Jane Tinkler

Hello and welcome to this podcast – where we’ll be finding out about the skill which every writer wants to achieve – how to make your ideas really enthral and inspire the reader.  I’m Jane Tinkler, Senior Manager for the Nine Dots Prize and we hope that the ideas of our three speakers will provide valuable advice and encouragement for anyone who’s planning to enter the Prize – or who just wants to make their writing more effective.

 

Devi Sridhar

I think to make your writing leap off the page, you should write how you speak as if you were having a conversation with someone and you wanted to hold their interest.

David Runciman

It’s much better to have a very simple, clear, easily summarisable idea and then to complicate it, than to have a very complicated idea and try and simplify it.  The other thing I would say is that there should always be a story in it.

Mya Rose Craig

As I was writing, I did come to realise that it’s not these big flashy moments – it is the quiet moments that make everything feel much more real and much more like real life.  There’s more emotion almost in the quieter moments in a lot of the book as well than these big flashy moments.  

 

Jane Tinkler

So use natural and direct language, keep it simple and remember that the small, telling details often mean the most.    One of the first things you have to decide on is how to structure your book to make sure the reader can really engage with it.   Let’s meet the first of our writers now and find out more about how she approached this.

 

Devi Sridhar

I’m Devi Sridhar, I’m a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, and I worked through the COVID 19 pandemic with governments as well as writing articles for the media.  And I finished a book about that experience recently, and it’s called ‘Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World and How to Stop The Next One.’   It was a really challenging thing to know how to take on a huge topic and there are different ways to cut it.  You could say, I want to focus on a particular country.  You want to say you want to focus on a particular area within it, like someone might write a book on long-covid or on vaccines.  But I decided I wanted to do something global and tell about the global unfolding, country by country.  So I’ve almost done it chronologically, of how things started in December and moving to January, February.  So the book kind of takes us through time of what was happening and in each moment in time where was the epicentre of the pandemic?  So obviously starting in China, but then moving out to South Korea, the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and then moving to Europe, North America, Britain, and kind of then across to big large middle-income countries like Brazil, India and South Africa.  So yeah, I think it’s a tricky one to know how to do it, but early on you kind of have to make a decision of how will you start to simplify a very complex story, and you can do that through time or you can do it through geography or you can do it through topic and I chose chronology.

 

Jane Tinkler

And why did Devi make that choice?

 

Devi Sridhar

Well, I think it’s how all of us heard about the pandemic, right?  So we all might have heard about it in the news, probably in international news in January, that something was happening in China.  And clearly there was alarm bells ringing, images out of China of the response.  And then we started seeing similar things coming out of other countries.  So in a way, I tried to kind of recap how many people might have got to know about the pandemic and how it became closer and closer and closer to home and pull them in to that.  It’s trying to kind of take that reader through the process of almost reliving it, but reliving it hopefully with the data and also some insider knowledge or insights into what did the scientific community know and not know at each point and how did that inform what governments were doing?

 

Jane Tinkler

Let’s meet our next expert now and find out more about that advice to start with a simple idea and that, when it comes to writing, less is often more?

 

David Runciman

I’m David Runciman.  I’m Professor of Politics at Cambridge University – I’m also one of the judges of the Nine Dots Prize – I’ve been involved from the beginning.  I’m part academic, part journalist.  I mean I’m lucky in a way that there is a kind of middle ground genre, which is essay writing, so longer pieces of journalism.  I write a lot for the London Review of Books.  And I think for lots of forms of writing, particularly writing for a general audience, it’s much more important what you leave out than what you put in, because it’s in leaving things out that the story becomes clear.  And even as I say these things, what I’m mainly conscious of is that I’m not very good at it.  I often remember a story I was told about two Nobel Prize winning economists, who had come up with an amazing new theory of something.  And they excitedly wrote to the Financial Times and said,  “We’ve just worked out how the world works.  Can we have 4,000 words to explain it?”  And the Financial Times said, “You can have 1,500 words.”  And they said, “Well, it’s not enough.”  And they said, “Well, that’s all we’re going to give you.”  So they slaved away and they slaved away at it, and they boiled their idea down to 2,500 words, and they sent it in to the Financial Times and said, “Take it or leave it, this cannot be said any simpler than this.  If we lose another word, no one will know what we’re talking about.”  Six hours later, their editor at the Financial Times sent them back the 800 word version, and they read it and thought, “Ah, that’s what we think.” And I always kind of think if you if you can have that story in the back of your mind, it really helps.  And that’s a good example of how if you know your subject inside out, you have a tendency to complicate it, but probably the thing that you want to say is quite straightforward.

