Transcript
Julie: Our guest today is a remarkable writer, originally from Wales, as you will tell when you hear him. He’s a writer of plays, novels, stories, poems. He says he won’t tell me how many because he doesn’t want to write his epitaph before he’s finished. And he’s still not finished. Good. Mike Dorrell. Welcome, Mike. Mike, I’d like to take us through an ordinary writing day for you. How does the day begin? What do you do? What do you eat? What do you drink? What do you have? Where do you go? Virginia Woolf used to walk three miles or so before she even began writing. Do you have any … How do you do an ordinary writing day?
Mike: I don’t think there is an ordinary writing day. There used to be an ordinary writing night. When I used to stay up all night, start about ten o’clock and pull late-nighters through to about three, four in the morning. Certainly when I was in my twenties and into my thirties, I did that. And I think that was because it was quieter, you were more in control, you were freer. I think that’s the reason. I no longer do that. But when I was living in London, years ago in the seventies, I used to have a study between two houses. I went to see it last November. I went to see where my old study was in the 1970s. And it’s no longer there because it always was a passageway between two houses on Haverstock Hill. It was like a tiny T-shaped room in which I used to pull all-nighters because you could go down there with a typewriter and there was nobody else around. It was in the basement of the house. And I could type away. That was a major thing in those days about where you could type if you were typing. So I would start and go till I was exhausted. But I learned not to do that. I learned that’s the way to burn out.
Julie: Tell me about how you do it now.
Mike: I’m more inclined to write in the morning now. But I was thinking about what Raymond Chandler said famously, that every writer needs three or four hours a day by him or herself, whether you do anything or not. You need that three or four hours just to go in the study or wherever it is you work and stew. And because it’s an unpredictable, and in particular I was going to say profession, but art or skill or whatever it is. And I’ve often envied painters because they’ve got to brush in some colors to start with. At one point in my early 20s, I thought I’m going to do sculpture instead. I went on a welding course and secretly learned how to weld steel because there’s steel in my family. I mean, I’ve been like Burton, you know, and Burton said acting’s not a man’s job. I think when I was growing up, this is what I’m going to do, but I’m not convinced it’s a man’s job. And there’s that famous Dylan Thomas quote, which is aimed at T.S. Eliot. And it goes something like, “I would rather see an ordinary man dressed like a poet than a poet dressed like an ordinary man.” (Julie laughs) And so you have to admit that.
Julie: The clothes are everything.
Mike: And those are the days of, you know, bottle green shirts and big knitted ties and arty stuff. And I say this because it’s part of the role is as important as when you do and how you do it. But I think how you do it changes throughout your life and the older you get. I mean, it’s horrifying how long I’ve been doing this. It’s over 50 years. I guess the young days now look sort of undisciplined, but they weren’t. It was just that you had more energy and you wanted to get something done. And I like that Noel Coward thing about, I used to sit down at the typewriter and just type the thing out. But then when I’d finished typing, I thought it was done because it was typed. It looked done, but it wasn’t. And then you had to go back and do your revision. So I think when you’re young, your sessions are longer. You haven’t learned the art of pacing and you can’t write a novel like that unless you’re Jack Kerouac. The beats apparently could do it, could sit there and pull. Although I think there’s some research.
Julie: With help from drugs. Yes.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Fuel drugs and a long, what was he had, a roll of paper?
Julie: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Mike: Yeah. I was in last year thinking about this in City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, which kind of disappointed me because it didn’t. The poetry section was smaller than I thought and didn’t quite have the ambience that I was hoping for. Yeah, I used to pull all nighters. When I learned to my own detriment about the impact this had on other people, particularly my then partner, when I used to work all night in my old cottage in Wales, pounding away. That was when I was writing both novels and plays at the same time, but the novels were kind of more left-handed, if that makes sense. The novels were aiming more money-making things because at the time, I was also working as a freelance publisher’s editor and reader, where I learned a lot.
Julie: Do you write every day now?
Mike: I try to.
Julie: Do you have any other rituals about that you have to be a certain place or you have to have a certain kind of sandwich or that you have to drink something or you have to whatever?
Mike: You’re asking this at a very awkward moment because I’m two months without any coffee.
Julie: (Chuckles.) You might fall asleep on us.
