E-mail a friendNick Hornby
airdate October 9, 2009
Nick Hornby is an award-winning novelist, who's also written non-fiction for magazines, including pop music criticism for The New Yorker. Many of his best-selling books have been adapted for film, including High Fidelity and Fever Pitch. The native Brit started his writing career with plays and, after graduating from Cambridge, worked a series of jobs, before finding his niche. Hornby is co-founder of TreeHouse, a charity for children with autism. His latest novel is Juliet, Naked, about rock stars and last chances.
Novelist Nick Hornby explains his special technique for overcoming writer's block. (1:38)
Full Interview (11:48)
Nick Hornby
Tavis: Nick Hornby is a perennial New York Times best-selling novelist and screenwriter whose many projects include Slam, High Fidelity and About A Boy. His latest novel is called Juliet, Naked. His latest film which opens in New York and Los Angeles this weekend is called An Education. Here now a sneak preview of An Education.
[Clip]
Tavis: Books, movies, you keep this up, you might make something of yourself one day (laughter).
Nick Hornby: (Laughter) I can't see that. My mom still doesn't think so (laughter).
Tavis: Your mom doesn't think so. I'll let you explain the story line behind the movie, An Education.
Hornby: Well, I adapted An Education from a very short piece of autobiographical memoir by an English journalist called Lynn Barber and it's about an affair she had when she was 16 or 17 years old right after the beginning of the 1960s with an unsuitable older man, played by Peter Sarsgaard in the movie.
Tavis: Why that project? Obviously, a lot of your books - we'll talk about that in a second - a lot of your books have been turned into movies. Why did you want to adapt that particular piece?
Hornby: Well, there were a couple of things. One, tonally I thought it was really interesting. I guess in the fiction, I'm always looking for stuff which is funny and sad and most projects just lock into a groove and stay there. Rather literally fiction does that; not so many jokes in contemporary literary fiction.
This piece was painful and very funny and I loved the way it switched in that way. It was about a time I didn't know much about. It's the 1960s in London, but it's not the swinging '60s. It hasn't happened yet. It's a country that's right on the cusp of enormous change and I found that pretty compelling for a screenplay.
Tavis: Speaking of compelling, I'm compelled to ask you what it is about this duality of funny and sad that has to be there to get your attention?
Hornby: Well, first of all, I think that's what life is. I don't see why we should read 400-page novels that don't contain a single joke in them because, you know, you go to a funeral and someone will make a joke at some point in the day. Some of my favorite writers are people who do that. I think, when you get to the end of the book like that, the end of the movie like that, you really feel like you've been somewhere emotionally if you've been kind of dragged about all over the place.
Tavis: Now to the new book, Juliet, Naked. Explain the title first.
Hornby: Disappointingly, it's about a record album (laughter). But I guess we're past the days where the word naked in a book title might actually persuade people to shell out for the book. It's about partly a reclusive singer-songwriter who's great work, his great breakup album, was called Juliet.
Twenty years later, the record company releases the demo version, so hence Juliet, Naked. It's about what happens when this record comes out in the world. It kind of has profound effects for the artist and for one of his fans and the partner of one of his fans.
Tavis: Strange question, but let me ask it, though. To tell this particular story, did the story have to be wrapped around a musical artist? Why that venue? Why that vehicle?
Hornby: Well, I wanted to write about art definitely and that was part of it for me, about why some art means something to some people but not to others. I also wanted to write about authenticity in art, whether that's important. So there were lots of things in that. I guess partly it could have been about writing, but I'm not so sure people are as interested in writers as they are in musicians.
Tavis: When you say authenticity in art, unpack that for me.
Hornby: Well, you know how some people think that if some things come straight from the soul and is raw, then that automatically means it's a great work of art, and some things that are more contrived, therefore, are not great works of art. It's not necessarily a theory I subscribe to.
I think, you know, [unintelligible] Motown was great music, but it was commercial music made quite often for white people. The great Hollywood films of the 1940s, the screwball comedies, were mainstream confections, but they have turned into works of art. They've survived. I don't think it's necessarily true that the howl of pain is automatically the thing that means the most.
Tavis: So your point, if I take it, is that even though Motown was commercial, to your point, written often for white audiences, it was still to you authentic?
Hornby: Or rather its authenticity is beside the point. They're still art anyway.
Tavis: You believe that? That authenticity is beside the point? Or does that only apply in art? Could that be said of across the board?
Hornby: I wouldn't want to say with people. I don't think a phony person could be a great person (laughter). But I do believe it's [unintelligible], that I don't think it's particularly relevant in discussing the success or otherwise of an artistic project.
Tavis: What for you, however you want to define it, makes a piece of literary work authentic?
Hornby: Well, I think if it's meant and felt. You know, there are lots of books that are written for other reasons than that and they're not ones that I particularly want to read. I didn't write this book because I wanted to be paid for it. There were many other reasons and I think you can tell that in fiction.
