My guest for this episode is Nick Hunt. Nick has walked and written across much of Europe. He is the author of three travel books – Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water – and has recently published his debut novel, Red Smoking Mirror. His books have twice been finalists for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year, and have been translated into five languages. His articles have appeared in numerous publications including The Guardian, The Irish Times, and Geographical and he is also an editor and co-director of the Dark Mountain Project.
I first discovered Nick’s travel writing this summer, transfixed by his epic walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul in Walking The Woods and the Water and I knew I had to have him on the show to discuss his adventures and the art and craft of storytelling.
If you enjoy what you hear please leave a review, like, comment and subscribe. It would mean the world to me and will help this podcast reach as many people as possible.
You don’t want to miss this!
Enjoy 🙂
00:00 Introduction
02:15 Pitching my first book
07:17 Childhood imagination and the birth of a writer.
11:12 Losing your self consciousness.
16:53 Realizing life is short, committing to dreams.
19:58 Unplanned journey for adventure and spontaneity.
23:59 Overcoming fears while traveling through Eastern Europe.
26:32 Mountains, sheepdogs and personal reflection.
31:36 Learning perseverance amid sublime and painful days.
36:12 Making a living as a writer.
38:55 Discovering new perspective on storytelling during lockdown.
42:44 Principles for telling powerful stories..
48:20 Overcoming fear of storytelling through personal anecdotes.
49:58 Crafting writing: detail, senses, hooks, and endings.
No, the truth is I’m. I’ve got a terrible sense of direction, and this is. It’s something my. My wife is. Is constantly kind of amazed at how bad I am. I came in, like, disheveled, covered in grease with, I think, just a. Kind of like
An. A four bit of paper I’d printed out describing what I wanted to do. And that is definitely not how you are meant to approach. A publisher spent weeks telling me that the people over the border were bandits and they were thieves, and I was going to be robbed.
And even though I took this with a pinch of salt, there was always this kind of. It’s hard not to hear that from dozens of people and not internalize it a little bit. My guest for this episode is Nick Hunt. Nick has walked and written across most of Europe. He’s the
Author of three travel books, Outlandish, where the wild winds are and walking the woods and the water, and has recently published his debut novel, Red Smoking Mirror. His books have twice been finalists for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the year and have been translated into five languages. His
Articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the Guardian, the Irish Times, Geographical, and he’s also an editor and co director of the Dark Mountain Project. I first discovered Nick’s writing this summer, transfixed by his epic walk from the hook of Holland to Istanbul in walking the woods underwater.
And I knew that I had to have him on the show to discuss his adventures and the art and craft of storytelling. If you enjoy what you hear, please leave a review like comment and subscribe. It will mean the world to me and will help this podcast
Reach as many people as possible. You don’t want to miss this. Enjoy. Nick, welcome to the show. My first question for you in life. What’s the most important thing you’ve ever had to pitch for? Well, I mean, the thing that springs to mind is the pitching for my first
Book, because that was the thing that led to all the other books. And looking back now, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have a clue about how you were meant to approach a publisher for a book. I didn’t have an agent. I do now. But
Then, this was back in 2011. I was preparing to walk across Europe in the footsteps of the travel writer Patrick Lee Firmel. So I had this kind of dream. I knew when I wanted to set out, I knew I wanted to write about it. I figured
That somebody would be interested in a book about this. And I just walked into a publisher that was called Arcadia because I knew that they’d published some of Patrick Lee Firmall’s stuff before. And honestly, I turned up on my bike. I had grease all over my hands because my
Chain had come off. So I’d had to kind of wrestle the chain back on in central London somewhere, locked it to a railing somewhere, came in, like, disheveled, covered in grease with, I think, just a kind of like an a four bit of paper I’d printed out describing what I wanted to
Do. And that is definitely not how you are meant to approach a publisher. And I think it was luck. The people in there, Gary Polsifer and Andrew Haywood, who were running the company, were just receptive at the time. They were interested in the idea.
