PassTheAux with Sam Knight: pitching the New Yorker, overcoming self-doubt, and finding ideas in libraries

Plus my cultural picks for the week – books, cinema, music

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Recently, as I wrote about in my last post about the merits of boredom, I experienced a slump in creativity, where my mind felt like it had turned grey and whenever I tried to think of fresh ideas it was like a valve in my brain had twisted shut and was refusing to budge. 

I thought a good way to rouse myself from this dispiriting funk was to do a PassTheAux writer interview, something I hadn’t done in a while because they tend to take quite a lot of time. But, a large dose of inspiration was in order, so I got in touch with a writer whose work I have admired for many years: Sam Knight.

Sam is so well known for his long reads that even friends outside of journalism know his name, primarily for his viral 2017 Guardian piece that revealed the ‘secret plan’ for when the Queen dies (which one friend from the civil service praised for getting every single detail correct when the Queen died five years later), as well as for his viral Guardian long read on how the sandwich consumed Britain. 

Sam is a meticulous writer, but he is also wonderfully in tune with the heart of a story – the one person or detail that makes its wider political, historical or social context compelling. “Don’t mistake an interesting world for an interesting story,” he once said in an interview. As every good journalist should be, he is an excellent storyteller. I was struck, reading an interview with WellTold festival a few years ago, about how he approached his piece on the Queen.

“A really useful thing I think about when I’m writing these kind of articles is ‘what kind of genre is this?’ Is this a love story? Is this about an invention? Is it about two rivals?”, he said. For 'London Bridge is down': the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death, Sam approached the story as one of theatre.

Now he’s a staff writer at the New Yorker, possibly the most coveted job in journalism, and last year published an excellent non-fiction book The Premonitions Bureau, which I read in just two days over the summer and told everyone I knew about it.

It tells the story of psychiatrist John Barker, who, while visiting Aberfan in 1966, when 144 people (mostly children) died after a colliery spoil collapsed, becomes fascinated with the idea that normal people can receive images in the future – premonitions – which are often linked to disaster.

Barker met several people who felt they had had premonitions of Aberfan, so decided to set up an experiment, writing to the science editor of the Evening Standard to see if he would publish a nationwide callout for premonitions of the disaster. The Standard, under the editorship of Charles (father of Anna) Wintour, then set up the ‘Premonitions Bureau’. 

As well as being a moving and compelling look at the strange life and work of John Barker, it’s also a fascinating insight into British psychiatry in the Sixties, which was when psychiatrists such as Barker were campaigning to close down asylums and radically change British attitudes towards mental health. So do go and read it if you haven’t, and I hope you enjoy my chat with Sam below. Perhaps it might help nudge some others out of their post-Christmas slump too. 

When did you realise you were ‘good’ at writing?

It’s such a good question because, when you're doing this, you spend so much time just sort of being stressed about pulling it off and kind of masquerading as a writer. You’re always trying to convince someone that you have a good idea. I spent so much of my twenties applying for jobs and never getting them, trying to get a good editorial job at the Guardian or GQ, but I only ever got the annoying jobs where I wasn’t doing any writing. 

The first magazine story I wrote was for the Times magazine, when I was 26, about following my shirt back to China. And that won a prize. And then on the back of that I got commissioned by the Financial Times Weekend magazine. And that was the first time I'd ever been taken seriously, when I could stop begging to do things. 

How did you pitch the story about following your shirt back to China?

I was working for the online bit of the Times and I would often drift into the office of the Saturday magazine editor and asked, “Did you get my email, about my idea?” And she just looked at me blankly every single time until she was finally like, “Alright, just what is this email that you sent me?” I said, “look, just let me try and do it, and if it works, you can pay me, but I’ll pay my own expenses”. So I paid my own flights to China, which meant I just about broke even when they did pay me. 

Do you remember your first big edit?

