How to Write a Book Millions of People Read (Matt Haig Interview)

Matt Haig sold more than 10 million copies of his book The Midnight Library. And I just checked on Amazon, it has more than 288,000 reviews. This book was a total hit, a smashing success. So, I invited Matt on the show to ask him how he does it. What's his writing process? How does he tell great stories? But also, given how successful he's been, I had to ask, is it okay to write for the mass market? Like, are you betraying the craft of writing if you're explicitly trying to reach as many people [music] as possible?

>> Can you walk me through how a book actually gets written? Like, how long does it take? Where do you write? When do you write? Are you somebody who writes 250 words every day, 1,000 words every day? Are you a little bit more stop-start? >> I'm entirely stop-start. I'm a lot of stop. >> [laughter] >> That is weird cuz I'm seen as prolific, but I spend most of my >> of stop. A [laughter] lot of start. A lot of stop. >> Yeah, it's 90% stop.

That's it. But, I I I it's a very I swing between two extremes. So, a lot of it is trying to think of an idea. Writer's block for me is not knowing which idea to choose. >> Huh. >> I don't have a de- a great detector at knowing which idea is going to work. I have to sort of end up writing them to know. But, they linger in my brain until they're developed enough to write. >> And these are story ideas, character ideas, what kind of ideas?

>> Story ideas. Sometimes titles just hanging there, which I think, that's a good title, but I just need an idea for it. Like, for ages I was I had this title, The Memory Thief, but I thought, whose memory? Who's the thief? What what what why is this in my head? And, you know, so you you can have a title without an idea, but sometimes the title's the thing that comes last. It just depends. But, a lot of it is just percolating in your in your brain. So, there's a lot of work that doesn't feel like work. And you're sort of beating yourself up cuz you think, "Why aren't I working?" But actually, that turns out to be the most important work because you are actually thinking about stuff.

And it's that classic thing like when you're sat in front of a word document, you just can't get inspiration. So, you you need to be away. It's often when I'm in another country or when I'm traveling that I'll just get an idea. It it it You need to be taken out of yourself a little bit to get it. So, I swing from that sort of state of thinking and peculating and beating myself up about not working whilst secretly working to then getting the idea and then uh worried that I won't remember it all, and that's when I sort of rush and uh write and have the impulse to write because it's the impulse to get it all down while it's still in your head.

>> And then, first draft revision, working with an editor, how does that go? >> Um well, I've had the same editor for 15 years now. So, I think it really helps to have a good relationship with your editor because then you know them, you know their taste. You know when to listen to them and when to sort of fight your own corner. Um and you you you know when they're saying something which a general reader would think versus when it's them as a person.

You know what I mean? So, you you know them well enough uh what is their specific taste versus what could be a general point that lots of people would make. So, um it's a lot of conversations, a lot of phone conversations, a lot of back and forth. He is a nice guy, my editor Francis Bickmore. Um and so, he's sometimes a bit too nice, so I have to get to what he's actually saying. I say, "You be a bit more brutal." Uh I I know I have to translate what he's saying and what he means. And sometimes in editing, it's easier to be brutal.

Um because often like there's a temptation to sort of like correct sentences and correct lines and correct a little scene when really there's a bigger problem. It's not the thing that's happening on that specific page. It's actually speaking to a bigger problem. What famously happens um with me and my editor is he will say a few things thinking I'm going to change a paragraph here, a paragraph there. And then suddenly I'll have whittled out 50,000 words cuz I'm just like, you know, if if if you're spotting a little problem over there, I'm going to like pull at that and think what is that problem about? Oh, it's about that whole character doesn't need to be there or that whole premise. I mean, with a novel I wrote called The Humans, I think I deleted 40 I It was a small novel to start with.

It was about 80,000 words. And so 40,000 of those went and then another 55,000 were added between the first and second draft. And and it's strange because you will click send on your first draft thinking it's the most perfect, complete, finished thing that you can do. You think You actually feel like it isn't a first draft cuz you've got You've known it and you've gone through it and you've been editing as you go. You've lived inside of it. You've lived inside it. So it's it's called technically a first draft, but it doesn't actually feel like a first draft and how it feels like something you've just gone through and gone through it. And you think this time my editor is going to faint in wonder and think this is perfect. There's nothing to do. And obviously that's not what happens. What happens is that that there is stuff to do, but it's needed those outside eyes to see it.

And it it's an interesting art editing because you have to go in knowing there's no such thing as perfection. You have to go in knowing there's no perfect novel that you can reach. And also understanding that there comes a point that each draft you're improving things could start to make it worse. Like there's a diminishing returns that happens. With me it's like the fourth or fifth round. After that you're you're getting so far away from the thing you started with that it's getting worse. And you see it in the film industry all the time. Like when things have just been too meddled

with. >> And this is a lot of people's complaint about electronic music. I was getting a haircut yesterday just listening to super pop EDM and I was like it feels flat. It's too perfect. You know, like all the notes hit on the fours and the eights. And there's none of the you know, we go out to a pub here in London tonight and you hear some of the like a really good live band. There's a messiness. There's a chaos that kind of comes from it that is very human but something about it feels more alive.