Mike: Two months ago. I’m not sure that I’ve given up. I can’t say I’ve given up yet, but caffeine. Caffeine is really important, not booze because we’re not of that ’30s or ’40s generation, which I think we touched on earlier, but I’m not sure.
Julie: We’re not going to die of alcoholism now, and our predecessors almost universally did. It was uncommon for somebody not to be alcoholic in the 20th century.
Mike: Well, I’m not sure they even said that they were.
Julie: Of course not.
Mike: We’re talking about Hammitt, Faulkner, Fitzgerald famously.
Julie: Yeah. And the playwrights as well. O’Neill, Pinter, Williams. We just thought that was the way to do it or people believed they could get in an altered state and do well. And maybe they could. Maybe.
Mike: I think maybe they did. But the toll was great as they aged, particularly on Williams. I don’t know about O’Neill because he’s the only playwright that wrote anything of consequence after he won the Nobel. I don’t think anybody else has ever done. Didn’t he do “A Long Day’s Journey into Night” after the Nobel?
Julie: I think he did, but it was secreted so that we didn’t know it was there.
Mike: He did a tiny little handwriting. I went to his house in California or something. Have you been there?
Julie: Yes. That’s an indication of focus. To write small means you’re very focused.
It doesn’t mean you have a small ego, by the way.
Mike: Oh, it doesn’t?
Julie: No.
Mike: Oh. Well, I’ve always done big loopy handwriting.
Julie: If you were in a world that didn’t have your regular study and you didn’t have access to coffee or anything else, how would you write? Does the place matter to you? The room, the view out the window, the temperature, any of those things matter when you’re not in your regular space?
Mike: I think so. Have you ever tried to write anything serious in a hotel?
Julie: I fix things in a hotel.
Mike: Okay. When I was back in 1980s, after I started to get my plays off, and then I learned that plays are notoriously difficult to get, to make them last. So I decided to go to film school because I met Carl Francis, who’s a Welsh film producer and director, who had then done a version of Dylan Thomas’s Mouse and the Woman. And I saw a review of that in The Observer. I thought, I got to be a director as well. Got to be a director. And how am I going to do this? Because I’ve seen my plays. I’d had two or three plays off by that time. Each one was kind of hard won, and I’m not really getting where I need to be. So I think I need to go to film school. So I went to film school and did a documentary, which I did the voiceover and became the director on this documentary about the fate of Swindon Railway Works, which was big in the 1980s. So they sent us, I was the oldest of the postgraduate film schools, and we had to find a hotel in Swindon. And we had to find a hotel where we could work, where I could do some stuff, maybe type some outlines, think about this, what questions was I going to ask people and so on, and meet these trade union representatives. So we went to this hotel, go to this hotel room, and I have two friends with me. In the hotel room, there’s not even a table. (Julie laughs.) So there’s no way to put the typewriter.So I have to ask for a table. And they say, a table? Yeah. And I say, have you got a lamp? And then you realize what the basic equipment is that you need. Lamp, table, somewhere to put, somewhere to just lay out your stuff. Meantime, my friend Ian Vasey, who’s now in the film business, we went out and he said, well, there’s this good secondhand bookshop around the corner. And so we go down into the basement and find I can’t find Ian. And so I’m looking for him because it’s time to go back and really, because we’re going to interview these trade unionists about what their ideas are, how to keep this railway works going. It’s a big, you know, it’s a social documentary. It’s serious stuff. And this is our chance, and it’s going to be on the BBC. The film school has an arrangement with the BBC. So this is our chance to really kickstart this part of our careers. Anyway, I can’t find Ian. And he’s on the floor in the basement laughing and he can’t get up. And I said, Ian, what’s the matter? And he still can’t get up. He can’t say anything. He’s pointing to a row of books. And they’re a row of books. And I recognize what they are immediately. They’re paperbacks, because they got my name on them. It’s “Dick Barton and the Great Tobacco Conspiracy,” written by Mike Dorrell. And he knows that I’m this different kind of writer, but he didn’t believe it. And this is the example, because they’re all remaindered books that I adapted from a film script that was adapted from the original radio scripts after the war. And we’ll come back to this later because how you do things, what you do, and you can never quite tell in the writing business what form this is going to surface and come back to you at. Anyway, back to the hotel, they get me a little table that’s rickety. I put my typewriter out on it. And I’m trying to concentrate on these trade unionist interview. So we get to them the next day. And I think the guy’s name was Danny Boyle, something. No, it wasn’t Danny Boyle, that’s the director, but something Boyle. And he said, where are you staying? And we give him the name of the hotel. And I said, what’s it like? How are you doing there? And we said, well, they didn’t even have a table, it’s really hard to get any work done. He said, of course you can’t get any work done. You know what that hotel is? It’s a knocking shop.