I had to write a profile of Jeremy Corbyn for The New Yorker, not too long after he became leader of the Labour Party, in 2015, early 2016. And I was having to do it under real time pressure for one reason or another. And I got the note back from David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who said that the piece was like “eating a chocolate chip cookie, but there weren't any chips in it.” That was pretty crushing.

So what did you do to change that? Was the issue that you didn’t have enough quotes?

I think one of my faults is that I can sort of start stories twice, or finish them twice. So with that Corbyn one, I just sort of ended up just starting it more or less in the middle, if you see what I mean. But then I think it just didn’t have enough variety or humour. In terms of quotes, at the moment I’m actually enjoying quoting less. I think using indirect speech is underrated. I think paraphrasing a quote confidently – if you knew what they meant and they didn’t say it particularly well – is often more pleasant to read. 

I agree actually. In newspapers you do often need a lot of quotes because they want newslines and they need direct quotes for that. But I recently enjoyed Ed Caesar’s profile of the DJ Solomun in the New Yorker and I noticed there were barely any quotes. And I think the profile worked all the better for that step back and perspective. Speaking of the New Yorker, so many writers spend their lives pitching it with no luck. How did you get your foot in the door?

Well, I’d been writing for a website which sadly no longer exists called Grantland, which was set up by a sports analyst for ESPN called Bill Simmons, who is the sort of person that doesn't really exist in British culture, but who kind of pioneered a type of sports journalism in America that focussed on sports through pop culture. And I was also writing for American magazines such as Harpers, which is an excellent and eccentric magazine – a place that writers should consider pitching.

For them I wrote a piece on a stalker, and spent time with a stalker who was locked up for a long while, and that got read by someone at the New Yorker. So I think essentially I was just writing for places that assistants at the New Yorker were reading. So they got in touch and asked me to write a profile of [the snooker player] Ronnie O’Sullivan.

Were you shocked to receive that email?

I mean, it was a really good day. I remember getting that email. But also it’s worth saying that I had written 40 magazine stories by that point, maybe three 10,000 ones for Harpers, and three 7000 ones for Grantland. So I was already doing that kind of work.

Why hadn’t you pitched the New Yorker?

I went to journalism school in America and I really loved the New Yorker. People approached me with perfectly good ideas to pitch it. But I was probably too reverential towards it. So I was just probably too scared to pitch it to be honest. And now when I talk about it I’m conscious that there aren’t the same rungs on the ladder that there were for me when I wanted to get into journalism. Many of the titles at which I learned how to write simply don’t exist any more, depressingly. 

How did you become staff?

I was interested in writing about British politics during the Age of Brexit. And that felt like an important thing to cover, and like a sort of weird corollary to whatever was happening with Trump. I mean they never said why, but that's my guess. I was very available, and very passionate about trying to write about stuff that's happening in this country without doing it through the traditional lens of political newspaper journalism.

How do you find your stories?

Some of the pieces I write aren’t even really ideas because they’re just so obvious, like going to the World Cup or profiling Theresa May during Brexit. But I get my most interesting stories from libraries – not necessarily looking for ideas, but spending lots of time doing research in books, as opposed to on the internet. There is amazing stuff in books that people tend to miss when they’re just looking for things on the internet. 

How did you come up with your Guardian story about the history of the British sandwich?

Well, I had an American editor, Jonathan Shainin and he literally had an addiction to British sandwiches. And he said to me, what is going on here, what are these things? He wanted me to write about it because he was so personally interested in them. So often these stories come about because someone else’s curiosity meets your curiosity. 

The thing that always gets me excited is when there is something counterintuitive or against the grain. There’s an interesting world, and in that there is some tension, something unexpected but often quite human. 

Like I wrote a story a few years ago about an art dealer who ripped off an oligarch by like a billion dollars. And the really interesting thing about him is that he was a shipper, a storage guy who would help get your artwork from A to B. But if you're one of these very skilled art shippers, you get a lot of privileged access to people's homes and storage places, you can see their personal collections. And then he started using that information to become an art dealer.