>> Yeah, exactly. And this is my one and only optimistic take about AI is it's going to make humans be more human. We're going to realize we can't do what AI is doing and we don't work like AI. We're actually work like the opposite of AI. We're going to become more human and I feel like the taste is going to be for weirdest stuff. If you think about what AI is, AI is looking at everything that's gone before. True creativity is going to become more valuable. I.E. creating new stuff.

Things that AI can't do because it doesn't exist and it's only known what's existed and we're trying to create things that haven't existed. So, I think this sort of trend of looking backwards at what trends were and what things are eventually isn't going to work anymore because AI can do all of that. We're going to have to find new messy human things. And it's interesting to me from the sort of creative standpoint to look at the difference fundamentally different nature of AI to human evolution. Like life famously evolves through mistakes and mutations, and that's how DNA works.

Whereas AI is set up to be a perfectionist. It sort of weeds out all mistakes at any equivalent of mutation. It stops. So, we evolve in fundamentally opposite ways. Life and technology evolves in fundamentally opposite ways. And I think there's a sort of optimism that that actually being human is something quite different that AI won't be able to replicate cuz we we we create more beautiful mistakes.

>> So, take me forward 20, 30 years. We're looking at the books that people are reading. How are they different in that world where AI is all around us than the books that we're reading now? >> I mean, I have no idea. But >> [laughter] >> So, I I don't know that, but the romantic in you will answer this question and me will answer this question and say that I think for me personally and for a lot of people the moment you know a human hasn't created something, a human hasn't felt something, a human hasn't gone through the pain that's being written about, then it becomes somehow automatically less or redundant.

Like part of me when I'm hearing a song, when I'm watching a film, when I'm seeing an actor, when I'm reading a book, part of that power is knowing there's a humanity behind it, knowing there's an articulation. You know, I've felt a lot like everyone, I've felt a lot of pain in my life. And one of the reasons I'm drawn to art is to ease that pain and to feel understood and feel less alone. And if art is there to make us feel less alone, then how is AI, which is making us feel more alone, going to help with that. We're going to need other humans more. We're going to need art more as our world changes in the face of technology. So, the romantic in me feels that books made by humans, even if it becomes like, you know, human-made as a sticker, like organic or fair trade, or on what I think there will always be a uh value of being human for humans. So, art will always have its place as a human form.

This is what I hope. I hope that things become out of sheer rarity, maybe, but as we're more clogged up, as our inboxes, and as the internet is more clogged up with this artificial stuff, the uh eyes and ears will be so much more craving um the sort of beautiful inauthentic the authentic, messy, chaotic side. >> I'm so desperate for it, man. Just like to read writing, where when I read it, I feel the voice, the soul, the personality of whoever that is on the other side. Where it's like I'm getting you. I'm getting Matt. I'm getting David in this email. And I can feel your presence through these words.

>> Um I think we'll be more forgiving of mistakes. I think we'll be more forgiving of imperfections. We might, you know, like uh young people have famously been feeling this pressure about looking perfect and everything else. And And that's going to fade away, I think, because we're we're going to realize we've failed to compete with AI, or we just value what we are inherently in ourselves. And I think that's the only way we can go.

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What I hope doesn't happen is that it becomes like modern art, where it becomes about the shock, and it becomes about the novelty, and it becomes about look at what I did that no one else has ever done before. >> No, yeah, right, yeah, yeah. But, I I I I think again that that you know, AI could almost replicate that. I feel like true human feeling, like when I'm talking about creating something new, it's not like, you know, coming up with a new form of new media.

It's literally just trying to articulate emotions in a way that haven't been articulated before, or a story that has been told in a different way. Cuz if you're not creating something new, if you're creating things that have already been written exactly as they are, then where's the impulse to write them? You might as well just, you know, read what's already been. So, I think it's essentially, you know, creativity is essentially anti-AI from the get-go because it's about creating stuff that's not there.

>> You think about short words and long words, and you have a line that I like that sparrows fly higher than peacocks. >> Oh, yeah. I do like short words. My favorite word is probably home. I like sky. I like love. I like monosyllables. I think in British writing tradition, certainly in the last 100 years, we're encouraged to always value the less used word. Um and I'm quite the opposite. But I can remember at school my English teacher always used to say, you know, you must never use nice. You must never say the word nice.

And I think why? Because people do use the word nice. And I actually like the word nice. It can It It can be a lazy word, but nice is a word with lots of sorts of subtleties to it as well. So, I don't think there's any word that you definitely shouldn't use by virtue of it being overused. I just think it's how you use it. And I also think there's something very accessible about simple words. And if you've got a word like home or sky, it's just got an infinite sort of archetypal power to it, I think.