It was a good moment for know, I just got lucky, I think. And they had the kind of generosity to sort of indulge me, completely inexperienced and unpublished. And I remember during that, Andrew Haywood said to me, he listened to what I was saying for a long time, and then he
Said, I’ve got a question for you. Are you a good writer? And I was really kind of. I wasn’t expecting someone to ask me so bluntly. And I thought I’d have to kind of be a lot more strategic. And I had to think about it, and I just said, yes. And
He was like, okay, great. Then we went from there, and that ended up, they did sign a contract with me, and I went on to do that walk. They didn’t end up publishing the book because of various problems they had, and it ended up being
Published by someone else. But that was how I got through the door, was literally just by turning up. And what an amazing story, being there at the right time. Were you unannounced, or had you managed to get an appointment with them? No, I did have
An appointment. I just sent an email to them. And it’s one of the advantages of a small publisher in that you don’t have to go through kind of layers of bureaucracy to get anywhere. It was just right moment. That’s great. I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because sometimes
We can overthink those moments as well. So I’m sure there was something in the kind of raw energy of you turning up, like, slightly disheveled, that was actually attractive, especially because it fits so well with the kind of theme of the book and what you were going to go
And experience. So I’d love to dig into that a little bit later on. If that’s the kind of most important pitch. What’s the one that’s got away? Have you ever had a moment where you kind of reflect and go, I’d really love to have worked
On that project, or, I’d love to have seen that thing happen. Yeah. There was certainly a book again that I proposed, which was turned down because they didn’t think there’d be enough interest in it. And I should have fought
For it, but I kind of went, oh, they’re probably right. They know what they’re talking about. And then a couple of years later, of course, a book comes out on that very subject that is going to do very well, but it’s not the book I’d have written.
And I think the lesson with that is I should have just had confidence in my idea and taken it elsewhere and not kind of caved at the slightest kind of query about whether it was a good idea or not. Interesting. I mean, you’re a very successful nonfiction writer. Your work’s been
Included in the best british travel writing of the 21st century. You’ve just published your debut novel, which is red smoking mirrors. What’s your story? Did you always want to be a writer? Have you been kind of telling stories since you’re a babe in arms? Yeah. The short answer is yes. I was always
Writing and always wanted to do that. So it’s been the sort of consistent thread of my life. And it came the first book in air quotes that I wrote. I had a friend, this must have been age, like, six or seven at the oldest.
And my friend James went through a stage of. He liked copying children’s books and just copying the pictures, writing the same text on the same pages and making sort of facsimiles of them. And he was making a copy of a nody book, and
I wanted to copy him. So I had a book called the Pancake King. I don’t remember anything about it, but it was called the Pancake King. And I started drawing the title page, the front cover, but I got the formatting wrong, so I just managed to write the
Panker. And then I’d run out of space, and I was about to air it up and go into a huff, and my mum saw it, and she said, oh, why don’t you just don’t throw it away? Why don’t you just write a different story that’s called the panker?
And then so I wrote, the story was about a monster called the panker who gets caught by a hunter and then escapes from the net. And I think that was it. But that was the first. And it was a thing that I can really kind
Of look back and credit my mum for encouraging me to do that. Yeah. So often that would have ended up in the bin. Yeah. And I went on from there just to make lots of little books stapled together and then just sort of continued. Continued
Writing from there. But I always love telling stories, I guess. And whether it’s nonfiction or the novel I’ve just written or these kind of odd little short stories that I was writing 1020 years ago, it’s always just been the way that I’m kind of happiest in a way. Were your family creative?
Is there a history of writers in your immediate family? Yes, there is, but my mum was in theater. She was an actor and then a theatre director. Her dad was a director and also wrote books about irish theatre mostly. And then my
Dad, who I didn’t grow up with because he left when I was quite young, but I was aware of him out there in the world being a writer. He went to Hollywood and he was a screenwriter. Still is. Wow.
