In conversation with: Julian Simpson

On writing, television, publishing, the creative life... and more.

Time for the start of a new feature — occasional interviews/conversations with people working in the creative industries, starting with my pal Julian Simpson.

I first met Jules when he was trying to put together a TV series based on my short stories. That never happened (approximately 107% of television projects never see the light of day), but in the subsequent twenty years we’ve met and talked often, and recently started working together on other things.

In addition to being one of the best writers and smartest people I know, he has a Substack providing extraordinarily thoughtful insights into both the film and television industry, and the writing process in general.

So, Julian: Who the hell are you and where have you come from?

JULIAN: I see you're bringing out the big guns in the first round. Well fine. Allow me to respond with an answer that is also part question (can I coin "quanswer?") 

OK, admin part — I'm a UK-based writer and director working in film, TV and audio. At least, that is what it says on all my social media profiles. What that means in practice is that since leaving school, I have managed to carve out some semblance of a career, starting with a short film, leading into a feature film called "The Criminal", which no one saw and is now whatever is the movie equivalent of out-of-print, then into writing episode of UK TV shows, then directing episodes of UK TV shows, then writing AND directing episodes of UK TV shows. At some point, Radio Four stumbled upon me. They asked if I'd like to at least spare the audience my visual sense and do some audio, so I did a bunch of radio plays for them, leading to the Lovecraft Investigations podcast series and the Aldrich Kemp radio shows. And breathe...

Right now (well, not RIGHT now because there's a WGA strike on), I mostly do my writing for the US market, but I'm still active in audio. I also have a writer-led world-building company called Storypunk, and we are in soft-prep on a movie right now that I have written and which I'm directing.

Lurking beneath all this is a more interesting question, though. And it's one that maybe we can explore together? The biographical details are easy, and I'm sure yours follow a trajectory that is at least a bit similar (i.e. we're more successful now than when we started, and I don't believe either of us trained in neurosurgery). But what I am struggling to recall as I look back is the decision point to do what I do. I remember being really into movies as a kid and doing the home movie thing when that technology became available. But at a certain point, I left school (I didn't go to university), moved to London and got a job selling advertising space on magazines for a few months. That was earning me money, and there was a career path laid out (albeit one that I was not remotely interested in following). But at some point, I chucked all that in because writing and directing movies, despite not knowing a single person in that business at all, seemed like a perfectly viable option.

Where did that confidence come from? If I sat down now and wrote out a list of pros and cons of this decision for the younger me, there would be no chance that we would arrive at "yes, go for it." Everyone around me was at university or starting careers that went somewhere. I knew literally no one who was doing what I wanted to do, so I had no model or mentor or roadmap. I cannot fathom the confidence (or possibly ignorance) that fuelled this choice. I didn't wait to set something up before jumping ship, either, I just bailed on a regular life and went all-in on this path without any kind of plan, contacts, anything. I mean, it worked out, but what was I thinking?

So I guess that's my return question: include biographical details by all means, but can we also zero in on the complete improbability that either of us has got where we are and explore the what-the-hell-were-we-thinking of it all?

MICHAEL: Why not — because that’s what aspiring writers often most want to know: often enshrined in what they assume to be the formative question, “How do you find an agent”… whereas any battle-scarred writer knows to their irritation and occasional despair that, WITH A FEW HONORABLE EXCEPTIONS, all agents do is work on contracts and disappoint you through strident inactivity.

TL;DR of me: While at Cambridge — where I was allegedly studying Philosophy and Social & Political Science, but mainly doing shows with the Footlights — an old friend introduced me to Stephen King’s work. I immediately read everything he’d written, going on to discover Peter Straub and then the English horror giants like Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker, and immediately decided this was what I wanted to do: with absolutely no evidence that I could. I gained new friends through entering the genre, and a couple of them — notably Stephen Jones and Nicholas Royle — were a huge help in finding my feet. One of the surprising things about the horror genre is how bloody nice everybody is... and Straub and Campbell also became friends.

