Interview with Paul Ham

Interviewer: How would you recommend a young historian should choose a topic to investigate?

Paul Ham: Well, they must write about something they love, they know and they feel comfortable with. I mean it's one of the oldest clichés: write about what you know. But it's a cliché because it's true. I know writers who go off thinking, 'That's a great book – there's a bestseller in that.' But their heart's not in it: they have a sort of tangential relationship with a subject and it shows; and the book is not a bestseller for that reason. Every bestseller, every great history or great novel, is always written by somebody who deeply feels an interest, a passion, for the subject; whether it's Dan Brown, who clearly has a great interest in writing thrillers about the Catholic church; or whether it's someone writing history like me, who has a great interest in revealing, at least to the extent that I'm capable, about the Vietnam War and the Kokoda campaign.

A young writer has to go out there thinking, 'This happened to my grandfather, it's an extraordinary story and it should be written and I'm the one to write it.' I've met a lot of people who have that view. Now, you may not get it published but you need to … therefore if you're wanting to get your work published as a young writer, you have to make a judgement .'Is this story, about which I feel so much, going to be of interest to the general reader?' So therefore you are already cutting back on your ideas, but you come down to a few that you think will be of interest to the general public. A publisher may be interested. You need to be realistic and retain a great deal of interest in it. That's the essential thing about a young writer starting out.

Obviously they need to learn the tools of the trade and that's a pretty brutal process at the hands of editors, who may discourage many writers who could've been great writers, but they get discouraged, they fall at the first hurdle. You know when I was starting out … you get your stuff desecrated and you just think, 'Well, I know better actually! We'll let that go but I'm sure my original...' No, you don't, you're worried about what they do to it and you take the best, you take a lesson from that. You look at whether he or she is right in editing your stuff. Was that a good idea? And then slowly a writer is formed. I don't think writers are born. I think there's a very hard process and that's the success of creative writing courses. Ian McEwan is a graduate of a creative writing course and he swears by it. He says they did succeed in teaching him how to write. Of course you've got to have some basic ability in stringing a sentence together and feeling the music of language.

Interviewer: Thanks for your time Paul.

Paul: Thank you very much.