Best BITTERSWEET

From successful screenwriter to bestselling novelist and back again. David Nicholls explains the difficulties and delights of both disciplines, to Tina Jackson

There can’t be a writer who captures the bittersweet romance of modern life better than David Nicholls – as anyone who watched this autumn’s must-see BBC adaptation of his 2014 novel, Us, will testify. Starring Tom Hollander as Us’s hapless hero Douglas as he tries to save his marriage by carting his wife and son on tour of Europe’s cultural capitals, Us was almost unbearably poignant in its depiction of places, and a way of life, that is no longer possible for us in a pandemic.

Us aired on TV in the oddly hopeful period between lockdowns when foreign holidays were briefly a possibility for some. ‘It was meant to go out earlier, but it would have been too painful seeing all those places,’ says David. He is in his kitchen, making spinach daal while we talk. In the event, Us was screened after the paperback publication of David’s most recent novel, Sweet Sorrow, making him a valued presence of kindness and humanity in a year when those qualities have never been more welcome.

David, who has a dual career as a screenwriter and a novelist, wrote the adaptation of Us – as he has done for all five of his novels. ‘It’s quite painful because you have to accept but there are things that won’t work on screen,’ he says. ‘Us is a monologue written in a particular voice, and you have to cut all those inner thoughts, but once you can accept that you have to be ruthless, I quite enjoyed working on it. It was

strange going back to it because you’re a different writer from the writer who put the words on the page.’

David, the author of global bestseller One Day, was an actor before he became a writer, and a screenwriter before he turned to writing fiction.

‘I worked on Cold Feet and had my own storyline and it got cancelled after the third series,’ he explains. ‘I didn’t have anything to do. I wanted to write about university and couldn’t get a student drama on telly, so I started to experiment with a monologue – variations of anecdotes I’d told. It became almost a short story and I showed it to a script editor friend of mine and she showed it to an agent. My agent, Jonny Geller. I came at it sideways. As a TV writer I’d had a couple of quite brutal flops. I didn’t come at it in an amateurish way so I wasn’t dabbling. But I came at it from a slightly different situation.’

That book, David’s first novel,

Starter for Ten, was published in

2003. Setting the template for the kind of romcom that David was to make his own, it featured the social and romantic misadventures of Brian, a student from a working class background, obsessed with general knowledge and in love with Alice, a student from a middleclass background, which gives her a gloss and sheen Brian lacks. It was followed in 2005 by The Understudy, but David’s career as a writer really took off in 2009 when One Day was published, and then, in 2011, when it was made into a film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. Warm, funny, sad and with the high concept of picking up the narrative on the 15th of July at key points in the twenty-year history of star-crossed lovers Emma and Dexter, it became one of those books that everyone read, and loved, and talked about.

When David came to writing fiction, romcoms were a natural fit for him. ‘I think I’ve always loved romcoms as a genre,’ he says. ‘Woody Allen, When Harry Met Sally, Billy Wilder

– a particular kind of romcom was something I’d always enjoyed. I’ve always been drawn to comedy and relationships. But I’ve never been able to do a Richard Curtis classic romcom. I always like a little bit of sadness in there – loneliness and frustration and insecurity have their place in a romantic comedy.’

A word often used to describe his novels is ‘bittersweet’. A straightforward love story isn’t for him, he agrees. ‘I find it hard to write entirely with a straight face. I want to undercut things and make jokes, and I didn’t want to deny that in my writing about family and relationships. Bittersweet is right – my books tend towards romance and they twist and become more poignant. I like the idea of making people laugh and I’m happy when people are moved by the stories.’

David prides himself on writing with care and integrity and doesn’t want to become stereotyped – or to stereotype himself. ‘So it can be a bit of a trap. I might have to write something that’s just bitter, or something sweet,’ he offers. He’s particularly conscious that he doesn’t want to be a manipulative tear-jerker.

