Test Match Special - #40from40: Sebastian Faulks

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Sebastian Faulks, award-winning author of Birdsong and Charlotte Grey, chats to Simon Mann at Lord's in 2011. Faulks discusses his deep love of cricket and his writing process.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. To embrace the impossible requires a vehicle that pushes what's possible. Defender 110 boasts a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms, a weighting depth of 900 millimeters and a roof load up to 300 kilograms. Learn more at landrover.ca. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. The Boundary on the TMS podcast. Hello and welcome to the Test Match Special podcast.

This is Simon Mann with you for another trip down memory lane as we revisit a classic view from the boundary from 2011. The matching question was at Lords between England and Sri Lanka, though the game finished in a draw is remembered for centuries from Sir Alistair Cook and Matt Pryor, as well as a massive 193 from the tourist Tilly Karatni Dilshan. Our guest up in the commentary box was the author Sebastian Folks, best known for his novels, Bird Song and Charlotte Gray.

Folks has been described as one of the most impressive novelists of his generation. As well as his writing, Folks is a keen cricketer and as we'll hear, has plenty of playing experience. So let's go back to 2011 when he joined me in the commentary box on a sunny Saturday in June. Hello, Simon. Nice to be here. It was great to have you here with us. But the reason we invite people on to a view from the boundary is because they are big cricket fans as well, and you are a big cricket fan.

You've listened to this programme for longer than Ploy Blowers has been on it, I should think. I would think so, unless he's been on it 50 years. Even he can't have been on it that long. It seems like it sometimes. No, cricket was a huge part of my growing up. We grew up near Newbury in Berkshire, and my dad was a keen cricketer, club cricketer. And just all summer long, we were either listening to what was, I think, then, on the third programme. as it then was, the commentary, or watching a rather sort of furry black and white television broadcast,

or of course playing in the garden and then at school. And although I'm a bit too old to be much of a performer anymore, I mean I have played hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of games. So what sort of standard? I suppose if I've been kind to myself, I'd say sort of superior village, but really not much better than that. I play now really only at the end of the summer for a team called the boffins, which is a, as the name implies, a fine, fit, athletic group of young men. And we go down to Devon, and we play some games down there against Sidmouth Seton along

that coast, Kilmington, and a wonderful village called Chardstock, where the pitch is on a sort of 45-degree slope. So if you have a sort of half-decent off spin really, you're off to a very good start there. But occasionally, even though this is very, very light-hearted cricket, you know, we'll come across a good player and, you know, a Devon opening bowler or an imported professional playing in the leagues. And that's always a bit of a poser. And a few years ago, the boffins had taken a lot of hammer from Budley Salterton, one of the local teams. And we got a bit fed up with this. So the chap who runs our team with Tony Fairburn, who works in the racing business, or did for a long time, decided that we'd stiffen our team by getting in a pro. And the pro

we chose was Keith Arthurton, who at that time still playing for the West Indies. Quite how we fixed this, I don't know. But anyway, we turned up to play at Budley. And they were rather bored with having beatenness so often. So they'd only got nine people playing for them. So I was deputed with my brother to fill in for them, which meant that we were bowling at Artherton. And my brother, who bowed sort of military medium at its best, got hit pretty hard, including through my hands at square legs. So it was a bit of teapotting at that moment. But anyway, Eventually when Arthurton scored about 32 in about 10 minutes, my brother Edward Baldwin was sort of fairly respectable ball

sort of on a length, but it sort of stuck in the wicket a bit, Budley being a very low-lying ground next to the sea. And it just, Artheton sort of played a forward defensive show just for fun, really, and it just took the edge, and it flew like a rocket, and it hit the Budley first slip right in the ribs. He let out this terrible roar, clutched his ribs, and when he took his hand away, the ball was still there.

