Roald Dahl on how to create interesting characters, his daily routine and writing process, and seven tips for fiction writers.
A brief overview of Roald Dahl before delving into his own words:
| Who (Identity) | Roald Dahl, a British novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter pilot, renowned for his captivating and imaginative children’s books and adult short stories. |
| What (Contributions) | Dahl is celebrated for his imaginative and whimsical children’s books, which often feature dark humor and unexpected endings. Notable works include “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda,” “The BFG,” “James and the Giant Peach,” and “Fantastic Mr Fox.” He also wrote acclaimed adult short stories and several screenplays. |
| When (Period of Influence) | Dahl’s literary career spanned from the 1940s until his death in 1990. His books have remained popular, influencing children’s literature and storytelling. |
| Where (Geographic Focus) | Born in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, Dahl’s work primarily took place in the United Kingdom, but his influence and popularity are global. |
| Why (Artistic Philosophy) | Dahl’s writing philosophy centered on sparking the imagination of children, often blending elements of fantasy with real-life experiences and emotions. He believed in the intelligence of children, writing stories that appealed to their sense of wonder and adventure. |
| How (Technique and Style) | Known for his inventive use of language and quirky characters, Dahl’s writing style is characterized by its humor, whimsy, and often an underlying edge of darkness or irony. He had a talent for storytelling that captivated both children and adults, with vivid descriptions and imaginative scenarios. |
This post is a collection of selected quotes and excerpts from secondary sources used for educational purposes, with citations found at the end of the article.
7 Tips For Writers
1. You should have a lively imagination.
2. You should be able to write well. By that I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader’s mind. Not everybody has this ability. It is a gift and you either have it or you don’t.
3. You must have stamina. In other words, you must be able to stick to what you are doing and never give up, for hour after hour, day after day, week after week and month after month.
4. You must be a perfectionist. That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can.
5. You must have strong self-discipline. You are working alone. No one is employing you. No one is around to give you the sack if you don’t turn up for work, or to tick you off if you start slacking.
6. It helps a lot if you have a keen sense of humour. This is not essential when writing for grown-ups, but for children, it’s vital.
7. You must have a degree of humility. The writer who thinks that his work is marvellous is heading for trouble.
How To Create Interesting Characters
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them and this is even more true in children’s books.
I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is really nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact. 1
Daily Routine
Dahl always kept regular hours. He went to his shed twice a day, 7 days a week. He wrote for two hours in the late morning, and another two hours in the evening. Stressing the importance of this daily routine, he maintained that ‘writing is not inspiration, it’s keeping your bottom on the seat.’
He chose two hour blocks for creative work as he ‘never works too long at a stretch, because after about 2 hours you are not at your highest peak of concentration so you have to stop.’
His full morning routine in his own words:
I wake up and I listen to the morning news on the radio, either at 7:00 or at 8 o’clock, quite often 7:00. Then about five mornings out of seven, my lovely wife goes and gets the breakfast and brings it to me, and about two mornings out of seven I get it for her, which is a sort of nice compromise.
We sit in bed and eat our breakfast and read The Times. We order two copies of The Times because that’s the only paper we like reading, so we have one each. I then slowly get up and I have a bath and I lie in it and do a lot of thinking.
At 10 o’clock my secretary arrives with the mail that she’s open the day before, and we go through them very fast and very efficiently. Then at 10:30 I fill a thermos with hot coffee and take a mug in my hand and walk up to my work hut which is away from the house up in the apple orchard.
I go into this splendid room which I really enjoy because it’s so comfortable. There is an armchair, I don’t sit up at a desk. I lie back in an armchair and I put my feet up on a trunk which I filled with wood to make it hard. The trunk is tied to the legs of the chair with bits of wire, so that I can put my feet on the trunk and push and it won’t go away.
I take a writing board which I’ve made myself and I put it on the arms of the armchair, and underneath it I put a roll of thick paper so the writing board slopes exactly where I want it. I have six pencils and I sharpen them and I pour myself a coffee and I feel very comfortable. 2
Getting Ideas
It starts always with a tiny little seed of an idea, a little germ, and that even doesn’t come very easily. You can be mooching around for a year or so before you get a good one. When I do get a good one, I quickly write it down so that I don’t forget it. I don’t dash up and start to write it.