So I think that it definitely had an influence on me, kind of knowing that a writer was a thing that you could be. Yeah. Presumably your parents created space for that creativity. I’ve got a nine year old daughter, and one of the things that I notice sometimes at
School is that we didn’t have time to finish the story. And you’re like, oh, no. How do you encourage young people to live in their imaginations a little bit more rather than be kind of ticking the boxes? How did you carry that through the kind of sticky teenage years? Because I’m imagining
That writing is not that cool when you’re twelve or 13, or was it where you went to school? No, it wasn’t. But I wasn’t cool. That was okay. Yeah, it was definitely a kind of identity that I put on, like a band t shirt, like you do when you’re a
Teenager. You’re trying out different things. And so I was writing short stories around that time, from what I remember, and interestingly, what I found. So I went on from there to do creative writing at University of East Anglia, and I found a big
Box of know. It was back in the days when you actually printed stuff out at university and kind of handed things in on paper. So I’ve got all these bits of writing. I did age 2019 2021, and what really struck me is that they were much worse than what I
Was writing when I was 16 or 17. Interesting, because they were painfully self conscious. I was kind of a young adult desperately trying to emulate who I thought of as the great important voices of our age. And you can really see that I was aping various people
Badly. And there was a kind of innocence when I was younger than that, I didn’t really care. I wasn’t trying to be anyone. I just wanted to express certain things. I didn’t think they’d be read. I don’t think it. Even though it occurred to me that
I was even doing this for someone else to read them. And obviously they’re kind of terrible in that because they’re written by a teenage me. But I found them a lot more palatable than my slightly later stuff when I was just thinking, overthinking everything and trying to be
Various things that I wasn’t. That’s really fascinating. I can see a real parallel to your kind of writer training, if you like, to my actor training. There was a phrase that always rings in my ear from one of my acting teachers at drama school, which was leave yourself alone. And it was
All about that idea of stop pushing, stop trying to show people and be. And that’s something that I try and take into the corporate work that I do now with clients is just kind of getting them comfortable in that idea of presence and being able to share of themselves
Without pushing and without the need for love and adoration at the end of it. Just sort of trust that if you’re speaking your truth, then people will respond to that. Where did the travel bug come from then? Because if you were doing kind of creative writing, you’ve got influences of your mum in
Theater, your dad’s a screenwriter. What made you go, I’m going to go down this path instead? Well, I didn’t really intend to kind of be a travel writer. I think I wanted to write fiction. I wanted to write novels. Didn’t really
Know how to do that. And then it came about, really, because of this walk across Europe. That was always a kind of dream in my head that I realized I had to do, otherwise it would just disappear. And then. So the sort of travel writing
Career came out of that. But the love of travel, I mean, it goes back again. I think we didn’t travel a lot when I was young. I mean, not outside the UK that often, but I always felt like just kind of stepping into a thrilling other world. I
Remember just even being excited driving through France, that the road signs looked different, even that was just kind of thrilling to me, that the colors were different and the signs on shops said different things. So I think it was always just something that deeply excited me and felt. It
Felt important. It felt important to see new things and know what was over the next horizon and around the next corner. Though I do remember the first time I went abroad was to Greece when I was seven, I think, with my mum and my godmother. And it’s kind of quite a special
Holiday because my mum was quite broke when we were growing up. So I knew it was kind of a big thing. And I was crushingly disappointed on arrival because I’d imagined. I think I’d imagined we were going to ancient Greece. So I saw people driving cars and
Motorbikes, and it was like, well, this is just like back home. Where are the horses and the togas? I thought we were time traveling. Right. But remember that holiday as kind of with a vividness that I don’t remember things for years later nearly as strongly. Or clearly so
With the walking, the woods and the water. You mentioned being inspired by that original journey. What was the catalyst? How old were you when you did the walk? I was 30. Set off when I was 30. So was it a kind of like, early midlife crisis, or was it something
That. Were you pitching to yourself, or were you pitching to the world that this. Is something that I can do? What was the catalyst? That’s interesting. Yeah, I think my midlife crisis is still to come, maybe, but it was something that, for about ten years, I’d had this idea. So it was
Kind of pitching to myself, in a way. But I remember having the realization that I was about to turn 30, which now, of course, feels wonderfully young, but at the time it felt like a big deal. I was leaving my twenty s, and I think I became aware for the first time that
Time is limited. And the things that are dreams in your head, you have to actually do them, otherwise they’re just not going to happen. And so somebody, I can’t remember who it was, but someone gave me some really good
Advice and said, well, if you want to do something and you’re worried that you might not do it, just tell ten people that you’re going to do this thing. Set a time, say like a year. Today I’ll set off to do this thing. I’ve got a year
To prepare for it. Tell ten people, and then if you don’t do it, these ten people will be kind of bugging you and they’ll be aware that you’re not doing the thing that you said you were going to do. And I think it really helped. And I did that. I
Told ten people that I knew and loved, and then that kind of helped make it real, because I had witnesses. Yeah. I mean, it’s an amazing journey and it’s a beautifully written book. I read it while I was on holiday this summer, and I literally couldn’t put it down, that kind of journey.