 

Jane Tinkler

And what about the suggestion to use quiet – maybe even mundane – moments to connect with the reader and bring your story to life?

 

Mya-Rose Craig

My name’s Mya-Rose Craig and I am an environmental campaigner and activist, and I also founded my charity Black to Nature.  And very recently my book, ’Birdgirl’ just came out.  I suppose at its core, ‘Birdgirl’ is a book about birds basically.  It’s kind of more than that as well because I originally wanted to write a book about birds and all the other things sort of fell into place.  And so it ended up being a book about, family and growing up and my mum’s struggle with quite severe mental illness and also my journey of activism.  I was trying to find a way for my joy and my passion surrounding these birds to sort of leap off the page and I guess the goal was for someone who’s reading it, even if they’d never bird watched a day in their life to sort of get a bit swept up in that and by the end to be like, “Yeah, birds are really cool.”  And so I spent a lot of time sort of sending my mind backwards and trying to remember all the small details.  But in terms of writing the bird watching, you know you don’t see the bird every single time and one of the comments that my editor made to me was, “You guys just seem to see the bird, every single time.  Surely that’s not true?”  And I was like, “Yeah, actually that’s not true,” and I wove in just a few stories of us missing the birds as well – ‘cos I think half the fun of bird watching is you never know if you will see what you’re looking for.

 

Jane Tinkler

Looking in more detail at specific examples of our writers’ prose – how do they set about making their words really engaging?  For Mya-Rose, her subject matter was in any case pretty eye-catching.

 

Mya-Rose Craig

While I personally really wanted to write a book about birds, I was also aware, you know, this isn’t a book for bird watchers, it’s not even necessarily a book for nature lovers, it’s just a book for normal people, I suppose.   I’d spent my whole life with people going, “But why birds, why bird watching?”  And so my original goal with it was for someone to read it and go like, “Oh, now I understand the bird watching.”   I suppose just with each bird I was trying to figure out what made it special to me and why I loved it so much. And one of my favourite bits that I wrote, there’s a passage where I absolutely fall in love with hummingbirds when I’m about eight years old, and especially the sword-billed hummingbird, which is magnificent, it has a bill that’s like double the length of its body, it’s ridiculous.  

Mya-Rose reading from her book ‘Birdgirl’

But I remembered the moment when birds became the absolute centre of my world, and that moment was right now, on the first day of our Ecuador trip, when I was at my least observant.  It wasn’t the bright red and green feeders which hung from the branches of the nearby trees that stopped me in my tracks, but the hummingbirds darting frantically between them in their perpetual hunt for more food.  I stopped breathing.  In the low sun they sparkled in shades of luminous turquoise, emerald green and deep, velvety violet.  I once again puzzled over how such colours could exist in nature.  And their wings – they flapped at such speeds they were barely visible, emitting a soft whirring sound.  I thought of bees hovering over a field of daisies in the summer.  No picture in a guidebook could touch their extraordinary depth of colour, their velocity or their charm.

Mya-Rose Craig

I realised that one of my two sort of favourite things about these birds were their beautiful colours, they’re in all these iridescent jewel tones, they look like sort of, I don’t know, small flowers or gems just sort of flying around in the rainforest.  But also their wings, these furiously fast wings that they have, like I think I say whirring around like a clockwork toy.

