{"id":11027,"date":"2019-10-06T09:42:06","date_gmt":"2019-10-06T08:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11027"},"modified":"2019-10-06T09:42:06","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T08:42:06","slug":"mlf-2019-david-nicholls-in-conversation-with-alex-clark-at-the-cosmo-rodewald-hall-martin-harris-centre-41019-reviewed-by-georgia-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11027","title":{"rendered":"MLF 2019: David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark, at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre, 4\/10\/19, reviewed by Georgia Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark <\/strong><\/p>\n

The last time journalist Alex Clark interviewed writer David Nicholls in Manchester, it was, she says, a \u201cmad experience\u201d involving the police and broken microphones. David returned to Manchester on 4th<\/sup> October 2019 as part of his book tour for Sweet Sorrow <\/em>\u2013 a story of first love set in the school holidays of 1977. Thankfully the evening \u2013 part of Literature Live, hosted by the Centre for New Writing \u2013 passed successfully in The Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre, with no incidents of damage, leakage or criminality.<\/p>\n

Clark opens the conversation on the impetus behind Sweet Sorrow<\/em>. First love was the primary draw for Nicholls; and having told stories ranging in age from university through to mid-life, he felt a need to return to adolescence. Nicholls wanted to give a \u201csincere\u201d and \u201clyrical\u201d account of teenage years which differed from the \u201ccorny\u201d and \u201cjeering\u201d tone of high school stories. \u201c\u2019Tender\u2019 is the word I keep coming back to,\u201d Nicholls reflects; and it may be no coincidence that his favourite book, as he tells us later, is F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s Tender is the Night<\/em>.<\/p>\n

However, Nicholls says his \u201cpreoccupations\u201d in novel writing are not autobiographical. He describes the process of creating the character Douglas in his 2014 novel, Us<\/em> \u2013 which he describes as a cautionary tale of partnership and parenthood \u2013 as \u201cwriting away from myself\u201d; Nicholls\u2019 early interest in science (Douglas is a scientist) was jettisoned by his acting: \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t been cast in all those plays\u2026\u201d. Nicholls still wrote the character based on his own internal experience: \u201chow could you not?\u201d<\/p>\n

Us<\/em> is the only novel in which Nicholls created central characters older than he was, an experience he describes as feeling initially like \u201cscience fiction\u201d. However, once he had created Douglas and was \u201cin character\u201d (language which is surely an overhang from his acting days), \u201cI could write Douglas all day\u201d. The Sweet Sorrow<\/em> tour overlaps with the filming of the forthcoming adaption of Us<\/em>. (Nicholls says it\u2019s a \u201cblessing\u201d that he hasn\u2019t been able to be on set; he has nothing to do and ends up upsetting the actors).<\/p>\n

The challenge of this adaptation, he found, was transferring Douglas\u2019s first-person voice into the dramatic medium of the third person. Nicholls faced this difficulty of transferring interiority while screenwriting for Patrick Melrose<\/em>, Sky\u2019s award-winning adaptation of the novels by Edward St Aubyn \u2013 favourites of Clark\u2019s. Nicholls said the adaptations were achieved through \u201cRewrites\u2026 it was years of writing [\u2026] Fidelity is relative when you adapt something,\u201d he reflects, \u201cand I wanted [the episodes] to be as faithful as they could possibly be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked about his experience of stepping between the identities of novelist and screenwriter, Nicholls relates the \u201cdull, grim\u201d process of delivering a storyline to a story editor to be judged purely on structure. He says the flash-forwards structure of Sweet Sorrow<\/em> came about because in all his novels, he has \u201cstructural ideas fixed in my head before I start\u201d.<\/p>\n

He began to think about Sweet Sorrow<\/em> using a method he describes as \u201cscrapbook\u201d, collecting ideas in a document for 18 months, and not starting to write until he knew who all his characters were, and what was going to happen. The conversation turns to editing: \u201cI only stop writing because they take it off me.\u201d He recalls an intriguing conversation at the Kobo (eReader) headquarters, in which the possibility was raised of eBooks one day enabling writers to continually edit their work post-publication.<\/p>\n

Nicholls rejects this and describes a book as a \u201cdiary\u201d for both the writer \u2013 it represents a marker of who they are at that time \u2013 and the reader, through the process of reading and re-reading. He exemplifies this with his most recent rereading of Tender is the Night, which he found newly disquieting. He says that he would not want to edit forever \u2013 and post-event purchasers of Sweet Sorrow<\/em>, individually signed and addressed by the author, must surely agree.<\/p>\n

Georgia Way<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark The last time journalist Alex Clark interviewed writer David Nicholls in Manchester, it was, she says, a \u201cmad experience\u201d involving the police and broken microphones. David returned to Manchester on 4th October 2019 as part of his book tour for Sweet Sorrow \u2013 a story of first love […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,16,283,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nMLF 2019: David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark, at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre, 4\/10\/19, reviewed by Georgia Way - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11027\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"MLF 2019: David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark, at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre, 4\/10\/19, reviewed by Georgia Way - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark The last time journalist Alex Clark interviewed writer David Nicholls in Manchester, it was, she says, a \u201cmad experience\u201d involving the police and broken microphones. 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