So that story, even though it was kind of about an oligarch getting ripped off, and the kind of fancy world of the art market, was really about someone shifting from one role to another and that being transgressive.

Yes, I find the most compelling stories are told through someone – there’s one human story that leads it.

Yes, so for instance I did a story about Toto Wolff, who's this big deal in Formula One. He runs the Mercedes Formula One team, and they've won everything for the last eight years. But this season, they didn't win a single race. So the story isn’t actually about Formula One, it’s about a perfectionist who is used to being the best at something and then suddenly isn’t.

How did you come across the art dealer story?

There are these things called freeports where people can avoid taxes, and I got a message from someone in an ideas meeting in New York who was like, hey, freeports, is that interesting? And I didn't know anything about freeports. But then I saw a news story about the shipper who had been arrested in connection to the freeports. And that seemed more interesting to me.

Talk to me about how you came up with the Guardian long read, ‘The Spectacular Power of Big Lens’.

I was speaking to an NGO about the ridiculous control of the eyewear market by a single company, and how cheap glasses should be considering how this technology has been around for literally 700 or 800 years. And there are loads of people in the developing world who don't have access to glasses and eye tests, and there is this big myopia crisis which is happening in the developing world as people start spending more time indoors, as a society becomes more industrialised and spending more time away from natural light. And they were really concerned about that, which is a really fascinating problem. 

It was an ambitious story, and it took me a while to get it off the ground, but I thought the way to bring that story to life and make it more immediate was to make it visible on the British High Street as opposed to, you know, a trip to Rwanda to see NGO eyewear clinics. I thought, I could make it worthy, or I could make you go, “Shit, Sunglasses Hut is owned by the same person that owns Rayban that owns David Clulow”.

And so I guess in that sense, it pays off to even read the kind of pitches and press releases from PRs that a lot of journalists might discard.

Do you ever get pitches turned down? I think people assume that if you’re staff at the New Yorker, your ideas must always be golden.

Definitely, I’m about to send some pitches [to the New Yorker], and there's two stories that I'd love to do, and I bet they'll say no to one of them. I mean, when I left the Times in 2007, I had a list of about six ideas and I thought, I’m going to try and get to the bottom of this list, but if no one wants any of these ideas, then maybe I’ll have to think about doing something else.

And so it still sort of feels like I’m going through that list, because the ideas always seem to come round again. One thing I've learned particularly at the New Yorker is that you can have a really good idea and it's the wrong time for that idea. But then two months later that idea is really good again, but it's quite hard to put your finger on why that is the case. 

How many stories do you have to write for the New Yorker a year and how long does each take you?

I have to write 20,000 words a year for the website and 24,000 words a year for the magazine, and while I’m called a staff writer, I’m basically on an annual retainer. So for the web I tend to write one 2000-word story per month, then three or four longer stories a year for the magazine, and they always take a variable amount of time. For instance my story on the Qatar World Cup took two weeks, but then I did a story earlier this year about a disputed Freud painting, and that took seven months, because I knew I was going to have to talk to all sorts of strange people who didn’t want to speak. So I always have that kind of back-burner story on the go while I’m writing other things.

You came across the idea for your excellent book The Premonitions Bureau at the British Library. Can you tell me more about that idea turning into a book?

It's something that I've done for a long time, going to the library for a few days to think of new ideas after I’ve filed a bunch of things, to get my breath back. And at the end of that few days, I will send an email to my editor with some ideas in it. I think for writers it’s incredibly hard to get off the treadmill of your working week and find time to think of ideas for things you actually want to write about, rather than what other people want you to write about.

But I don't think there's a particularly easy way around that except for fashioning the time to do it. You know, this makes me sound incredibly annoying, but when I read those books about premonitions in the library, it was a Saturday. You just have to make the time.

Has there ever been a moment in your career when you’ve wanted to do something else? When journalism has just gotten too much, too time consuming, too badly paid?