Yeah, one of those. So that was, you know, we have some pretty good moments. So he didn't do the job, he was picked to do, which is to win you the game? No, no. Well, he was very sporting about the whole thing. My brother had to think pretty quickly on his feet as to how he'd done it. He said, well, it's my classic in-swing-out. The first time I found a man good enough to get a touch.

What do you do? You're a bowler, a batsman? I used to keep wicket. I'm really too tall, but no one else would do it, so I had to do it. and I was an opening batsman of rather in the sort of Colin Middleburn mould, I think, you know, go for it from the off and hope for the best. Do you come to Lords Much? Is this a big treat for you today? It's a big treat. Well, certainly being up in this wonderful commentary box looking down,

I probably get here, you know, once or twice a year. I live quite nearby. But I've been coming here for a long, long time. One of the first times I came was in the old Gillette Cup days. and I remember seeing Yorkshire against Surrey here and Jeff Boycott scored 140 odd I think We don't talk about that very often He's not in the box But I know he'd like to be reminded of a shot he hit over Cow Corner

Off Ken Barrington Oh a slog from Geoffrey Yeah, first time I'd ever seen him get the ball off the turf He might claim it was midwicket But believe me it was Cow Corner Well that was supposed to be one of his great innings Wasn't it the 147 he made Was it that innings?

Yeah he did And it was interesting because it was in the early days of one day and a lot of very, very high pedigree test batsmen couldn't really adapt to playing, you know, across the line and hitting the ball in the air at all. I mean, Colin Cowdery, for instance. But Sir Geoffrey

was, he played fantastically well that day. I noticed you've knighted him, we night him as well. Well, it just seems the only way to go, doesn't it? Did you sit on the grass here when you came to Lord? You'd better do that, didn't you in the early days of one day cricket? No, I don't remember sitting on the grass. We were in the Warnersdown, which then was

quite new. But it's fantastic seeing the Sri Lankans here because I have had the great pleasure of playing in Sri Lanka about 30 years ago. The Guardian newspaper took a team out there, which was quite an exciting thing to do because it was before Sri Lanka were playing test cricket just before, I think. And they didn't have a lot of visitors from England in those days. And the people were so incredibly kind and so enthusiastic and the island was so beautiful that we all sort of. fell in love with it. We had the most wonderful time there in Colombo where we played up the main pitch and then we went up to candy and up into the hills and so on. And they were just so enthusiastic and you have very large crowds which were, you know, we were only a newspaper

team. We were pretty, you know, a lot of paunchy hacks, you know, not very athletic, but we played in a place called Kuro Nagala. I played that. Have you? Yeah. And there are about 5,000 people watching and mostly small boys aged about 10. Everyone seemed to be aged 10. But we had a wonderful, wonderful day. And at the end of a huge party. Yes, this massive rock. Incredible setting. And at the party afterwards, it was a Buddhist dry day,

which meant effectively no alcohol. But in fact, in the pavilion, you were asked if you wanted beer or whiskey, and if you said beer, you got a bottle of beer. And if you said whiskey, you've got a bottle of whiskey. About 1 o'clock, this amazing dancing was going on, hundreds of people. It was such fun.

How many games did you win? Because when I went on the torch, we lost every single game. We won a few. But they were good. And we played a lot of sort of schools, boys of 16-17. And they played shots that I hadn't really seen before. That sort of lift over the slips on these very bouncy wickets and some of them coconut matting.

And we just about held our heads up. Then we got to Madras. We went on to India. And then we rather met our Waterloo. We went to practice at the Chapawak the day before we were due to play Madras. And I couldn't think how on earth we'd been scheduled to play against Madras. It's like playing at some Yorkshire or sorry. And we had a rather disappointing practice.

And I went into the pavilion afterwards. And Venkat, who was the captain of a dress, was standing at the bar. And I rather sort of nervously engaged him in conversation. I said, you do realize, don't you, that we are just a group of sort of out-of-conditioned journalists. And he said, oh, please don't worry in the slightest. My team is very much weakened by test match calls against Buster.

