Joe Dunthorne: Disgustingly talented

Joe Dunthorne, the brilliant author of a Faber New Poets pamphlet and the stunningly hysterial Submarine, is certainly an author to watch. With his whimsical style, ability to capture snapshots of popular culture with such accuracy and humour, and easy manner, he is surely one of Britain's best young authors.

Submarine is currently being made into a film by Moss from The IT Crowd starring Paddy Considine, and Dunthorne was shortlisted for last year's Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. Need more reasons to be intrigued? Read on and learn about his football obsessions, his comedic inspirations and his co-horts in poetry collective, Aisle16

> Your first book Submarine has been out for a while now. I wanted to check how much of it was ‘writing what you know’?

I like to think of it as a percentage. About 35% is true and 65% is fiction. Quite a big chunk of it is true. Oliver’s dad is mostly just my dad. The mother in the book is not my mum. Oliver is an amplified me in certain respects. A lot of the incidental stuff is true but the big dramatic storyline isn’t.

> I wondered while reading the book whether Oliver had Aspergers or something similar but it’s never referred to. Did you write him with a certain ambiguity in mind?

I just wrote him as a weird character. I didn’t think of him being diagnosable in any way. For me, he’s within the scope of how weird a 15-year-old boy can be without him being totally out of place. I’m sure there are boys in most schools who are of a weirdness similar. Most teenagers have got some freaky business going on in their minds that they don’t tell you about.

> There’s also this meta-diary format throughout parts of the book. Was this homage in any way to Adrian Mole?

It wasn’t homage but I was aware of it. I have read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole but wouldn’t say it was an influence. I wasn’t trying to update him in anyway. There was a point at which I had to be conscious of Adrian Mole when I was writing it because it was so within his scope. I never thought Adrian Mole was cool when I was young; I thought it was decidedly uncool. A 40-year-old woman pretending to be a 13-year-old boy is uncool no matter how good the book is. As a 13-year-old, I couldn’t accept she was pretending to be me. That was kind of the reason I wanted to write Submarine when I was young- I was 22 when I started it- with having only been a teenager seven years before, I had to use less imagination than Sue Townsend did. I wanted the book to be properly authentic.

> Was it difficult writing a book for adults with a teenage protagonist?

I didn’t think it was hard until people started saying it was Young Adult fiction… It never crossed my mind that it wasn’t an adult book. There were all these suggestions from the publicity team that maybe it was a crossover book. I think of the age of Oliver, 15, being the youngest age you should read it.

> What was the process writing it?

The process was UEA (University of East Anglia) quite tragically. I went there to study my MA for four years and they’re brilliant, they do a great job. I met agents through my course, I won the Curtis Brown prize through my course and that put me in a good position, in that I was in contact with agents. Then I spent a year working in a call centre and finishing the book in Norwich. Then I sent it to my agent, who helped me edit it. She then sent it out and some of the publishers said no and some said yes. It was relatively straightforward, which was great.

> It seems like with the advent of the internet, it never seems to be as straightforward as that these days.

I think it’s so hard right now for anyone trying to get published. There’s no money and everyone’s so cautious. There’s no mad swagger anymore. From what I hear from publishers, Ross Raisin, myself and a couple of others were the last to get a punt taken on us on the basis that we might do alright and nowadays, you wouldn’t get that. No matter how good the book is, you wouldn’t get a freewheeling publisher to put some money behind it because they’re too scared of the risks.

> In light of that, what would your advice be to aspiring writers?

The advice is the same really: write the best book you can, work really hard on it. Nothing can be completely perfect but it has to be as perfect as you can feasibly envisage it being.

> What are you working on at the moment?

Book two, which is set in a commune in Wales, partly inspired by the real life of a friend of mine who was born and raised in a commune that her parents had set up. It’s about a family, a mum and dad and their friends who staff this commune in the eighties. The kids are born there. It’s about them growing up there, how the community develops and eventually falls apart and it’s about one of the characters believing the world is going to end in 2012, which is annoying because it means I have to publish the book before 2012. I’ve written my own deadline for the book. If I don’t finish it this year, that character’s purpose will seem defunct. The film of 2012, I enjoyed it in a perverse way. I thought it’d be good research. It wasn’t good research.

> Are you reading anything to inspire you for the book?

I’m reading so much at the moment, more than I ever had done. I’m ravenous. I’m reading Saul Bellow, and this non-fiction book about brain science, and David Vann’s novel, Legend of a Suicide, which I’m really enjoying. I’ve got Infinite Jest lined up and ready to go, which is intimidating.

> What about music?

I can’t listen to music when I write but I’m listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Jimi Hendrix, the new Hot Chip album, Discovery, The Dorian Experiment which is weird dubby electronica, the Fever Ray album, and the new Joanna Newsom album.