In the meantime my college pals and I tried to make a go of comedy. This was the era of improv and standup, however, and so four young toffs from Cambridge presenting meticulously-crafted skits were not what anybody wanted. I somehow got a job in event planning and graphic design instead, while starting to write horror stories under the name Michael Marshall Smith.

Then, for no obvious reason, I wrote a science fiction novel (Only Forward), inspired by a dream I’d had. To my surprise, it sold to HarperCollins — meaning I was now apparently an SF writer. So I wrote two more (both of which, it only occurs to me now, were also kick-started by dreams). Then, to keep everybody on their toes (and bewilder my publisher), I wrote a present-day serial killer novel — The Straw Men. To avoid confusion in the market I allowed myself to be talked into a dumb decision, and lopped the “Smith” off my novel-writing name and became Michael Marshall. That book did surprisingly well, so I wrote two more.

Then, because I have no idea how to run a career, I veered off into supernatural thrillers. Three novels later, after a calamitous and deal-ending disagreement with a new editor (who’d inherited me on an expensive contract, and basically been told to get rid of me) I took another name and have subsequently written two adventure thrillers (starting with The Anomaly) as Michael Rutger. Then just for kicks and to muddy the waters further, I wrote a semi-comedic novel called Hannah Green and her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence, back under the name Michael Marshall Smith.

Now I’m mainly working in TV, however — partly as Creative Director of Neil Gaiman’s production company, and also as writer/producer.

This whole chaotic journey brings me back to your question (finally). When Neil called (I was standing in a Whole Foods parking lot at the time) and asked if I’d come on board, I had zero TV experience except for having written a few speculative scripts. The imposter syndrome started before we’d even finished the conversation — and at epic, CNN-worthy levels. A couple of days later I was suddenly on high-stakes conference calls with angry producers and actors like Ian McShane, trying to help sort out the apocalyptic mess that was season two of American Gods.

Did I think I knew what I was doing? No. Did I believe I had a right to be there? Of course not. But.. there I was. So do it.

It’s been four years now and I hope I’ve grown into the job, and/or discovered I already had relevant skills and that it was primarily a matter of having (or faking) the confidence to apply them. And I suspect it was the same with entering writing in the first place. I decided writing novels was what I wanted to do: therefore I was going to do it. Like you, I look back now and think “Huh, took a bit of a gamble there, didn’t you mate?”... but here I am, and here you are, decades later, still turning up every day to the word mines, and somehow earning a living out of it. There’s a shit-ton of ludicrous good fortune involved in my “career”, but also a lot of digging in.

So I’ll hand it back to you: What keeps you here? Given the challenges and disappointments of a creative life... why do you still do it? And do you think the haphazard zig-zags are part of what keeps it fresh and compelling, dangling that endless promise of it all finally coming good at a yacht-buying level?

JULIAN: The yacht-buying instantly reminded me of a David Lee Roth quote, “Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.”

I guess the simplest answer to the question is that I don’t know how to do anything else. I still find myself, thirty-some years on from that fateful decision, walking down the street, watching other people doing their jobs and thinking, “Could I do that? If this all ended tomorrow, is that a thing I could do?” And the answer is invariably no. So the complete lack of options is certainly a factor somewhere in the thinking.

More than that, though, I don't want to do anything else. I think it's a truism of most writer-directors that when you're writing, you wish you were directing, and vice versa. But even given that, I actually wouldn't want to be doing anything else (and I secretly don't understand how or why anyone does).

I think, deep down, I've just always really liked making up stories. There's something about having that initial spark of an idea and nurturing it, and then feeling it reach out and connect to other ideas... Stephen King talks about it in terms of dusting off a perfect fossil - the thing is buried just below the surface, and it's perfectly intact, and your job is to gently uncover it without accidentally hacking off a leg (or having some exec smash its skull with a mallet because algorithms). So it feels like discovery, a lot of the time, as much as invention. And I like how it all comes together and the elation when a plot twist or something a character does surprises you (which happens all the time, despite how incredibly precious and pretentious that sounds). I love getting a character's voice and writing dialogue and moments. And then I equally love being on set with the actors and crew and taking this thing all the way from the germ of an idea, that spark, into something tangible that you can present to an audience.

