I’ve spent my career as a fresh-faced reporter, a travelling correspondent, an editor, and as an executive responsible for huge media companies. I enjoyed it, and learned a lot; but what I didn’t realise until recently was something else it was training me to be.
I had already written a memoir called The Bootle Boy and the research had been easy. I wrote about my life and experiences in chronological order, looking back now and then at old diaries, calendars, and newspaper clippings to check my memory.
After that, I wanted to try fiction, which is a whole other thing, and, I discovered, much more difficult.
Thinking up the story; inventing characters; developing the rise, fall, and climax of the story. All this turned out to be far more difficult than I had dreamed.
But what I hadn’t realised was how built-up lessons of my life would help rescue me.
Writers of fiction, as many readers here will be aware, depend heavily on their lived experience. That’s what feeds their imagination. To give their work authenticity, they infuse what they write with the true dreads and joys of the life they’ve lived. Not literally, of course, but to summon the glowing moments of happiness they have known; or the sadness of a loved one’s death; the romance gone wrong; the betrayal of someone you trusted, and to use their imagination to apply these experiences to create wonderful and terrifying moments in their fiction.
The richness of a life, linked with a fertile imagination, is the foundation of all fiction. I can imagine the above words will be like teaching some of you to suck eggs. But I’m new at this and want to go on to explain what it means to me; how a life face to face with the extreme tragedy and beauty of human existence can be a treasure for a writer.
Let me tell about someone who has seen the highest and lowest of life:
He has been with lottery winners celebrating their millions; with the destitute and homeless and drug addicted; sat in court as a black-capped judge delivered the sentence of death.
He has stood by the piled-up, rotting corpses of massacred women and children in a war zone; walked through the horrifying remains of what was the world’s worst air disaster; survived an IRA bomb.
He has been drunk in a Manhattan punk bar with Johnny Rotten; received a playful punch in the stomach from Paul McCartney; made the late Queen Elizabeth laugh at his jokes.
He has met presidents and prime ministers; stared from two feet away into the cold eyes of Benjamin Netanyahu, sat alone with an anguished Tony Blair as he prepared to send his country to war; been the object one-to-one of the overwhelming persuasive power of Margaret Thatcher; and a victim of the easy, body-pressing charm of Bill Clinton.
He has worked in the fantasy world of Hollywood among the movie stars and egocentric moguls. Sat at a breakfast cafe next to Stephen Spielberg; watched Meryl Streep stroll by with a baby on her hip; lived next door to O J Simpson at the time he may, or may not, have murdered his wife and her lover.
This someone I’m writing about, you will have guessed, is me and that list represents a fraction of the life I’ve lived. It’s part of the inventory of my life and a treasure that means I should never run out of the ideas a fiction writer needs.
I’m not the first journalist in this position: Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Geraldine Brooks, Michael Frayn, Frederick Forsyth . . . I could go on, there are many more, and I’m definitely not comparing myself with all that brilliance.
My point is that, if you’re a journalist long enough, all human life will pass your way. Some of it is tough, unbearable sometimes and the stuff of terrible dreams, but, boy oh boy, it’s great raw material if you want to write fiction.
My book Dying Days is about the dying days of newspapers and a mysterious group intent on the murder of Press barons and their editors.
It is entirely fictitious, more or less. There’s a prime minister who “no matter how serious things were, a perpetual expression of amused indifference seemed to play on his face.” But it’s not Boris Johnson. This PM bites his fingernails; but it’s not Gordon Brown.
There’s a nonagenarian Press baron and “all the stresses and strains and dirty tricks of his long life were carved deep into his war-torn face” … but it’s definitely not my old boss Rupert Murdoch, far from it.
There’s another Press baron who’s “a caricature of his bawdy newspapers . . . an alien life form unreached by everyone else’s ideas of civility and social convention.” Well, I admit having Robert Maxwell in mind when writing that.
There are many the other characters, foul and fine people, and I know there’ll be others who’ll say of them “ah, that’s so and so.” But they’ll never be right, not completely
It’s almost all made up. None of it is absolutely true. But it does draw from the rich harvest of the life I’ve had.
Dying Days by Les Hinton is published by Whitefox on 6 November, £9.99 paperback
Journalist Dan Brasher wasn’t supposed to be at the Chatstone family’s exclusive summer gathering – a who’s who of media moguls, politicians and power brokers. But when a bomb rips through the historic mansion, Dan and fellow journalist Jess Hunter find themselves thrust into the most dangerous story of their lives.What begins as a shocking act of violence soon reveals something far more sinister, trapping Dan and Jess in a lethal web of power, treachery and cold-blooded revenge that stretches to thehighest levels of global power.
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