> Do you have a process for your writing day?

It’s very loose and I regularly don’t do it. Get up, do some writing immediately. I try and be in my office from 10ish. I need somewhere to go. It doesn’t work when I’m at home. I try and get a few hours in before lunch and then a bit afterwards but I usually fade into emailing by mid-afternoon. Then if I’m lucky, I have a sleep at four for 20 minutes with my head on the desk then do some more. That’s a good day. On a bad day, I’ll check emails immediately and be on my email till one, eat lunch and then feeling like the day’s wasted, so go back to checking more emails.

> I think Jonathan Franzen said recently ‘It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.’

Thankfully I don’t.

> At UEA, what was the biggest lesson you learnt about your writing and making it better?

I always thought I had a weakness with dialogue. So that was something I worked on and felt I got a lot better at. I have a stubborn weakness with plot in that I’m not willing to plot. I continue to not plot and it’s a really disastrous method that I wouldn’t recommend to anybody. But I don’t like knowing what’s going to happen while I’m writing, which is fun but the result is so clunky most of the time, that you spend ages reshaping. I was taught to plan and structure in UEA but I chose not to and I stand by that as a way of making writing the most enjoyable thing it can be while you’re writing it. I learnt lots of cool little things like, when I used to write dialogue, it’d be ‘”Hey Nikesh, what’s happening dude?” said Joe’ but now I write, ‘”Hey Nikesh,” said Joe, tipping his cap. “What’s happening dude.’ I’ve learnt to add the action in-between two bits of dialogue. It was a good moment learning that. Also, always give the character a problem. I remember that being a good bit of advice. As soon as you introduce something as a character’s problem, it’s no longer yours and it’s easier for them to solve.

> Who is your biggest stylistic influence?

I suppose, actually, it’s Vonnegut as the person I feel most influenced by, especially during the time I was writing Submarine. Reading him I realised, you can be that playful, you can be that creative and I suppose, and he loves jokes as well.

> Do you feel you have a style?

The style of Submarine isn’t my automatic writing style. I like it and I’m fond of the writing but I think I’m more traditional when I’m in my everyday writing mode. This new book I’m writing in the third person. I’m trying to invest it with a kind of liveliness. Unless you’ve got a character built, you can’t be quite as loopy as I could with Submarine and Oliver, which allowed me all these different perspectives. As much as I can, I try and invest energy and put a bit of life into my prose.

> Tell us about the England Writers Team.

It’s the biggest and best perk of being a writer. I love football. I love writing. And they come together perfectly in this team. And we sometimes get to travel to other countries and play football, which is such a fantasy. I can say the sentence, ‘I’ve scored international football goals against Norway.’ That’s good, that’s nice- the sentiment is amazing. I’ve represented my country and I knocked one in. Although... there is no Welsh Writers Team, which hurts me. Looking back on Ryan Giggs’ career, he should have probably selected to play for England back in the day. If I had the option, I’d jump ship and play for England. Sorry Welsh.

> Who’s your favourite author now and from growing up?

Now is either Don Delillo or W G Sebald or Dave Eggers or David Burman. Favourite when I was growing up, it was Terry Pratchett for a long time, when I was 12-13. Then I got into Kafka for a while. It sounds pretty cool to say you were into Kafka. At least around 16-17, I was into him. I wasn’t a reader as a child and I didn’t like reading anything that wasn’t Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams until I was 15. My sister was a great reader, always trying to get me to read Dickens and Austen but I hated it. My actual broadening out into reading was quite late.

> When did you realise you wanted to be a writer

Not until I got to university. I thought it’d be a fun thing to do, which is why I chose to do it at university. But I didn’t think it was really a prospect for me until I got there and realised how much I really enjoyed it. I took to it.

> Tell us about your work with Aisle16.

It was very kind of them to welcome me into their ranks. Aisle16 was, if you don’t know, a poetry group of Ross Sutherland, Chris Hicks, Luke Wright and Joel Strickley. I remember seeing them at university and they were kind of like punk poets, screaming into microphones, making loads of racket and being really exciting. We became friends as their thing developed and as Aisle16 changed personnel and their careers have blossomed, it’s become a production house. I’m in it now, Tim Clare’s in it, John Osborne’s in it. There are 7 or 8 of us. We work together on different projects, live literature shows and it’s a support group. We run HOMEWORK, a monthly night. We’re trying to help each other develop interesting stand-up poetry. I always had a side of me that’s a bit performance-y and being a novelist isn’t always great for being up onstage and showing off. The stand-up poetry side of things is good and you get to interact with people and shout if you want to and be a bit livelier.