That whole process, despite its emotional and logistical ups and downs, is just amazing. And the reason most of us are so pissed off all the time is that we are flanked at every turn by execs, lawyers etc, who want to standardise that process into something that they can understand and quantify in their terms. And if they get their way, which they usually do because suit trumps jeans every time, they invariably fuck it up in some way, minor or major, for all the people in the process who actually care about the thing.

And so, to wind my way languidly back to the actual question, I think the reason I keep going, or keep coming back for more punishment(!) is not so much to do with buying the yacht but because THIS TIME I have a great idea for something, and maybe THIS TIME I'll be able to shepherd it through without someone screwing it up. (I am happy to screw it up myself, by the way, I just resent it when someone else screws it up for me).

So, yeah, I would probably keep doing this even if no one ever paid me again (that's not a suggestion), because there's genuine pleasure and fulfilment in the process. The great shame of it is the pointless interference (as opposed to the eminently reasonable "we can't afford that on the budget" interference - I'm perfectly happy with practical limitations, just not creative ones). But even then, I'd rather be in this fight than any other fight (or, God forbid, an actual fight).

So, the bounce-back question... And this kind of scratches an itch I have at the moment. Take a great movie, like The Godfather, a great TV show, like Breaking Bad and a great novel, like To Kill A Mockingbird (and feel free to substitute your own examples if these don't resonate); which would you rather have created and why? I'm interested to know how you measure the level of craft, achievement, and the cultural impact, of stories across different media. And yes, I'm very aware this sounds like an exam question, sorry!

MICHAEL: I only wish exams had questions like that! Firstly, I wanted to echo some of what you said above in terms of the reality of the creative process. That “discovering a fossil” feeling, or maybe “Listening hard enough that you hear the bones of a story some invisible spirit is telling nearby”, is exactly how it feels to me. Stories are discovered rather than made, at least in that central kernel idea. The process is then, as King says of the fossil... to not to drop it on the hard floor. As chefs sometimes put it: Source the best ingredients, and then don’t fuck them up.

And fucking stories up is so easy. So often I’ve got to the end of a novel and thought “Okay, that’s fine, and as good as I can do... but it doesn’t have the pure glory of the initial spark, when everything seemed possible, and this could have been a thing of perfection.” The first word you type starts the process of lessening its potential. I read a great quote from the sorely-missed Martin Amis about that only the other day, in London Fields: how when the halfway mark is passed you start to relax into the knowledge that the thing will get finished after all, and it’ll be fine... while still wishing “the gods of talent had thrown you that little bit higher or further”.

But... you do what you can with the talent you’ve got, and the time available, against what may be a strong headwind from the people you have to convince to let it out into the world.

Ideas have a life of their own, which is why I seldom note down something I think might be enough to inspire a novel. They have to possess the vitality to keep hassling me, prodding me, saying “Go on, write me, it’ll be fun” — utter lie though sometimes turns out to be. Also why I don’t like the planning process, and often forego it: otherwise an idea can start to feel like a houseguest that’s stayed too long. Not that I recommend this as a process, especially with film and TV. Don’t do this. It’ll be great fun to write the first two acts and then you’ll realize you have no clue what you’re doing, what happens next, or why you thought it was a good idea in the first place.

In terms of which I’d prefer to have created, from the choice of a superb TV show, movie or book... it’d have to be the novel. Though I now work in the other media and astonishingly good and life-changing works can be achieved in both, the novel is where I feel at home (or used to — I haven’t written one in four years, which bugs me). There’s a kind of one-on-one you experience there. It’s just you, alone in that world, for months and months: especially if you manage, as I normally do, to deflect the publishers’ gentle enquiries as to what this one’s actually going to be about.