Julie: What does that mean?
Mike: A knocking shop. It’s a place where prostitutes gather.
Julie: It’s called a whorehouse.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Julie: Okay.
Mike: Yeah. And so, yeah, you need a table. You need your basic things. Do I have, no, I don’t have particular set rituals. I’m not like Georges Simenon, who did all the Maigret series, who used to have a brown envelope and a sharpened pencil and a telephone directory. And then he would go down and pick the names of the characters that he was going to dream up out of the telephone directory and write them down. And when people asked him why he did that, I think this comes out of the Paris Review series, he said, well, that’s the way I did the first one, and the first one worked.
Julie: We’re creatures of habit, even though no one told us what the habit should be. And we invented it, and then we think that that’s the way everyone does it, which is, of course.
Mike: But don’t you think, though, the agony is getting started, I think, for anybody.
Julie: Yes, I do.
Mike: And then writers are famous for the delaying mechanisms. They’re all delaying mechanisms.
Julie: Yeah, yeah.
Mike: Because then you have to confront, is there anything in your head this day at all?
Julie: That leads me to one other question that’s related here. If you think back on all of your work, you no doubt had an experience where the piece wrote itself, if we say it that way. Could you tell me how that worked, if it ever happened to you?
Mike: I think poetry is the most, what Stephen Spinner called God-given. And he said something like, the first line is God-given, and then you have to work the rest out.
Julie: Okay.
And I think poetry famously is the most inspirational, but you don’t necessarily know in what direction that’s going to go. It’s like, didn’t Coleridge leave Kubla Khan unfinished?
Julie: He did.
Mike: Because the dream was interrupted, the reverie, or whatever it was that he did it in.
Julie: The opium.
Mike: Yeah, I think it was an opium trip. So, I mean, they’re all attempts to get disassociated somehow and let the underlying truth, if there is one. And so I think when you’re younger, that seems to happen more easily, particularly with poems. And I was thinking about this the other night, because I knew you were going to ask this. In my mind, poems and plays are nearer to each other, in that if you, can you think of how you came to the first line in a play you were going to write?
Julie: No. I have no idea. But I would know an image, or I would know maybe a line of dialogue, or some situation.
Mike: Do you learn not to ask where that first line comes from? Because if it’s there, follow it. (Julie laughs.)
Julie: And is that what you do?
Mike: If it’s there, if somebody’s talking, write it down. If they’re not talking, it’s very difficult to make them talk.
Julie: And you’re talking about characters in your head.
Mike: I’m talking about characters in your head.
Julie: Yes, okay. Yes, that’s good. I’ve heard you say that before, and I wondered what you meant. But now I think I understand. If they’re talking, write it down. How much does discipline affect what you do? What’s the ratio of discipline to inspiration?
Mike: Oh, the sort of inspiration, perspiration question?
Julie: Yes.
Mike: I just read a thing about Sarah Cain. Yeah. And Sarah Cain asked to be locked in a room. They did locked room sessions because she said no writer likes to start work. That is, no writer likes to write. And the same was true of Sheridan. Sheridan, I think it was “School for Scoundrels,” I forget which of his plays, anyway, because there are only three or four. He had to be locked in. They knew he could do it. And they would lure him into the green room in the theater with a roast chicken and handsome booze and lock him in and not let him out. And I think you get to learn your own pattern, which may change. I don’t think it’s the same for everybody, and I don’t think, and I work with a lot of writers now because when I was at the Acting Company, and I’ve learned not to try and tell a writer how to fix anything because that results in the wrong, it’s a mechanical approach. You could suggest an edit, but if you’re going to say a fix because it has to come from inside, what that inside is, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does know.