You were so present, or it felt like you were so present. I’m a massive planner, right? So if I’m leaving the house, I need to almost kind of create a tick sheet of what I’m going to take with me and what the potential weather might be. But there was so
Much space because you were on foot that I presume you couldn’t plan for every eventuality. So in that year of buildup, what were you doing to get yourself ready to go on that. Mean? I did reach out to. What I discovered was this kind of community of people who loved Patrick Lee
Furmore’s books. I had no idea that he was such a kind of well known writer, actually. I thought it was something that I’d sort of discovered. None of my friends had heard of him, and I think it sort of ended there. But obviously he was kind of adored by millions of
People. So I sort of managed to tap into a very loose network of fans who were scattered across different countries in Europe to give me these kind of anchor points. So I had people to meet in a few different places, which helped kind of set the route, I guess.
And, I mean, I wrote in the book that I didn’t really do a lot of planning. I wanted to do it with the same kind of spirit of adventure that he had and not, you know, in the time I was doing my walk, I could have looked up everything, looked up Google maps
And photographs of everything and Wikipedia pages about every landmark. And I consciously avoided doing that because I wanted to be surprised at what I was finding. I had the route and I knew where I was going, even though some bits of it were a bit hazy.
But I think often with travel and stuff I’ve done since then, I try and have a kind of. It’s like having a skeleton of the journey with a couple of points where you know where you’re going to be. If that’s just as simple as booking a room somewhere and then a few
Days later there. So you’ve just got kind of points of contact and then trying to leave everything else a little bit hazy to give room for tangents and random encounters and just plans changing or wanting to stop for a couple of days because you find somewhere that you love.
You love. Were you a kind of seasoned map reader and a navigator before you left? Or was that something you’d learned en route? No, the truth is I’ve got a terrible sense of direction, and it’s something. My wife is constantly kind of amazed at how
Bad I am. I have no intuitive sense of where I’m going. Some people just have this kind of compass sense. I really don’t. I got lost a lot and kind of had to make that part of the journey. I mean, in some know, like, even Europe is wide,
But you’ll always find kind of people somewhere and depending on where you are. I was never kind of out of contact for days, but, yeah, I’m okay at reading a map, but I don’t have that kind of natural ability to find my way that I know some people do. Were
You ever scared along the journey? As I kind of reflect on. The. Kind of story and the places that you went to, I think of my 30 year old self and think maybe I would have had a greater sort of sense of adventure
And less adversity to risk than I do now that I have a family. And I think those things have changed. I remember walking the pennine way, or the first five days of the pennine way when I was about 26, on my own
With a backpack and getting lost in the fog and all of that sort of stuff was fine. And I think if I put myself in that situation now, I’d be a bit more like, where’s the gps? And have I told people my route? But you were certainly in the latter stages of that
Journey. Wild camping, for want of a better phrase, in some pretty remote areas. Do you remember having kind of anxiety about what was coming next? Or did you get into the flow as you progressed along that path? Yeah, I think I did get more and more into the
Flow, which worked to counter the fact I was going into places which felt wilder and more unknown. And there was definitely going through eastern Europe, from Slovakia to Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and then into Turkey, that at every one of those borders, people had spent weeks telling me that the people over
The border were bandits and they were thieves and I was going to be robbed. And even though I took this with a pinch of salt, there was always this kind of. It’s hard not to sort of hear that from dozens of people and not internalize it a little bit. So there was that
There was the kind of absorption of other people’s tribal, ancient prejudices that are still very much alive in some parts of Europe. And, I mean, the kind of sleeping out was interesting because you get a kind of sense, and it is quite an intuitive thing. I’m not
Intuitively good at finding direction, but I think I’m quite good at intuiting whether a place feels okay. And this is obviously kind of fallible, but I would camp in places that felt kind of safe and there was nothing really definable about that. But just the kind of COVID
Was right. There were certain distance away from places often camping by rivers for some reason felt like I had more right to kind of be on the banks of a river than in the middle of a field. Interesting. But there, you know, obviously were places that I did feel
Uncomfortable because you don’t know really where you are, who’s around, what kind of people they are, what the local sort of problems might be. And then dogs were my kind of greatest daily fear. After Slovakia you encounter unfriendly dogs more and more. And Romania, which was a country that
I deeply loved and I think was the happiest walking I had, was in Romania. But there are packs of feral dogs and if they think you’re in their territory, they’ll attack you. And up in the mountains there’s these huge, terrifying sheepdogs that, again, if they think you’re after the sheep and the shepherd
Is over the next hill out of sight because they kind of COVID a huge area. So I had several incidences of just fleeing dogs or kind of fighting them off with my stick. Jesus, that was the biggest, single biggest threat to my legs was from dogs for sure.
