Danielle:

Today, I am delighted to have Ian McMillan with me, writer, poet, broadcaster, and so much more. I really love the playful and touching nature of Ian’s work, whether it’s going right back to the stories and poems and autobiography in the super fun book, Dad, the Donkey’s on Fire, or whether it’s more recent works like Ian’s beautiful and really funny memoir, My Sand Life, My Pebble Life, which I really enjoyed. So I have so many questions for Ian about how he brings humour into his work. But before we dive in, Ian, is there anything else you want to add with regards to you and your work?

Ian McMillan:

Oh that sounds good to me, that sounds excellent, what a great introduction.

Danielle:

Great. So I want to take you back because I’ve read that you wanted to be a writer all through your school days. I’m just curious whether humour showed up early for you, or if that’s something that you evolved as you grew.

Ian McMillan:

I’ve been thinking about this and this sounds made up but actually it was November 1967 when I was 11 when I wanted to start making people laugh because I was a studious kind of boy at junior school and I liked reading. I liked reading kind of odd science fiction things at the same time as reading comics and I liked watching strange shows on the radio like on the tele I mean like the Avengers. I liked the kind of weirdness of the plots. And at the same time I was a quiet serious boy and I think it was around that time there was a show on that was a precursor to Monty Python’s flying circus called Do Not Adjust Your Set which was a children’s program that had some of the people out of Python in it and what I liked about it was its absurdity. And people would say ridiculous things. And at the same time, I was watching a bit of Spike Milligan.

So we went on a school trip to London and went to the Albert Hall to see an orchestra which was fantastic. But on the way back from the school trip I remember thinking… this is November 1967 so I was 11… and I thought… if I say something ridiculous it might make people laugh. So I remember I had some kind of pen or pencil and I said something like, I can’t remember the exact words…. ‘This isn’t a pencil, it’s actually the feather from an ancient Chinese bird that lived for four hundred years and died by eating too much porridge.’ And so that kind of thing, that thing just fell out of my head and my mates laughed.

I thought… that’s interesting. I didn’t quite know where that came from, that sentence. And then I started doing it all the time. I would just say ridiculous things all the time that were a sort of bumping together of different kinds of language. So they bumped together the descriptive and the outlandish, the surreal and the ordinary. And I was getting laughs. I was getting kind of odd looks as well but I was getting a lot of laughs. You know I’d say…. well I’ll just have a cup of hedgehog… rather than say… I’ll have a cup of tea. And for some reason that rubbing together of different registers of language made people laugh.

So I realised then that I could make people laugh. It’s a funny thing and it’s like an obsession and a disease that you’ve got to make people laugh all the time. And if people don’t laugh… for example, this afternoon I was doing an interactive poetry event with a big gang of pensioners in my local library. They didn’t realise it was interactive until I got the flip chart out and we started making things up. All the pensioners laughed apart from one who was sat on the third row and sat completely glum and didn’t, well she kind of enjoyed it but she wasn’t laughing and I took that as my personal quest to make her laugh. Right, I’m going to make you laugh Mrs, I’m going to make you laugh. There was a lady on the front row who was a bit hard of hearing so I was able to speak loudly and that was alright for her but the one on the third row… and in the end I’ve got to tell you I failed, she didn’t laugh. She didn’t laugh once. She smiled at the end and said… I enjoyed that. And so I took that as a personal affront…. that I couldn’t make her laugh. I was an absolute total failure. So it is this weird disease, I think, or I don’t know, an obsession or an addiction is the word. It’s an addiction to making people laugh and it’s just a weird thing.

Danielle:

But so beautifully described there. And I still love that you had that quest and who knows what she was thinking after you left, I’m sure you still touched her day.

Ian McMillan:

It occasionally happens where somebody comes up at the end of something and goes… and they haven’t laughed at all, they’ve not laughed and they go… I really enjoyed that. And you think, well, you miserable, why didn’t you just laugh once? But then again, you know, some people enjoy it without laughing. And then sometimes the opposite happens where somebody laughs uproariously and kind of loudly and… what he said wasn’t all that funny and they’re laughing. And I’m laughing and people around them are getting a bit miffed by the fact these people are laughing and they can’t stop laughing and you’ve obviously tickled them in some way

but it’s like they’ve gone right over the top.

And then very occasionally… very occasionally I get the giggles myself which isn’t very professional. But I remember once I was doing a thing and there was a lady on the front row and as I’m doing the thing she was laughing but I thought I kept thinking… she looks like somebody. She looks like somebody… does she look like somebody I know? Who is she? Who does she look like? And then for no reason at all, halfway through the show she put a pair of dark glasses on and she looked just like Roy Orbison. So that made me laugh, that just made me laugh. And I was laughing… and to start with they’re kind of sympathetic to your laughing, but after a bit they go… I wish he’d just stopped laughing. What’s he laughing for? So laughter is a funny thing as it were that just kind of either takes over, doesn’t appear, or hangs about in the wings waiting to suddenly bite.

