One Day author David Nicholls will be talking at Mannington Book Bash on October 5 about his latest novel, the touching midlife rom com You Are Here, about a couple who meet on an epic walk. He tells us about his favourite Norfolk rambles and more
Once a year, novelist David Nicholls takes a big, solo walk.
Sometimes he'll choose the north of England, with its challenging gradients, as his destination. Other years he might opt for the more gentle undulations of Norfolk (not quite as 'very flat' as Noel Coward once proclaimed). Perhaps the Peddars Way, which follows the 49-mile Roman road from Knettishall Heath near Thetford to Holme-next-the-Sea. Or the Norfolk Coast Path which takes you 84 miles from H to H - Hunstanton to Hopton - through a rugged and windswept Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty,
But during lockdown, like all of us, he had to stay at home.
'I love hiking and I hike as much as I can,' he says. 'And suddenly, because of lockdown, I wasn't able to do that and I found that I missed it a lot. It was suggested to me that maybe I write a non-fiction book about walking, but I didn't quite have that in me - but I thought that maybe a novel might work, and perhaps a love story, so that was the starting point.'
It became You Are Here, which was published to critical acclaim in the spring and which he'll be discussing with Henry Layte of The Book Hive when he appears at Mannington Book Bash on October 5.
Geography teacher Michael's wife has left him, and taking solace in long walks he decides to do Alfred Wainwright's famous coast to coast walk from St Bee's to Robin Hood's Bay. His friend, Cleo, decides to turn it into a group trip and invites a gang, including proofreader Marnie, along. Marnie is divorced, lives alone and feels like life is passing her by, As the rest of the group drops out of the trek, friendship, and possibly more, starts to develop.
'Lockdown made communication very difficult and made us all feel quite isolated,' he says. 'I wanted to write about walking and the sense of loneliness and isolation that lockdown gave us all. And wanted to write a love story, but with a couple of different backgrounds and settings. And also I wanted to write a love story where actually being by oneself wasn't the worst thing in the world - there are pluses and minuses.'
David has been doing his solo walks for around a decade.
'I did a lot of walking with my kids, but there was definitely a point where they rebelled and I had to go off by myself because no-one really wanted to walk that far in the rain anymore. In theory it helps my creative process,' he says. 'Sometimes the inspiration just doesn't arrive and instead you just have to treat it as exercise and nothing more. But this book had to be researched and I found that being "on location" if you like, to actually be in the spot where the story happened, was incredibly helpful, incredibly enjoyable, and it's almost as if the landscape gives you story ideas and contributes. There's a sense of what might happen here, by the side of this lake or in this rain or in this terrible hotel? What could possibly happen to our characters, so certainly with this novel it was a massive inspiration.'
David grew up in Hampshire. He loved reading Dickens, but says that he wasn't one of those children who was always making up stories.
'I wrote the stories that my teachers asked me to write, but I wasn't sure how people actually did it as a job,' he says. 'But I've always been a massive reader - and viewer, I love film and TV so that's very much been an obsession for as long as I can remember. We had some very precious looking copies of Dickens novels in our house that you weren't really meant to touch, because they were our Reader's Digest leather bound editions. But I read Great Expectations [which he went on to adapt for the screen] at quite an early age and absolutely loved it.'
David studied drama and English at Bristol University and then trained as an actor in New York. During his 20s he worked as an actor, including several years as an understudy at the National Theatre. At the end of the 1990s he moved into screenwriting, and then in 2003 his first novel, the University Challenge-inspired Starter for Ten, was published. That was followed by The Understudy, which drew on his experiences as an actor.
And then, in 2009, came the novel with the orange jacket which would make people cry on public transport and turn into a multi million best seller. One Day.
The premise is simple. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet on their last day at Edinburgh University on St Swithin's Day in 1988. The book catches up with them on July 15 for the next 20 years as they grow up together.