That's just everyone has their own understanding of it. >> An infinite archetypal power. What do you mean by that? >> Well, I mean, like, if we think about the power of language being something that brings people together and connects people, then within language the most simple concepts and the most simple words are possibly the most powerful ones cuz they're the most shared and they're the most understood. And I always find, I don't know why, but if you end a chapter of a book with one of those words, like sky or home, it just leaves on a nice little note of kind of, you know,

>> Mhm. What is it that you love about first drafts, but then you're frustrated with in the editing process? >> A first draft is new, you know, if you think about a novel being something new, I mean, that's why you're writing a novel. That's what novel means. That's why, you know, the impulse to write is to put something new into the world. A first draft everything is new. It's new to you. So, that's as close as you'll get to being a reader of your novel in the first draft because you're sort of reading from your own imagination and dictating what's there. So, I like first drafts because they're not boring to write, whereas editing can become by its very nature monotonous, repetitive, and familiar. Uh whereas uh when you're writing a first draft, you're sort of you're fishing your own imagination. You're like on the banks of your own imagination, and you're um waiting to see what's there.

Because I've written nonfiction and fiction, and the difference between writing nonfiction in first draft and fiction is that with nonfiction, you are confined to literally what you know. And not just that, to what you absolutely know, you know. Whereas with fiction, I think it's much more mysterious. I think you're writing what you know, but you're writing what you don't know, you know. So, you're sort of waiting to see what's there, and and you sort of discover more things about yourself and your imagination. It's all It's like entering your own dreams, isn't it, fiction versus nonfiction, where you're in the land of sort of shared objective reality, whereas fiction is much sort of like trippier in a way, and you're going into your sort of in subconscious.

>> Wow, the idea of entering your own dream is crazy. Describe that. >> Well, like I think it doesn't happen all the time, but you can reach a kind of like flow state in the middle of writing a first draft where you're not consciously thinking around the writing. You're not sort of aware of what you're doing, you're just writing. If you're doing anything often enough and you're getting proficient at it, you can reach a point where it's becoming quite unconscious.

And I've noticed with writing fiction, that's the point where interesting stuff can happen, where it's almost automatic and it's not planned. I'm not a planner. I, you know, I like to know roughly what I'm writing. I like to have a title. I like to know a concept and the characters, but beyond that, I'm not someone who sort of linearly writes down chronological order what what's going on. >> So then when you're when it's working for you, what are you feeling?

>> Um I'm feeling like excitement, but I but there's also a kind of anxiety that sets in and a kind of feeling of like putting pressure on yourself because with me, it is equivalent to being a reader in a in the sense that you have a story in your mind and you're trying to dictate it and you're experiencing it for the first time and you're rushing in the sense that you're trying to get it all down before you forget it. So you have the book in your head and you've got the sort of duty to get it down before it's gone. This is my problem with first drafts. I I generally love first drafts, but my problem with them is that mine tend to be quite rushed. You know, it's like a six-year-old coming in to say what just happened in the sandpit and like saying, "And then and then Sammy pushed me over and this happened and that happened and then and then and then. So every sentence pretty much starts with and then. You know, I was

just sort of garbled writing it writing it rush. I even have and then tattooed on my wrist. >> [laughter] >> Just to remind me that this is something I do and that I possibly shouldn't. But there's an always an and then in life. But yeah, so and then is my is my weakness of just like always sort of like rushing. But the flip side is that that >> [sighs] [gasps] >> that means you're sort of like not lingering on stuff you don't need to linger on. You're getting the story down and then you can embellish in sort of editing process.

>> So implied in what you're saying is the thing that is pulling you is the plot, the story? >> Well, I suppose with me with my writing I want people to feel something and to to get something out of it that's slightly more than a story, but the story is the vehicle to get them there to that feeling. So I feel like for me a story is a way of carrying an emotion, a thought in the best way that I can manage to deliver it to someone else.

>> So break that down and how that would show up differently in different books for you. >> Even though I'm seen as quite a I think quite an uplifting optimistic writer in recent years. In my earlier books they were quite depressing. I mean I wrote a book my third book which you won't have read, no one has read. It's it's called The Possession of Mr. P that's like the most depressing book I think anyone's ever written. Everyone dies in it. There's literally no hope. I would recommend no one to read this book. But it was >> [laughter] >> It wasn't badly written I don't think.

It was just so pointless and so depressing. And I was quite depressed when I was writing it. So I was so I that is an example of the extreme, you know, how how you can feel extremely low and that be reflected in the work. Now, when I'm writing something uplifting, it's not because I'm feeling necessarily really happy, it's because I'm wanting to do something a bit more difficult than when I was younger and actually to to go into sort of like the tricky areas of life and try and find some sort of authentic optimism.