Danielle:

I love that. And have you always…because you’ve got such a specific memory of when you remember really starting to engage with that…. Did you ever question it? And the reason that I’m asking that is that I feel like there are so many delightful books that engage with wordplay and rhyme schemes and let you say different things, bumping up against each other and just relishing in language for children and for young people. And that adults love too. And then… like my memory of senior school and poetry is like humour’s not allowed anywhere in the room. So did you ever question it or was this always your personal quest?

Ian McMillan:

Well, I was lucky enough to go to a West Riding County Primary School on the West Riding of Yorkshire between, well it finished in 1974, but it was a wonderful education authority that was run by this genius called Sir Alec Clegg, God rest him, who said all children are creative. And so at that junior school, I was given leave to write, to sing, to dance, to paint, to make plays. They weren’t all funny at the time they weren’t you know as serious. But it made you think… well I can be creative… I can be a creative person. Those wonderful teachers. And it was just an ordinary school. It was just a school in a pit village, but it was a school where creativity was encouraged all the time, which is why I always encourage everybody to be creative.

Then at secondary school, when I decided to be funny we had some teachers who weren’t that funny but we had one particular teacher and we were doing a book of poems, an anthology called Nine Modern Poets. And Ted Hughes was in it, and I quite liked the work of Ted Hughes.  They weren’t funny but then I remember Mr Brown took me on one side – this is 1971 – and he said… I’ve got a book of jokes here. You like comedy. Here’s a book of jokes by a comedian.

And it was Ted Hughes’s collection Crow which is a fantastic, kind of viscerally violent, shamanistic collection of poems about this crow. But because he said… here’s some jokes… it kind of made me laugh and it made me think. And then he said… oh, by the way, you could be the editor of the school magazine.

So I started writing these comedy bits for the school magazine and he said… oh, we’re doing a playwriting competition, why don’t you write a play? So I wrote a play that made people laugh, you know, and so I was encouraged by that teacher. So I’ve never really questioned it. You know, I’ve always..at times people have said… I wish you’d be a bit more serious. And I do write serious poems. And I’ve always thought about that, whether you think that somehow… you must come across this a lot in this podcast…whether, you know, seriousness, whatever the seriousness is, it’s more important culturally than the funny stuff. Even if the funny stuff is so much funnier and cleverer and more loving and more intimate than the serious stuff which might just be a bit clunky and might not work so much.

There’s this kind of idea that if you’re making people laugh you’re somehow not as clever as the ones who are making them think. So I’ve always been interested in that. I’ve always had those two things side by side in my head because I do love writing serious poems and reading serious poems and reading stuff that’s quite hard to fathom. But at the same time… give me a flip chat and a room full of people and I just like making them laugh, you know. Then they relax and they come along and they, that’s the opening, isn’t it? You make them laugh and then you say, let’s write a poem. Didn’t think they could, but they did, you know. So, I’ve never questioned it, but I’ve often been, I’ve been interested in why maybe other people question it. And also there’s that

thing where you do something that you think is funny and the people in the crowd don’t think it’s funny. That’s always fascinating to me as it’s happening. You think, oh, yesterday people laughed at this. The week before they laughed at it. It’s the same kind of group in the same kind of room, yet they’re not laughing. Absolutely endlessly, endlessly fascinating comedy it is. Although I never call myself a comedian because they always say, oh, come on, make us laugh. I like to be, I’m a writer and a poet. And then you kind of get one up on them, in a sense, because they don’t think you’re gonna be funny. And when you are, it’s like it’s a bonus.

Danielle:

Yeah. And your work is so touching as well. For example, in My Sand Life, My Pebble Life, there were so many stories that absolutely creased me up. I don’t want to spoil it for people that haven’t read it yet. People should go and read it. But there was one with a potential zip wire and a life vest and rowing. Oh my goodness, it made my sides hurt. And then there’s also incredible poignancy with some of the stories set during COVID and thinking about different relatives.

And I love that it embraces all that. And I actually really don’t like this sort of false dichotomy that people have between drama and comedy. And I see it being blended more in TV now. And people are coming up with clunky terms like dramedy and trying to find a good way of explaining it, but not necessarily helpful labels.

But I’d love to know for writers who do want to kind of… grow those comedy muscles and get better at capturing and conveying funny stories, like you do in your memoir and you do within your poems and collections…. Any practical places to start if they feel like that skill’s a little bit underdeveloped in them.

Ian McMillan:

I would think, and it’s obvious really, but always listen, always listen to people. People are so funny and they just say ridiculous things all the time. So yesterday I tweeted about it because as you know I’m always on Twitter. I tweeted about it. There were two people on the bus. I was going to Doncaster to do a workshop and this woman said…yes this gentleman’s got a sweet shop. And her mate said…yeah, he says he has. I thought wow there’s a story. There’s a thing you know.

