Nick Bradley, author of 'Four Seasons in Japan' - Writer discusses going easy on himself, living in Japan, and intricate plot structure
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we're chatting to Nick Bradley. He's an author, a creative writing teacher, a translator, and his new novel is, 'Four Seasons in Japan'. It's about about Flo, a translator in Tokyo. She finds a book on the subway and tries to track down the author and translate it.
We discuss his previous novel, 'The Cat and the City', which was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick. Also, how his time living in Japan transformed how he thought of novels, and how he spoke to his characters. You can hear how he's inspired by sitcoms when plotting, and why he takes it easy on himself.
Nick discusses his 5000 word limit across the week, why seeing things from a different perspective can really help, and how life experience makes a writer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along to a brand new episode of writer's routine. |
| 0:12.6 | This week we're chatting to Nick Bradley. |
| 0:14.4 | His new novel is Four Seasons in Japan. |
| 0:17.4 | We talk about why he goes easy on himself. |
| 0:19.8 | Also, how this novel came from an idea that different |
| 0:22.9 | generations completely forget who they are and where they've been and what other people are going |
| 0:28.5 | through. And you can hear why living in Japan completely changed who he is as a writer. |
| 0:33.9 | When I was learning Japanese, I felt like a child again. I felt, so I went there |
| 0:39.8 | after being, you know, a university student. I'd done a master's degree. I was very much like |
| 0:44.7 | in academic mode. And I looked back on my writing then and it was it was convoluted. It was, |
| 0:51.6 | it was trying to be too clever. And I think it was from being, you know, a learner of Japanese and feeling restrained again |
| 1:00.6 | and constricted by my vocabulary and not being able to express myself at those early |
| 1:06.4 | stages of learning that made me understand that you can deal with very difficult and big concepts, |
| 1:14.2 | but with very, very simple language. |
| 1:16.3 | There is more with Nick Bradley in this week's writers' routine. Let's get to it. |
| 1:46.3 | Yes, welcome along to the show. My name's Dan Simpson and this is writer's routine where we take a look inside an author's working day to hear the stories behind their stories to see how they plan their day and their life around getting words on the page. And this week for the time, we are supported by Plotter. I'm so grateful that they've helped power the show for a little while, just like they |
| 1:50.7 | can power your writing. Now Plotter is a writing tool that does what it says on the TN. It plots. It helps |
| 1:55.9 | you plan your books the way that you think, letting you outline faster, organize smarter, and turbocharging your |
| 2:01.8 | productivity. It does the back end. It's brilliant if you're a visual writer. You can color code |
| 2:06.9 | everything, quickly skim between your timeline, the outline, your notes, the details on characters |
| 2:12.0 | and places. You can tag it all to make it so swift for you to move through them. You can track |
| 2:17.3 | everything at a minute, |
... |
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