Tavis: When you get to - since you went there, let me follow you in - when you get to your level of being a perennial New York Times best-selling writer, when most of your books become movies, if you're not writing for money, at your level, why are you writing?
Hornby: Exactly the same reason I was writing when I started it. It felt like, you know, the old something inside that has to come out and an itch that has to be scratched. If I don't write for a few months, like I'm not at the moment because I'm doing a lot of this, I start to feel uncomfortable. There is a need for me to do it and that need has not been satiated.
Tavis: I'm always curious about peoples' processes. What's the writing process like for Nick Hornby? To your point now, you're not writing because you're out talking to people like me, regrettably for you (laughter).
Hornby: (Laughter) I'm enjoying it. It's better than work.
Tavis: I'm glad to have you here. But you're out doing the book tour thing now, so you're not writing now. But when you're in the writing mode, what's your process? I'm always curious about process.
Hornby: Well, I have an office outside of my home. I've got a one-bedroom apartment about ten minutes walk from where I live, so I keep office hours. I drop a kid off at school and I buy myself a coffee and let myself into my office. The idea is, you know, that I do a day's work and go home. The reality is that I check for emails, I try and find some band on the internet, I write three sentences, it's time for another coffee. You know, the real kind of itchy, scratchy day. Not good.
Tavis: I noticed you said that your office is a ten-minute walk outside of your home down the street. Could you do what you do writing inside the home? I'm just trying to figure out what that distance has to do with it.
Hornby: Well, I think it induces some kind of professionalism for a start. It means I have to get dressed in the morning. I think, you know, a job where you have to wear clothes is a minimum requirement (laughter).
Tavis: That helps, huh (laughter)?
Hornby: So there's that. I got too many kids and they're not very conducive to working at home either. You know, I just leave all the stuff there. Work is work and I don't have to have loads of papers and manuscripts in bits and pieces floating around. The truth about a writer's life, I think, is that you don't stop working anyway because it's all in your head and you take your head home with you, so there isn't much you can do about that.
Tavis: However you define writer's block, do you ever get that and, if so, how does one of your stature move beyond writer's block?
Hornby: Well, I think that writer's block is a colossal loss of confidence. It doesn't mean that you physically can't write or that you can't think of what you want to say. I think what it means is that you stare at what you've written on the page and you can't understand why this would be of interest to anyone other than yourself. I can't believe that any writer worth his salt doesn't get afflicted by that sometimes. It's just a question of how long you let it go for.
I think my thing is to keep the outside world at bay. I don't read reviews; I don't read profiles; I don't Google myself because, you know, that Kipling thing about treating those twin imposters the same. That makes a lot of sense, I think. It's really trying to just keep your confidence steady and plugging away.
Tavis: To your earlier point, since you believe that no writer worth his or her salt doesn't have writers' block from time to time, I'm assuming that means that you've been there before.
Hornby: Yeah.
Tavis: And when you get there, how do you personally navigate beyond it or around it?
Hornby: It's not very easy. Usually, some kind of computer game is involved (laughter).
Tavis: First I've heard that answer before (laughter).
Hornby: It's six weeks of feeling miserable and playing Solitaire. Eventually there comes a point where self-loathing takes over and I get back to the computer.
Tavis: Since you know nowadays that most things you write - you tell me. It may be before you start writing. But you know these days that most things you write, somebody is going to want an option to turn into a movie. How does that impact your process of writing?
Because you said earlier, you write because it's an itch you have to scratch. I suspect, though, when you know that people are waiting to pay you a bunch of money to turn this into a movie, does it ever impact your process or get inside your head?
Hornby: Well, I think I've been really lucky in that the first couple of books that I wrote, one was a memoir about my relationship with a soccer team, Fever Pitch, and the next one was High Fidelity. They seemed to me not to be movies in any way whatsoever.
High Fidelity was set inside somebody's head inside a record store. There's no helicopters, there's no physical action of any kind. You know, I think it was difficult to adapt. There was a lot of John Cusack talking into the camera. They adapted that book because it made sense to them as a piece of fiction, not because they thought it was a movie. In other words, I'm writing exactly what I want to write and somehow for some reason the books are being optioned anyway.
So, no, is the short answer. It doesn't affect me at all. I think people don't realize, if your book has maybe recognizable characters and a narrative and also the book has some kind of profile, it will get optioned, if not by a studio, then by 21-year-old English producer who's just set up office next door. At some point in the process, the book will get optioned, so there's no point in thinking about it because you know it will happen.
Tavis: Speaking of which, how long before we see Juliet, Naked on the screen?
Hornby: Well, I mean, there's bits of stuff happening now, but how long is a piece of string? I've got a couple of books that are lost in the system somewhere already. Four or five years, I would imagine, is the average.
Tavis: The new book from Nick Hornby is called Juliet, Naked. If you are a fan of his, as many of you are, you know his writings and you know the films that come from these books. Nick, nice to have you on the program. Good to see you.
Hornby: Really good to meet you, Tavis.
Tavis: Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it.
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