Matthew Beaumont

How did you become a writer?

As a child, I dreamed of becoming a novelist, but in actual fact I took a rather less Romantic route to becoming a writer, since my books, although increasingly aimed at so-called 'general readers', have emerged from my scholarly engagement with English literature. I've been attempting for the best part of a decade now to explore the literary and cultural histories of cities, especially London, especially at night, and this enterprise has led me not only to write about poets, novelists and others who have written about walking the streets but to record some of my own experiences of metropolitan life (my most recent book contains, in the form of an Afterword, two autobiographical sketches of walking at night, an activity to which I am very committed). I haven't completely given up the dream of becoming a novelist, however, and a couple of years ago the first short story I'd written since attending school was shortlisted for a prize in the UK.   

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

As a child I was profoundly influenced by my uncle, whom I admired enormously. He was a novelist and travel writer called Philip Glazebrook, who is now dead and who is largely forgotten. His prose was extraordinarily elegant and refined, and it was him who helped me understand that, even if Flaubert was a pretty remote example to emulate, there were those closer to home for whom the shape of a sentence was of paramount importance. He gave me a copy of Walter Pater's book The Renaissance  as a teenager, and in Pater's beautiful, rhythmic prose, which Oscar Wilde found utterly intoxicating in the 1880s and 1890s, I encountered an exquisiteness that, though I couldn't possibly reproduce it, seemed something for which to aim.     

When and where do you write? 

I'm forced to fit my writing in around my teaching activities, so I tend to fantasize about sitting at my desk producing reams of perfect prose rather more often than I actually end up sitting at my desk producing small quantities of imperfect prose. I like to write, if I can, in the mornings, when I feel mentally most fresh, with stacks of my books around me (surrounded by these books, which make me secure somehow, I feel a little like those babies whose parents prop them up in their cots with soft toys so that they don't roll over on their sides). I like to go for a walk before I start to write - otherwise I feel as if I haven't connected to the world outside my window.

What are you working on now? 

I'm meant to be writing a history of the literature of London, for Cambridge University Press, but I haven't had time to make a start on it yet, though I am enjoying doing lots of reading related to this project. During the first UK lockdown I started tentatively writing a novel, so I'm hopeful that at some point I can build on the little that I've already drafted.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Yes, but I cleverly avoid calling it that and tell myself instead that I'd always intended to spend the morning on which I feel blocked reading or walking or even paying bills. The trick is, it seems to me, to trick yourself.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

That most advice is useless, in that everyone approaches writing in radically different ways... More seriously, though, I'd recommend that people don't get too caught up on the writing itself but concentrate instead on the activities that precede that process - by which I don't mean planning plots or practicing techniques or anything like that, I mean daydreaming. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Go for long walks, in the city or the countryside, and let your imagination off the leash.

Matthew Beaumont, a Professor of English Literature at University College London, is the author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015) and The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020).