So my knees turned to warm. My knees turned to water. But they put out a very friendly team. So we had a sort of game, but they were still far, far, far too good. Even their sort of, you know, youths and old men were far too good, yeah. Did you play against or with Gary Sober's, you were telling me? Was I tell you, gosh, how terrible to me. Yes, I did drop that name.

That was another moment where rather dreamlike moment. Because as a child, you know, growing up, I didn't really have heroes very much. But I had two heroes, one of whom was Bobby Moore, and the other was Gary Sobers. And I spent most of my childhood imitating Gary Sobers in the garden, bowling, you know, left arm over to my brother. And I played in a game up in Stafford for the Houses of Parliament. I can't imagine why. We played against an old Barbados team. They weren't that old, though.

They included Joel Garner, who'd only retired about a year before. So I was hiding in the pavilion. I'm not surprised. I'm not to catch the captain's eye. but eventually I got into bat about number five and thank goodness Garner was off by then but Gary Sobers was bowling and it was a completely surreal experience

to be facing this person whom you'd imitated impersonated in your own garden and who was just a great god I mean probably the greatest cricketer there's ever been and I patted the first two or three balls back down the pitch with so much respect and care and then the fourth one he looked to me a bit like a long hop and I thought I can't believe the guy

It was mold and long hot, but I looked again, it was still sitting up there, so I carted him over a square leg for four. To tell the truth, it was a bit of a top edge, actually, but you don't need to know that. Next one, a bit quicker, was it? Yes, a bit quicker, yes, but he was terribly friendly about the whole thing. They were charming people. I understand, what's your, what's your, you're on Desert Island Disc, weren't you?

What was your luxury? I think it's worth reminding people who didn't listen to the programme. Yes, it was on a couple of years. Yes, it was on a couple of desert island desks, which after test match special is everyone's thing that they really, really want to be on. And as far as a luxury was concerned, I chose a bowling machine with a strip of coconut matting and net and an endless supply of balls. And I wanted the bowling machine to be a one that you could set to replicate Shane Warren or Michael Holding or whoever it might be. And then, you know, one would just play sort of timeless tests in forever and ever. And England would probably just win them all narrowly.

Is that what you'd choose as well? Well, funny enough, that's exactly what I would have changed as well, if I ever on that program, which would unlikely ever to happen. Henry has been on Desert Island this, but yeah, because endless sunshine. Yeah. The only problem is you get so good, but you wouldn't ever be able to come back and play here or play against, you know, play at a high level.

I think Shane Warden would occasionally find me out, you know, even after a few years. I'm talking to Sebastian folks, and we're going to move on from, cricket to talk about writing. I mentioned at the start that you said you made up your mind to be a writer at the age of 14. Is that right? You set yourself that ambition? Yes, I did. At school when I was about that age, I first started, you know, graduating away from police stories, crime thrillers and adventures into what we call proper books. And I was so thrilled by what I read that I thought, oh, this would be wonderful to do this. of these books seem to be rather sort of anti-establishment which is very exciting to you when you're 14 or 15 they seem to be taking the mickey out of authority quite a lot but at the same time their authors were praised and respectable and knighted and so so i thought this is this is what i'll do i'll try and i'll try and do for other people what these writers have done for me which is to make me

feel uh happy and alive and part of something bigger than myself and how did it progress for the age of 14 because bird song which is the novel that's i mean made your name really didn't that i mean that was published when you were what 40 i was 40 when i came out yeah yeah well it when you're at school you're going to see the careers teacher they don't say oh yes no this fine yes well just do this so no you have to make it up you have to uh all all writers make their own way and it's no one there are no schools which teach you it's not like art school where you can be taught how to draw and paint and how to make things uh you just have to do it by trial and error, you read a heck of a lot. And of course, meanwhile, you have to pay the rent

yourself and you have to get other jobs. I think a lot of writers, young writers, make the mistake of thinking the world owes them a living and that their books must immediately be in print and be bestsellers and so on. And that's one of the few mistakes I didn't make. I recognize that I had to get a job and then I would write in the time that I could make available. Was that easy? Was it really hard work? It was pretty hard, actually. I mean, the first novel I wrote actually was about cricket. It was about a cricket match. I submitted it to various publishers and it came back pretty rapidly. But part of the problem, of course, was that it had 22 main characters.

