Speaker 1: 0:00

You are listening to Making Sense of Work with Jean Belfort.

Speaker 2: 0:08

Hi everyone and welcome to Making Sense of Work. I'm Jean Belfort and today I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Danny Dagan. Welcome, danny.

Speaker 3: 0:23

Hi Jean, it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Danny and I have known each other for a long while, and let me tell you a bit about him. He spent most of his career working for and with tech companies in London, from startups to large corporates. He openly admits that the corporate trajectory, even as a freelance consultant, was lucrative but never excited him For his midlife crisis. He went to law school, but his real passion had always been writing fiction. In 2017, he quit the rat race and moved with his partner to a small North Sea island, and his debut novel, the Game, came out last week to glowing reviews and massive congratulations, danny, on the launch of your book.

Speaker 1: 1:16

Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 1:18

I'm very honored to say, outside of the publishing team, I was the first person to read it and I'm a big reader. I read all the time. It's not a genre I would normally read, it's a thriller and I could not put it down. I had it on my Kindle and I had to carry it with me everywhere I went because once I started there was no stopping. So just again, congratulations.

Speaker 2: 1:43

It's a stunning book and you deserve all the success that we can see clearly is coming your way now. But we're going to talk today about the journey really to getting to the book and what it was like and how it became your job. So let's start there and say how's work at the moment.

Speaker 3: 2:07

So it's been a busy week. The book came out last week and it's been a bit of a whirlwind and trepidation, to be honest, and relief. You never know how a book would be received and reviews so far have been a lot more than I expected. So, yeah, relief, but it's been a very, very good week for me, life-changing really.

Speaker 2: 2:30

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure, and you changed your life to become a writer, as we said, in 2017. And what does your working day look like now as a writer?

Speaker 3: 2:46

So what's a good day for you? So I own an island guest house, so there would be, you know, on a normal day there would be an admin and cleaning in the morning. I try to listen to addictive audiobooks when I clean, so I really look forward to dealing with the rooms and finding out what happens next in the book I'm listening to. Then a walk along the beach one of the island's beaches and a few hours of writing, and if I'm productive with the writing, then the day's been good. I feel good about the day. It's really a big part of sort of my happiness. How I define I don't know if happiness is the right word it's a sense of accomplishment that makes me feel good. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2: 3:35

And when you're writing, do you write for long hours at a stretch? How does that look?

Speaker 3: 3:43

So I tend to write for three or four hours.

Speaker 3: 3:45

Sometimes I write for longer. One of the things, interestingly, one of the things I learned at law school was, before law school, my concept of writing was like I'm an artist and I'm going to, you know, when the muse hits, I'm going to sit down and write for a bit, and you know, know, that was it. What law school taught me, uh, was that if you just sit down and you work, then the work happens. So I used to have to, you know, sit in the library for hours on end, sometimes through the night, to go over statutes and cases and all the rest of it, and the first two hours was sort of like the night, to go over statutes and cases and all the rest of it, and the first two hours was sort of like you had to break through that barrier and once you did, you could actually concentrate for longer. Um, and for me that was that was a a huge lesson, because before it was kind of like oh yeah, I'm kind of, you know, smell the flowers right a bit, and now I'm a lot more productive.

Speaker 2: 4:46

So it's a discipline. Now you see that if I sit down in the desk, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 4:51

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 4:53

Yeah, I heard Jerry Seinfeld talk about writing actually, and he said the same thing. He said you know, he always has a ritual he has black coffee sits in the same place but he fundamentally believes that you don't write unless you sit down to write, and the muse is not going to show up until you're actually sitting down to write yeah, I think, um, in the past I I had this kind of I used to go for a walk and then have a coffee and and then sit and write for a bit.

Speaker 3: 5:23

Um, these days I know I just need to sit down and write. What I sometimes do to help myself get into the groove is allow myself what I call some faff time. So for about 30 minutes I browse the internet and do things that are unrelated, but then when that ends, I just stop everything and start writing, and that seems to work for me.

Speaker 2: 5:48

Great. I think this is a lesson for all of us actually that if we commit to doing the deep work, then the deep work gets done. It's about that commitment.

Speaker 3: 5:58

Yeah, and I think in terms of writing it's a long-term process. So it takes me a year to 18 months to write a book. I know some people turn them out really quickly, but it's a commitment and it takes time. And I do remember I went on holiday once and someone asked me what I do and I said, well, what I'd really like to do is write. And he said, oh yeah, I'd like to write a novel. I think I might take two weeks holiday next year and go and write my novel. And I was thinking in two weeks I could possibly write three chapters and they won't be very good, they'd still need a lot of work. So it's understanding. I guess. For me it was understanding my flow and how I work best. And that was once I kind of got into that groove and understood how writing works for me and that's. You know, there's no recipe. Each person is different. Then I knew I could be productive.

Speaker 2: 7:02

It's really interesting. I'm listening to a really good book called tiny experiments at the moment, which also came out last week, as it happens and um, she's talking about how we're better to create measures of work in the way you're describing, especially for big projects. So to create the measure is how much time do I sit down to do the job, rather than how many words do I write that day or how much do I complete, because we A get a sense of fulfillment that we at least did what we were going to, and some days the work will flow, and some days the work won't flow, and so we're much better to say on this day, I commit to spending three hours at my writing desk.