The book had its first outing on screen as a film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in 2011 (David wrote the screenplay). And earlier this year a new version landed on Netflix, just in time for Valentine's Day, winning the story a whole new generation of weeping fans, alongside those who still haven't quite got over the book's ending.
What does David make of the reaction to it - and why does he think that people have taken Emma and Dexter to their hearts in such a big way?
'It's been wild,' he laughs. 'I think that people see something of themselves and their friends in Emma and Dexter. They recognise the dilemmas and difficulties of growing up and the choices you make and where those small choices send your life. I always wanted there to be a sense of identification and that's something that I'm always very flattered by when people say that they can see themselves in the characters.'
It is something which David does so well - his characters feel like real people. They're flawed and they're funny and sometimes they make terrible decisions - and you're rooting for them 100 per cent.
David says that bringing One Day to Netflix took around five years. The rights belonged to Universal, then it took a while to find the right person to do the scripts, who turned out to be Nicole Taylor.
'There was a good year of writing to get the first scripts ready and a year of production and then a year of editing and post production, so it's an incredibly long process,' says David, who was executive producer.
And then there was the task of finding their Emma and Dexter. It's hard to think of more perfect sparring partners than Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall
'We had a great casting director called Rachel Sheridan who auditioned hundreds of people and started to whittle that down and we started to see people individually on tape and then we started to pair the actors and see how they interacted,' says David. 'We were all unanimous that Ambika and Leo were the best choices. Ambika had done This Is Going To Hurt for the BBC, but Leo had done very little so we were definitely taking a chance, but they were so good together that it was a very straightforward decision.'
The story is really suited to the episodic TV structure. The Netflix adaptation has been described as like listening to your favourite album - that once you've finished it you find yourself wanting to start the whole thing all over again. Set largely in the 90s, depending on your age it's either a period drama or a nostalgia trip. The soundtrack captures the era perfectly, as does Dexter's foray as a TV presenter on a post-pub youth TV show during the Britpop years.
David's novels translate particularly well to the screen.
In 2006 Starter For Ten became a film, starring James McAvoy, Rebecca Hall and Benedict Cumberbatch (he would go on to write and win a Bafta for the series Patrick Melrose in which Cumberbatch also starred).
In 2020, his novel Us was turned into a four-part BBC series starring Tom Hollander, based on his screenplay. David paints Marnie and Michael so vividly in the You Are Here that it too is crying out to be adapted for TV. Has he had any thoughts about who he would like to play them?
'I always do and I always have to keep it secret because who knows what's going to happen? It would be awful to say it in an interview your dream casting and then end up with someone else, so I keep those things to myself,' he laughs.
'I think there's a whole world of dating and apps online which I've never really experienced, which is why I liked the idea of writing something that was removed from that. There's very little technology and very little online activity in the novel,' says David. 'I'm not sure I could write a love story set now. Also, Marnie and Michael are somewhat younger than I am, but I find it very hard to write about teenagers or twentysomethings now, I feel like I can just about get into the mindset of someone in their 40s, but I think growing up, starting a relationship, all of those things are so different now, so I think it's probably slipped out of my range.'
David says that there will be another novel on the horizon, but for now he's 'doing his homework' and re-reading the work of another of his big influences, EM Forster, for a new introduction of Howard's End (or Howard's Way, as Dexter calls it).
And there's also the continuing promotion for You Are Here. David says that he's especially looking forward to coming to Norfolk as he's a regular visitor.
'Hannah, my partner is from Norwich so I've spent a lot of time in Norfolk,' says David. 'We quite often go out to the sea, I like to cycle and I often cycle around Bungay, Diss and up on the coast - I like the route from Great Yarmouth all the way to Wells, to King's Lynn. And I've been to the Book Hive many times, I love the Book Hive.'
David Nicholls is appearing at Mannington Book Bash at Mannington Hall on Saturday, October 5. Go to manningtonbookbash.co.uk for details. You Are Here is out now in hardback.