Not an easy optimism, not all unicorns and rainbows, but to try and find something within the reality and the pressure and darkness of life, but to try and find some light or hope in that. Just because, basically, I think that's a more useful thing to do with the one life we have, to actually put something that can gives give someone a little bit of hope or a little bit of uh optimism. >> We're talking about what pulls you as a writer. How would a premise pull you?

Cuz a question that's being asked, an idea that you're exploring. >> Yeah, a concept for me is everything like if I get a concept that seems simple enough that I can just articulate it quite easily in a sentence, I think, "Okay, that that's good. That's I'm not having to overthink the concept. It's there. It's neat, you know?" Doesn't happen often, but when you get it, you kind of uh >> Like with The Midnight Library for >> The Midnight Library was definitely one where I thought that is a very uh simple idea, but I had that idea for a long time. It became simpler when I had the title because for a while I didn't have the title. I just had this idea of a library.

I think the original title was The Library of Lost Lives, which would have been much too sort of long and uh a bit I don't know, pretentious. But, The Midnight Library just shrunk it and just made it a simpler concept. So, that was an example of a sort of like the right title simplifying the concept. >> What's wrong with pretentious? >> Um, there's nothing wrong with like, uh, difficulty or complexity, but when it's just to sort of impress for no other purpose than just to impress and to say, "Aren't I clever person? Aren't I clever writer?" Then, I think, "What's the point of that?"

Um, so, and it's a trait I used to have when I started out. I think there's two two temptations a writer has that can make you go wrong or go off track or stop you being yourself. One is the desire to be too popular, too too liked, to, uh, you you you know, too much of a people pleaser on the page. And the other thing is the desire to be taken seriously, to I don't know, to be seen as a proper writer, to be award-worthy, to get the big reviews and that. At various points in my career, I've fallen victim to both of those traps, I feel, um, out of certain insecurities at different points.

So, the commercial trap, I suppose, and then the capital L literary trap. And to write purely, uh, I think you kind of just have to just find a sort of inner voice that is immune to both of those temptations. And that doesn't mean that someone else reading it might think, "Oh, this is too commercial." or "This is too literary." or "This is too pretentious." But, it means you writing it wrote it from a pure place. >> At what point in your career did you feel like you could transcend at least the commercial instincts. Did you come out of the gate saying I need to make money from this?

>> Well, one very simple uh understanding is that the moment you try and be commercial or try and research the market is the moment you will fail to be commercial and fail to reach the market. So, there's a paradox inherent in that. I notice in publishing a lot and it's understandable and it's there in every industry that it becomes quite backwards looking by its nature. Trends will be dictated on the basis of what sold last year. And even what sold last year is actually going further back in time because it was um taken on and edited 2 years ago and written 3 years ago and conceived 4 or 5 years ago or a decade ago. So, by looking at the market, going out and just looking at the tables in a bookstore, you're just looking at the past really. You're not looking at If you started writing a book now and that book's all right, it's going to be on tables in 5 years' time.

So, that's not the market. That's That's the past from where you're going to be. So, so thinking commercially I don't even know what that means in that sense because we don't know the future of the market. So, you The only reader you're going to know is yourself. So, you just have to be honest about the book you would want to read and that you would want to write. And hopefully those two things are the same thing. And when that happens, then that's what to do.

>> What if I came to you and I was like, "Dude, I am being honest. Like, I think this is good. It's just it's just not working. No one is buying what I'm making. Help me." >> That was my situation. Like, I I was the the big sort of breakthrough novel, I suppose, for me was The Midnight Library, but that was like book number 20 in terms of everything. Um so, I had written a lot of books. I'd been rejected by a lot of publishers.

I'd been dropped by a couple of publishers, but still I had to just find what I wanted to write cuz I had never no other way to write. And I'm very ADHD. So, for me, I can't write what I don't want to write cuz I'm just too bored. You know, I I I can't just be motivated by a deadline or necessity. I have to actually enjoy it. Because, you know, otherwise I get too distracted and I there's more interesting things. So, it has to be the most interesting thing for me to write.

And often, actually, one of the best things for me in terms of my career was being dropped because I was dropped by a publisher at a tough point in my life cuz we'd just had our first child and we had zero money and lots of that. So, we had a lot of financial pressure, which would make you think you were going to try and write something safe and commercial. But that was the point, for some strange reason, I just wrote my first attempt at ignoring all that. I wrote a book which had elements of science fiction, was strange tonally. It went from comedy to serious. It had an alien in it as a central character. It was called The Humans. It was a very odd book to write at that time. It didn't fit in the market because it wasn't pure science fiction. It wasn't a pure literary book. It wasn't purely comedy. It wasn't purely romantic. It was lots of different things, but it was very much me and all my influences in one sort of

pot. And that became, at that point, certainly in the UK, by far my most successful book. Because I'd been dropped, I was had a kind of like devil-may-care feeling that well, probably no one's going to read this anyway. So, if I'm writing something, I might as well just write it for me. And often when you get into that mode and you feel a little bit of nervousness in your stomach about what you're writing, that tends to be the one. When you lean into the nervousness, the anxiety, the self-consciousness, and actually just push past it, that's the point where I always think, "Oh, this is going to work for me."