But what was the plot? What was it called? The plot was really, they were too complex and too boring. Okay, fair enough. But I learned a few lessons from it, and you just have to learn from your mistakes and all the piles of paper you throw away. But most of all, you learn from reading other people and thinking, oh, that's good. How could I copy that? How can I make that work?

conversely actually that really doesn't work at all but if that character had been a woman not a man and had been 36 not 94 hmm then you know so you can there's nothing you can't learn from what was your what was your first book that you wrote and you had a rejection slip and were you were you disappointed obviously disappointed by that but did it disillusioned you would you keep going I'd no it put a bit of fire in my belly really I thought I'm just going to do this I'm going to make sure I keep plodding away and keep it there or thereabouts in the corridor of uncertainty. You know, just keep trying.

And I slightly altered the kind of books that I was writing. And I then wrote a book called A Trick of the Light, which was quite short and it was quite modern and it had quite a powerful story, almost thriller-like story. And it was a semi-cinical way of getting into print, I felt. And that was finally published when I was about 30. And then the book after that was called The Girl at the Leondor, which was set in France in 1936,

which was really the book I'd wanted to write all along, but I didn't feel anyone was going to accept it. Why did you feel that? Because, you know, to write a book set in a foreign country in the past, if you're unknown, and it was a complex book about, you know, people's personal relationships and the effect of the historical past on the individual present was it didn't seem to me to be naturally a terribly, you know, commercial proposition.

But, and indeed, you know, I don't think the publisher thought it was, either judging by the advance they paid. But it actually sold okay, it's sold quite well and people still read it. What about your research, bird song, I remember reading that, all that detail about being in the tunnels in the First World War. How much research did you do for that? How do you do research for that? The answer really is not quite as much as you might think. really what you're doing as a novelist is you are making things up

and you are imagining things and the task I had to do was to know somehow what it felt like to be a 20-year-old boy about to go over the top on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and of course most of them went over didn't leave any account of it because they weren't able to because they died so all you can do is read around

and I went to the Imperial War Museum and I read hundreds of letters and postcards and diaries and documents and so on. And you pick up little details from that. But really the big effort of research is looking into yourself and looking into your imagination and trying to think, well, how would it feel? Of course, the odd thing about very huge events when they're happening is that a little bit of you remain slightly detached. A little bit of you are still thinking about the fact that you've got an itch in your shirt

or that there's a sort of nasty taste of the rum rations still in your mouth, or tiny little things like this. And it was by the combination of those tiny little sort of what you might almost call domestic details, combined with the perspective that we have from history, knowing what those men didn't know, that made me able to just about give a convincing account of it. When you'd finished it, did you think I'm onto something here? I think this is pretty good.

I think this is going to really work for me. I did feel when I'd finished it that what I suppose I felt was a bit when a diver in the Olympic Games goes for a dive off the top board, it's marked not just by the execution, but by the tariff of difficulty. And I felt it was a very high tariff of difficulty what I was trying to do. And I wasn't aware when I entered the water that I had messed up any element of it. But that still doesn't mean to say that I thought everyone would agree. And when I popped up out of the water to extend the analogy, I still looked very nervously towards the judges. But it's sold incredibly well. It caught people's imagination, didn't it?