He says he’s got… this gentleman…. called him a gentleman… this gentleman’s got a sweet shop…. he says he has. I just I tweeted that instantly because I thought there’s a thing. So if you want to write something funny you listen to that phrase and you pick out the individual words… this gentleman has got a sweet shop. And you think instantly… you see the man, you see an image of him, he looks a bit like Ronnie Barker, in Open All Hours. Then you hear that odd phrase… he’s got a sweet shop…. and it’s almost like, you know, it has echoes of a phrase like sweet spot. And it has echoes of other phrases.

So when you’re writing this kind of thing you pick up the verbal and aural echoes of a word and you think oh yeah that word could be that, that word could mean that. And then, this woman was kind of open and happy that this gentleman has got a sweet shop. And then her mate was a bit more cynical… he says he has. And the way she said it… he says he has… so says half rhymed with has. There’s two he’s in the sentence.. he says he has.

And I thought… wow you could you could write that down. But then you think all right… and as a comedy writer you will go… what happens next/ What happens they get off the bus and the cynical woman says well take me to his sweet shop. And the happy woman goes… well it’s not open today. Or something. And then they get to the sweet shop and it’s something totally different. So I would say, you know, listen. Observe. Watch the endless absurdity of real life.

The other thing I’d recommend to somebody is actually writing with somebody else. If you’re writing comedy form a team. Years ago I wrote a detective comedy series for Radio 4 that’s still on 4 extra now and then called the Blackburn Files. And there were three of us. There was me and my mate Martin and my mate Dave Sheasby. And we go to Dave Sheasby’s house and we’d write. We’d pace about the room and me and Martin would come out with gags all this time. Gag, gag, gag. And Dave would be in charge of the typewriter as it was in those days. And so he’s writing it down. So he’s in charge. So he typed this out and then you go… gag, gag. And he’d, at the same time, he’s shaping it. He’s putting it into character. So, you know, I’m trying to think of a, so you do a ridiculous gag like…what is a milliner? He’s a milliner. Well, he’s got a lot of hats. Well, he’s a multimilliner.

You know, ridiculous gag, but then he’d put that into the characters saying it, and then you go home. Me and Martin would go home, and he’d ring up and say, I’ve read it, it’s rubbish, it is terrible. What, it’s not funny, nobody’s ever gonna like this. Then you’d have to go back the next week and cheer him up and get him going. But if you write in a team and you can fire gags off each other you can practice stuff because a lot of stuff looks good on the page but it’s quite hard to say.

That’s why I liked… he says he is. You know that was just so good because she said it was so good to say. So I’d recommend that. I would recommend always, these are just obvious things really, but always have a notebook. Always have a notebook because things will occur to you and you’ll forget them. All you’ll remember is that you had an idea. And if you overhear these things and you don’t tweet them or write them down straight away, they will go. And what they’ll do is… I would then write them down and I would let them marinate overnight these phrases. And then I’d look at them and go…what are these characters telling us? How could I make this into maybe a half-hour thing or a standup routine.

Or for example, when I was working a lot in village halls, I used to find notices, I loved notices.

Danielle:

Me too.

Ian McMillan

There was a great one, their entire publicity was a notice that said… funny poet here on Friday. Just beautiful. Then the best one I ever found was a note that I found on a tree and it said… where can we go to watch people play badminton and eat our sandwiches? And it was…the word badminton was highlighted. Where can we go to watch people play badminton and eat our sandwiches?

And again that would just set you off on all kinds of roads. Why? Why badminton? There’s somewhere they can go and watch tennis, but why badminton? And so I would always hold it up as part of the routine and then at the end… they’ll never go now because I’ve pinched the notice. So things like that, just little things that you see and you find and you can gradually build into something. And it just, it trains you all the time to be listening.

It can be a bit tiring in a way, I don’t find it tiring but people said they do, if you’re always like listening. And as they say in Derbyshire… hanging the tab. You’re always hanging tab listening. But it also makes you realise you know that the wonderful thing about people is that they’re all different. And the wonderful thing about people is that they will often say pretty funny things, you know and especially if they’re talking to each other.

So I’d recommend that really. And when I first started I was just writing jokes. I used to write jokes for, there used to be a thing on Radio 4 called Week Ending. And me and my mate would write these topical gags. But because this is the days before the internet, this is way, not before the internet, but like the very early 80s, we had to post these gags to like by letter. So, and this meant to be a topical program – it was recorded on a Friday. So if anything funny happened on Thursday, we’d had it. But if something funny happened on a Tuesday, we’d post these gags. That was just how I started, just making gags with just a bit of wordplay, just tiny bits, tiny little bits of wordplay. Because I’ve always been a fan of wordplay and how it works.