Mya-Rose reading from her book ‘Birdgirl’

A tiny bird was moving in a single blur of iridescent green.  Its feathers gleamed in the sparks of light striking through the canopy of leaves overhead.  The sword billed hummingbird was putting on a show just for me.  How could this bird even fly?  Its impossibly thin bill was longer than its body. And yet it took to the air gracefully. Its wings whirring like a clockwork toy. It was a hummingbird, like all the others. But it was in a class of its own

Mya-Rose Craig

I think detail and texture in general are so important, especially when it comes to something like ‘Birdgirl’ that is real, you know, it’s not fictional.  So, for example, in the hummingbird scene I talk about the way that they are all fighting over feeding and the sugary nectar that had been left out for them or the way I was sipping this hot chocolate for hours while watching them and letting it go cold.  And I think it just makes it all real, especially when you’re talking about going to all these other almost fantastical places and seeing all these amazing birds.  I don’t know there’s an element of it that can seem almost like fantasy. And so I really wanted to ground that in the real world.  And I think you can see that in particular in the way I include lots of very real-world things that were going on in lots of these places. And so I talk about deforestation and things like that that I was seeing.

 

Jane Tinkler

Mya-Rose was writing very much about her own experiences – and although her subject matter was much less personal, Devi also recommends bringing something of yourself into your narrative, as she demonstrates in this extract from her book.

 

Devi Sridhar  

Yeah, so I was thinking the section on children and COVID, given that so many people have such strong opinions on that, just to try to also show that you can use more informal styles in writing to show people the difficulty that we had.  So let me just pull out the excerpt here, I have the book in front of me…

Devi reading from her book ‘Preventable’

The point I’m trying to make is that there were no easy answers on schools.  I gave an interview on the 18^th  of March 2021 to Professor Eric Topol of Stanford University. The schools have kept me up at night because there are so many conflicting data points and there are so many stakeholders and they’re all not wrong.  Sitting in meetings where unions are telling you how teachers are sobbing because they don’t want to go into classrooms because they’re scared they’re going to get infected.  You are wondering as a teacher if you’re going to get infected and die because we gave the wrong advice.  At the same time, we get every week a report from the child welfare officer.  You hear about the rises in child abuse and the children who are getting beaten up at home because they’re not able to get out and they have parents who have lost their jobs and they’re angry, stuck in tiny flats and they have no money.  You’re thinking, well, kids need to get back to school.  No one is wrong.  Everyone is right in what they’re saying to you.  How do you give the best scientific advice?   What keeps me up, the one thing that does stress me is, am I giving the best scientific advice?  Where are the holes in my argument?   My take, quite simply after much reflection analysis, is that while schools were not superspreading locations, like bars or clubs, nor do they operate in a bubble.  They were part of a community and mirrored what was happening in terms of cases.  Quite simply, the more cases in the community, the more likely it was that the cases would come into a school and students would have to isolate or that the school would have to shut completely. The best way to keep schools open was to keep cases as low as possible in the community.

Devi Sridhar   

Something that the editor of ‘Preventable’ and me talked about was bringing in the personal voice as much as possible and that there will be a lot of books written about COVID 19, so what makes it unique is when you can bring your personal voice to it and your story of actually how you were involved in this unfolding and how it affected you. And I guess there what I try to do is bring people into the room. And you can really imagine sitting there and you have a union member who’s like, “Can you guarantee us that no teacher is going to get infected or die in a classroom?”  And you’re thinking, “I can’t guarantee that.”   And I tried to use my personal voice coming out at various bits of, “Oh, this is what I was thinking,” or “This is what happened when I was sitting in that meeting.”  And it’s interesting is that at the start, as academics, we don’t do that, like we don’t bring ourselves into scientific books or papers.  And I’ve never done that in any of my previous books, even though the first one I was in the field in India, I wrote it very much third person – right – that was a study of something else out there now than me in it. And it was really my editor said, “You need to put yourself into it.”  And I was like, “But isn’t that narcissistic? Like, why would anyone want to know what I was thinking at that moment? Or that I like going running or that I got a pet?”  And he’s like, “Actually, they would like to know that, that’s interesting.” And it is funny because that’s what’s gotten reported afterwards. People like, “Oh, she has a tortoise.”