Julie: That’s actually what you’re good at as a critic, that you know more about writer process than anyone else that I know of. And it’s always about where are you here. And it doesn’t have to do with the structure of the story or whether the climax is too early. It’s where are you in your process. Go back to the inspiration again. Is that inspiration for you?
Mike: I don’t know.
Julie: Or inside?
Mike: I’m not sure.
Julie: Okay.
Mike: Because I’m not sure that I really think there is inspiration, because, you know well enough, I’ve written a lot of things, that once you’ve started, you’ve got to keep at it, because a lot of work done is unconscious.
Julie: Do you imagine a time when you will not write?
Mike: I’m thinking about caffeine. (He laughs.) I mean, I’m just thinking about this because it feels fairly dated. This feels almost as bad as when I stopped smoking. I thought I wasn’t going to write anymore. I took the risk. I stopped smoking. I threw my pipe away and I couldn’t write.
Julie: Interesting.
Mike: And then, I thought I was never going to do it again because I needed that whatever it was, the filling of a pipe. In those days it was a pipe, but that was obviously part of the ritual that got you thinking. And when I stopped that, I didn’t think I was going to succeed ever again. So I think we all fear that there may be times when it’s not there. And I’ve talked to two people who have had heart attacks and had triple bypasses, and sometimes it’s not there unaccountably, not there, because something happens either during the operation, or not. And I don’t think there’s much you can do. I had a friend who’s a Danish poet who famously used to do Allen Ginsberg Jack Kerouac-type sessions and wrote both in English and in Danish. And he never wrote again after his heart operation. He had a bypass and an artificial valve. It wasn’t the same. He would send things, he would write letters, but I’m not sure that he ever wrote a poem. His wife survives him and she might contradict me. The poet Leslie Norris, who was Utah’s poet and was Welsh, and so we became friends, he said something similar. So there’s something physical there in terms of, I don’t know whether we should call it inspiration, some physical mental conjunction that makes you go. And if components of that are missing, you might not. And that seems like, I think Simone de Beauvoir said, a day without writing is a day like ashes.
Julie: Yeah. Do you like writing, Mike? Is the process of it, is that pleasing to you?
Mike: No, I don’t think it is. Making marks on paper, yes.
Julie: Then why do you do it?
Mike: Because I’ve got something to say.
Julie: You’ve got something to say.
Mike: And I’m not done.
Julie: And you’re not done saying it. If you can talk about your career, if you talked about what you know now, and you could look at yourself or talk to yourself as a younger man, a younger writer, what would you tell yourself?
Mike: Let’s go back to the original question, do you like writing?
Julie: Yeah.
Mike: Of course. But I always, if somebody says I love writing, I think you’re an amateur. You haven’t been through that crucible.
Julie: My colleague at the UNLV used to say, there are writers who like to write and there are writers who like having written.
Mike: Yeah. I think the having written is the…
Julie: Having written is salient, yeah?
Mike: Yeah. Agatha Christie said that she didn’t become a writer until The Blue Train. She hated the book, it sold moderately well, and that was about her third or fourth book that she wrote after her divorce from her husband. And she knew that she had to write it because that was what she was now. She was a professional writer and what do professional writers do? They write.
Julie: Now go back to telling yourself what you might like yourself to know at a younger age. Can you?
Mike: I think the circumstances surrounding writing have changed so mightily in, what, 50, 60 years that it’s almost unrecognisable. And I’m very glad that people still have the impulse. So it’s very difficult to transfer yourself back because 50 years ago, living was certainly possible for all kinds of writers. Now, I think last year, the average income for writers, and I’m not sure about the U.S., but in the U.K., from $11,000 a year to $8,000 a year. So are you seriously going to say to somebody that $8,000 a year is what you can reasonably expect to earn? If you had told me at 20, you can’t make a living out of this, I would have said, no, I’m going to because this is what I do. And I’ll do anything to make this happen. Including what I call left-handed work. I think that’s what Graham Greene meant when he said he divided his work into his novels and his entertainments. I think the entertainments were deliberately popular. I became a publisher’s reader at age 22 after I finished my first degree and wrote after a bunch of London publishers. By age 22, I was sitting there reading other people’s manuscripts, and I thought I was hot stuff. I thought, I know how to do this. I don’t know how I know how to do this, but I know intuitively how to do it, and I still think so. I was prepared to learn the business side of it.
