Character Study

Novelist Jem Calder reads from I Want You to Be Happy in this passage episode of Character Study, a scene about a hundred pages in, as his two characters go on early dates and feel each other out across a pub table by the river.

Jem and Freya talk about writing romance that feels real without being neat, the transactional and inexplicable pulls that draw two mismatched people together, and why a "situationship" can carry the weight of a love story even when you know it won't last. They get into the small, specific power of complimenting a stranger who's dressed a little braver than usual, and then into the harder subject underneath the whole book: attention. Jem and Freya make the case for stepping back from social media to protect your writing: the compounding minutes, the shrinking attention span, the excuse that posting is somehow part of the work.

📚 Further reading mentioned in this episode:
– Liadan Ní Chuinn, Every One Still Here (short story collection)
– Zadie Smith on living without a phone

🎥 WATCH the full episode here
📘 Buy Jem Calder's I Want You to Be Happy and Reward System, plus Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work
💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions
📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts
🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

00:00:00 Introduction — and last night's karaoke reading
00:00:56 Jem reads from I Want You to Be Happy
00:02:12 The power of complimenting a stranger
00:02:53 Writing an unironic love story
00:05:02 Being reverent about the relationships that don't last
00:06:33 The intimacy of two people who really listen
00:08:19 Sharing your writing with a partner
00:09:50 Sensitivity as a superpower
00:11:28 Why he gave himself a pass to write about writers
00:12:43 Bring back emailing someone a poem
00:13:34 The decision to quit social media
00:15:14 "You'll get your attention back" — advice for writers
00:16:20 Liadan Ní Chuinn and the myth that you need a platform
00:18:54 Zadie Smith on living without a phone
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Novelist Jem Calder joins Freya to talk about I Want You to Be Happy, his debut novel about two people trying to fall in love while everything around them is engineered to distract them. Jem’s writing career started with Sally Rooney emailing him about the first story he’d ever finished and now his debut is on the tote bag of every literary it girl this summer. He tells Freya why he’d rather write a novel than a memoir (he’s a self-described cagey person who doesn’t like giving too much of himself away) and why he thinks of fiction as a gift, something a reader can reach for in their worst moments. They chat about how quickly a good line about phones curdles into cliché, why he keeps thousands of words of notes he’ll almost never use and why writing within the constraints of a genre is a form of respect for the writers who came before.
A funny, honest conversation between two writers about connection, cringe and what fiction is for.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:44 Book tour vs writing — the "spiritual maths" of promotion
00:04:24 Why Reward System reads like a novel, not a story collection
00:05:17 The novel-in-stories form and Tulathimutte's Rejection
00:06:04 "Limbic capitalism" and the little treats of modern life
00:09:26 Writing a love story when everything conspires against connection
00:10:29 Writing cringe, and the brutal comedy of small humiliations
00:12:08 Turning real life into fiction — the notes process
00:13:41 The anxiety of being judged forever on your first book
00:16:44 When readers over-read symbolism into your work
00:18:15 Cringe as comedy, and fiction that makes you feel understood
00:19:36 Why fiction, not memoir or autofiction
00:22:38 The Cazalet Chronicles and reverence for the family saga
00:26:32 Chuck as a version of Jem who took the other path
00:27:41 Comedy as inspiration, and the sauna theatre reading
00:30:25 Writing an unlikable character you still feel empathy for
00:32:40 The likability question and his Financial Times essay
00:39:30 Why he wouldn't want to adapt his own novel
00:42:09 Annie Baker, plays vs screenplays
00:44:41 Favourite live performers — and a clowning night gone wrong

⚠️ Contains spoilers for the ending of I Want You to Be Happy — skip forward when you reach that section if you'd rather go in fresh.

Links to further reading:
This Substack on writing by Naoise Dolan
Liadan Ní Chuinn – Every One Still Here
Tony Tulathimutte — Rejection
Philip Roth – On writing and re-writing a novel
Elizabeth Jane Howard — The Cazalet Chronicles, including the announcement of the reissue of The Light Years with a foreword by Jia Tollentino
Elizabeth Taylor (novelist)
Ella Hickson – The Writer
Annie Baker – Infinite Life

🎥 WATCH the full episode
📘 Buy Jem Calder's 'Reward System', and I Want You to Be Happy
📘 Buy Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work
💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions
📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts
🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poet Will Harris reads Speakee Stonehenge, an exclusive sneak peek into the collection of poems he is currently working on, Speakee.

