“One Day” is Today

So the day is here – “One Day” opens in theaters today, and this marks my final post on the book/movie/author.  I thought I’d use this opportunity to provide some more information from the author interview I participated in last last week.  I’m going with a standard question-and-answer format today, taken from the official transcript of the call and featuring a handful of questions asked by the other bloggers who participated in it.  And if any of those bloggers happen to stop by, please do feel free to comment, direct us to your sites, or share your own thoughts/impressions.

And so, without further ado, I bring you some “One Day” insights into the book and the writing process, courtesy of David Nicholls…

Question: Emma and Dexter are extremely detailed and just very well drawn out.  They’re very real but they also have their flaws.  How much of yourself did you put into those characters?

David Nicholls: Well, as far as Dexter’s concerned, very little; very, very little, I’m pleased to say.  I mean, I like Dexter very much, well, I don’t always like him, but, there is a certain amount of my male friends in Dexter.  A lot of my male friends left University with incredible ambition and incredible focus.  And they found success very, very early on in their 20s, and they didn’t always handle it very well.  So, there’s a certain amount of observation with Dexter.  I worked in my 20s as an actor.  I was a very, very, very unsuccessful actor surrounded by a lot of very successful young actors.  And it was interesting to watch them all slightly go off the rails, because it’s a hard thing to handle success at that age.  So, with Dexter, there’s very little of me but a certain amount of several of my friends and acquaintances.

With Emma, there’s a little bit more of me.  We share certain anxieties, I think.  I think certainly in my 20s, I was always worried about work, always worried about finding a vocation, always worried about my money and where I was living and the jobs that I was doing.  So, the kind of neuroses and anxieties that Emma has are very much mine.  I was very kind of politically involved and a lot more vocal about those issues in my 20s than I am now.  I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.  But, like Emma, I think I had a kind of idealism at that stage of my life, probably a certain amount of pomposity as well about those things.  We share musical tastes, I think.  We share some kind of literary tastes, although not completely.  So, there’s a certain amount of me in Emma.

I’m also ashamed to say there’s probably a little bit of Ian in me as well, you know, the terrible stand up.  I think I probably was a little gauche and awkward on dates in my 20s.

It’s not an autobiographical book by any means.  But, there’s definitely some personal experience and some observations of some friends from that time.

Question: How does your writing process differ from writing a book to writing a screenplay?

David Nicholls: It’s a long time since I wrote a book, unfortunately, because I’ve been sort of tangled up in these various screenplays, which I love.  But, the hardest thing is, when you write a novel, you create the characters.  You kind of cast them in your head.  You decide where you’re going to go.  You decide whether it’s raining or snowing or sunny.  You decide what music is going to be playing on the radio.  You kind of do everything.  You’re very much the director, the designer, the music coordinator, the editor.  It’s all down to you.  And when you move on to a movie, you have to kind of spread that load.  You might get asked what you think of a particular location or a costume design, but it isn’t your responsibility.  And that’s not a bad thing.  That can be quite liberating to know very precisely what the parameters are of your role.  But, inevitably you can feel as if you are losing a little control.  And so, on this movie, I felt that much less than I have in the past.

Collaboration is one difference.  The other difference is you lose a lot of your equipment, if you like, your technique.  It’s very hard to do an internal thought process.  A lot of what happens to Emma in the three years she leaves University happens in her head.  And unless you use acres and acres of voiceover, minute after minute of long, protracted voiceover, you can’t really get a thought process.  You can’t really get an interior monologue onto the screen. So, there’s this terrific pressure all the time to move things forward and to concentrate on what people say and what they do rather than what they think and feel.  And that can be quite tough.

The hardest thing for me is always to cut things.  Dialogue on the page of a novel, as long as the dialogue is kind of entertaining and funny and engaging, you can write at length and at leisure.  On the screen, people are always saying, “Do we need this?  Are we going to cut away here?  Is this too long?  Is it too boring?  Is the audience going to be fidgety?”  And so, you always have to just constantly keep distilling things.

And finally, I suppose there are the budgetary and scheduling restraints.  I mean, the most obvious example of this, and I’ve used it before, is if you write in a novel, you know, “it’s raining,” then it’s sort of just words on the page.  It’s nothing.  And if you write “it’s raining” in a screenplay, then suddenly they’ve got to hire all this equipment, stand around in the rain all night, and it costs an extra 200,000 pounds.  It’s not your 200,000 pounds.  And someone is going to ask, “Does it really need to be raining?”  There’s that constant confrontation with the realities, of the sort of physical realities of filming people swimming, for instance.  Skinny-dipping on the page, it’s fine.  You just write the prose.  And on the screen, suddenly they’ve got to fill a soundstage in Pinewood with water.  And it becomes much more. Theatrical practicalities mean that you’re constantly having to adjust what you can do.