What I do find is I’m not great at character. People said to me, do you fancy writing a novel? And I go, no, because they would all be like me. That’s why I enjoyed writing My Sand Life, My Pebble Life, because that was just me. That book came about because… I always swore I’d never write a book again. So I’ve written a couple of books that I quite enjoyed but I’m good at short stuff, at poems and stories and articles. So Bloomsbury rang me up and said… could you write as an introduction to a book about the coast, it’s a thousand words. I said… yeah, a thousand words, I can do that. They said…. oh we like that, a thousand words, do you fancy writing a book about the coast? I said… no, no book, no book. And they’re going… it’s not that long, it’s 50,000 words. I said… no, no book, no book.

But then, because I’m freelance you end up going well…all right then. Look how about if I write… rather than writing 50 000 words.. I write 50 1000-word bits. And they went… oh yeah that’s all right you can do that. And that’s  what it ended up being. And the idea was that I would go to a village hall… I did a lot of gigs in village halls pre-pandemic… and I’d stay over and then go to the nearest bit of coast and write about it.

But then the pandemic happened so we couldn’t go anywhere. If you’d have gone to the coast, it would have been weird. So I said to him, can I write 50 memories or more or less memories? So that’s why there are quite a few memories in there. So every day I’d come up to this little room that I’m in now and just sit there. And the great thing about it was, you know this, that memories pull other memories up. You know, so the memory of me on the zip wire then pulled up a different memory of something else and they do …they’re like little hooks. So I would recommend that as well to people actually.

Another great resource is memory. Memory is just the greatest. But then what happens is they’ll write something and I’ll say to them in a workshop, why don’t you make…do something there, could that happen? Why doesn’t that happen? They go, no, it didn’t happen like that. That’s not what happened in real life. And you go, actually, it’s not real life anymore. You know, you’re writing it. You can make things up. So, you know, you start with your memory. and then you make things up. I’m sorry if I’m rambling.

Danielle:

Not at all. No, I’m fascinated.

And do you think your memory has always been this sharp and this vivid? Or do you think that you’ve trained it to be able to time travel back and locate those different points…what you were holding up and who was there.

Ian McMillan:

I think you do train it, you definitely train it. I think you train it through reading, through writing, through listening. For me what helps is that I’m only a hundred yards, no, three or four hundred yards from where I was born. So I’ve always lived in this place. So this place knows me and I know this place. And that helps. So I can walk down the street and think, oh, that’s where Uncle Charlie fell down. Or I can get on a bus and think, oh, that’s when that thing happened on that bus. So that helps, that does help. I think you can train your memory definitely and I think you get that thing where you think, is it false? You know, somebody actually said, remember when that happened? And you go, yeah I remember that.

Like today, one of my old teachers came to this session and I said, oh Mrs. Burrows it was, Mrs. Burrows, she came to the session today. I said, you remember, Mrs. Burrows, when Mrs. York, the school secretary chased that goat out of the hall with one of those long poles that they opened the windows with. And she went… it wasn’t a long pole it was a brush. And I went… do you know in my memory it’s a long pole. So that’s interesting isn’t it…I’ve written about it… I’ve written about Mrs York chasing this goat out the room with this long pole, and Mrs Burrows remembered it being a brush. So what does that mean? I don’t know what that means. Because in the story, it’s funnier that it’s a long pole. So she’s like, she’s jousting. It’s quite funny. But, I don’t know. So yeah, I’ve always had a good memory that you can kind of tickle at the edges, I suppose. You know, so you can go… I remember that, but actually that bit is made up. And I think that’s fine. You can remember things, but then alter them a little bit to fit the story. So in the end maybe Mrs York didn’t have one of them things but in the story it’s funny and Mrs Burrows this afternoon remembered it as something else.

The other thing that’s useful is I always tell people to use the real names of people because when they make them up it’s obvious they’ve made them up. So you go look Mrs York… what a perfect name…Mrs York. I can see Mrs York and we can all see Mrs York when I say Mrs York. You know and you go to you go to Cleckheaton in West Yorkshire. That sounds like it is, but if you make the name up and call it Cleckhuddersfax, you know, it doesn’t work. So real people’s names, real places, real times, real events, but then just turn them up a notch so that a little smoke of fantasy blows through them. You know, that’s worth trying, I think. That is worth trying.

Yeah, I was amazed to see Mrs. Burrows. I thought she was dead, but then she said… hello, remember me I used to teach you. And I thought.. I didn’t remember her. So I said… is it Mrs Stansfield? She went no. I said is it Mrs Hudson? I mean I’m 67 so she must be in her late 70s at least you know. She says no it’s Mrs Burrows. Mrs Burrows.. hello and I didn’t recognise her to be honest with you. Maybe she was making it up, I don’t know, but she was a great… One of them great West Riding teachers, they’ve just got you singing, dancing, writing books.