>> With that book, what stood out to me was something I see over and over is this idea of you're going to write about something that's disconnected from you, but then in that disconnection, you then have the freedom to write about things that are very intimate. >> Yes. >> Talk to me about that. >> Totally. Well, yeah, like that was weirdly my most personal book. The Humans was my most personal book, but it was also my most fantastical in the sense that it was literally about an alien from another planet coming to Earth to destroy humanity. So, it wasn't my life.

Weirdly, it wasn't my life, but it also was an example of when you're writing fiction discovering things about yourself that you don't know about yourself. And this in quite a literal sense. Like a lot of people read that book and said to me, "Oh, thank you for writing a fable of autism. Thank you for writing a book about what it feels like to be autistic." I was like, "I haven't written a book about autism. What are you talking about?" And then years later, after my son who who presented very clearly as autistic was diagnosed with autism, I went along thinking I was just going to get diagnosed with ADHD, and then I was psychiatrist also told me I was autistic.

I thinking maybe I was. Maybe I was writing about what it feels like to be neurodivergent via this alien in a human body who doesn't understand human rules. And maybe that's what I was writing, but I didn't know I was writing that. I thought I was writing Douglas Adams' tribute about an alien coming to Earth. And that's what I find addictive about creating stuff. I I think that unknown sort of lagoon that you're sort of like sat beside and then watching things bubble up. Yeah, that's what's sort of tantalizing about it. You know, there's a point in your career where it becomes a career. Where there's contracts, there's deadlines, there's advances, there's expectation, there's a readership.

And then you start to think you start to question am I writing for the right reasons? Am I Do I Would I still be a writer if this wasn't a job and this was a hobby? Would I still go away and just write the stories? And you never 100% know the honest answer to that. But I think genuinely in my case I would because after The Midnight Library, I had a kind of mental health wobble. I gave up alcohol. I um had therapy for the first time in my life. I should have had it about 20 years before.

>> After the book came out? >> After the book came out. >> After it was successful? >> Uh well, it was successful, but it I don't think it was to do with that necessarily other than the fact that when you have success you can have this sort of sudden guilt if you're not feeling happy all the time because you're like other people think, well, what have you got to worry about? But my >> Yeah. >> I had barrier stuff. My dad was going through cancer.

Um we My my son was ill for a while and you know, just lots of life stresses were going on simultaneously at the same time this other great dream was was fulfilled and I had this big successful novel. So, it was just a lot. It was It was It was a sort of time to get therapy. But, I also thought that was possibly the time to step away from writing. I thought, I don't need to write in the way I used to for, you know, as a job. I could step away for a while.

I could just sort of leave it there. And so, I had about 6 months to a year not writing. But, I found I had nowhere to sort of like hook myself, to sort of like place this energy in in terms of my own mind. And so, I did end up writing and I wrote a very strange novel called A Brief Life Impossible. And that, I feel, it was almost like writing a first novel again cuz I I was genuinely writing that for me. It wasn't a very outward-facing novel. It wasn't a very reader-centric novel. It was just me getting stuff out.

And um but, it was It was kind of therapy. It was kind of like just ordering the world in a way that I couldn't otherwise. >> Yeah. What are the adjectives that you feel like you're embodying when you're pulled into a story? Is it curiosity? Is it play? Is it wonder? Is it kind of like fantastical? >> I do like fantasy and I like realism, but I like having one foot in both. But, my my safe space, the place I like to work in, is where it's a recognizable real world, but something odd is going on within that real world.

And I also think now, in like um the 2020s, it's increasingly hard, I feel Some people can do it very well, to write about objective reality because I feel like in the internet age in our increasingly divided society, it's hard to agree to have a consensus to have a unifying idea of what reality is. >> And how would this show up in a novel? >> Well, in a novel the way the reason I like to write a sort of recognizable reality that has something surreal happening in it or something that couldn't quite necessarily happen is because I think that is almost more realistic to me now because we're all in our own little reality bubbles that aren't necessarily capital R reality. So, it seems almost arrogant, I feel, to just sort of write a novel and say this is reality or this is what London is or British life is because it's like I feel everyone has a different version of what that is.

