Set in 2054, when humans have locked themselves out of the internet by forgetting the names of their favourite teacher and first pet, Simon Stephenson’s dazzling debut, Set My Heart to Five, is a hilarious, touching, strikingly perceptive story of the emotional awakening of an android named Jared, and a profound exploration of what it truly means to be human.
Set My Heart to Five is set to become a major motion picture with Edgar Wright directing, and Working Title, Focus Features and Universal Pictures producing.
Born in Scotland and now living and working in LA as a writer, Simon Stephenson is a former NHS doctor who worked in paediatrics. His memoir Let Not the Waves of the Sea about his brother being killed in tsunami was a highly acclaimed award winner. He spent two years writing at Pixar in San Francisco and originated and wrote Amazon’s forthcoming feature film LOUIS WAIN (starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy). Julia Roberts is also attached to his screenplay TRAIN MAN.
Find out more about the author at www.simonstephenson.com
Today we have an opportunity to ask questions to Simon Stephenson:
I had wanted to write a novel for the longest time. And by ‘the longest time’, I mean a literal decade. My previous book, a memoir, came out all the way back in 2011, and here we finally are now! I’d started a whole lot of novels, but none of them quite took. I work as a screenwriter, and through that work I’d sort of realized that I work best in the shaded area where ‘funny’ and ‘sad’ overlap. I then got a job in the Bay Area, which is so tech-obsessed that you can feel like you are living in 2054.
This is one of those classic things, where for a long time I believed I’d had this moment of creative inspiration, and the idea of an awkward android dentist who becomes a screenwriter had just popped into my head like creative magic. It took a friend pointing out that I am an awkward human doctor who becomes a screenwriter for me to see that, yep, the apple did not fall so far from the tree!
All of them! But specifically, in the book Jared the android falls in love with a very specific kind of big screen blockbuster from the 1980s and 1990s: Forrest Gump, Thelma and Louise – that sort of thing. And so I consciously tried to take the reader on the same kind of emotional journey those movies take me on. You can decide whether or not I was successful!
On the day-to-day level, they both involve too much coffee and wrestling with the blank page. But I think the classic thing that people say is true: that novels – particularly those written in the first person, as Set My Heart To Five is – are quite internal, and movies external. What I mean by that is that in the book you can simply have your narrator tell thereader things, but in a screenplay the old maxim of ‘show don’t tell’ is true: ie you have to find ways to demonstrate things visually. That is fine when your characters are robbing a bank or jumping out of an airplane, but it gets a lot harder when you are trying to convey something like Jared’s favourite emotion of schadenfreude.
I’m always envious of writers who can move consecutively from one thing to another. I’m much more circular: I always have a bunch of things on the go, and sometimes come back to them after months or years – that’s probably why it was ten years between books! I’m currently working on a new novel, but also some film things too. If I say too much I tend to jinx things, but I am definitely hoping the next one will not take a decade.
Thank you for this fascinating insight!
This post is part of the blog tour! Read reviews and extracts as you travel along.
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