William Nicholson: Rich and Mad

WILLIAM Nicholson insists he is not schizophrenic. His CV suggests otherwise.

A TV writer, he also wrote the screenplays for movies Gladiator, Shadowlands and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. He has written for stage, fantasy books, novels for young adults and grown-ups.

"I don't think it's schizophrenic – it's all writing," insists Nicholson.

"I've only used the different forms because of the accidents of my career.

"I get refreshed by the changes – I find it mentally stimulating to work on a film script, then another novel then a kids book, and I'm about to do a play and it all keeps me buzzing.

"And it's not that difficult. I mean, writing is difficult, but writing in the different modes, that's not difficult." So what sort of writer would he say he is? Novelist? Screenwriter? Playwright? "I would just say I'm a writer." Nicholson's career began in television, his first job was as a documentary maker for the BBC's religious department.

It was there that his first break came in writing, when he was asked to write a script for the department.

Until that point, Cambridge graduate Nicholson had been writing in his own time, determined to become a novelist, spending two hours every day before work practising his own writing.

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Now 62, does Nicholson look back at his younger self and see something heroic in the dedication that saw him waking up at 6am every day to write? "It's either heroic or obsessional. Either way, it's something a bit dodgy," he says.

Nicholson's personality is such that he was obsessional about his writing, but he is an all-or-nothing kind of a man.

He says: "I kept thinking I had cracked it and that was my mistake. I remember so well finishing a book, hand typed, sending it to my agent, who was only my agent out of kindness, she'd never made a penny out of me. I didn't want a comma changed.

"I'd brooded over it for two years and now it was either brilliant or it was nothing and when she came back and said 'maybe you should look at changing this', I just reacted by saying 'I'll do something else' and threw it out. I just needed to grow up and realise it's not glory or disaster, but it can be somewhere between. I could have made some of my books work if I'd only gone back to them. I had a lot of drive, but in a way I kept giving up."

There were two moments for Nicholson which set him on a path which led to the career he now enjoys.

The first was being asked to write the first drama script for the religious department of the BBC and the second was a moment of realisation.

"The eureka moment was a rather downbeat one. It was when I switched from writing novels, which had been uniformly unsuccessful, to writing for television.

"My then boss said 'apparently you get up every morning and write, why don't you write it?' (the script for his department).

"I thought television wasn't real writing. I was an Eng Lit snob. I'd done it at Cambridge. To this day I believe the most powerful forms of storytelling I have read have been in books.

"So I undertook this job, kind of for fun, I didn't take it that seriously. Suddenly I was dealing with a subject that was not to do with my exquisite sensibility.

Suddenly there was a subject out there to be served." All those hours spent at the typewriter were Nicholson trying to express himself.

Learning that he was not the most fascinating thing he could write about was the real turning point, he says.

"I think that helped. I realised the mistake I'd made was essentially pretension, when you're young you have a burning desire to show off. I didn't call it that. I called it a desire to be good, to dazzle, to be brilliant. But nobody's interested in whether the writer is brilliant or a genius.

They're interested in the story that you're writing about and when it dawns on you that the subject is more interesting than you are, a change takes place. There are some writers who have ruined it for the rest of us by writing about themselves and writing so brilliantly.

"Philip Roth writes endlessly about his own agonising, but he does it so brilliantly that you are endlessly engaged. Someone like James Joyce has become a dead end for us or Virginia Woolf because they are so superb and they are writing about their own consciousness with extraordinary genius and that's okay if you are an extraordinary genius, but if you're not, it's just someone droning on about themselves."

The lesson learnt has served him well, although with his latest work Nicholson does return to himself – only his younger, teenage self, in his latest novel for young adults, Rich and Mad.

It tells the story of Maddy Fisher, a girl who is longing for love and a teenage boy, Rich Ross, who is also looking for love, but is scouring the wrong places for advice on how to find it – his friends and internet porn.

Nicholson says: "I started writing about young love when I was young and in love and my first three failed novels were about that.

"If you write a love story about today's teenagers, you have to make the decision about what you do about sex.

Do you pretend it doesn't exist? Do you write about it in a coy way? Or do you make it part of the story? I've made it part of the story. I don't think there's any problem with that and the more responses I get, the more I realise I have been right about that.

"It is sexually explicit and the story ends with the two virgins making love not successfully, technically, but emotionally successfully.

"It's my attempt to write something for teenagers today about how sex, when combined with love, is a time of wonder and something amazing.

"I wanted to say that, because I don't think people are saying it. People are saying you've got to love, fine, you need to know about the facts of sex, fine, but nobody's connecting the two.

"Kids are getting high romance and pornography and it's because writers don't want to get into the business of sex because they are concerned about being called pornographers or frightened of being called silly, so the field is abandoned."

Nicholson has already faced some controversy, and is prepared for more.

While he was writing the book, he realised that he would face the question of what to do about sex in a book about teenage lovers.

"I asked my publisher what the rules were and she said there are no rules," he says.

"I wanted to be honest and it seems to me it's a lie to enter teenage love and ignore the tremendous desire of sexual power and fear. My publisher backed me completely and said fine, let's do it."

Rich and Mad, published by Egmont, is available now.