 

Jane Tinkler

An unusual pet may be one way to get the reader’s attention – but what about grabbing them with a proposition which – at least at first – may seem  outlandish or eccentric.  It’s something David’s done.

 

David Runciman

So this is an article I wrote for The Guardian – for a few years now I’ve been interested in the question of why children are excluded from voting.  And then The Guardian had a series coming out of covid in which they asked a few writers to come up with a sort of big, radical, perhaps slightly sort of surprising idea about how the world could be different.  So it’s in a series of what are meant to be slightly provocative or unusual ideas, but making the case that they should be taken seriously.  And it was a longer piece as well, so it’s I think about 5,000 words, so it has quite a lot in it, but it’s journalism and so it has to begin by saying what it’s about. 

David Runciman

I’ll just read the opening couple of paragraphs. 

David reading from this Guardian piece

There is no good reason to exclude children from the right to vote.  Indeed, I believe there is a strong case for lowering the voting age to six, effectively extending the franchise to any child in full time education. When I have made this case, as I have done in recent years in a variety of different forums, I am always struck by the reaction I get.  It is incredulity.  What possible reason could there be to do something so seemingly reckless and foolhardy?  Most audiences recognise that our democracy is growing fractious, frustrated and frustrating. Our political divisions are wide and our institutions seem ill equipped to handle them.  But nothing surely could justify allowing children to join in.  Wouldn’t it simply make everything worse?  It would not.  In fact, it might make things better.  But to understand why, we first need to understand the nature of the problems our democracy faces, and in particular, the generational divide that has become an increasingly important factor in politics over recent decades.  We have never been more divided, and yet we have never had more in common.

David Runciman

It then goes on to discuss the ways in which contemporary democracy is not so much divided by class, a much stronger indication of how people are likely to vote is age.  Our democracies were set up on the assumption that most people were young. Now we live in societies where most people are old, so the young get outvoted.  And the piece begins in the way it does, because I’m aware that you then take that leap and people think you’ve lost your mind because you’re starting to talk about children voting. But if you think there is this injustice and also this imbalance in our democracy that needs to be corrected for, you then I think have to have a good reason why that’s not the solution, not to bring children into the voting.   But the set up is to say, I know this is shocking, but there is something we need to acknowledge here, which is that our democracies have become unbalanced against the interests of the young.

 

Jane Tinkler

But having said this, be wary of trying to be provocative just in order to grab attention.

 

David Runciman

But it does need to be not for its own sake. In a sense I think this one, if it works, it works because I mean it.  I think we’ve all read things that are deliberately set out to be shocking, but you kind of think, you know, this is a bit contrived.  If you can find the thing in the thing that you really want to say, that is the most arresting part of it, rather than, again, taking what you want to say and then dressing it up as something it isn’t.  Because I think we all know what a sort of deliberately sensationalist opening to a piece of writing looks like, and it tends to be off-putting because the reader loses a little bit of trust.  Whereas I think something like what I just read the idea is to try and say,Look, I know you think I’m taking the piss, but I’m not and I’m actually going to go on and the hope is that this person then wants to, to go with that. But yeah, it’s definitely worth grabbing the attention with a big idea.

 

Jane Tinkler

And big ideas are certainly what we’re looking for.  So to inspire all of you potential entrants out there, let’s end with a final tip from each of our writers.

 

Mya-Rose Craig

I guess in terms of writing tips, not that I feel like I’m in any position to give writing tips, but I suppose like the first one is obviously persevere.  I know everyone says it all the time, but writing does get better when you practise – it is just a skill like anything else, no-one’s magically given the skill of writing.  In some ways writing about the why of bird watching was really difficult – ‘cos I remember when I first sat down and I tried to write a passage that explained the bird watching, I just couldn’t quite do it because it’s definitely is part of me, that’s part of who I am.  And I ended up writing very purpley sort of prose that sort of when you read it, it sort of had lots and lots of words and kind of said nothing at the same time. And so I sort of looked at it and I was like, Right, this is not what we’re going for. ‘Cos like I said, didn’t say anything at all. And so I sat down and I really tried to pinpoint, why birds.  Things evolve and quite often that is for the better, so I guess like sort of embrace it if the idea starts to shift. Don’t be afraid for the book to change or the writing to change and not be identical to what you first expected of it. I know ‘Birdgirl’s’ definitely very, very different from what I had first anticipated writing, and I know it’s all the better for it, even though realising that it was going to be something different was kind of terrifying at the time.