I think just while we’re on that, I just want to add one thing that I think is worth saying. And it’s something that I wrote about a bit in my latest travel book, Outlandish. And I don’t think travel writers talk about this enough, but it’s easy to write about
Dog attacks and being scared of thieves and bandits because that’s kind of big, exciting, adventurous stuff. But there’s also sometimes I just didn’t want to be a foreigner. I didn’t want to be seen, looked at with my beard and rucksack and dirty clothes. You walk down the street of a kind of perfectly
Normal town or village and people are looking at you wondering what you’re doing. And so sometimes I just have kind of plain social anxiety. I wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning and kind of go through a day of being the outsider who doesn’t know where they’re going, can’t speak
The language, sort of wandering idiot that everybody’s kind of aware of. So yeah, sometimes I just wanted to not be there. And I think in a lot of travel writing that isn’t people project this idea of kind of adventuring into the unknown. But I
Think I’d imagine most people do have days like that. Yeah, the battle with the self as well as with the external forces and. With boredom and tiredness and everything else. And having to motivate yourself to put your feet in front of each other. I suppose there’s definitely a metaphor there for life.
The one thing that really strikes me is that as you walked slowly and you talk about the idea of bicycles seeming fast and cars seeming off the charts, you experience that change in landscape, changing culture, but at quite a glacial pace. Did it kind of make you feel that humanity is
Different or that actually there is much more that binds us together than that separates us? I mean, the wonderful thing about walking is that you see the links between cultures and the kind of indefinable moments where one culture has kind of bled into another one. And that can be includes, like the food
And whether they drink beer or wine, what kind of houses they live in. And so, yeah, there were kind of. I mean, there were moments of know, complete shift. And one of those was going from Austria to Slovakia, where, know it was eastern Europe. Even
Though that isn’t a geographical thing, it’s a kind of cultural term. But the buildings were different. I remember the smells being different things. Yeah, suddenly the smell was different. I couldn’t quite define what that was. So there were some kind of hard points of change.
But I think for the most part, it was slowly seeing the kind of germanic culture sort of blending into the slavic and then into the hungarian and romanian, and you could see the blend between those things. So I think it’s harder to see that if you’re traveling any other way. Really.
