The Opportunities of a Writer
An Interview with Roddy Martine
Join us as Roddy Martine, co-author of Demarco’s Edinburgh takes part in our series of quick-fire Q&As!
What is a quick-fire Q&A?
We have our interviewee pick a number at random (between 1-42) and we ask them the general question listed next to it.
Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions (1-22), to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.
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Discipline.
It’s also a very solitary life. You must give up a lot of things.
As an author and a journalist, I used to find myself working up to 10 at night and then wanting to go see people, which is rather unfortunate.
I was very young when my mother gave me her typewriter. I used to sit there and type silly stories. I decided that I wanted to do that for a career.
It started in school. I was encouraged by the art department to start a school magazine, which I did with various other people. In time I decided to join a publishing company, but of course, you don't join a publishing company if you want to write.
But anyway, I joined a publishing company in trade and technical publishing, and I then progressed from printing works up to doing the layouts. In those days, you didn't have computers. Everything was cut and pasted. I learned all about paperweights and pagination. Then they moved me on to be an assistant editor of a magazine.
I had a wonderful boss who said to me, ‘What if I ask you to fly a helicopter? The answer is I don't care whether you can fly a helicopter or not. I want you to go out and learn how to do it.’ It was a very good maxim in life because he would throw me challenges and he wasn't going to tell me how to do it. I had to go out and find out myself.
And I did.
I was working in magazines up until 1985 when I started doing newspaper columns with The Sunday Times, The Daily Mail, and so on. It gave you a wonderful voyeuristic insight into everything that was going on in the world.
Be more self-confident.
The joy of journalism and writing is that you get the opportunity to meet so many bizarre and wonderful people that change your life because every door was open to you.
I would say some of the early Compton Mackenzie novels, I loved them all; Monarch of the Glen and Whiskey Galore, etc.
I love Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. I thought that I'd find some of my friends living in similar conditions nowadays, sort of impoverished grandeur, sort of thing.
There was a wonderful book published in Canada called No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod. It's about a Scottish family called MacDonald, who immigrated to Nova Scotia. It's a very powerful book and it captures all that wonderful courage that these Scots who left Scotland had.
My old boss, Maurice Hedges, told me to go fly a helicopter.
He gave me a lot of self-confidence by sending me off to cover it.
He said, ‘If you want something enough, you can do it.’
It gave me an opportunity to go back into my life and talk about all the wonderful things that I've done and the people I've met.
The main message is that Edinburgh is a great city. The Edinburgh Festival brought it to life in 1947 and it gave so many people the most wonderful opportunities. The festival was conceived to heal the wounds of war.
I was about 13 years old but when I came to Edinburgh in the 1960s, it was such an old city and it was very Presbyterian and very dour. Yet, every autumn you had this wonderful splurge of slightly bohemian glamour and great orchestras, great musicians, great singers and dancers. People came to Edinburgh and it just transformed the capital of Scotland into an international city.
What this book actually sets out to do is to tell that story and to say how important it was for Edinburgh and for Scotland, for Europe, for the world.
Well, I have to say, as much as I enjoyed reading Richard's contributions, I think probably my favourite chapter was the silly saga of Anton Krashny, which I wrote myself, the Polish Miniaturist surrealist painter. It was completely fictitious but came to be believed because one or two journalists fell for this silly story and started creating a real person who took on a life of his own, even to this day.
But of course, it was at a time when you had all the problems going on in Poland, so the Polish Miniaturist who was coming to the Edinburgh Festival, who had once danced with Diaghilev and was a great friend of Princess Margaret, seemed highly credible.
I didn't really choose the cover. It was Richard's choice. He is one of these rather beautiful, vastly underrated artists. He should be up there with some of the best Scottish artists. A lot of people think of him as a gallery owner and teacher, but he's an incredibly accomplished artist in his own right.
I think people should read this book as a piece of history. It is a fascinating procession through Richard's life. He's 93 and he has an incredible timeline because it tells you not just about him, but what was going on in the world around him.
It's a very inspirational book.
What it's like to write a book in three months.
I've written around 30 books in my life, and I've normally taken a year or two years to write them. There was some urgency in this book, but to some extent, we were conditioned to it because Richard already had a lot of his stuff written, and I had set out a few years back to write my memoirs, which I had no intention of publishing.
But some of these chapters have made me think maybe I will write my memoirs.
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