It's a piece that keeps circling back on itself, returning to the same small moment in a room full of people, and each time it comes back it has picked something up: a piece of research, an overheard shout, a memory of a stranger's grief. Nothing is explained, and by the end a single ordinary word has quietly turned inside out. It's about who gets to belong somewhere, and how language decides that for us before we've noticed.

Will and Freya talk about writing people as names and voices rather than fully fleshed-out characters, why the most poignant moments are when someone stutters or says the wrong thing, and the danger of editing: that in smoothing out the clunky words, you can flatten everything interesting about a sentence. Plus, whether the internet and MFA culture have quietly made all our sentences sound the same.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:11 Speakee — the book Will is working on
00:00:32 Will reads Speakee Stonehenge
00:03:11 "Is it a poem? I don't know"
00:03:56 Writing people as names and voices
00:05:28 Why the poignant moments are the stutters
00:05:43 The exercise of transcribing overheard speech
00:07:15 Repetition, word choice and editing
00:07:58 The danger of smoothing out the difficulty
00:08:24 Has the internet made all our sentences the same?

🎥 WATCH the full episode
📘 Buy Brother Poem, RENDANG and Mixed-Race Superman by Will Harris and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work
💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions
📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts
🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poet Will Harris joins Freya to talk about writing a whole collection around a brother he never had. Will, who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, tells Freya where that idea came from: a hunch that people with siblings remember their childhoods better. They chat about why the most exciting phase of a writer's life is the one before you’ve published anything, how the copious notes he kept travelling across America by bus ended up weighing his writing down as much as helping it and why poets are always arguing that the ‘I’ on the page isn’t them. They also get into the novel about feeding the ducks he abandoned, the white jumper he dreamt about that became an elegy for his grandmother and why a poem doesn’t need to be solved.

A warm, thoughtful conversation between two writers about invention, memory and what gets lost the moment your first book comes out.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:28 Being young and wanting to write
00:02:46 Greyhound buses across America
00:06:14 When notes give you too much information
00:07:56 How you can tell when someone writes from a photograph
00:12:12 Publishing a first collection
00:13:32 RENDANG, identity and being marketed
00:14:54 "Am I British? Am I mixed?"
00:16:30 Invented worlds and invented selves
00:18:58 Poetry as a form of truth telling
00:21:41 The one big lie behind Brother Poem
00:24:14 The family stories that shape us
00:27:46 Children arrive already formed
00:30:43 The fiction project that became a poem
00:35:55 The White Jumper
00:40:39 Poems that change form when read aloud

🎥 WATCH the full episode
📘 Buy Brother Poem, RENDANG and Mixed-Race Superman by Will Harris and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work
💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions
📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts
🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Screenwriter, artist and Murky Book Prize-winning novelist Sufiyaan Salam reads the opening chapters of Wimmy Road Boyz: three young men in a BMW, cruising towards Manchester's Curry Mile at the start of a night that none of them yet know might be their last together.

Sufiyaan and Freya talk about writing as a kind of method acting, how he inhabits his characters so completely that when they're in trouble, he is too, and the film-set principle of "method dressing" that shapes his approach to prose: build the parts of the room the camera will never see, because the reality bleeds through anyway. They discuss the histories buried in the text, from Tipu Sultan to Manto's Toba Tek Singh to Islamic Spain and Partition, and why he likes leaving them there as either a treasure trove or simply texture that feels real. And they talk about the pressure of being one of very few British Pakistani male literary novelists — and why he'd rather write questions than be anyone's spokesman.

This is a conversation about the last night of being young, the work behind effortlessness, and why novels ask rather than answer.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:08 Wimmy Road Boyz Passage Reading Chapter 1: three boys drive towards the Curry Mile
00:04:40 Wimmy Road Boyz Passage Reading Chapter 2: the homeless man
00:09:28 The first chapter that barely changed
00:12:06 "Method dressing": building what the camera won't see, and Martin Scorsese
00:13:43 Writing as method acting
00:14:09 Hidden histories: Tipu Sultan, Manto and Partition
00:16:06 The last night of being young
00:17:18 Can you come of age at any age?
00:19:55 Why he doesn't want to be a British-Asian spokesman

🎥 WATCH the full episode
📘 Buy Sufiyaan's novel Wimmy Road Boyz and Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work
💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions
📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts
🎙️ And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.