Danielle:

Wonderful. And oh my goodness, I love that phrase, adding like a little smoke of fantasy. That’s beautiful.

Ian McMillan:

It just occurred to me, that phrase. But that’s what you can do, isn’t it? You can just have a bit of smoke of fantasy and it can do the things that smoke does. So it can kind of, it can set fire to the story but it can also obscure the story a little bit, so that, you know…because I was telling them this afternoon at this event about one of the stories in My Sand Life, My Pebble Life, about when me and my mate were walking home from school and somebody told us that the… pithead gear of Darfield main pit was Blackpool Tower that you could see through the mist. And I could see one or two people in the room kind of nodding, oh yeah, we remember that. So it’s also about a shared community, which is what I like. The fact that all this gang that were at this thing this afternoon knew it.

And I volunteer at our local museum in this village and they all come in and they just like to tell stories of things that have gone on. That kind of thing feeds you. But I realise that not everybody can live where they were born.

Danielle:

And do you find that when you think back on different things, that that’s your most common lens that you access? You described like a tickling sensation and the smoke and fantasy. And the reason that I ask that as well is that, for example, in memoir, there was a whole sort of clutch of memoirs at one time that were nicknamed misery memoirs in the sense that the tone of them had just this incredibly painful feel. Whereas you always seem to, by the time it ends up on the page, be able to access that beautifully poignant, bittersweet spot where we can still feel the longing and the loss of COVID. But it’s also with these rhythms that delight and images that spark fun. You seem to be able to access that really consistently on the page. Is that how it works with your memories or is that a process?

Ian McMillan:

That’s just that’s how it works. I’m kind of an endless optimist. I’m always optimistic. So being optimistic helps a lot you know this kind of Panglossian view of life despite the terrible times that we’re in. And so I’m always able to see the kind of broad comedy in something. But you’re right just maybe twist it a bit, make it a bit poignant. A bit like you know some of my…. I like the American essayists who used to write in the New Yorker when I was a young man. I used to read the New Yorker. I still do. But essayists like um James Thurber who could write something that was funny and serious.

And also on my shelf… I was going to get it down if I can find it..Patrick Campbell. Patrick Campbell used to be on Call My Bluff and he wrote this amazing column for the Sunday Times that was both funny and poignant at the same time and he was my role model. So for example he suffered badly from a stutter and he wrote this fantastic column about being in a little tiny room with somebody else who stuttered and they’re both stuttering. And as they’re stuttering… because they’re both exhaling quite a lot… the lamp, the light in the room because they’re both very tall starts swinging between them and kind of bashing of them on the head. And gosh I thought…I wish I could write like that.

I’ve always tried to have that edge of poignancy and it’s partly to do with I’m obsessed with sentences. I love sentences. One of my favourite things… I like writing poems, but there’s an American short story writer called John Cheever. Again I found him in the New Yorker and he writes these amazing sentences and his sentences are astonishing. They’re a bit flowery I suppose, they’re full of adjectives and adverbs but they can be both funny and poignant at the same time. In his introduction to his collected stories he says…. I remember a time when New York was lit by a river light and almost everybody wore a hat. And I thought, what a beautiful thing. Almost everybody wore a hat, not everybody. And New York was lit by a river light.

And you know, when I’m doing writing workshops, I talk to people about individual words. You know, the word, this sounds stupid, but the word a and the word the. I love those words, because you go, A woman walked in a room. You go, which woman? What room? The woman walked in the room. You go, oh yeah, that woman, that room. So it’s, you kind of, if it’s the, you know the woman. If it’s a woman, which woman’s that? You know, you kind of write about.

So, see, I work very hard on these sentences when I’m writing things like My Sand Life, My Pebble Life. And when I do… I do columns… I do a column for the Yorkshire Post every week, which is based really…. I try and write it like Patrick Campbell wrote his. And I write a column for the Barnsley Chronicle, which is slightly broader and more kind of comedy. And again, I’m just trying to work on the sentences and try and put something funny and poignant in at the same time. You can kind of train yourself to do it. Sometimes what you try and work against is sort of sentimentality.

I’m a very sentimental person and I know I can be accused of that and that’s fine. And also a kind of… flippant kind of fulcrum in the sentence so that you’ll go gag whoops poignant bit you know you don’t want to do it too much like that. But I would recommend Patrick Campbell. His collected columns…35 years on the job. And it’s just every week he did this column for the Sunday Times. There’s a brilliant one about him and his wife driving in the Alps and he suddenly looks out of the car and there’s an aeroplane passing him underneath because he’s so high up.

Danielle:

Oh wow.

Ian McMillan:

And there’s just a great bit at the end where he goes… I enjoyed the holiday. I like it where I am under the bed holding onto the floor. You know, it’s just poignant and funny.