I’m very careful. I walk around it and look at it and sniff it and then see if I think it will go. Because once you start, you’re embarked on a year’s work and so it’s a big decision. 1
Why He Wrote Short Stories Instead of Novels
I think I had a very strong feeling that it was my metier, you know. And if you find that you can do something, you don’t rush off and try to do something else. I think I was probably right. I’m not a novelist, and, on the whole, the pure short-story writer is not a novelist.
The short-story writer has got to get everything so tight, so close, and so concise. It’s the opposite of a novel. The novelist can spread himself or herself. They can take a page or two to describe the fucking landscape, can’t they? You can’t do that in a short story. 3
What’s It Like Writing A Book?
When you’re writing it’s rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe up on to the top of a hill, and you see something else, then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape.
The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book because it’s got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see everything you’ve done all ties up. But it’s a very, very long, slow process. 1
His 5 Books To Take To A New Planet
1. Price’s Textbook of the Practice of Medicine. Reason: A professional medical textbook covering the description, diagnoses and treatment of virtually every known disease or illness.
2. The Greater Oxford Dictionary
3. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
4. A book containing all of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas
4. Johann Sebastian Bach’s B Minor Mass 4
How To Keep Your Readers Entertained
My lucky thing is I laugh at exactly the same jokes that children laugh at and that’s one reason I’m able to do it. I don’t sit out here roaring with laughter but you have wonderful inside jokes all the time and it’s got to be exciting, it’s got to be fast, it’s got to have a good plot but it’s got to be funny. And each book I do is a different level of that. The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it’s a disaster is a very, very fine line. 1
I have such a terror of boring the reader, of having the reader close the book and say oh god isn’t this boring, isn’t it slow. I always condense my work and when I’m rewriting it I try to cut out every possible sentence which doesn’t mean anything or isn’t useful because I have this terror of the reader throwing the book away. 2
Screenwriting
I used to do it for money, yes. Because it is a lot of money. And it’s such a beastly job, that no one would ever write film scripts except for money. Or unless you wanted to defend your own property. And even then you can’t, because they get hold of it and do what they like. I did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; I thought I was defending it, but in the end they buggered it up.
Here you have a best-selling book, an enduring book, and they bugger the film up. Well, there’s no excuse for that–it’s just bad film-making. I hate film directors. The only nice experience I had was doing a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. I liked that.
It was a nice director, and they left you alone, and they followed the script. It was lovely. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was ghastly. Once you get a rotten director, or an egocentric director, you’re dead. But they pay a lot, so you take the money and run. 3
Writing For Children Is Hard
To write a children’s book of comparable quality to a fine adult novel or story is much more difficult. When you’re old enough and experienced enough to be a competent writer and you’re ready to write a book for children, by then you’ve usually become pompous, adult, grown-up and you’ve lost all your jokiness.
So unless you are a kind of undeveloped adult and you still have an enormous amount of childishness in you and you giggle at funny stories and jokes and things, I don’t think you can do it. 5
Writing Short Stories – Plot Vs Mood Pieces
I’m judging right now a short-story competition, a very serious big one, and there’s not one single short story I’ve read so far with a plot. They’re all mood pieces. You know: I went down to the kitchen and my wife was there and she had a saucepan and we had a little row and threw the carrots out the window and the dog came in and – they’re concentrating on their writing, and not on the content.
Well, the average reader doesn’t care about the writing. They want something which will keep them reading, wondering what’s going to happen next. None of these stories says what’s going to happen next. And then to finish it satisfactorily, so the reader says ha ha, I wouldn’t have guessed that, how fantastic, how fascinating, ooh, golly! That’s jolly hard.
My advice to people writing for your magazine would be–well, we assume you can write a bit, but remember that writing is only half the battle. The plot is the other half. And then putting it right. People who can write very well, like John Updike or Virginia Woolf, think they can get away with just writing. But you’ve got to have the plots, or people won’t care. 3
Why A Writer?
Reflecting on his years as a writer in Boy: Tales of Childhood, Dahl asserts that writing is draining but worth it for the freedom it offers.
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock.… A person is a fool to become a writer. His only [reward] is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
Influences
Dahl cites Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Frederick Marryat as having a huge impact on his work. Talking to Twilight Zone Magazine in 1983, he went into more detail about further influences:
D. H. Lawrence, for some of his sentences and phrasing, not for his construction–his use of words. And Hemingway, for his construction. The master, really, of modern writing.