One thing that is becoming more kind of prevalent, I suppose, in terms of wellness and well being is this idea of kind of walking meditation. And really, your whole journey seems to be, to a certain extent, a walking meditation. What did you learn about yourself over the course of that year? Was
It. It wasn’t quite a year. It’s about seven and a half months. Seven months. Okay. That’s still a long time to be the outsider. I mean, I definitely learned that I can keep going and that I can be quite bloody minded about finishing something because there were days that were
Sublime, and it was like being in a kind of walking dream or a meditation. There were other days when it was just painful, repetitive, boring, exhausting. And I just wanted to get to somewhere I could go to sleep. But there was the biggest problem I had was getting achilles
Tendonitis. Which was in sort of south Germany just before the snow came. And being told, the doctor said, this could be five days, it could be five weeks, it could be five months. I can’t tell you how long before
You can walk again. And it ended up being several weeks. I had to stay still, and people were. People I was in touch with, their home were saying, well, you might have to come back then, kind of call the whole thing off, maybe try it again in a year. And I was
So determined to carry on, I ended up. The doctor said, maybe a few on cycling might be a good kind of midpoint between. It’ll get blood circulating, but you won’t be tramping up and down on your feet. And this amazing woman that I was staying with her and her boyfriend, and she
Just said, all right, you can take my bike. This was in Ulm in south Germany. And I said, well, how long can I ride it for? And she said, well, the limit is Vienna, but when you finish with it, leave it in a safe place with someone you’re
Staying with, make sure it’s locked, and I’ll come and pick it up in the summer and cycle it home again. And so that kind of got me through that little. I think it was a week or so I was on that bike. So, yeah, I definitely learned that I
Was determined to do this. It became deeply important to me to finish, and that carried me through. Amazing to hear, and there are so many examples of it in the book, but amazing to hear the kind of generosity of others that actually, people seemed very willing to help you, to give you a
Bed, to buy you a beer, which in the times that we live in, is hugely heartening. How did that first book change things for you as a writer? So does it become easier once you’ve got that first published piece of work, to then pitch other? Yeah.
Yeah, it does. And I continued to have a good relationship with my publisher. They were bought by another publisher who, incidentally, first published Patrick Lee Firmel John Murray, who I’m with now. And so, yeah, definitely it allowed the second book and it allowed
The third book. Hopefully, it will allow a fourth, which I’m pitching for at the moment. Okay. And it did certainly open. Yeah, it opened things up. I mean, there’s never a kind of point where you go, oh, I’ve done it now. I’ve kind of got to this position that I feel confident in.
And, yeah, it’s always a case of kind of looking ahead for the next thing. But certainly that book was my way through the door. And helped me. I mean, I thought of myself as a proper, in quotes writer for the first time, just with something to build on. Is
A writing career linear? So I know as an actor that you land the dream job and then don’t work for six months, and then you’re trying to get a bit part in something else. And I’ve rarely met someone who has had that kind of perfect stepping
Stone from first thing to next thing to next thing, and it’s all just gone perfectly. So is it linear? And if it isn’t, how have you learned that kind of resilience and that ability to bounce back? Yeah, it’s definitely not been linear for me, and it is hard, especially
As you get older, kind of going from one thing to the next. I think your kind of ability to endure that does decrease a little bit. And so I think that the main thing is just diversifying what I do. I also edit and do some teaching
And do some mentoring and have done all kinds of odd jobs within that as well, or kind of outside writing, too. So writing is the main thing, but it might not be always how I am able to make my money kind of consistently, and it is a case of kind of looking for
Other work, for money. But also, I don’t know if I want to just sit at a laptop all day, every day. It’s good to do things that involve being around people and just having different experiences. So, yeah, I definitely find that diversifying really helps kind of financially and mentally as
Well. Yeah. How did you diversify from nonfiction into fiction? So your first novel, Red Smoking Mirror, has been published, and you said it when we started the conversation that the fiction thing was always there. Did you have to convince your agent, your publishers, that you could do fiction as well
As you could do nonfiction? Yeah, I found it was a very different, very different thing. And the way that you have to kind of have written a novel before you can start pitching it, really. Right. Especially if it’s your first one, unlike
The nonfiction I’ve done, where you have the idea and then you might get an advance based on the idea in order to do the actual work. But this novel was. Yeah. And it’s an idea that I’d kind of been really obsessed with for
Years. It’s not a very long book, but the work that went into it and the time that went into it is by far more than I’ve put into anything else. And it went through two times when I genuinely said, it’s defeated me, I can’t do it, and kind of gave
Up on it and put it aside and produced tens of thousands of words of nonsense that I couldn’t do anything with. And it was extremely frustrating to me because I knew that the core of this idea was good, and I just could not find the voice, and I couldn’t find the characters. And