With TV and film you know from page one — even if you’re a writer/director — that you’re going to be handing the world you’re conjuring up to other people to manifest. I’m not even talking here about the often-infuriating but occasionally instructive process of dealings with execs and producers (and of course in prose there’s editors to withstand, and sometimes be saved by). It’s more that inherent in screen projects is a knowledge that you’ll rely upon actors to evoke some elements of the characters, that there’ll be music and a foley to be wrought, a DOP to get the thing on video or film, sets to be conceived and built... and while you may have a say in all this, it ain’t you doing it. With a novel, it’s all on you. You conjure a universe entire, and for a while you truly live there.

Sometimes that’s a challenge, and a burden, but it’s also a wonderful feeling. Like you, I can’t really do anything else, and I don’t want to. I’m a guy who makes shit up. To be responsible for making up entire worlds... that’s what I love most. When it works.

I’ll hand this back to you with a timely question. What do you think’s going to happen to creatives in our trades? I’m not referring for the moment to the spectre of AI: more the situation with studios and streamers who seem to neither understand nor care about what we do in creative terms, who broke the old models of television and film for one based on escalating share price, and who now seem to be dimly realizing it’s not going to work long-term?

JULIAN: I'm quite obsessed with this question at the moment. And I think a lot of people are pondering it because of the WGA strike, and the conditions that led to it. But I think there are a few assumptions that are worth examining. I don't buy the idea that the people at the top of the movie studios and TV networks/streamers care less about the creative than they used to. I don't think they've ever cared. I'm not talking about studio execs or producers here, I mean the people who write the cheques; the boards, the share-holders etc, the people who are in this business for profit. And the movie and TV industries have always been run for profit. There have been times where profit came from telling good stories well, but that has always been the exception, rather than the rule.

You're right that the streamers broke the old TV model. But that wasn't a great model - for every West Wing, there were a dozen bad, cynical shows generated to sell advertising.

For a brief moment, the streamers had something better, but they got greedy and they started spending more money than they could afford on movie star projects they didn't need, leveraged by Wall Street valuations that were based on smoke and mirrors. And then the same Wall Street douchebags who over-valued the streamers realised their mistake and insisted that the streamers cut costs. And so now we find ourselves with an ad-supported streaming model and no one taking any risks at all, and the tech bros trying to pass this transition off as a "pivot", when really they are just back to a network TV model, which they are ill-equipped to understand because they already broke that model without ever having explored it.

So that's a cluster-fuck, right there. But it's shenanigans, and there are always shenanigans. The fact is that it is hard right now to get a good show off the ground. But it has always been hard.

The same goes for movies, but there we had the rise of the franchises, which are running out of steam now (though it will be a while before anyone will admit that). We've gone through the first phases of the Marvel movies and, up to Avengers: Endgame, those were pretty good. They weren't movies, as those of us who grew up in the seventies understand movies, but they were really fun rides. But in recent years, they have gone off the boil, and I'm not sure how, or if, they can bow out gracefully.

Hollywood is a place governed by fear, and when these folk are scared they tend to look for sure things. Right now, they think IP is the sure thing, so they're only interested in making shows and movies based on books, comics, video games, or other movies and TV shows. This is a perfectly understandable strategy, but it's a bit like sitting down at the roulette table and putting all your money on red; the odds aren't bad, but the payout is too small to sustain itself. You don't get The Matrix or Star Wars or Indiana Jones or Stranger Things that way.

So at the present time, absent the situation with the strike, Hollywood is panicking. This is a disconcerting time to be a creator, but it's arguably also the best time. The gold rush is subsiding, and everyone's pausing for breath. No one is buying at the moment, and some companies might start to fail while production is on hold. Finance is harder to come by, and no one seems to know what the next thing is. But out of situations like these can come new opportunities, new ways of doing business, and new companies that might succeed in new ways.

