Zadanie 3.

Interviewer: I’m very happy to welcome the next guest to our programme, the successful novelist, Paul Cornell. How did you become a writer, Paul?
Paul Cornell: At school, I wrote just for my own pleasure. I planned a career in business but when I started my studies it turned out I wasn’t good enough. I just didn’t understand maths so I failed my university course. I had to leave university and find some kind of work.
It wasn’t easy without a degree so I came back to writing and decided to make a living out of it.
Interviewer: If someone wants to write for a living, what advice would you give them?
Paul Cornell: Just one piece. It is your job as a writer to search for various opinions on your work and change your writing if it is not good enough. Your mum won’t tell you that your work is poor or boring. She loves you too much. You’ve got to find people who will honestly tell you what they think of your work and point out what’s wrong.
Interviewer: Tell us a little bit about your writing routine.
Paul Cornell: Well, I never believe those writers who say ‘I get up at seven o’clock in the morning, go to my study and work an eight hour day, stopping only for a cup of tea at lunchtime.’ That’s not for me. I will write two thousand good words of prose, or five pages of comics in a day. If I do that by lunchtime, then I can do what only writers can do and go to the cinema in the afternoons, which is the whole point of being a writer. That’s what it’s all about, being independent.
Interviewer: Where do you get your ideas from?
Paul Cornell: Everybody has them. But writers are people who write them down. I think anybody can have a great idea for a novel. But most people just think ‘Ooh, that would be interesting,’ and then get back to whatever they do. But writers have to keep those ideas.
And I think there’s no such thing as writer’s block, when you cannot write anything.
Whether you like it or not, the best thing is just to start writing. You’ll write ten pages of rubbish and then you’ll find that you’re back to normal.
Interviewer: Summing up, was it a wise decision to take up writing?
Paul Cornell: Well, that’s a difficult question to answer. You don’t often find that people are happy with every decision they make. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like with a university degree but I don’t regret that things turned out this way. I really enjoy my life as it is.
Interviewer: I’m afraid that’s all we have time for today. Thank you for coming to the studio.

adapted from www.bbc.co.uk