And the other thing you said earlier, rhythm, rhythm is such a great thing. Rhythm in speech, rhythm in performance, definitely. But also rhythm on the page. That’s partly to do with the way we speak. But also once we start putting things on the page, we can be in charge of the rhythm of the sentence or the paragraph. So I always, I start from the basis of the sentence and then I move up to the paragraph.

I think the paragraph can be another beautiful thing that you can work with. But like today with this gang in the library, I said we’re going to make a choral…it’s going to be a choral piece. So they all had to go… a choral piece, a choral piece, this will be a choral piece. And I had to go… What’s it about? And they went… the library. And so it was just absolutely beautiful. There’s a bloke outside setting off fireworks for some reason. So that added to it somehow. Somebody setting off fireworks. Oh dear. Sorry, I’m rambling.

Danielle:

That’s amazing. And I’ve written down those recommendations. Thank you.

Ian McMillan:

I’m just going to stand on this chair.

Danielle:

Okay. A moment of, a moment of jeopardy.

ian mcmillan:

Jeopardy, Jeopardy. Here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go. Right I’m back. This is the first Patrick Campbell book I ever got. Fat Tuesday Tails. I’ve covered it with plastic because it’s so precious. And then I got that and then I got this one. 35 years on the job, Patrick Campbell, 1937-73. Astonishing writing, really just. And they’re quite short, they’re about 800-900 words, so they’re not long. And there’s a great one where he says… So far I, naked, have rushed at people three times. What a great opening line. Alright, who are they? He’s just so good at beginnings and endings. So I would recommend that to people. Find a writer that you like and read them as a writer, because…. read them and dissect their sentences. Think how have they done that? How have they made me laugh? How have they made me cry? What words have they used? It’s to do with rhythm, it’s to do with assonance, it’s to do with the sound of it, it’s to do with how you build those sentences. You know, do it and always, like T.S. Eliot said, always read with a notebook beside you. I’m quite happy to write in books. People tell me off for writing in books, but I like to write in books and just underline stuff

Danielle:

Me too.

Ian McMillan:

Doing arrows and you know, because that’s what it is. I think that shows that you love a book. If you love a book, you’re writing in it. One of my producers at The Verb, she gets really cross when I write on a book. But it just, I think it’s just like, it’s just to show that you love it.

Danielle:

Yeah, I agree.

Ian McMillan:

But they… poignant sentences, some of my favourite, Americans can do them so much better than us somehow. American writers are just really good at making poignant sentences, I don’t know what it is, partly I think again to do with place names, you know their place names have got such rhythm, you know like Wichita Lineman, that great song. Wouldn’t work so well if it was Rotherham, you know. You know, partly because we have this romantic image of it.

But yeah, I would recommend dissecting anything you read. And the writer won’t mind that. The writer will be really pleased. If you can talk to a writer, if ever I interview writers and ask them detailed questions about their writing, they’re always pleased because people don’t often ask them that.

Danielle:

I think that’s lovely. And it’s so inspiring hearing the way that you talk about sentences and paragraphs, because I think again, if your experience of poetry, like most of mine is still from school, like I’m super passionate about fiction and very interested in other forms and have been reading a lot more poetry in the last year, because I’ve been taking the Ray Bradbury challenge to read a poem, a short story and an essay every night.

Ian McMillan:

Wow.

Danielle:

Because he said then it like deposits like pomegranate seeds in you and fruits. Previously, I was very drawn to work like yours or Wendy Cope or Pam Ayres, things that I know how to access, but other poems I’ve struggled with. And I think some of it is because of the way that it’s taught. Even things like sentences and paragraphs become things of grammar, which is important and is beautiful, but then sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s the beauty that’s attached to it. It feels like it’s the mechanics

But you’re able to do all of it, to have the craft and to have… Like it gets me so excited to think about sentences and paragraphs the way you talk about it.

Ian McMillan:

Well it’s a shame that these days school education is the opposite to what I had. You know, because we were taught grammar through the example of writers, we looked at writers. We weren’t told that these were particular kinds of words but we knew how they worked rhythmically. And I think it’s a real shame that young children are being maybe put off the gorgeousness of language by being tested on it. You know, it’s a shame. People should always find their own way into language.

You know, I don’t mind what I call variant spelling. I don’t mind if things are spelled wrong. I mean, I’m so interested in language change. The one that I’ve noticed recently that I find really interesting is the way that peak, as in I’ll have a sneak peek. Spelling has altered. So now it’s peek, as in P-E-E-K, has become P-E-A-K, as in the peak of a mountain. I’ll have a sneak peak.

Danielle:

Oh!

Ian McMillan:

You see, have a look in all kinds of, in press releases, in official documents, in adverts. Sneak peak, and people are getting cross and going… it should be sneak peek. And I go, you’re not going to stop it. You know, language, that’s what language does. That’s the great thing about language. And if we as writers have got that, you know, we can do what we want with language. We absolutely can.

