like a vampire needs to drink blood. It sounds absurd, but if I dont write, if I dont get the ideas out whether the idea is a full-length script or a short gag on Twitter I dont feel well. Its got nothing to do with being visited by my muse; its more physical than that.

A writer a Proper Writer is someone who doesnt just lie awake at night thinking of ways to make Act II less boring or to explain how Captain Mathers died in the conservatory (he was allergic to orchids). A writer is someone who cant stop thinking about the work theyre doing and the work theyre going to do. Writers often spend days in a fugue state, unconsciously assembling huge arrays of prose or dialogue and then will suddenly sit down and let it all come out in a huge but beautifully-structured torrent. Writers are at the mercy of their subconscious, which is a massive Satanic factory belching out ideas which someone has to put together and make coherent. And theyre often left empty afterwards. The novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd once told me that, when he has finished writing a book, he instantly forgets everything he learned researching it. Similarly, columnists say that when they write a piece, they often have no idea of what theyre going to write until theyve written it.