So, that’s the hardest thing, or that’s the biggest difference, but, also part of the thrill of it as well.

Question: How did you find writing from a woman’s perspective?

David Nicholls: Well, my first book was written from a male perspective in a first person voice, and that I found very easy.  It was kind of like improvising.  And the second book I wrote was in the third person voice, but it was very much from the male point of view, from the central character’s point of view.  And in “One Day” I wanted to write in the third person but to sort of jump between these different points of view.  And I think my approach to that was not to worry about it too much.  As I’ve said, I feel much closer to Emma than I do to Dexter.  I think there’s sort of a lot more of my personality in Emma than there is in Dexter.  And I tried not to think of it as sort of taking and putting on a voice or a guise or giving a performance.

I really think, in most aspects of Emma’s life, in her feelings about relationships or politics or work or family, her feelings are pretty close to my own.  And I think the worst thing you can do is kind of do an impersonation of what you imagine to be a kind of female psyche, because I think you end up exaggerating differences and stereotyping.  So, I genuinely didn’t think about it too much.  I think there were certain experiences I would have felt more self-conscious.  I’d still be very wary of writing in a first person female voice, perhaps, or writing about sex or about childbirth in the first person female voice.  Then I’d start to think, “God, you know, this is tough.”  But, a woman working in a restaurant who wants to be doing something else and is worried about the future, I would think my experience with that would be universal. What I don’t like, particularly in books about relationships, is a kind of exaggerated difference, the kind of that he said/she said thing, because the attitudes and the experiences of my female friends are much closer to my own than one might imagine from that kind of heightened poverty and sexual awe.

Question: People have described your novels as cinematic.  Do you see a story unfolding as you’re writing it?

David Nicholls: I do, but I always find myself sounding really defensive, because when I write a book, I’m really, really primarily concerned with it working as a novel, because otherwise I’d write the script.  I mean, I’d write it as a script first of all.

Since as long as I can remember, I’ve watched five movies a week and read a book a week.  And I’ve just kind of absorbed both forms from all my life.  And I love them both very much.

And I think probably because I used to work as an actor as well, I love dialogue.  I love characterization.  I love writing on the page something that will have the kind of spark and back and forth and fizz that you get in a really good movie scene or a good scene in a play.  So, I think my background as an actor and as a scriptwriter and as someone who’s watched a lot of movies probably finds its way onto the page.

But, as I say, with “One Day” in particular, I really wanted to concentrate on the prose and write the best prose I possibly could and to concentrate as much on kind of the stuff you can’t do on the screen, the thoughts and the emotions and the descriptions, as I did on the stuff that I’ve written for the screen, the dialogue.

Question: There are cultural references throughout “One Day” – you talk about the fashion they were wearing, at one point, there was a Studio 54 party, there are references to public figures.  How much research did you have to do to get all that correct?

David Nicholls: Well, when I started writing it, I went to the British Library a lot.  And the British Library has this incredible archive of newspapers and magazines.  And I looked at all the newspapers on the 15th of July for each year, and actually not with an eye to introducing lots of kind of current affairs or news events into the action, but really just to provoke my own memories of what July in 1992 felt like and what July in ’89 felt like and what July in ’96 felt like.

So, it was as much about kind of conjuring the mood as finding material to put into the book.  But, what I really found actually was it wasn’t so much the news events that called up those memories as the music, as looking at the TV shows. If you really, really want to remember a time and place, go find the TV guide and look and see what was on TV that night, and suddenly you’re there.  In other words, I found pop culture just as useful in conjuring up a period as I found newspapers.

I looked at a lot of old photographs of myself and my friends and I listened to a lot of music, and I was surprised at how much of it came back.  But, I was also very wary of not cramming the novel too heavily with cultural references, because I think there’s a danger that you run into of stereotyping and exaggerating and kind of being jokey and cartoonish about it so that everyone in London in 1991 is wearing white jeans and listening to acid jazz.  You can be too broad.

Question: When you do return to writing a novel, how will your approach to writing have changed because you’ve done so many adaptations?

David Nicholls: I have done a lot of adaptations.  I’ve kind of made a resolution with myself not to do any more.  But, I think inevitably you take something from the books you adapt.  When I was writing “One Day”, I was adapting Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” for the BBC.  And I think even though Thomas Hardy is a supreme lyrical, poetic writer and a genius and does a lot of things that I would never dream of doing, I think there’s a sense of fatalism.  Things like letters that don’t get delivered, phone calls that don’t get made are very Hardy-esque.  So, even though I wasn’t consciously aping Hardy, I think a little bit has snuck into the book.