Whereas, when you write the book a little bit of fantasy in there, you're suddenly entering the land of dreams. And I feel like dreams are not only safer in that sense, they're also more revealing and you can actually you can bring very different types of readers together. I think the thing I'm proudest most of in terms of my career is that I don't have a specific reader. Like, when I I do a book event, I've got, you know, men, women, young people, old people, you know, I don't have a specific reader and that I think for me is the thing I'm proudest of that I don't have a set demographic because what I'm trying to do when I'm writing is to try and reach that level of shared empathy and understanding between people.

>> Mhm. How did writing children's books help you get there? >> Writing children's books to me I is the purest kind of writing. Um I feel like children genuinely are the best readers. In the sense that they are so close to their imaginations. So yes, obviously if you're writing a children's books, there's stuff you can't write about and shouldn't write about. And you have to be aware of that and also there's a sense of responsibility when you're writing for children. But at the same time, there's also great freedom because children are so willing to go with the daydream. They're so willing. You can have a sort of real world setting. You can set a novel in London and then have a unicorn walk down the street. And the child will be so willing to believe in that unicorn.

>> [laughter] >> That they will go with the unicorn. If you do that in an adult novel, you would have to have an essay on quantum physics about how it could be possible. And to the extent, this is how much I value writing for children and children as readers. If I'm stuck writing a novel for adults, I try and think what would be the children's story version of this. So if like the last book I I wrote, The Midnight Train, the first draft of which was very adult. It was actually about AI. It was a sort of a AI dystopian story and it just wasn't working at all.

And I thought what could I bring from sort of like children's literature? And that you know, children's books often have a magical train or railways in them. It's kind of like you know, The Railway Children, Harry Potter, you've got the Polar Express. Yeah, you've got a lot of magic trains in children's books. So that was one of the things that led me towards the train. >> Cuz that's the way things happen in The Polar Express. I love that book.

Oh my goodness. >> Yeah. And there's something about that. I get like as a as a child wanting to step on board for a magical adventure and going somewhere. And that's kind of like what stories do, isn't it? When you're a child, you literally the power of a book as a child. It's why so many like when people talk about their favorite books is always a children's classic in there. I'll always talk about Winnie the Pooh or, you know, because the books that you read when you're younger.

>> What do you love about Winnie the Pooh? >> Winnie the Pooh is a book I loved as a child and then I loved again when I was 24 years old having a breakdown at my parents' house and I was agoraphobic and I couldn't leave the house and I just had a load of children's books on the shelves cuz they were my old books. And it was so comforting to read. I think it's the ultimate self-help book that's ever been written. You have to remember A.A. Milne had been in the First World War.

He'd been at the Battle of the Somme. He had what we'd now call PTSD. He was going through a lot of uh mental trauma. And yet he wrote what is arguably the most comforting book that and um House at Pooh Corner, two books and further stories that were so comforting and so uh fulfilling, I think. And I think one of the reasons is that every character in those books is an archetype of a different mental state. With our sort of 2020s language, you can go through and give them all either um mental health characteristic or a neurodivergence quite easily. So, you'd have uh Piglet with anxiety, Eeyore with depression, Tigger ADHD, Owl's dyslexia and narcissistic personality, Pooh I would argue is an addict, you know, for honey, gets himself into all sorts of scrapes.

You've got Christopher Robin who's having a uh mass hallucination event in the forest. And so, I I genuinely think like he wasn't necessarily consciously doing this, but I feel like 100 Acre Wood world was created by A. A. Milne as his own kind of like escape, the thing that could keep him sane by escaping into this upper world. And I think often it's the most troubled or difficult minds are creating the most comforting stuff. You always think that the sort of tortured geniuses will create the darkest strangest works, but often the impulse is to go the other way. It's to create a sort of lands where you feel safe and comfortable.

>> Walk me through a little bit more of having written children's stories what that showed you that then you applied into novels for adults. >> What isn't talked about a lot when people talk about writing, um, certainly in traditional writing advice is feeling. And I think feelings are contagious. Very often what you're feeling as you're writing is the feeling that the reader has when they're reading. So, if you're feeling genuinely happy and you're enjoying writing a story then hopefully the reader at the end will feel that. This is especially true true with children's books. Like you have to like if you're writing a sort of silly scene with some sort of rude elf or something then you're writing that scene. If if you're just writing it because you have to write it and you want to write 1,000 words a day and this is your 1,000 words then it's not going to have that feeling. You've got to

enjoy what you're writing and it will be better writing in that sense. Um, editing's different, obviously. But when you're when you're creating the bulk of that scene, you've got to try and uh feel what you're wanting the scene to feel. >> Is there a room for excruciating agony? And maybe, hey, actually that is a good place to write from, or is it like, no, you got to process that and be somewhere else? >> No, I think so. I think obviously, you know, like in art, when people watching this the screen and standing in front of it, then they're they're feeling some of the sort of panic disorder or whatever Monk was going through, they're feeling some of that. And I I feel like the same with books. And often often there's a comfort in knowing a character or an author went through something when you're reading it.