Julie: I’m interested in who looks at your material. Do you have a set of people whom you consult or people who read your early drafts? Or is that all yourself? Are you unwilling to let go of it until it’s published or produced or whatever? What is your relationship to other readers before production, publication?
Mike: I think that changes with time too. I think unless you’re very lucky, that intimate circle of other readers that you do need tends to diminish. And I’m thinking that I used to work with my ex-brother-in-law in the early years in London, and later in Wales. They were different circles, but I certainly had a circle.
Julie: And you have less of a circle now.
Mike: Less of a circle now. Well, partly because I’m in exile.
Julie: Yeah, here.
Mike: Yeah, and when we were at the Salt Lake Acting Company, which you know that we worked together for about 10 years altogether, then we had quite an intimate circle. But I never showed drafts. I don’t think you’ve ever seen a draft of mine. So I tend not to show, and I certainly won’t talk about it while I’m doing it. It’s fatal.
Julie: And that’s another question. Do you ever talk about it?
Mike: No.
Julie: Do you ever even describe what it’s about?
Mike: Sometimes you have to. Haven’t you had the agony of a commission? And in the commission, they say, well, what do you want to do?
And real answer is, I want to do my next play. Well, what’s it about? If you knew what it was about, you wouldn’t have to write it.
Julie: Is that true, that you start out a writing project or a writing session not knowing where it’s going, not knowing exactly, and then you discover it as you write?
Mike: Yes and no. The famous example of this is my play about “Secrets of the Floating World,” about Frank Lloyd Wright. And by that time, I’d had a number of radio plays done, and my producer said to me, okay, we’d agreed a date where the draft was due, and so I had to unshackle it. And I said, I had said something like, I want to do a very unusual interior play about Frank Lloyd Wright. And this was, looking back, I’ve done a series of plays about artists of different kinds, writers. I’ve done odd bio plays. Did one about Dickens. Anyway, Frank Lloyd Wright was one of these. So I did the play. I think I was working at SLAC (Salt Lake Acting Company) at the time. I did the play, and I sent it to her. It was agony to send it because they needed it quickly, and I had to send it.
I had to fax it. I had to fax it sheet by sheet, and it was like, I don’t know, it was an hour and a half play. Anyway, and it got there, and she said, Well, this is good Mike, but it’s not what you promised me, because what you promised me was an unusual time set and scale and more compressed. And I thought, yeah, she’s right. I’ve got it out, so this is, what I’ve done is just the first draft then, and I have to reconfigure it into what I’d said I was going to do.
Julie: Back when you were another person.
Mike: But she was right, so I had an original idea that I’d blabbed in order to get the commission. Then the play that I’d produced was not really what I’d promised, and then I went back, I had to go back to my original idea and sort of re-conceive it more poetically, if you like. So the first play or the first draft was just a track, which freed me.
Julie: Do you ever write with an outline? Do you ever use an outline?
Mike: Yes and no.
Julie: (Laughs) You’re equivocal on everything.
Mike: No, no, I’m not, because I am ruthless in the sense I will use any methodology available, and all those are available methodologies, and I will use them at different times for different things. I think I have done plays without any outline in my head whatsoever, but you form the outline as you’re going. Do you know the thing about Sam Shepard when he said he’s got his drawers full of starts of plays that are about 10 pages or something, that if you can get past, I think it was 10 or 15 pages, then you’ve got a play?
Julie: I agree with him.
Mike: You do?
Julie: Yeah.
Mike: Okay.
Julie: I’ve worked with an outline a couple of times, and it feels very routine, the product. If I’m not discovering in the moment, the play doesn’t seem to pop off the page. It just sits there and does exactly what it’s been told to do, and I feel very…
Mike: So do you think Shakespeare had an outline?
Julie: I think he did in the sense of where it went, but I don’t think moment to moment he did at all.
Mike: No, but he had the histories, whatever it was that he was using.
Julie: Yeah.
Mike: That he then took and remade.
Julie: And he did a lot of looking at somebody else’s life and learning from it, and I’m convinced he did that with his own group of people, as we all do. Let me get back to that question. How about the subject matter of your plays? What percentage of it would you say is autobiographical?