Yes, not to begin with, but it was well received, you know, by the reviewers, but it took a long time. It wasn't until it came out in paperback. Something had happened between the hardback and the paperback publication. Do you know what that was? Word of mouth, a simple word of mouth recommendation. I've read this extraordinary book, et cetera, et cetera, and people would say, well, it's set in the first world, and I was saying, God, what a yawn, how disgusting. I don't want to know about that. And someone said, well, actually, you know, just read it. And somehow, like a snowball going downhill, it eventually reached a sort of critical mass, I think. Did it change your life? It did in a very simple sense that I became a sort of viable writer.

I mean, I could make a living from writing after that, though I didn't expect to. I was always ready to go back to work. I worked as a journalist for a long time, newspapers, and I kept my hand in. I did sort of freelance stuff, and I suppose it was only a couple of years ago that I thought, I can't go back and be completely unemployable no one would want me presumably you don't need to go back now though

you've sold so many coppers of books and you've sold the film of Charlotte Grey as well yeah I don't I don't anticipate having another full-time job at this stage but I just don't know what I'd do but so no

I'll stick with what I know best and what I've done for the last 20 years do you enjoy writing or is it Is it hard work? Some days you get up, you think, I just don't want to. Do you write or do you get your laptop out? I go to an office. I don't work at home.

I have a little office or studio office about 10 minutes walk away. And some days you do and some days you don't. And some books are more enjoyable than others. I mean, the last book I wrote called A Week in December was kind of a nightmare to write, really. It was a lot of research. And it was like trying to put together a rubic cube in either hand. It was very, very technical, very tricky.

and I didn't really like any of the characters. I mean, you're not known, nor is the reader meant to like them either, apart from one or two, I suppose, a bit. The book I'd written before that was the James Bond adventure to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming's. Yeah, Ian Fleming's. That was just absolute joy from start, the only took six weeks of joy from start to finish.

And the book I'm writing now, I've written 40,000 words, again in a first-person narration, and I've really enjoyed that. It's about an American singer-songwriter, woman in the early 70s, a bit like sort of Carly Simon or Joni Mitchell, one of those sort of people, but completely invented. And the great thing about writing in the first person, it's not her who narrates, actually, it's her manager, who's her boyfriend,

is that once you've got the voice in your head, they sort of write the book for you. You just tune in and you just then type. So that's been very exhilarating, but that's only one part of the book. And the part I'm writing at the moment is much more hard grafted, you know, it's like cricket, everything's like cricket, really. I'm now in a sort of head down, nose over the ball

and make sure I don't make any mistakes for a few. Well, it's a wonderful metaphor for life cricket, isn't it? It's total. So when you write and you get up in the morning, you say, right, I'm going to write for an hour, I'm going to write for two hours, I'm going to write for five hours, or I'm going to write a thousand words today, or 500 words today? I work very sort of normal hours,

10 or 6 or 9 or 5 really, go in a bit like 1. working in insurance except it's not. Never less than a thousand words a day and sometimes, sometimes I'll do two, but usually about 14,500 and sometimes they come quickly and sometimes they don't, but you're writing all the time in your mind, you're turning it over when you go to sleep and the actual physical typing aspect of it is really quite a small part of it. Though it's also true to say that someday is when you go in, you don't know what's coming. You know you've just got to write a bridge between two incidents or two pieces of the book that you know exist.

And you're just sort of feeling your way. And as Alan Bennett said, you know, you have to go in. It's like going to the post office just to see if anything's come in. And those are hard days. But suddenly, sometimes it's not until 5 o'clock in the evening that something comes in. And then your 1,000 words are done in 20 minutes. So it's variable. in notebooks around with you, where you write an idea, don't you not on the tube?