>> When you're writing, do you think about originality? >> One thing that I realized very early on is that so many ideas you think of are unique have been, you know, done. There's a balance between uh understanding that, you know, there are no new stories in one sense, you know, and the hero's journey and that those sort of archetypes are there in lots and lots of uh things. Yeah, the the ways of telling them uh is is what's important and the emotions carried through them um are what's important. So, you have to think about uh originality, but with me it's again it's an ADHD thing, I think, of just not wanting to bore myself. One thing that becomes harder as you as you write uh more stories is as finding newness within your own work.

Even on a simple level like >> Like it's even a originality contest with yourself. >> Yes. And you realize how much you've already written or how many characters names you've given, you know, like you to try you don't want to call a character something that you've called a character in another book. The one character I find hard to write, the one narrator I find hard to write, certainly, is someone who is like me, sort of like a middle-aged man uh like myself, I find very hard to write.

And in fact, the first draft of The Midnight Library, it wasn't Nora being the main character, it was a man called Adam. And I nearly gave up on the book, but just because I could not see this person. And I think it's like how sometimes you don't know what you look like because you've seen yourself too much. You you you you know, if you look at yourself in the mirror or you look at a word too long, it starts to lose its meaning. And I think when I'm writing someone who is basically me, uh two things happen. One, it stops being a character because it's just me.

And you you don't really see yourself as a character, you're just a very complex state of existence. And then the other thing that happened was I was a bit guarded because it was me. It was like writing non-fiction. So, by changing the gender, changing the age and location a little bit as well, it suddenly wasn't me. And therefore, paradoxically, I put more of myself in terms of my experience of mental illness, in terms of like feelings about regret and guilt and that sort of stuff. More of me went into this character as soon as it wasn't me.

>> You said this that I thought was interesting about sales numbers. If we were number two in the bestseller charts, the only book we would ever be thinking about is the one selling more. >> Well, I think I wrote that before I'd ever been number one for a start. And I wrote that in my 30s. I'm very ambitious. And um I think I don't know if that's a universal thing, but that's definitely something that I've always felt in my career.

There's always another level that I'm looking up to. As I've got older, I've been more aware of that. I've resisted it a little bit more. Um because I I I sensed a pattern in my career where before I was published, I thought, "I'm going to be happy forever if I'm published. If I get my name on a book, I will be happy forever. I'll be satisfied that validation will be there forever." Um you know, 2 weeks later, there's something else. You want to be on the tables in the bookstore. You want to be in the window of the bookstore. You want to be in the Sunday Times bestseller list. Oh, then you want to be international. You want a foreign publisher to take you on. You want to be at on their charts. You want to be on the New York Times list. You want to be on the number one on the New York Times list. You want an adaptation cuz someone else is having an adaptation. You know, it's endless when you do that. There's

always When you're plugged into that, there's always another level. And I'm not saying it's totally useless cuz it's it gives you drive and it gives you a hunger, but you need to have more than that. You need to have something innate in you that wants to articulate something. I think for a while actually, we think of ourselves as ambitious in a very crude sense, but when we delve into our ambition, it's about something else.

It's not just about money or status in those crude ways. And I think for me, my own experience of that mental illness and being a troubled teenager played a big part in in my ambition because I think one of my incentives to write is to be understood. So, obviously, if you're selling a lot of books or you've got a lot of readers, then that gives you something else. It makes you feel like, "Oh, I'm accepted or I'm understood by these people. I'm not that weirdo I once thought I was." Or if I am a weirdo, I found these other weirdos who share these weird thoughts. So, I think that's part of my ambition as well, because I realized I don't There were choices I could have made, certainly about 10 years ago, where I was offered like more money by a bigger publisher in the UK to write something that I wasn't 100% comfortable with in terms of non-fiction.

And I said no to it. And I think since then, I've been quite proud to define my career by what I'm saying no to, as well as what I'm saying yes to. I'm saying I've said no to a lot lots of things, and even to in terms of film adaptations and things like that. And I think, you know, that's not a selfless thing. That's not a humble thing. That is simply not getting any kind of buzz or kick out of doing stuff that doesn't feel like me.

Before I wrote uh novels, I had a brief career for about a couple of years writing books about marketing and business for a business publisher, while I was very far from being a business person. But I was just a sort of jobbing writer who'd written a column in a magazine. I was writing a newsletter for my girlfriend who was setting up a PR company. And I got commissioned to write these business books. And it just felt so pointless and such a drag to just write words for the sake of writing words for the sake of a check. And obviously, I needed the money, and I don't resent that, and it taught me some good things about meeting deadlines and stuff like that. But in terms of my own impulse to write, during that time of writing I really didn't want to write, my impulse to write stuff I did want to write just grew and grew and grew. So, I think for me now, I understand what my ambition was. My ambition

was to be read, definitely. I'm not one of those writers who says, "I just write for myself." I write to be read, but to be read and understood as me. So, I don't really see this the difference. People say, you know, like you either write for readers or for yourself. No, I write for readers to understand what's going on inside me. So, I write to be understood in the sense. So, so writing for readers and writing for myself is kind of the same impulse.

