Paul Cornell Interview

As well as being a successful novelist, Paul Cornell has written for Doctor Who, Casualty, Holby City, Doctors, Robin Hood, and Primeval.

How did you get started as a writer?

I'd been writing for my own pleasure since school, but I really had to try and make a living out of it when I flunked out of my astrophysics course at UCL within a couple of weeks of arriving there.

I just didn't get the maths, I wasn't good enough. And I didn't have the dedication at that point to make myself get good enough, so I dropped out of university and had to go and support myself somewhere, and I supported myself in the end by writing. And I think that's a very good thing to have to do to make you better very fast.

How long did it take from dropping out to being able to support yourself by writing?

Years. I won a BBC writing competition called Debut On Two, and got a small play on BBC Two. It took me six years after that to get my second commission, which was all down to Russell T Davies getting me onto Children's Ward. But in the meantime I had started to sell books and radio sketches. So it wasn't all a lifetime of gruel.

If someone wants to write for a living, what advice would you give them?

I have one sentence. I have actually lots more but my one sentence is: It is your job as a writer to seek out harsh criticism of your work and change because of it.

Your mum won't give you harsh criticism of your work. It's her job not to. You've got to find people who will genuinely give you harsh, tough, scathing critique of your work. And then you've got to change because of it. I see people coming up to editors and saying to them "So what did you think of my piece?" and the editor will tell them. And the would-be writer starts to argue, starts to say "Oh no, you see what I was trying to do there was..." He's fending off the criticism because he doesn't want to listen. Doesn't want to change.

And at that point the editor might as well turn around and walk away, cos he's not listening, this would-be writer. What he's got to do is stand there making notes, taking it all in and accepting it. Even if you can't take it all in and accept it there and then, it's a really good thing to at least pretend you are, because it's a big sign to commissioners of who is a writer and who is not. The writer is the one who listens.

I think there are two good books, but only two good books, on how to write. One is "Story" by Robert McKee, which is basically everything you need to know from top to bottom. And the other is Stephen King's "On Writing" which is three-quarters an autobiography, but the little gems he has in the last quarter are worth the price of the book alone.

King is a really good example of the attitude you need. All writers have mad stories about how they got into the business. There's no single, typical, common story. There are no apprenticeships, and gradual processes, and going from making the tea to being a writer. All writers have mad origin stories because they've all clung on desperately being determined while they met the friend of a friend of a friend who get them in somewhere and gets them the ability to show things to people. It's determination and the urge to improve and to listen when you get that first critique from somebody who knows what they're talking about, or from audience members, or from anybody. King tells it like this: He had a series of spikes on the wall above his desk when he was writing his first short stories. And he filled up those spikes with rejection letters from magazines and publishers. And he got to the third spike full of rejection notes before they started to have notes on the bottom saying what was wrong with the things. And then he filled up another spike full of more rejection letters before he made his first sale

Now that kind of willingness to take on board rejection and then to learn from it because of those notes is why King is as famous as he is today. He includes in the book the letter he wrote back to the first rejection note with something written on it in the form of advice. He said it took him ten drafts to get the letter he wrote back right because he wanted it to convey exactly the right impression - to be spelled completely right, to be grammatically perfect. And what he was saying in the letter was "Please give me more criticism. Tell me more things about how it was wrong." That's why he's Stephen King.

And that's my main message, that it is a teachable skill. There's almost nothing in the way of talent, I think. It's just that the people who are famous, they're just the people who have tried harder than anybody else. And that, and honing your craft by paying attention when you get notes, is what it comes down to.

The other thing is that when people ask "Where do you get your ideas from?" I always say "Everybody has them." But writers are the people who, when they have them, write them down.

I think literally everybody has a great idea for a story or a novel. But most people just go ooh, that's interesting, and then let it slide and get back to whatever they do. But we have to keep them.

And there's no such thing as writer's block. I simply don't believe in it. It's one of those things that people who don't know writers think we all do, wander around with our hands on our heads going "I'm blocked today. I'm blocked". And I think you can always find something to write. Not the thing that you don't want to write today, write something else.

A good cure for writer's block is just to start writing. You'll write ten pages of rubbish and then you'll find you're back to normal. The reason you feel you shouldn't be writing is actually quite a good thing. You're developing a skill, which is that you realised, without knowing what it is, that there's a problem with whatever you're working on at the moment. And that if you build on top of it you'll just have to demolish everything you build because the problem is down in the foundations. It's probably not where you are now. It's probably a couple of pages back or a couple of paragraphs back. And you were uneasy when you wrote it and you've forgotten that but you're uneasy. And something inside you is saying you don't want to have to work for nothing, I'd better do it all.

So when you feel like that, go back and have a look at your previous work. It's always a good idea to look at your previous work. And unless I'm doing a novel or something of a length which makes this impossible, whenever I'm writing a TV script or a comic script I always start every day at the top and re-read and do little edits all the way down to where I'm going to start that day. So apart from anything else that means the start of the thing gets smoothed and polished many, many times as you go through it.

And it also means that you've got in your head all of the emotional journeys, all the character expectations sorted out for when you start. If you start cold you may think you remember where everybody is but sometimes you won't quite, you'll miss something.

There's a particularly difficult knot where characters meet for the first time. They both have things they want and the central question is: in what order are they going to ask each other about those things? Those are difficult little knots and they sometimes cause what people refer to as writer's block because you may have simply forgotten one of the things on the list that those characters want. And if they were real people you have to ask yourself in what order they would ask each other those things. So writers' block is a diagnostic tool, rather than a problem.

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