No, I don't really. But occasionally scribble, the back of checkbooks have quite a lot of completely indecipherable stuff. Sometimes you have a wonderful thought and later on you think, oh, what was it I was thinking about earlier? Yeah. No, sadly, I'm very few of those. Your plots, how do you, I mean, how long is a piece of string in a way, I suppose, but how do you decide what you're going to write about? just comes over a period of a long time and really what it is is things which fascinate you, interest, you, obsess you. And the difficulty is to determine the difference between a thought

and an idea. So I may be very interested by certain notes in a female singer's repertoire. And I talk about this in the pub. And if people's eyes glaze over and they say, well, this is really completely uninteresting, very technical about music. And I know that's just a thought I've shared, and we move on. But if people, sort of it lights up their eyes, say, yes, that's very interesting, of course. I wonder if people write songs in order just to include those notes. And also, to what extent are these people write about their own lives? Do you think it's possible that a singer might actually live her life in order to give herself material for a song?

And you think, well, you wouldn't do that, would you? But suddenly that's more than a thought. That's kind of an idea you can see some sort of flesh on that, particularly if you put it together with another idea. And then the plot itself, which is simply the incidents, which happened. are kind of determined really by the ideas you're talking about. They simply illustrate the ideas. So you do a bit of market research, do you, before you start writing? Yeah, kind of pub research, yeah, conversational research.

And I think it's quite important to do that. And it still doesn't mean to say that you're going to be able to express. I mean, in a week in December, I was quite wound up by the sort of contract that investment banking had pulled on the public in this country. But it was hard to get people interested, Even though I say, well, they've stolen your money and your job, people still wouldn't say, well, they'd just say it's a sort of boring subject, really. So, you know, you really have to work then to make these ideas accessible to people. And when you finish a book these days, obviously you have to fight at the start, as all young authors have to do,

when you finish a book these days, does it automatically get published because of your name now? Or does your editor or whoever say, Sebastian, I'm not quite sure this is what we're looking for, or do they just wave it through? How does it work? I mean, I have a contract at the moment for two books, which they will publish. But if they think that they've fallen a bit short, they will politely say, I'm not sure this works, or, you know, it's a bit dry or it's a bit long. And have you thought about, you know, alter it. And I very, very much welcome that sort of job. So you're quite hard on yourself.

You're happy to be, happy for someone to be hard on you as well? Very much so. A book I wrote called Human Traces, which was a long and difficult book. I actually sent it out to people outside my publishers, two people whose opinion I very much respected. And they both read it, they both liked it, they both wrote detailed notes, but unfortunately they radically disagreed

and their suggestions were completely opposite. So it's hard, and the longer you go on, the more people tend to say, well, he knows best. But I don't think that's the case. You don't have objectivity. You want someone else's eye and you want it before it's too late. You don't want it when it's come out. You want it before.

Well, talking about when it's come out, do you read your reviews? Do you read your newspaper reviews from the start? Yes, I'm not the sort of keen student as they come out, but I see them in the end, and I help pick them, you know, which ones they're going to put on the paperback and so on. And I think it's not helpful to read them at the time that's going on

because you have to go and do a lot of publicity. And if you've just received a terrible review, you're feeling rather downcast, and you've got to go on the radio and talk about your book. Or if you've just had a sort of fantastically good review, you think you're walking on water, and then that's not very attractive either. So it's better to do it.

read them later, I think. What about reviews that your readers write? Because if you go on to the Amazon website and say, all the books are reviewed by people who've read them and some of them can be pretty harsh, can they. Yeah, I don't read internet stuff, actually. I think it's Ian McKeown has a good phrase for it. It's sort of road rage, he calls it. There's a kind of, you know, sort of baglady thing going on out there, which I don't think's really healthy to read. Of course, too, you know, lots of people who write on, you know, these things. perfectly sensible but there's not much of a filter on the internet

is there? No, none at all but are you not tempted sometimes to go on there? I'm really not you know, I'm really not no my internet access is very very limited to sort of you know radio 5 live BBC you know sport and that's about it and I don't really read much else

it's probably the best thing to do actually because one bad review can destroy all you know ten good ones I think people a lot of people tend to obsess about the one bad one and forget the other one. So, therefore, I think it's best to. I let them get sort of filtered by the people at the publisher.