Definitely. There have been times where financially, and also, spiritually, I’ve felt, what does this really add up to? And that’s really hard. It requires so many different skills, and you can see friends who seem to be exhibiting the same or fewer skills in their jobs, and it's going easier for them.

I kind of had that crossroads point when I had a contract for a while with the FT magazine, and then I lost that contract in 2012. That was pretty bad. And then I had my first child in 2014. And that was when I was really kind of doubtful about it all. But then a great stroke of luck was the Guardian setting up The Long Read that summer. And there weren’t many people in London who could write that kind of story without too much mentoring and support, or who were too busy with their day jobs. So that really saved me.

Did you ever have second thoughts about writing a book, since so many authors say that writing a book is not financially viable?

No, actually, that wasn’t the case for me. I had wanted to write a book for such a long time, so it was such a treat for me to do that for a bit, and also I knew from the start that it was going to be a really short book. I could see the outline, it had a beginning and a middle and an end. I wasn’t just starting off on some new uncharted project. And also, it coincided with the pandemic, so I was at home anyway, and it really worked out.

So what’s next for you, another book?

I'd like to write another book, but I just haven't had a good idea yet. 

Finally, what’s a piece of journalism that you’d like to recommend?

I loved this 2019 Guardian long read by Nicola Davison about geologists arguing about whether this is the Anthropocene epoch. I learned so much.

And this is an incredible profile of the architect Peter Zumthor by Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker, from 2020: The Iconoclast Remaking Los Angeles’s Most Important Museum.

This week in links

I’ve been reading the Booker-winning novel Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which has been sitting on my bookshelf gathering dust for the past two years, looking too hefty and glum, with its morose black and white cover, for me to go anywhere near it. Finally, this Christmas, with four days off and deliciously empty afternoons sitting in my parent’s house, I decided it was time. A heartbreaking story about alcoholism, working class life in Eighties Glasgow, it is one of the most vivid books I have ever read, with characters so alive I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them since. For anyone who has already read it and loved its naturalism as much as I did, I recommend reading Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir or Thérèse Raquin.

I’ve been interviewing the formidable Janelle Monae, who, let me tell you, did not give me an easy ride when it came to this pre-Christmas interview for her excellent performance in Glass Onion…

I’ve been listening to sensational RnB group Flo, who I voted for at the Brits and so was delighted when they won Critic’s Choice, and they’ve topped the BBC Sound of 2023 list. Listen to their song Cardboard Box.

I’ve been watching The Menu, the superb dark comedy horror about a disillusioned and homicidal acclaimed chef on a remote island, played by Ralph Fiennes, who expertly satirises the absurdity of fine dining with his pompous dishes inspired by ‘the eco system’.

I have to say it brought back some traumatising memories of, age 22, having to review a 23-course, three Michelin-starred menu in Madrid (woe is me!!!) with the chef sitting opposite me as I gagged and retched my way through each ludicrous “interactive” edible structure next to a newspaper food critic who, after every bite, would sink her neck into her shoulders with delight and moan. It culminated in my exploding a perfect quail’s yolk all over my white sundress after, in a haze of indigestion, accidentally poking it with a knife. “But I told you to eat it whole, Madame!” cried the waiter emerging from behind a velvet curtain.

I can’t stop thinking about the woman I met, quivering with shock, in the cinema loos after a screening of the brilliant cannibal horror Bones and All at the Prince Charles. “Did you know that was going to be a horror film?” she asked me, ashen face, clutching the side of the door frame. “Well, yes,” I said. “Well, I didn’t,” she replied. “My dad’s in hospital, I took myself off to the cinema to cheer myself up thinking from the poster it was a love story… and to top it all off I’m a vegan.”

To let me know what you think of my culture picks, Pass the Aux or if you simply fancy saying hello, get in touch by replying to this email or DMing me on Twitter @eleanorhalls1