Joining Ol Parker to talk about his life as a writer Nick Hornby visited the London Screenwriter’s Festival. His personal stories about ordinary people resonate with a wide audience around the world through both his novels, screenplays and other writings.
He is best known perhaps for his breakout work Fever Pitch published in 1992. The process of creating a novel he indicates is a more solitary one than screenwriting, the bulk of the work being done by him as he sits alone and only later looked at by an editor after the revisions he wants to make are done. Screenwriting came hot on the heels of his early novel success when he was offered the opportunity to adapt his book Fever Pitch for screen. David Evans had read through all of the book thoroughly his process of adapting and condensing everything he’d written in the novel for screen was by muddling on doing whatever David told him to do.
These days he’s a regular writer for both novels and screen but in terms of his career he tells us that it was only when he turned to prose in his writing that things started to really work for him. . He points out that one of the great advantages for him of writing for screen these days is that the odds are never great for a film being financed and made, whereas at his stage of career his novels are about 99% certain of being published so there’s more pressure to get the writing right. Often with film there’s only about a 10-20% chance with all the elements involved so the writing process is different. Independent film where you don’t have so many big named stars attached can be tricky. Nobody wanted to make An Education or Brooklyn for the longest time, period dramas tending to be more expensive and Wild only got off the ground so quickly because Reese wanted to do it.
As a writer he says he never writes with specific actors in mind because in his mind his characters are ordinary people and it’s their story he’s connecting with and telling. Much of his work is self-generated but he chased Wild after reading a New York Times review of the book before it had been published in the UK. he’d met Reese Witherspoon at a party once and she’d praised a short story he’d written in an anthology and asked if he’d consider writing for her one day. Impressed that it was one of his more obscure works that she’d liked best he told her that if anything came up that was maybe suitable he’d bear it in mind.When he was chasing down the rights for Wild, Reese was in the process of acquiring them so they came together to see the project realised.
When adapting stories as opposed to creating them it’s a different feeling he tells us, the story means something to him without being him, not from his head so it feels fresh. He attempts to create the feeling of the original writer and characters when adapting for screen but while serving the story that needs to be seen on screen and he’s not adverse to writing new material. There’s one scene in the film, where a guy tells Cheryl to quit her walk that that was not in the book but that felt very like the vibe of the book.
When a project reaches production Nick prefers not to be on set for any of it. He finds it fairly boring for him and he doesn’t need to watch and wait while take after take happens. As a writer he’s always conscious of how much writing work he could get done instead of spending 12 hours on set. Not that he writes 12 hours in a stretch ever, he tells us, it’s more like three with some procrastination and research done in that.
These days Nick writes in a one bedroom flat he keeps a few minutes from where his house is which he treats like a workplace, keeping a separation from his home life where he can relax. He doesn’t outline when he writes, primarily because he’s a prose writer and it’s a problem for him because, he tells us, outlined prose is shit prose. In trying to outline he can’t stop thinking about the prose in order to make it the concise thing it’s supposed to be so for him at least it doesn’t work. For novels he says you have to say no to everything and find space to write. He does research though, when he wrote Funny Girl it was the worst because he felt he had to watch all the episodes of the 1950s TV show. He likes the industry around writing for novels a lot, saying that publishing is a very fair industry, they’re really looking for work to publish. He laughs that he’s never met a film company who felt to him like they wanted to finance a film. Nick Hornby though is a writer who navigates both worlds with ease and grace and we hope to see many more of his intimate stories both on our screens and our bookshelves for many, many, many years yet to come.
Leilani is an actor, screenwriter and filmmaker and has been blogging for the London Screenwriters’ Festival since it’s inception in 2010.
