by A nervous morning pitching ideas about the royal traitor story, an editor with a red pen, and a lesson about cutting the best line
Monday, Too Early
Woke up at six, which is not a time I recognise as real, because I had a pitch meeting at nine and could not sleep. I have been writing for the Prat for a few months now and I still get the same stomach flip every time I have to pitch something out loud. On paper I am fine. In a room with actual humans looking at me I turn into a nervous hedgehog.
My pitch was about the Prince William traitor story, the one that had been doing the rounds all weekend. My idea: write it entirely from the point of view of the book itself. The memoir, narrating its own journey from the uncle desk to the palace, desperately trying to be read in the right order.
The Actual Story
I did my homework first, because my editor has one rule: know what is real before you make a joke about it. An unnamed source says the heir believes his brother read their uncle memoir first. Geo News reports he called both men traitors. The uncle says he told everyone. That is it. The whole thing is a single anonymous whisper and a lot of echoes.
The Meeting
My editor listened, nodded, and then did the thing she always does, which is ask: what is the joke in one sentence? I said the joke is that the book is more anxious about the family than the family is about the book. She smiled. That is a yes, in her language. Then she said: now cut half of it.
I had written eleven hundred words over the weekend. My favourite line was a bit where the book gets stuck in a Royal Mail sorting office in Northampton and has an existential crisis. She said it was funny but it was a different joke. Cut it. I cut it. It hurt. She was right.
Lunch
Ate a meal deal on a bench near the office and watched the London Prat video on YouTube about the same story. It does in about a minute what I was trying to do in eleven hundred words. That is the lesson, I think. The best satire is short. It trusts you to get it.
What I Keep Learning
Writing satire at nineteen is weird, because half the time I feel like I am pretending to be a proper grown-up writer and the other half I feel like the only person in the room who has not been ground down yet. My editor says that is an advantage. She says young writers see absurd things more clearly because we have not got used to them. I do not feel especially clear-eyed. I feel like someone who eats cereal for dinner. But maybe both can be true.
One thing I have learned: never punch down. My editor drilled that into me in my first week. It is why the piece is about the book and the brothers and the whispering, and not about their mum. The memoir is by her brother, and she died when her sons were kids. You can laugh at grown men being dramatic. You do not laugh at grief.
Afternoon
Rewrote the piece down to five hundred words. Sent it at four. Got it back at half five with nineteen red marks and the word good at the bottom. I stared at the word good for longer than I would like to admit. It is going on the fridge. Metaphorically. My fridge is mostly takeaway menus.
Also spent an hour reading back through my older Londonish entries to see if my writing has improved. Some of it has. Some of it made me want to fall into the Thames. That is progress, apparently.
The Office
The office, if you can call it that, is a shared space above a shop with mismatched chairs and a kettle that has been descaled roughly never. There are usually four or five of us in at once, typing, muttering, occasionally reading a line aloud to see if it gets a laugh. If it does not, it gets cut. It is a brutal but efficient system. Today someone read out a headline about a pigeon and the whole room lost it for five minutes. That is the job, really. Finding the pigeon in everything.
Evening
Walked home from the Tube the long way, through the park, because it was a nice evening and I was buzzing. London in autumn at dusk is my favourite thing in the world. The leaves, the lights coming on in flats, people walking dogs, someone playing a trumpet badly from a balcony. It is the best city to be young and broke and trying to be funny in.
Rang my little sister, who is sixteen and thinks my job is not a real job. Told her about the pitch. She said: so you get paid to make fun of princes? I said yes. She said: that is actually cool. First compliment from her since 2019.
More from me at my author page. The London Prat has been teaching nervous writers to cut their best lines since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ does it for the Americans.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