Devi Sridhar

Oh, editing is absolutely vital.  I think the idea that people write a perfect first draft, maybe there are some very talented writers out there, I’m not one of them.  I think a first draft is really just trying to get words on a page, which is the hardest bit, right? You can all imagine sitting in front of a blank screen with nothing on it and thinking, I’ve got to write 50,000 words. Or like my book, 100,000 words. That’s hundreds of pages from a blank screen. And so the first draft in some ways is the hardest, is just getting your ideas down, getting your words down.  Maybe sentences aren’t perfectly constructed, but get them down, the concept is there.   And once it’s there – and that’s for me probably two or three drafts where I’m going back and reworking it, making sure, I often read things out loud because in sentences that are clunky, you can simplify, and then that moves into a new phase when you send it to your editor.  And for my editor, I was sending him individual chapters because he said, if I can feed back to you, you can fix future chapters, not fix, but you know what I’m looking for.  So that was really useful.  So I revised each of the chapters and I sent the whole thing. He read the whole thing, gave me really detailed comments. I had to revise the whole thing probably twice. So this was, you know, a huge process. But I think it makes a better book.  And I think it helped as well, because I wrote the vaccines chapter – it was my favourite chapter because I’m quite into kind of tech and science and MRNA technology.   And my editor came back and he was just like, “It’s boring and people don’t want to know about this vector and why it goes in that vector and that.”   You know, he was just like, “You’ve got to simplify it.”   And then he was like, “Can you bring more people into it? Because what’s interesting is the stories behind Moderna and the people behind Moderna and Pfizer rather than actual technology.”   And I just kept saying, “Well, don’t people want to know, like, about the biological mechanisms?”   And he was like, “They don’t.”  

David Runciman

This is going to make me sound like an academic because academics like me say it to students all the time. But one of the interesting things about this prize, the Nine Dots Prize, is that it’s a question. And one of the things that leaps out is an answer to the question. I mean, it might sound odd, but a lot of entries don’t answer the question. They use the question as the starting point for a sort of a rumination on this and that or a personal history or whatever it is.  Whereas an interesting answer to the question is very, very valuable.  And if you have what you think is an interesting answer to the question, put it out front.   So if you have a kind of heart to your answer, if you can say up front, why this matters, what’s at stake in this question, what hangs on it, that’s good too.   What you don’t tend to need is a sort of rambly introduction. You know, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that or I hope to do this, or I hope to do that. The way to grab the reader is to go straight in with the heart of it and then show how it might be more complicated than that.  Resist as hard as you can, the temptation to cram too much in.  You do have to think of your idea, you have to know what it is that you want to say.  But once you’ve got that idea, don’t then worry about all the things that aren’t in that idea or worry about all the things that it leaves out.  If you’ve got an idea which is an interesting answer to the question, or an interesting take on it, shows what’s at stake, trust in it and kind of run with it.

 

Jane Tinkler

Sage words of advice there from David, who is one of our judges.

Now it’s your turn to get writing. 

Our question for 2022 will be revealed on the 7th of October.

We hope we’ve persuaded you to enter and that the insights and experience of our writers will help and inspire you as you get started.   We’re looking forward to receiving your entries and don’t forget that the deadline is the 23^rd of January, 2023.

We’d like to thank Professor Devi Sridhar, Dr Mya-Rose Craig and Professor David Runciman for taking part in this podcast and for their generosity in sharing their advice.  Thanks also to producers Tom Woolfenden and Louise Adamson and to all the team at Loftus Media.