With the next book, it’s not really a complaint, but I have started to worry about repeating myself, and I do feel like I have to do something different.  But, I’m also aware that I don’t want to suddenly deliver a kind of ultraviolent science fiction novel or a novel about the Second World War.  I don’t want to be perversely contrary.  I want the next book to have some of the qualities of One Day, but I don’t want to write another bittersweet epic love story.  So, I suppose the worst element of it is it’s made me a little bit self-conscious.  But, again, it would be really churlish and mean spirited to complain too much.

I do feel strongly that I need to write something a little different.  There will always be an element of a love story.  But, I don’t think the next book will primarily be a love story.  Who knows?  I’ve made some notes towards it, but I’m a long ways from starting writing.

Question: Emma and Dexter’s relationship is this grand relationship full of obstacles, but they never feel like obstacles for the purpose of obstacles.  Their love is a great cross between romantic love and friendly affectionate love.  How did you go about writing that and making it so multifaceted?

David Nicholls: This is the great conundrum for the writers of modern love stories.  What are the modern obstacles to people getting together?  The sort of golden age love story, there are kind of class divisions and family feuds and all of these very powerful barriers, the kind of Romeo and Juliet barriers.  And now, what are those barriers?  And I think they’re to do with temperament and personality.

And in “One Day”, there’s a mixture of plot driven obstacles, like letters that don’t get sent and phone calls that don’t get answered and a single stupid remark that pushes them away from each other for a period of time and being with someone else.  There’s definitely a point where Emma and Dexter could be together but Dexter has met someone else and is about to get married.  Those things are fun to plot, but the main obstacles are to do with their growing up.  There’s a period of time where Emma is just much too self involved and lacking in self-confidence and much too depressed, I think, for it to be the right time with Dexter. I know definitely a long period of time where Dexter is just too immature and just too self involved and too foolish, really, to be the right match for Emma.

And that seemed to me to tally with real life, with the observation of the relationships between my friends, that often the process of getting together was incredibly protracted, incredibly complex, incredibly complicated because it wasn’t quite the right time.  And I think maybe that’s the great modern obstacle, that we all take a lot longer to settle into a relationship and to settle into thinking that it’s the right time.

Question: Emma is very literary and she’s always making recommendations to Dexter on what he should be reading.  What books would you recommend, based on their characters, to help them along?

David Nicholls: Emma and I have quite similar tastes.  I think she likes Emily Brontë and Jane Austen more than I do.  And I probably like Dickens and Hardy more than she would.  And she loves Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”, which is a book I’ve never got on with.  With Emma, it’s hard because she’s so well read and her taste is so good.  I think apart from “Wuthering Heights” she has very good literary taste.  I think I’d be too scared to tell Emma to read a book, because she’s so well read and smart.

For Dexter, I think the coming of age novel is important.  I think books like Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus”, the books about the travails of youth, the kind of foolishness of youth, the foolishness of young men.  I think, “Catcher in the Rye” and “Goodbye, Columbus” are the books I’d probably press onto Dexter.

Question: What was your favorite scene in One Day to write originally?

David Nicholls: Well, I loved writing the long, protracted Emma/Dexter battles.  I love that back and forth, that kind of banter, that sort of Beatrice/Benedick, Katherine Hepburn/Cary Grant repartee.  So, I loved writing them kind of arguing on the beach on holiday.  I loved writing their meeting in Paris.  I loved writing the scene in the maze where they’re reunited after a long time apart.  I like writing those two-handers.  I find the process of writing a little bit like improvisation.  It’s kind of improvising with yourself.  And I’m very happy writing like that.  I could keep going forever like that.

The most striking chapter for me in terms of the experience of writing it was with the scene where Dexter takes a lot of drugs and goes on an all night bender and then goes and sees his mother, who is terminally ill.  And I was a little nervous about that because it was the first time I’d really written a serious passage in prose.  I’d written serious scenes in screenplays, but I’d never really written something that was quite that somber in prose.  I’d always written largely kind of comedic scenes until then.  So, that scene and chapter was a little intimidating to write.  But, I wrote it very, very quickly in longhand, I think in a single day.  I think it’s about a 4,000-word splurge and I just wrote it out in one go, and I loved writing it.  And I don’t usually write like that.  But, I would think, again, probably if I looked at the longhand version and looked at the final chapter, they’d be pretty close.  So, that was the biggest change for me in terms of how I actually go about writing a book.  It was much more emotional, I suppose, much less a methodical way of writing.  And I’m still very proud of that chapter.  It sort of took me by surprise and I enjoyed writing it very much.