But on the other hand, I think it is good to read them. I think it is good to know. And you can actually, some people will put their finger on something that's wrong that was troubling you and you weren't quite aware of. And you think, yeah, they've got that right. I'll make sure I don't do that again, you know. So they can be helpful in that time. Do you think books in their traditional form,

I, you know, published on the page with a hardback and then a paperback, a history, if you like, and that it's all going to be e-books, now on? It's too soon to say, but it's going through a fantastic revolution at the moment. I mean, my contract with my publisher has a provision in it for e-books, and it has a clause saying to be revisited not later than two years, and that's one year ago. It is changing so fast, and e-books are now beginning to outsell physically existing books or P-books. I don't know. But at the moment, it doesn't look very helpful or hopeful for the author because the people

who are taking the biggest slice of the money, are the people who provide the apps and the people, you know, Apple and Google and all the intermediaries, a friend of mine told me he read a business plan which showed something like 105% of the purchase price of the e-book already divvied up between the various intermediaries

without any money at all going to the person. That's actually created it. But of course that will, you know, that will sort itself out. And I think eventually the author's take will go up to about 50%. You'll take 50%. royalty but it'll be 50% on 5 quid which in it yeah I think you're our best hope as it comes back to roughly you make the same amount per unit as now but I'm sure how much how

much do you about 50 pounds for a hardback and for a paperback and about two quid for a hard back roughly so so so two pounds out of 1899 or something yeah that's that's at the top end doesn't seem a great deal for all your labours does it it doesn't know but you know the bookshop will take a huge will take 50 50, 55% of that, and they're paying very high rent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it is, I mean, you read very, very depressing articles which say that in 10, 20 years time, no one will, in the world, will be able to make a living out of writing. And, you know, the music business.

Do you believe that? I try not to, but I'm hoping if it's 20 and maybe I may be okay. Maybe under the wire by then. That's quite a depressing thought, isn't it? What would be your advice to aspiring writers? listening? My advice to aspiring writers would be ignore the advice that's always given to people, which is right about what you know. Write about what you don't know. That would be my first advice. Stretch yourself. Give an example. Well, don't, if you're trying to write a novel, this is.

Don't write about someone of your age and of your sex and of your nationality and living in the present day. If you're a man, write about a woman, write about someone younger or older, living in another country at another time. And that way you'll stretch yourself and think, gosh, what is it like to be someone else? What is going on in that person's head and life? Secondly, write only what you care terrifically about. Don't try and write to a market or for a market or something you think is sellable. Write only what matters hugely to you. And thirdly, just keep plugging away like Glenn McGrath.

Be Glenn McGrath. Did you think people deliberately write to get published? Some people do, yeah. And that doesn't work? I think it depends. I mean, some people write, they change the way they write, and then they have a big success, and then they write again and again.

I was hearing on the radio coming in today, an American writer called Jodi Picou, who is a sort of teenage writer, and I think she stumbled into a sort of genre by chance, and then found it worked, and she writes, I don't know, quite what her motivation is, but for money she writes in this genre, and good for her.

But generally, I think, you should write what you want to write, not what you think people will buy. How should people deal with those rejection slips? Because people write in, don't they? People, you know, a lot of me, even very well-known authors have been rejected a lot. I mean, J.K. Rhone, whatever you think about the body of work that she's created, it's been hugely successful, and yet it was turned down on from numerous occasions at the start. Yeah, so all publishers have great stories about rejecting.