A lot of the time I quite like reading strange, unfathomable poems that I can’t understand. Partly because these people are really having a great time with language. But I’m interested in language change, in the way that the apostrophe…I think, is dying out. Good. And I think, things like sneak peak… You think, well where’s that come from? And it’s so interesting that it’s there.

People get very cross about apostrophes. And I always say… I did a song with me and my mate, we used to do village halls, and we had a song called Apostrophe Amnesty Day, when I said… look, today’s Apostrophe Amnesty Day, put them where you like. And we wrote this song that went..It’s Apostrophe Amendsty Day, throw in a comma, don’t let it get in the way. And then all the audience had to join in. And you could see the ones that were joining in going… I don’t know, this isn’t right.

Again, you get genuinely on Twitter, people going, I’m gonna kill them because they’ve put the apostrophe in the wrong place. And you think, well, you know, I would think get a life, frankly, because in the end, language will go its own way. And you know, King Canute trying to stop language, it’s not gonna happen at all.

Danielle:

Oh my goodness, I have so many questions I want to ask you, but I want to be respectful of your time. So I’m going to ask you one last craft based question, which is just you mentioned in your interactive project that is focused around Elvis. And for example, I also love music and I have books of song lyrics of my favorite writers because I also really love song lyrics. Again, I find them like an accessible way in and I love some of the imagery and all kinds of things. And I can… I find it easier to hear them. I don’t think, my ear is just…it’s nowhere near as developed as you being able to hear a poem and see a poem and translate that process well. So I’d love to know why you’re using music in the interactive project or focusing on Elvis.

Ian McMillan:

I’ve done such a lot of work with musicians over the years. You know, I’ve written musicals, I’ve written lyrics for songs, I’ve written operas, and I just love that place where words and music meet. It’s such an interesting place where, you know, the musician can take a line that’s maybe not that inspiring and make it better.

The thing I’ve just done, I’ve just translated the Barber of Seville into Yorkshire dialect which was a fascinating project

Danielle:

Wow.

Ian McMillan:

because there’s an existing English translation in standard English and I’ve been interested in dialect operas for a while, I wrote one a few years ago and so I had to take the existing English translation and translate into Yorkshire but I wasn’t allowed any more words because it already fitted the song, the arias and the choruses. So that was such a craft-based task. I had to, I wasn’t allowed that…. I thought if there’s one more syllable here I could do a great gag but I couldn’t. So I’m fascinated by that mixture of words and music.

Me and my mate Luke would write instant songs with an audience you know. Just, that meeting of words and music is great for me. The Elvis thing is just a kind of absurd thing where at my local museum on Saturday, we’re doing this interactive Elvis event where we pretend that Elvis actually came to Barnsley. They say that he landed in Scotland in 1957. He didn’t. He landed in Barnsley, pretending. And so we’re going to meet in the museum and we’re going to tell them he landed in Barnsley. Some gullible people will believe this. I’m then going to take them across to the local church hall, which is the old cinema, and say this is where they show Blue Hawaii. And he went to see it. Actually stood up and interrupted the film. And then we’re going to go down the churchyard and find some of the graves of his ancestors down in the churchyard and then in a wonderful meeting of words and music we’re going to go back to the museum and I’m going to pretend that I’ve discovered that every Elvis song can be sung to the tune of Illkla Moor Baht’ At…So I’m going to get the assembled crowd,  and in fact it’s true so if we can sing well bless me soul what’s wrong with me wrong with me, I’m itching like a man in a buzzy tree, I am all shook up, all shook up.

And that’s just a kind of absurd thing. We like to do absurd events at the museum and that’s just for me it’ll be like a one-hour-long improv in a way, just improvising about Elvis. And then it’ll culminate with me and this guy Richard playing the guitar and we’ll sing a bit of Elvis. And so I’ve always been interested in the meeting of words and music and… I’d like to do more of it, you know. Me and my mate Luke have been writing words and music and what was nice, the thing I used to like doing best was just making up a song so we’d get the audience to give us a few words and they’d shout out words, this is in the village halls, and then he would start a riff and then this was a kind of process beyond thought, a kind of improvisatory process where you open your mouth and because it’s got a rhythm. and because you think I’m gonna make this rhyme, then you come out with this thing. And I had no idea where it was coming from. And if you suddenly started thinking about it, you think, I sound ridiculous, you would then stop. And then people would go, oh, you must have made that up before. And I go, I didn’t. And it was something… sometimes I had to convince them. But yes, that’s the interactive Elvis tour of Darfield. Ha.

Danielle:

Oh my goodness, this sounds extraordinary.