Mike: My mother said, used to listen to my plays or come see my plays, and she’d say, I know where that comes from. And I’d say, no, you don’t, Mum. She’d say, yes, I do. I know where that comes from. And so none of them are directly autobiographical, but it’s in there. Of course, there’s people you know, of course. Bound to be, because where else are you going to draw your material from? There are things you’ve known, people that you’ve known, but not directly. Let’s go back to the outline thing.
Julie: Sure.
Mike: That an outline is a technique that may be seen as non-inspirational, but there may be circumstances, particularly working with other people, where an outline of some sort is an absolute necessity.
Julie: Hollywood does not exist if you don’t have a storyboard, if you don’t have a detailed idea about where you’re going. It doesn’t exist.
Mike: And writers often feel that somebody asking for an outline is a measure of control, and I think to an extent that is true, because what they’re saying is, we want a reliable product. We want to know that you can do this reliable product. So if you’re up for that game, which I used to be more than I am now, then I would outline. But I worked with my ex, I call him my ex-brother-in-law. We produced two or three novels together in our 20s, several of which were published under different pseudonyms. We would outline, and then we would take alternate chapters to write. But then we would get to the point where you’ve got your outline there, and it says this happens and this happens, but you can’t make it happen because it doesn’t feel right. So you’d have to bring each other up. We either do it and say, well, this is not working, or you’ve got a six-page outline, say, or a four-page outline, and there’s a paragraph there, and the paragraph turns out to be one line, and the one line turns out to be a chapter. You know, you can’t hold yourself rigidly to the outline, except you are going to make the same plot point if it’s a plotty thing. And I learned how to do this. I spent years. I spent seven years altogether when I was a publisher’s reader, and out of that, I also learned to edit. I learned about pace, and I became a rewrite man. And out of that, again, came those novels, the Dick Barton novels that I sort of re-wrote out of somebody else’s material, that my friend, Ian, was collapsed on the floor laughing about. So, I think there’s the trade, there’s the skill, there’s the inspiration. Everybody has different mixes of how to do that.
Julie: What piece of literature or play, poem, whatever, do you wish you had written that you didn’t, presuming you would choose somebody else’s work? Is there a writer that you would to have written one of, his or her pieces?
Mike: When I was about 15 or 16 in school, we had to read O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, and that had a great influence on me, because at the time, I couldn’t understand why it was that Irish writers could write about themselves, and the Welsh had not. So I started to read more of O’Casey and wished there had been a Welsh Juno and the Paycock, the book world does not come anywhere near it. So in that sense, I first started to write seriously. I knew that I had to make a tradition, because we really did not have one.
Julie: I feel the same way about Utah, that if writers don’t write about where they are, who will? There are more places than London and New York.
Mike: Seems to me western writers are always marginalized, or told they are western writers. To themselves, they are just writers. If somebody else tells you, “Oh, you’re a western writer, or you’re a Welsh writer,” what does that mean exactly?
Julie: Yeah. Could you say something about being older and how much that influences you, how it may or may not influence the content of what your write or the point of view that you take?
Mike: This came up in a conversation some years ago that I was having with a Welsh poet, Nigel Jenkins, who was a friend of mine in the early days, and then we connected back. And he, by that time, just before he died, was Professor of Creative Writing at the University in Swansea. One of the things we were talking about was the difference in generations of writing. And he said we as a generation are inherently political and may not even notice that we are. But generations now are all to do with personal things, but they didn’t see it necessarily in the same social sphere. That set me thinking. I’m not sure that it’s actually true, but we are survivors in the sense that we are like Shakespearean playwrights who survived into the Restoration. And I’m particularly thinking about plays here. So are the things we have to say now still relevant? They not be catchy. We have things to say about aging without despair. We have a lot more to go. And what is our legacy as a generation of people? Because we are left in an increasingly warming world. Can we write about that? Every older actor has King Lear in front of him or her. That is their great challenge. So, I think as writers, we have that last thing, or series of last things to come to terms with, and I hope they’re big, I don’t know necessarily what they are yet. I don’t know how to frame it, but there’s a hell of a lot to say before we go.
Julie: Thank you. Mike Dorrell, our special guest today on Calling the Muse, a series of interviews with Utah playwrights, focussing not on what they have done, but how they do what they do. I am your host, Julie Jensen, and my audio engineer is Rod Daynes.