‘There’s a danger that you become manipulative or mawkish if you feel obliged to make people weep,’ he says. ‘As much as I can I avoid sentimentality or predictability. I think it’s important to believe: if there’s a theme in my writing it’s people trying to be decent despite their faults and their failings. I can’t write anything cynically or spitefully.’

As a novelist, David’s work as an actor and screenwriter have influenced the ways he creates a piece of fiction, but he says they are very different disciples. ‘There’s something quite intense about writing fiction,’ he says. ‘You feel every word has to be the right word – clear and precise. You have to be in the right frame of mind.

“If there’s a theme in my writing it’s people trying to be decent despite their faults and their failings. I can’t write anything cynically or spitefully.”

Screenwriting is very pragmatic, you have all these limitations on what you can write. With fiction the blank page feels very blank. With screenplays there’s always someone you can phone up. With a book you have to summon up the characters and story all by yourself. It’s more intense and more personal.’

He says he always has the option of writing a story as an original screenplay, and an idea will dictate what approach he takes. ‘It takes much less time – six weeks and you have a spec script. But with fiction you can do all kinds of things – access the characters’ inner thoughts, write crowd scenes, show children growing up. With a screenplay, there are certain scenes that don’t work particularly well. Moving around in time is very tricky.’

Sometimes the boundaries blur between page and stage. ‘I write a book as well as I can as a piece of fiction, and pay great attention to the characters and prose – but I’m very influenced by film and theatre and performance, so the two things are muddled in my head,’ says David. ‘But I have a good idea what might work for each story.’

Both screenwriting and acting have provided David with vital tools as writer. ‘There’s a technical craft aspect to screenwriting that I really love and if the writer’s voice is very different from my own I love putting on that costume,’ he says. ‘With acting, you develop improvisational skills, you learn about structure and comedy and how to build a character. It was good training to be a writer, in a roundabout way.’

What’s key for David is knowing the atmosphere he wants to create. ‘Mood is a big part of it – the tone of a piece. I have that in my head. The effect on the reader,’ he says. ‘Often it’s wanting to create a certain feeling in a reader, fondness or nostalgia or regret. Joy. With Sweet Sorrow I wanted to relive the pure expectancy of that feeling of the end of summer, that sadness of love. A pleasurable sadness.’ In Sweet Sorrow, his central character Charlie joins a school holiday theatre group where he bonds with Fran, a girl from a different social background, during rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet.

Romcoms depend on character creation – unless readers fall for a character they won’t care about their situation. Like a method actor, David has to know his characters inside out before he starts writing them. ‘I don’t want to discover the characters as I go along. I have to know their histories and attitudes and taste in music – all the questions an actor would ask – before I start. I can’t write from a blank page. If you don’t do all that there’s a fear of it drying up and then abandoning it. I do the homework before I start.’

David crafts his characters meticulously, getting to know them inside and out. ‘I have a document where I write out the biographical details. I improvise dialogue to get their voice. I find dialogue easy to write so I write pages of dialogue. I carry with me a real person’s voice and physicality and mannerisms. I think about the way an actor brings a persona to a role – I think in terms of performance. I make sure I can answer any questions about them before I write. I see them in my head. I know who they are.’

He finds more of interest in characters like Us’s Douglas, or Sweet Sorrow’s Charlie, who are socially awkward and anxious, than in a traditional romantic hero. ‘There’s certainly an amount of failure and mishaps, it’s more fun to write about someone who makes mistakes than someone successful and confident,’ says David. ‘They show some self

awareness, they have a tendency to get things wrong. It’s not just comedy, but pathos. You need the mistakes.’

Writing Us’s Douglas was a pleasure. ‘Once I’d cast Douglas in my head and knew what he was like – he is maddening but he was easy to write – I wrote it very quickly. I always felt quite fond of him because he was so well intentioned and because of how much he loved his family. But it is an interesting game for a writer to play – how badly can I make this character behave before the reader loses their patience?’