Ian McMillan:

Well the other thing I did, I must tell you is that the museum itself, I always tell people, it’s the only museum in the world named after a gay cross-dressing ex-Marine who was the great Maurice Dobson. It’s the Maurice Dobson Memorial Heritage Centre. Maurice Dobson and his partner Fred were that rare thing, an out gay couple in the 60s in a pit village in Barnsley. And they had a corner shop and Maurice was like a character from a Noel Coward play. And he wore a blue powder blue suit and he had a cigarette in a holder and was very camp. His partner Fred was less so and they had a swearing parrot that used to swear when people went in. So eventually when Maurice died he gave the corner shop to the local amenities group as a museum. So for the last 20 years, it’s been a museum.

So last year on April Fool’s Day we did this stunt where I said we published it in the local paper we said we found some jars down in the cellar that through obscure, what do we call it, obscure recording techniques actually contain the voices of Morrison Fred who died in 1977 and we have a jar with the parrot in it and people believed it. This local council went, is it true? I said yes it’s true. We invited them all to the great unscrewing….we had this thing we called the great unscrewing… and it was… and they all sat around and my mate was playing like portentous music on the squeezebox.

Then I said…. we’re going to open the first one, one and this was like Morris and Fred singing and I opened it nothing happened and he went wah wah. Now so with the second one and we unscrewed it and the audience had to shout…. unscrew the jar…. we unscrewed the jar and nothing happened. Then we got to the third one, the parrot swearing it and nothing happened again it was just the most beautiful poignant thing. So yeah we like to do absurd events at the Morris Dobson Museum. So much fun.

Danielle:

I love it. Oh my goodness. I feel like I’ve had a little trip myself. I can imagine that so clearly. That’s awesome.

Ian McMillan:

Good. If you’re ever around this way come and see us we’re open Saturdays and Wednesdays and it is quite a remarkable place I’ve got to say. In fact we have a couple of people who are such fans of it… there’s a friend of mine who lives in Nottingham who comes up at least once a month just to be in this place where people just talk and things happen and it’s just a bit ridiculous.

Danielle:

Beautiful. Memorable. And for… lots of people listen from the US to this podcast as well. So if you’re not lucky enough to come to the museum, then definitely I highly recommend all of Ian’s books. And there’s lots of ways to listen to you online as well. But Ian, where would you like people to go to find you who haven’t had that lovely experience before? Where should they go to find you? Online.

Ian McMillan:

I would say go to my Twitter which is @IMcMillan…because I just tweet endlessly all the time. But I get up very early in the morning and go for a stroll, so I tweet about that. Also I have a website ian-mcmillan.co.uk. And my radio three show The Verb is on BBC Sounds. Twitter’s often the best place to find me because I’m there all the time I’m always there perhaps too much.

Danielle:

I’m going to have to ask you, I said no more questions, but just one last question, because I feel like there’s quite a lot of anti-Twitter sentiment in the writing community at the minute. And I love that you still love it. Is that because you’re an optimist, because you love the brevity of the form? You connect with people. What do you love? Because it’s nice to hear a different take.

Ian McMillan:

All those three, it’s because I’m an optimist. It’s because my little… kind… end of Twitter doesn’t seem to… get the horror… that other places do. I know there can be nastiness, but I’m honestly, I’m not kidding when I say maybe I’ve had… two or three… nasty tweets. Do you know Miranda Keeling? She does the most beautiful… tweets, just little observation tweets. She did a book of her tweets. Moose Allain. Moose like the animal and A-L-L-A-I-N, he’d be very good for this podcast, he’s a cartoonist. He does the most beautiful tweets. He gets what Twitter can be so he put like…I couldn’t get my trousers off so I had to have an emergency trachebotomy, you know what a clever gag that is. And then I made a model of Everest, was it to scale, no just to look at. Beautiful, almost poems.

So that’s why I like that. I like the brevity of it, but I also like the way it forces me, it forces me to be creative. So that in the morning I get up five o’clock and I tweet my pre-stroll tweet. So I tweet something that I’ve just thought of as I get up, often a gag or an observation. Then I go on my early morning stroll and I train myself. It’s always the same walk around the village, always the same walk. and I train myself to see five different things. So I put those in the tweet.

And if I don’t tweet, if I’m doing something else, I tell people in advance. And if I don’t tell them, they think I’m dead or they think something’s happened. And then I always tweet, I always have my first cup of tea, and I try and tweet something beautiful about my first cup of tea. And all the time I want people to go, I could do that. That’s all I ever want people to do. So yeah, Twitter, find me on Twitter. There’s another Ian McMillan who gets quite grumpy, and he has to put,

I’m not Ian McMillan the writer. I think he’s a plumber from Scotland somewhere, but he’s a different spelling. So yes, come and see me on Twitter. I’m always there.

Danielle:

I love it. And thank you so much. I feel that you’ve literally rewired parts of my brain in the most beautiful way and given me such an inspiring way to walk out of the door and re-engage with life. So thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

Ian McMillan:

Good. Thank you.