I'm super excited for this guest blog. It's my first ever guest blog and I hope the start of many more to come. Matt Dunn is one of my heroes. I read his first novel Best Man a few years ago and that along with Turning Thirty by Mike Gayle, really gave me the confidence to write. Books like Best Man and The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook were exactly the sort of books I wanted to write - I just didn't know it until I read them. So I owe Matt a huge thank you for helping me get started and also another huge thank you for writing my very first guest blog. Cheers, mate!
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| This is Matt Dunn reading the aforementioned The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook. |
I'm the author of seven romantic comedy novel, which have been published in both in the UK and as far as the US, Germany, Brazil, Turkey and Serbia. On the back of that, I've also written about life, love and relationships for the likes of Cosmopolitan, Company, Glamour, Elle, The Sun, Daily Express, Guardian, Times, and the Mail on Sunday. Metro even used me as a relationship agony uncle once, though I only realised this after I'd seen the joke answers I'd submitted to what I'd though were made-up questions appear in the paper!
In terms of how I started, I knew I wanted to write from the age of fourteen, when I wrote a piece to be read out in front of the whole school which got a few laughs. And while that may have been because my flies were undone, it was then I knew I wanted to be a comedy writer. Unfortunately, it took me another twenty years to sit down and start writing my first novel, Best Man, partly because work/life got in the way, but mainly because it wasn't until I read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity that I realised there might be a readership for the kind of thing I wanted to write about.
For us men, the pursuit of women
is the thing that dominates most of our lives, and yet the strange thing is
that very few of us are any good at it. As my love life progressed – or didn't
– and I saw the trials and tribulations I and my friends were going through,
I'd often sit down with them over a beer to discuss what was going on, and the
conclusion we'd reach was often 'you couldn't make it up'. So fortunately, I
didn't have to - once I started writing, I realised I had a wealth of material,
then I just wrote how/what came naturally. Best Man was a story I'd been
mulling over for a while - I had a friend going through a similar dilemma – so
writing it seemed quite logical.
I then took the usual
submission-to-agents-followed-by-rejections route (I think I had 31, but if
you're a man, again, you're used to rejection), but a few were kind enough to
give me some feedback, which I tried to incorporate in my next rewrite.
Eventually, I got an agent, and from there, a book deal with Simon &
Schuster in the UK. The surprise was that I had to sign to write two
books, so I frantically had to come up with an idea for a second, and then
formulated the premise for The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook in the space of about
half an hour – ironic, because it went on to be my best-selling novel, sold
around the world, and was even optioned for sit-com development by CBS.
I always intended to write about
what I saw as the six main issues/dilemmas the modern man faces: friendship (Best
Man), being dumped (The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook), fatherhood (From
Here To Paternity), maintaining a relationship (Ex-Girlfriends United),
marriage (The Good Bride Guide), and proposing (The Accidental
Proposal), so once I'd done that, I had to have a long think about what I
wanted to do next – which was when my seventh novel, A Day At The Office,
was born. Having written all my novels from the first-person point of view (a
fairly straightforward approach), I thought it might be interesting to do
something different, and write a multi-strand, multi-viewpoint book set in an
office over the course of one Valentine's Day, and following the interwoven
stories of five characters as the day progressed. Hopefully it's turned out OK,
but getting the technical side/timings right and ensuring I tied up all the
loose ends meant I certainly developed a few more grey hairs while writing it.
In terms of my writing days, they
all start in the same way - I look at my mortgage statement, then frantically
start typing. Like most writers, I'll set myself a word target (either a
thousand words a day, or two thousand if I have a deadline looming) – that way,
I know I'll have written the first draft of the novel in around three months.
Then the fun starts – for me, it all comes together in the editing – and I can
put the jokes in (or at least, try and make the ones I've already written
funny), which as a comedy novelist, is what it's all about.
And next? I'm in the middle of
trying to write something a bit more serious, although to be honest, I have to
keep stopping myself from slipping jokes in, so maybe it'll turn into another
comedy after all.
Matt Dunn's latest Novel, A
Day At The Office, is available now in ebook.
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| This is Matt's latest book, A Day at the Office, pop along to Amazon and get your copy now! |
Until next time.
Hugs,
Jon X