David has a sharp insight into the reasons – borderline funny and tragic – that keep his characters apart. ‘I write comedy of manners, class and social circumstances – I think it’s always there when you’re writing a modern love story. I’m looking at the barriers between people getting together, and they’re all to do with upbringing and class. It’s often a source of tension between characters. In Sweet Sorrow, Fran is not rich but she has a kind of educational swagger and books at home. That’s a barrier. Charlie has been taught that if you get up on stage you’re going to get mocked. Self-expression is a source of weakness. For Fran’s friends, it’s valuable. A cultural divide is often there. In Us, it’s between science and art, in the way Douglas feels a bit intimidated by art and artists. In One Day it’s a very clear class divide. Dexter has a confidence and swagger that comes from being a rich, educated white man. There are all kinds of divides between people – class, culture, income – which are useful when you want to find tension in a story.’

He is very conscious, though, of the way he uses comedy. ‘I think when I started, it was the time I was writing in, there was a lot of quite cruel comedy around, a comedy of humiliation. I can’t write in a nihilistic bitter cynical way. I don’t like black comedy – there are things I can’t be funny about. I’m less keen now then I was when I started on the comedy of embarrassment. Now I want more humanity in it. Satire often comes across as smug and cynical. There are branches of comedy outside my range.’ He works very hard, though, to make the books as funny as possible. ‘You want a response, don’t you? People saying they laughed out loud – I think that’s the bare minimum. I’ll do my best to make that happen.’

Families, particularly the father-son relationship, are central to both Us and Sweet Sorrow. ‘Families are certainly a theme,’ says David. ‘I haven’t been on a date for 25 years. I’m much more interested in long relationships and parenthood and I couldn’t write with confidence about a dating app. It’s write what you know. The father-son relationship in Sweet Sorrow is not a straightforward relationship. I’m interested in mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. The relationship between a parent and offspring of the same gender. I do find it interesting, in my books and others.’

He is also interested in how looking at the past influences the way his characters see their present, and his books are imbued with a certain kind of nostalgia. ‘I want it to be accurate,’ says David. ‘The algia bit of nostalgia is pain. It’s the pain of missing home. I’ve never felt looking back was a glibly fine thing. I always think it’s a slightly more ambiguous feeling, with sadness and regret and slightly darker emotions. I don’t want to be sentimental or rosetinted about the past.’

His writing practice is all about finishing what he’s started. ‘With fiction it’s all about forward momentum. Just keep adding to the word count. If you can get to the end and it’s terrible that’s fine – you’ve got something to work on. I do revise as I go along, but I want to get to the end, put some distance between myself and the manuscript and do another pass and try to fix the problem. I have to wait until I feel particularly proud of it before I show it to anyone else. I try to write 1,000 words today, three pages a day, and keep it going until I get to the end.’

He tries to make sure there’s something he’s looking forward to writing. ‘I tend to have something up my sleeve, something I’ll enjoy writing about – it’s good to have something up my sleeve. I like writing set pieces where you set up a scene and go “this is going to be funny”. If you can get everything in place whether it’s comic or dramatic these things where you know you can enjoy it as a writer. And hopefully the reader will get that kind of glee.’

By now, it’s time to let David get back to his spinach daal, and we say our goodbyes. It’s been a real pleasure

‘The bit of nostalgia is pain. It’s the pain of missing home. I’ve never felt looking back was a glibly fine thing... I don’t want to be sentimental or rose-tinted about the past.”

talking to you, says WM truthfully, adding that we’ve been looking forward for a long time to be able to feature him. It turns out we chose our moment well, as there may not be a good reason to speak to him in the near future. ‘There won’t be another book for another few years,’ he says. ‘I feel like the last ten years since One Day have been fairly intense and I need, not a breather because I love my work, but I need to work out what comes next.’

There’s nothing half-hearted about David’s approach to writing novels. ‘You’ve got to really believe in the idea. I’m not a dabbler – I have to really believe the idea will work,’ he says. ‘I can only write fiction if I feel it’s really good idea – and I’ve only ever had five.’

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