It seems to me that the universities, especially in America, make the trends, deciding whether somebody is in or out of favor. Hemingway was out of favor for a while. They’re completely wrong. He’s been a greater influence on modern writing, on English literature in this century, than anyone else who ever lived.
He taught all of us the value of the short sentence, using adjectives very, very carefully–in other words, hardly at all unless you really wanted it to mean something. And you didn’t keep saying “wonderful” because it became meaningless.
They’re great secrets, those, and nobody ever did it before him, they just didn’t. You can read the writers who came before him, people like Galsworthy and Bennett and even Mark Twain, although he was a very fine writer, they all threw these adjectives around.
Hemingway had far greater impact. A page of Hemingway at his best has more power than a page of Twain. Or a page of Dickens, come to that. Dickens just threw adjectives around like peanuts. Although he was rather marvelous, because of it. 3
His Transition Into Children’s Books
I spent the ensuing 20 years {from when he started writing} just writing short stories for adults, nothing else. Then I began to have my own children and tell them stories in bed and I probably ran out of a plot for a short story.
I was telling one to my small children in bed and this one they seemed to rather like about a peach that got bigger and bigger as it grew on the tree. I thought well by golly why don’t I have a go at writing this myself, I’ve nothing else to do. So I sat down and gave it a go I enjoyed it enormously, I found myself loving doing it, you know, and that became James and the Giant Peach. 5
Dahl insisted that having to invent stories night after night was perfect practice for his trade, telling the New York Times Book Review : “Children are … highly critical. And they lose interest so quickly. You have to keep things ticking along. And if you think a child is getting bored, you must think up something that jolts it back. Something that tickles. You have to know what children like.” 6
How He Got Into Writing
Well I was working in Africa when the war broke out. I left my job and joined the RAF and learned to fly in the Middle East. Halfway through the war they wanted people who had been in combat to publish stories in the American papers to give Britain a boost.
A man was sent to me, a famous writer called CS Forester who wrote Captain Hornblower stories, and he said I will take you out to lunch and you will tell me your most exciting adventure in the RAF and I will write it and it’ll be published, because I can always get them published, and it’ll be good for Britain, so I said lovely.
I was terribly excited to go out to this famous writer, I’d read everything he’d written and we had lunch and halfway through lunch we had roast duck and he was trying to eat his and I was trying to tell him the story and he was trying to take notes. I said look, I’ll go home tonight and scribble this down roughly and send it to you and you can put it right.
When I got home in the evening and started writing it, it sort of went very nicely and I felt the story growing under me. So I wrote it and sent it to him, didn’t expect here anymore.
A week later I got a letter from him saying I was expecting you to send me notes. You have sent me a complete story. Did you know that you were a writer. Here is a check for $1000 from The Saturday Evening Post and they want some more. 2
His Wide-Ranging Interests
I love pictures and have always collected pictures even when I couldn’t afford to buy them and now I have some good ones, lovely ones. I love wine and have several thousand bottles in the cellar. I love furniture, especially 18th century English furniture. I loved cultivating plants, especially for kids.
We have a good snooker table in the house and we play three times a week and that’s played with my local friends. Sunday is a long session. I mean we start at 6:30, four of us and we finish about 11:00. 5
8 Rules He Applied To All His Children’s Books
1. Just add chocolate
2. Adults can be scary
3. Bad things happen
4. Revenge is sweet
5. Keep a wicked sense of humour
6. Pick perfect pictures
7. Films are fun…but books are better!
8. Food is fun! 7
How He Would Like To Be Remembered
I could quote Oscar Wilde – “When I am gone, let it be said that my sins were scarlet but my books were read.” 8
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References and Related Resources
- Interview with Roald Dahl from Scholastic Book Clubs.
- Thrillmaker – a chat with Roald Dahl, YouTube.
- February 1983 issue of The Twilight Zone Magazine, RoaldDahlFans.com.
- The Book of Lists 3 – by Irving Wallace.
- Roald Dahl’s Writing Routine, 1982, YouTube.
- Roald Dahl Biography, Notable Biographies.
- Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rule Book, TV Special.
- Roald Dahl’s Writing Routine, 1982, YouTube.