Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, Simon Stephenson is a writer and screenwriter now living in LA (with stop-overs in London and San Francisco along the way). 

His first book was the memoir Let Not The Waves Of The Sea, about losing his brother Dominic in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. It won Best First Book at the Scottish Book Awards in 2011. His most recent novel, Set My Heart To Five, was released in summer 2020 and this is what we’ll be discussing today.

In this episode Simon and I discuss:

• His method for writing a “mis-topia” future and how that differs from a dystopia.
• Why writing a character without feelings allows you to explore feelings more.
• What role movies played in developing his protagonist and the plot.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Simon Stephenson

Simon Stephenson is originally from Scotland, but now lives in Los Angeles, California. He was born in 1978, an auspicious year already renowned for bringing the world such inimitable cultural treasures as the Bee Gees’ Sergeant Pepper’s movie, and the Star Wars Holiday Special.

A junior library cormorant from a young age, the arrival of the first series of ER on television diverted him from his inevitable English major to medical school. A less impressionable teenager would probably have understood that what he was drawn to was story and not hospitals, but we live and learn.

His first book Let Not The Waves Of The Sea, a memoir about the loss of his brother Dominic in the Indian Ocean tsunami, was written around his hospital shifts and published in 2011. It was serialized on BBC Radio 4 and won Best First Book at the Scottish Book Awards.

By now working as a children’s doctor in London, he next wrote a screenplay about a depressed children’s doctor who desperately needs to make a major change in his life. He remains unsure where this idea magically sprung from, but the script – in which the doctor travels to a life-altering conference in San Francisco – came third on the Annual Blacklist of Hollywood’s favorite screenplays and opened the door to a screenwriting career in the US. In an irony not lost on Simon, he subsequently got a job writing a movie at Pixar Animation Studios in San Francisco.

He has lived in the US since 2013. As a screenwriter, he originated and wrote Amazon’s forthcoming Louis Wain, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy. He also has a small credit on everybody’s favorite bear sequel, Paddington 2.

He got the idea for his new novel while living in the Bay Area, a place where the near future can sometimes seem very near indeed. Set in a 2054 where Elon Musk has incinerated the moon, it tells the story of Jared, a biological android who learns to feel by watching old movies and then sets out to write a movie of his own. Many of the lessons Jared learns might well be the same ones he has learned on his own writing journey, but one he did not learn is about the importance of short titles. His novel is called Set My Heart To Five; despite this, it has nonetheless been optioned by the director Edgar Wright to hopefully make a movie of its own.

You can follow Simon on Twitter.

Set My Heart to Five

Set in a 2054 where humans have locked themselves out of the internet and Elon Musk has incinerated the moon, Set My Heart to Five is the hilarious yet profoundly moving story of one android’s emotional awakening.

One day at a screening of a classic movie, Jared notices a strange sensation around his eyes. Bots are not permitted to have feelings, but as the theater lights come on, Jared discovers he is crying.

Soon overwhelmed by powerful emotions, Jared heads west, determined to find others like himself. But a bot with feelings is a dangerous proposition, and Jared’s new life could come to an end before it truly begins. Unless, that is, he can somehow change the world for himself and all of his kind.

Unlike anything you have ever read before, Set My Heart to Five is a love letter to outsiders everywhere. Plus it comes uniquely guaranteed to make its readers weep a minimum of 29mls of tears.*

*Book must be read in controlled laboratory conditions arranged at reader’s own expense. Other terms and conditions may apply to this offer.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 350

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 350: Voice, Emotion, and Metastory in a “Mistopia” – Interview with Simon Stephenson appeared first on DIY MFA.

Deadlines Teach You To Write, Word Limits Teach You To Edit    

At eighteen, I didn’t know any writers – or even any other aspiring writers – so I started by entering every short story competition I could find.  I would mail out what I was certain was the greatest story anybody had ever written, and six months later it would return home, accompanied by a facsimiled list of the infinitely-better stories that had actually won the contest. But I never minded much, as I would have already sent out several new greatest-stories-ever-written. And repeat, again and again, until my name began to feature at the bottom of the facsimiled list, and slowly worked its way up towards the middle.  I never won a single contest, but my prize was ultimately far greater than any $25 Book Token: so many endless hours writing to deadlines and word count taught me what I wanted to say, and how I could begin to say it.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

In our relentless world, I worry that a new writer starting out today won’t get the same space I had. Instead, they will quickly find themselves on writing Twitter, where everybody seems to flex. They are either so loudly successful or endlessly rejected that after even a few minutes of scrolling it seems clear that there is no point for any of us to even try. 