>> Talking about your relationship with the publishing industry itself, cuz you reference this Keats poem about the sweet shop, standing outside looking in. >> At the sweet shop window. And you know, pressed against the glass. Cuz uh yeah, I used to study like romantic literature at university. And I I was always drawn to Keats cuz even Keats by today's standards would be seen as quite posh and upper middle class. Um he he he was a little bit outside and he was famously looked down on by Lord Byron.

They called him like piss a bed Keats. Uh you know. >> [laughter] >> He just He just saw him writing about this sort of delicate sort of like what he he he's seen as sort of sort of feminine stuff rather than writing about wars and heroes. In terms of the publishing industry, I've always uh I don't I don't really know. I I think I struggled for a while working out what type of writer I am. Cuz I think in the UK especially, books are very related to uh class. I was someone who when I was growing up, I never knew where I fit in personally. I think this comes from my mom who was adopted, so she never knew her parents and was very sort of class conscious.

I grew up in a working class town. I was considered quite posh because my mom was a teacher and my dad was an architect. And then you start writing books and enter the publishing industry and think, well, I didn't go to an expensive school. I didn't go to the top university, so you know, you suddenly feel like you're at the lower end. So, I I never knew my position. And in terms of my own influences in terms of writing, you know, at university you study all this sort of like your Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, um everyone else, but my own influences would be from everything from children's books, choose your own adventure stories, John Hughes movies, >> Borges?

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Borges, definitely. I think in my early days, because I was published by a very highbrow uh publisher for my first three novels, I was very uh self-consciously literary to an extent that I wasn't being truly myself. Took me to being sort of dropped and left a little bit on the metaphorical scrap heap to actually find find myself. And I I still wouldn't say I necessarily feel like I I belong in any one particular box, but I actually like that feeling now.

>> Let's end here. Story is easy, the plot of every book ever. Someone is looking for something. The commercial version, they find it. The literary version, they don't find it. That's it. >> Yeah, I mean, that is it. >> [laughter] >> I think I think that's it. And then like and there's a sort of commercial literary version where they kind of find it. Or they maybe find it in the next unwritten chapter. But no, I I uh I I like to demystify uh the process. And there's a I I think like sometimes the difference between literary and commercial is the difference between comfort and discomfort. And it's like, what's wrong with comfort? What's wrong with hope?

What's wrong with that positivity from time to time? And you know, I think it's very interesting often that it comes from a certain type of like critic, this idea that sentimentality is the very worst thing anything can be. I can remember in the 1980s I used a music magazine um which is still going, but it was NME was like the Bible in Britain for sort of like bands. And um the critics could be very harsh. >> What sticks out to me about that story is trusting your instinct. You're like, but I just like the song. That song has brought me so much joy in my life. Like, I don't care what the critics have to say. And that probably applies to my art, too.

>> Exactly. Trusting feelings, trusting your own feelings, trusting readers, trusting yourself. I I think it's about that. And not needing a real or imaginary gatekeepers' approval before you can trust your own opinions. And I think that's what you need as a writer and possibly as a human being. Just that ability to kind of like trust yourself. >> Yeah, I was talking to a friend the other day who I think is an amazing writer, an amazing writer. And I was saying that I'd just gone to the Louvre and I didn't like it that much. And he goes, yeah, cuz cuz 17th and 18th century French painting is crap. There was nothing good made in 200 years there.

And I don't know if he's right. I don't know if he's wrong. He knows a lot about art. But you know what? He trusts his own taste to say something so bold. And he can back it up in terms of his knowledge of art history and I was like, that is cool to be as in tune with your own sense of what is good and bad and not be so caught up in what the critics have to say, what society says you should and shouldn't think. >> Yeah. Uh, you know, I tell I tell my son this a lot cuz he'll go on like Reddit and and work out what the collective opinion is. And I was like, it's like it's just what do you feel when you listen to that or when you read that?

And that is your correct response to that. And I try and remember what I feel as I'm sort of sending off my book before anyone's read it. What what's my actual feelings about this? Because it's so easy to have your mind turned, you know, with that sort of outward view, but you've got to sort of like trust and be a bit stubborn. I think, you know, writers can be quite difficult people, but that difficulty has a use. It's to protect, to put a boundary around yourself, to actually have those battles with that commercial interests or people pushing you one way or the other way. To actually say, "No, I want to do this."

>> Yeah. Great to meet you, Matt. >> You too. Thank you. That was a good one. Thank you. >> Yeah.