Then it came. I mean, this kind of sounds quite cliched during the lockdowns, when all the travel writers I knew couldn’t travel. And I know more than one who suddenly turned themselves into a novelist during that time. But for me, that was when
It suddenly came together, and I realized that I could start from a completely different point. My agent was very good, and she said, I gave her this kind of sort of rambling thousands of words. And she said, I love it, but it’s quite kind of plodding. And she said,
What story do you want to tell? And I realized that the story I wanted to tell was literally the last two weeks of what, until then, had been a 30 year kind of epic of like, one thing happening after another, covering decades. And she said, well, why don’t you just
Start in those two weeks and tell the thing that you want to tell? And that kind of unlocked something. And really just. It suddenly seemed quite easy. It’s like, oh, I’ll just. Yes, why don’t I just tell the story I want to tell? It’s that simple. And so
It was a very different process. It was a lot harder than any of the travel books I’ve done, but satisfying in a completely different way. And it was very exciting that the thing happened that I’d always heard novelists talk about and maybe
Had never quite believed, that characters take on a life of their own and start doing and saying things that you don’t expect them to do. And that started happening, and it was thrilling. So I was like, oh, this works. Imagination is real. Yeah. So I’m very pleased to have
Got that written and got that published, because there were many times when I thought, either I genuinely can’t write this, or nobody’s going to publish it. Having finished it and focused on that time period, has that opened up the possibility of ten prequels that are going to get us to where
This one starts, or is that on the cards? No, it’s not. All the stuff that I cut out is in that book. It’s just referred to in memories and references. It’s all part of the world building of that book. And
Without it, I definitely couldn’t have written those final two weeks if I hadn’t done the hard graft of writing all the other stuff before, but it has certainly made me want to write more novels and also kind of expand that it’s sort of speculative history or alternate history, red smoking
Era, and the idea of writing something that’s more kind of leaning into fantasy speculative writing is very appealing because it’s so fun, and I had such a good time with it. And I think it’s a nice balance as well, writing nonfiction, which is normally about me doing stuff and going to real places,
And then something that isn’t about me and isn’t about this time or this world. I spend a lot of time working with leaders and sales teams on the idea of storytelling and how to tell powerful stories. So it’d be really remiss of me to have you on the show and not kind
Of geek out a little bit about this for nonfiction, because most of the people that I work with are telling a nonfiction story. What are some of the principles that you think listeners should be thinking about to create a compelling narrative? Well,
I think a lot of, one of the things that I really try and get across when I teach kind of travel nature writing is you have to be a good travel companion or a good somebody who’s leading the reader and someone that you want to spend time with, I think is really important.
Just having that kind of trust in that the writer is a good guide, and it’s a hard thing to kind of teach because it does come down to taste, and not everybody likes the same voice. And some people find some voices insufferable, and some people love them. But I think it’s a good
Principle to apply to yourself when you’re trying to tell a story in that, what kind of guide am I being? So maybe that’s, I think, the first thing to get right and the voice you have. And it makes me think, also something we haven’t talked about, but
I don’t do so much of this now, but I used to do a lot of storytelling, like performance stuff, which was always unscripted, often kind of retellings of traditional stories or some that were my own, but I never wrote them down. And something about that kind
Of, it’s similar to when I talked about traveling, having this sort of skeleton structure, but then allowing lots of space for kind of flexibility. It was definitely the same with telling stories that you have to know what happens in the story, but you don’t have
To tell it the same way twice. And there will always be kind of tangents, and the words change and descriptions change as they come to you. And that depends on being responsive to the audience and kind of picking up on what they like, what they don’t like, what they’re getting,
What they’re excited by. So I think that as well, just remember that you’re speaking to an audience, whether you’re speaking or writing or whatever, and it’s not just you kind of shouting from your lonely tower into the void. I think a lot of people are almost scared about the
Term storytelling. I can’t do that. I can’t tell stories. I think sometimes just reframing it as narrative is kind of easier. That applies more to the kind of logical brain that we need that in very simplistic terms, a beginning, a middle and end. We’ve got to go
On a recognizable journey with the character. One thing that I think you’ve been brilliant at in your writing is setting context, but in a very succinct way. So in walking the woods and the water and in where the wild winds are, I get a very tangible sense of place and environment in the
Language that you use. How have you done that? Or is that just instinctive or something that you have to refine? I think it’s. I mean, I’ve done it by trying to genuinely tune into a place. And again, that sounds a bit vague, tuning into
A place, but it underlies a lot of what I write and also what I teach as well. And I’ve got sort of practical techniques for doing that that are quite kind of meditative practices of listening and standing still and looking in a certain way.