It's our job to watch and wait, and to navigate this new landscape as it starts to emerge. Spending a long time watching the ups and downs of this industry has made me, perversely, an optimist. And my optimism is based on one simple idea; that a bunch of tech bros and bankers making drastic mistakes and misunderstanding the entertainment business is a sideshow because the fact is that people will always pay money to be told good stories. So we have to, as far as possible, ignore all the nonsense and continue to create good stories, in whichever medium we can, and to get them to the audience by whatever means are available.

That's the in-a-nutshell version of my thinking on this, at least. And I'm focusing on the TV and Film industries. But as someone who has just embarked on the impossibly long journey of writing a novel, I'm interested to ask you a similarly themed question: "What the fuck is going on with the publishing industry? It looks like a hellscape out there at the moment!"

MICHAEL: Totally agree with your summation on TV above, and as you know — I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with that’s novel-shaped. When it comes to publishing, I feel I should admit that I’m a little off the pace as — for a variety of reasons — it’s been three or four years since I’ve tangled with the publishing industry either in terms of trying to sell them a book, or helping them sell one to an audience. I miss it, and intend to get back to it very soon, but in the meantime there’s no denying the industry is going through some things.

Advances are way down, to the point where it’s not a profession where you can really hope to make a living unless you’re up in the rarified realms of the super-bestsellers, or else were a celebrity beforehand, and you and the publisher are using this to increase your mutual worth. Of course there’s lucky break-out books, and plenty of very talented people working in publishers to try to find them. Nurturing authors, as in the old days, however? I’m not sure there’s much of that going on any more. Going from hopeful unknown to someone with sufficient sales to pay the bills is an uphill slope right now — partly because there’s just so damned much out there. The “democratization of publishing” some people proclaimed with the advent of self-produced eBooks and print-on-demand and “indie publishing” has merely lead to an absolutely vast amount of unedited books of indifferent quality (or worse) in almost every genre. That’s going to get even acute as people start feeding AIs with prose prompts, slapping an AI cover on it, and calling the result a novel.

There’s also an increasing challenge in how you differentiate yourself in that swollen market — how the industry of it works. Not so very long ago every publisher had active and professional marketing and PR departments. Ads would be designed and placed, book tours embarked upon, launches sculpted, huge piles of books sitting in the bookstore on every main street. Most of those are gone now, and marketing a book is 90% virtual. The publisher runs a Goodreads promotion or sets up a “blog tour” and hands over some assets for the writer to circulate around social media... and that’s it. Everything else is down to the authors themselves — the endless and frankly soul-destroying task of trying to “build a brand” aka pimp yourself... while tens of thousands of other weary fuckers are out there doing exactly the same.

Building a career as a fiction writer has never been easy... but it seems harder than ever now. The next book I sell will likely not cover even the family’s health insurance for the year, in terms of advance. Once you’ve got past the point where having something published with your name on it is sufficient grail, that’s not super-motivating.

BUT I think this just reinforces both the last point you made and also the tenor of most of what we’ve said overall. Creators create. Yeah, we want and deserve paying for it, but we’re gonna create anyway. It’s not a choice. And now and always, both in books and TV, part of that job is holding the line, watching the markets and the industry, and figuring out how to both make a living and have some fun.

I can’t do anything else, partly because I don’t want to. Writing’s what I do, and it’s been pretty good to me so far. Nobody said it’d be easy, or that the conditions or challenges would remain the same. That’s the creative life. If you have a career that lasts longer than a decade then the playing field is bound to change and shift during your span as the world spins and progress happens, for better or worse. Both streaming and AI are merely the next challenges to either overcome, or work with.

Either way we keep writing, because it’s what we do and no fucker can stop us.

JULIAN: I think that's exactly right. I read an article this morning about how to reinvent yourself; just wipe everything out and start again from scratch. I have no interest in doing that, because there's nothing else I want to do. I think there are always obstacles, and the landscape is constantly shifting, but at its core, what we do is make up stories, and that has been a bullet-proof profession since humans started walking upright.

We may have ups and downs, we may fall out of favour occasionally, but however the media evolve, and whatever the role technology plays in that evolution, there will always be a place for the person who can sit at the campfire and spin a yarn.