A friend of mine was submitted to a very long book about Chinese woman's family written in what he described as not very good English and said, I really can't think anyone's going to read this. Anyway, it was wild swans and became the biggest selling nonfiction book ever written. So publishers are not infallible and publishers often are just looking for something, a specific piece of the jigsaw which will fit the specific gap in their list. So the fact that one publisher turns you down I mean the girl at the Leondeau My second novel was turned down by two publishers I think It just didn't fit

They liked it well enough It doesn't fit what they wanted to do So gotta keep trying Which book were you Have you most proud that you've written You know you've picked one out I noticed you brought Engleby for Agas today And you signed copy of him

Is that the book that you'd like most that you've written? It was the only first edition I could find on the bookshelf actually And Engleby is such a weird character I thought I just might enjoy it. Where did he come from? I don't know. He came.

He's the people who haven't read it. He's a basically, he's a murderer, isn't he? I'm afraid he is, yes. But he's a very charming murderer in his way. He's a sort of geeky, charming guy. And you're not quite sure whether he's done it or not. But I'm afraid the bad news is that he does end up in somewhere very like Broadmoor, and the things are not looking good for him.

I don't know where it came out of, but I hope I guess will enjoy it anyway. To which book did you enjoy most? I think the one of it, was it not really worth it? like that? It doesn't really. I mean, I think, I mean, Birdsong is a book that I, it has meant a great deal to me. And the fact that it has meant so much to other people matters to me. Human Traces, I think, is the book that I am most proud of in a way. But it's quite a difficult book for everyone to get a handle on. But really, it's always the next one that you're most excited about. So it's the next one. And the next one is going to be called and when is it going to be published? out next year, provided, you know, I don't fall under a bus, and the provisional title is a possible life that it may, they publish it may say, well, that's a terrible title, let's call it, you know, something else, we'll see. And how far down the line are you with it? I'm about a third of the way through. Right. So it's to the office on Monday and six hours and

what, eight hours or whatever? Yeah, yeah, and then home at six, yeah. You hope you get the inspiration at 1030 rather than 5.30. That would be nice. That would be nice, yes. Well, it's been a great pleasure I could talk all afternoon to you, Sebastian folks, but the players are back out at Laws for the afternoon session. Thank you very much Simon and on behalf of all the village cricketers, may I thank you and all the team for the fantastic

pleasure you've given us over so many years. Well, I hope you enjoyed listening to that. Folks remains one of the nation's favourite writers and of course keeps right across his cricket. Since we're on the subject of authors, here's a snippet of another writer who's taken a view from the boundary. The year was 2012 and Jonathan Agnew

chatted to Adrian Mole creator Sue Townsend. It was cricket that made me realise actually that I'd got a serious sight problem because my husband was driving me to the station as he did a lot of mornings in a week because I worked a lot in London. And it was about 8 o'clock in the morning. I looked over Victoria Park

and I could see these cricketers and I said, that's so early to be playing cricket in the morning and they're all in whites. And I said, what's going on? And he said, nobody is playing cricket soon. There's nobody on Victoria Park. And I said, of course, there is,

I can see them. And what it was, we were going by and it was the War Memorial, the white marble seen through trees as you travelled along. The brain obviously sent a message to me, white, and it was cricket. You know, the brain is... When you lose your sight, the brain panics a bit

and keeps sending messages, the messages that it thinks fit the image that you're trying to get, such as potato peelings, looking like rubber gloves, or vice versa. So he's throw the rubber gloves. rub gloves in the bin,

thinking their potato peelings. It will supply an image, yeah, and then it gets used to the fact that you can't see you properly. That was the first thing that was made me real life. It sounded a way that cricket should have done that to it. I know, I know, but I do love it. If you'd like to listen to all of that interview, just subscribe to the TMS podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing.

BBC Sounds. As things slowed down for everyone this year, decided to reach out to Virgil Van Dyke amongst loads of other A-list guests. That buzz of going out there and playing for 60,000 at Enfield, you're going to miss that at one point. I talked to them about what gets them up in the morning and how they dealt with the world grinding to a hole. I really don't have those days when I think I don't want to because I know I have to. Join boxing promoter Eddie Hearn for the No Passion No Point podcast. Subscribe on BBC Sounds.

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