And then the trick, and the tricky thing is then conveying, just conveying the kind of the vivid descriptions that kind of make people feel something rather than just. It’s hard to read, just kind of flat observation of what somebody’s looking at. So it’s trying to
Find the points that lift it up and make it inhabitable for the reader, I think. I don’t really know how to explain how to do that. It’s just trying to write in a way that I find something that makes sense to me and that I would want
To read. Yeah, there seems to be. Go on. I was just going to say, because it occurred to me, from what you said before, people are scared of storytelling. What I found, I’ve been teaching travel and nature writing to some students at Bristol University. And what worked really well is
That the first class, because people come with such kind of hangups, I think about writing and producing things and sharing it understandably. And so I just told a couple of anecdotes really from my walk across Europe. A couple of things that I found illuminating, amusing, interesting,
And didn’t script that at all. Just told them a few stories. And then the point of that was, that’s all we’re doing here, is imagine that you, or you’ve just got back from holiday or a trip, or an interesting experience. You’re sitting around a friend’s dinner
Table or with friends in the pub, tell a story like you would then. And then got them in pairs doing that. And suddenly, because people were relaxed and everybody knows what it’s like to hear somebody telling an anecdote in a pub. And it’s very good
At kind of unlocking that sort of, oh, God, I have to write something just like you’re just telling friends a story and sharing something that you want to share that at the heart of it. It’s no more complicated than that, although, of course it is. Once you get into the principle, I. Think
The craft is something that you can refine and refine and refine. But in general life, if your objective in the world is not to sell novels or travel writing, you can create such human connection with very simple story. And I think the thing that I draw
Out from your writing, but also from the other observations that I’ve made, is that it’s about detail and engaging the senses, not in a frivolous and kind of over the top way, but if you can help your audience make an imaginative leap, if they can see what it’s like
Or smell what it’s like or taste what it’s like, then you ground them in that environment so much quicker than. Here’s a checklist of things. In pitching, that kind of opening hook and closing statement are really vital. And it seems to me, as a layperson, to be the same in a book.
You’ve got to get your reader past the first ten pages to want to continue, and you want to leave them with something at the end that feels meaningful rather than just everything doing a sort of slow fade to black. Have you got anything that you can share around
How you’ve crafted the beginnings and the ends of your work? Or have they just been obvious? Certainly for ends, I think if you know exactly where you’re going with a story you’re telling of any length, you lose interest in it. So again, it’s just having that bit of flexibility. I don’t
Like to know, because if you know what the end is, kind of what’s the point in doing the journey? What’s the point in writing it? If you’re not intrigued to discover the mystery that you think is out there, but you’re not quite sure.
So I think maybe just carrying a sense of that mystery through this is quite a kind of obvious thing to say. And they talk about it a lot, especially in travel writing. But the idea of a quest is a useful thing to think of. What’s the quest? What am I looking
For? And it might be something obvious, or it might be something quite subtle, but what’s the thing being discovered here, whether that’s in the external world or inside me or in something else? Yeah. It was the same for the novel. I kind of knew what I had, a last image, but
I didn’t know how to get there or quite what it meant or how it had happened. So there was always that sense of like, I’m intrigued to find out what’s going on. So that’s why how you get there. That’s why I’m inviting the reader to come on this journey with me, because
I think they will be intrigued too. That’s amazing, Nick. It’s been fascinating talking to you and I could continue the conversation all day. I’d like to wrap things up with a final question. If you could go back and give that six year old boy with his folded comic, the panker, one piece of
Advice, what would you say to him? I think I’d say just maybe he wouldn’t understand this. I’d say that your life will not last forever. So if there are panker stories you want to tell, just get on and tell them now. And don’t leave everything for some kind of
Future time that seems unimaginably distant to you now. But of course the 60 year old wouldn’t hear that because life does last forever when you’re six. But I think, yeah, just try and do as many of the things that you love and that excite you and intrigue you as you possibly can. Amazing
Advice, Nick. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thanks for listening to the why life’s a pitch podcast. If you’d like to improve the way you pitch and communicate, I’m giving away a special gift to all my listeners. We’ve developed the pitching with impact
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