A quick check of Twitter today tells me that it is National Novel Writing Month, that a high-profile agent will accept pitches containing a particular hashtag for the next hour, and that a new writer has sold the high concept manuscript they wrote in their lunch breaks at auction.  Terrific as these successes are for all involved, will reading about such things encourage our own new writer to follow their own muse, and take risks without fear of failure or certainty of reward?  Most good books weren’t written quickly and can’t be pitched in 120 characters, but reading and writing Twitter would quickly convince you otherwise.

A Weirder Flex

An even weirder flex: many writers’ Twitter bios contain the phrase ‘repped by’.  Ostensibly this is to assist the editors desperate to commission the writer, but anyone who needs that information could swiftly google it.  Instead, having an agent seems to have become a bizarre kind of status symbol.  Perhaps it helps reassure the ‘repped’ writer they are a real writer, and of course we could all use a little of that reassurance sometimes.  But having an agent doesn’t make someone a writer any more than not having an agent makes someone not a writer, and I would hate to think that any writer might feel they have to write with the goal of getting an agent rather than of telling the story they want to, in the way they want to.  Moreover, I am sure most agents feel exactly the same way.

The Creative Writing Industrial Complex

This flex of being ‘repped by’ business feels part of a wider trend, where each year the balance between the craft and the business tilts ever more to the business.  Publishers and agencies now even offer creative writing courses, and while their intentions are surely noble, it edges us ever closer to territory where writers feel obliged to write entirely to market and perhaps even pay for the privilege of consideration.  This, in turn, seems likely to contribute to an unfortunate homogenization.  Is it a coincidence that so many novels of the past few years have a title that follows the mathematical formula: ‘The (adjective) (abstract noun) of (intriguingly-unusual-yet-reassuringly-familiar-name)?

The Screenwriting Industrial Complex

Screenwriting has always been the writing discipline most heavily tilted to the business, and there are valid reasons for that.  Nonetheless, a screenwriter starting out today could very quickly squander a small fortune on how-to manuals and development services, none of which would help them nearly as much as simply reading lots of great scripts and putting in the endless hours on their own. A great screenwriter doesn’t flex about the number of how-to books they’ve read.

In my novel, Set My Heart To Five, my android protagonist sets out to become a screenwriter and enrolls in a class that guarantees he will write a screenplay in eight weeks and have scenes performed in front of an industry professional. When he attends the class, he is baffled to discover that his classmates have zero interest in what their teacher has to say, and have signed up simply to meet the industry professional.  That takes place in 2054, but it is only a slightly exaggerated version of the problem I see today: the focus is almost entirely on the business, when it should be almost entirely on the craft.

Your Mileage May Vary, But Be Aware There Aren’t Many Short Cuts

I truly hope that you are the person whose Twitter pitch gets bought for a million dollars. (Sure, I’ll possibly be a touch envious for a passing moment, but mostly I will be thrilled for you, in part because it will show that somebody out there is still betting on books.)  But if you are not that lucky individual – and few are – then you will just have to do it like the rest of us, and in the quarter century since I began sending out my own stories, the only secret I have learned is that there is no secret beyond endless hours spent honing the craft: read books, write words, and edit them, over and over again until they sing.  And if you can keep doing that until what you have is undeniable, everything else will fall into place.  So – for you, and for me – back to work, and let us together stay off twitter, and never mention our agents in our bios. 

Simon Stephenson is originally from Edinburgh in Scotland, but he now lives in Los Angeles. He has also  had stopovers along the way in London and San Francisco. 

Simon’s a writer and screenwriter, and once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away he was a physician. His first book was a memoir called ‘Let Not The Waves Of The Sea’, about the loss of his brother Dominic in the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.  It won ‘Best First Book’ at the Scottish Book Awards in 2011. Simon’s novel, Set My Heart To Five was released in summer 2020.

You can follow Simon on Twitter.

The post Tweeting about Writing: A Weird Flex appeared first on DIY MFA.