Philip Wilding, author of 'The Death and Life of Red Henley' - Ghostwriting, changing how you write, and different parts of your brain
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Philip Wilding is a fantastic storyteller, and a brilliant talker of storytelling. He's worked as a radio producer for many national stations, written as a journalist following bands across the world, and has ghostwritten memoirs, including Carl Barat of The Libertines.
His newest novel is 'The Death and Life of Red Henley'. It's a noir novel about 1980's New York, a religious commune in Tennessee, and the myriad characters entwined in the death of Red Henley.
We talk about how it was written because of old ambitions and checklists he about writing a novel, also how working for him is a bit feast or famine, and how that infects the attitude of how his work is going.
You can hear why he leaves time between writing books, and how he switches on different parts of hid brain depending on the work he's doing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Well, hello, welcome to writers' routine. |
| 0:10.5 | This week we're chatting to Philip Wilding. |
| 0:13.6 | And where stories and writing are concerned, Phil has done a bit of everything and all of it, really. |
| 0:19.0 | He is a journalist, a radio producer, and a novelist |
| 0:22.1 | too. He's ghostwritten memoirs and toured the world writing about music, and has taken that |
| 0:27.8 | experience and the love of Americana into his newest book. It's called The Death and Life |
| 0:33.3 | of Red Henley. We talk about how he's deliberately changed, how he's written each of his books, |
| 0:39.3 | also how he switches on different parts of his brain, depending on what the work needs, |
| 0:43.5 | and we hear how the story changes as he gets into writing it. |
| 0:47.3 | And I started writing one thing, and then as many letters, I'm sure I've told you, |
| 0:50.8 | by the end of it, I was writing something else entirely. And then I hit the junction |
| 0:55.5 | before I had to sort of finish and do the day job, where I was suddenly found a new path through, |
| 1:02.3 | this is all sounds very vague. I'm so sorry. But I, yeah, I started to write one thing this morning |
| 1:06.9 | about love, which then turned into mania and kind of murder, and then went back to |
| 1:13.9 | love. But when I started writing out this morning, that wasn't why I set up the light. But it did take |
| 1:18.4 | me to a part of the book where I wanted to go. There is lots more this week with Philip Wilding |
| 1:23.6 | in our brand new writer's routine. |
| 1:33.2 | Yes, welcome along to the show. |
| 1:37.5 | My name's Dan Simpson, and this is writer's routine, the podcast where we take a look through an author's working day to see how they get stuff done, to see where, when, and generally |
| 1:42.6 | how they write. |
| 1:44.0 | How do they take that idea, |
| 1:45.9 | put it down on a page, and publish it, self-publish it, do whatever they can to hopefully make it |
... |
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