Speaker 3: 7:46

That's my goal not to achieve a task yeah, and I think with with writing, and I think that's very similar to business problems as well you're writing in your head as well. So when you go for a walk, you're thinking through problems and you're thinking through plot points and you're solving sort of issues that you have with the text. And it's the same with business. You know you take some time off to get away from the screen and you're actually doing some of your best work then.

Speaker 2: 8:20

Yeah, definitely when you step away. I noticed we've dived straight into writing, which is great, so I think we'll just carry on talking about writing, because that's the reason you're here. What helped you take that leap from corporate life and law into writing?

Speaker 3: 8:40

Well, I've always written from a very young age. Well, I've always written from a very young age. I remember the praise I got from my English teacher about a short story I wrote I think I was about 15 at the time and it put me into that frame of mind, that delusion you need in the belief in your abilities that carried me through the kind of the initial years of being a really bad writer and improving and and and kind of the deluded belief in myself that I was good until I was actually good. So it's not so much fake it till you make it, it's more delude yourself until you make it. Um, and writing again, um.

Speaker 3: 9:26

I see this with a lot of people, writers who write their first book and are completely committed to it and believe it's the best thing ever, um, and never write a second book because they don't get any traction, not realizing that you have to learn the craft Most overnight. Successes took years to get to the point where they are now, and so I think maybe it's luck or circumstances or whatever, but I didn't dwell on the books I wrote, I just wrote a book and then, if it didn't get any traction, I wrote, I just wrote a book and then, if it didn't get any traction, I wrote another and got feedback on it, and then another, and then another. And what I kept telling myself which really helped was well, if they don't like this one but they like the next one, then I'll have a back catalogue of books I've written. So it's not wasted work, it's actually work. That's going to help me Now, if I look back at, you know, first novels. I wouldn't want anyone to see them but there wasn't a leap as such.

Speaker 3: 10:38

I think the breakthrough moment for me was actually on my second book. So I wrote a book which, again, I don't think was anywhere near ready to see the light of day. But I went to the Winchester Literary Festival and in those festivals you get an opportunity to book a feedback session with literary agents and I met with three and all three read the first three chapters of my book and all three of them wanted to read the whole thing. And one of them said oh, my mind was blown. Now, the first three chapters were well written but the book as a whole didn't really work. But that sustained my delusion, I think, for the next 15 years, and enough time to kind of carry on and carry on and write another one and another one and increasingly I got you know better and better feedback, so I knew my writing was okay. I just didn't quite understand at that early stage how to structure a compelling story, and that's something that I learned over the years we haven't said is that this book that's just come out is your seventh book.

Speaker 2: 12:07

You've written seven novels, each of which have taken up to 18 months, and you've been in an enormous long game of writing, reading, reiterating, having rejection, carrying on, possibly even rejecting them yourselves by the sound of it, because you kind of get to it and think, oh, I'm not sure this quite works, but I'm going to keep going. And I'm really curious about the nature of your persistence through this. And how did you keep going? What was it that propelled you to keep going and get until you got to this point where you have reached by any measure and were early days success?

Speaker 3: 12:48

Well, in terms of writing, there's kind of two aspects to it. One of those is the writing itself, and I have to write. I have no choice but to write. Okay, it's part of my makeup. I think it's part of who I am, and you'll hear this sometimes from writers that to stay sane, they have to write, to write fiction. And I know that if I don't write, I start getting preoccupied with things that are less important and get obsessive about things that are less important and get obsessive about things that are less important. And if I'm obsessive about my writing, it frees up my life to be the person I really want to be. So that's the writing part of it and I just have to do it.

Speaker 3: 13:42

The publishing part I'm on a lot of internet forums where people, where writers, congregate and places like reddit and facebook, and I would suspect that a lot of people that get to the point where they say, oh, actually I'm just writing for fun.

Speaker 3: 13:56

Well, some of them are, but really what we as writers of fiction want is for other people to read our work. And, yes, there's the dream of you know, huge success and all that, but you kind of want your words to be out there in the world. I think the most eerie and weird experience for me was that over the weekend, when I was listening to the audio book of my book read by an actor. It was a really weird experience because these were all words that were in my head and and then someone else tells my story and the first listen I really hated it. I was like this is a really bad narrator, really really hated it. And then I listened to it again and realized that I've just been playing these words over and over and over again in my mind and now someone else owns them and interprets them and it's no longer just my story. And that's part of the magic.

Speaker 2: 14:59

I wasn't prepared for it it's interesting that, yeah, the magic is about wanting others to experience it, to go on that journey of the words that you're writing, to enjoy the story as much as you've written it.

Speaker 2: 15:14

Yeah there's a really interesting thing for me about that part of you that just had to write. And I think for many of us there's a part of us that wants to express ourselves, and I often think these are not that complicated. So I think for me it's actually teaching that I, you know, I love to teach so much that even if I read a book, even if I read a novel, I'm often thinking, oh, what can I share from this, or how would this go? Or you know, where can I take this information? And I think for all of us there's something about pondering what is it that we love to do so much that we feel drawn to it?

Speaker 2: 15:55

It can be some form of creation. Often it is a form of creation. But to trust that and go with it and allow it to have some form, I think in our modern work it's hard to do that sometimes, because if we're in a corporate job, as you were, we're very busy and it can be hard to make room for that thing that's deep inside of us, that needs to be expressed, and yet in not doing that, we don't give a part of ourselves expression.

Speaker 3: 16:28

Yeah, and I think you know, when you write a corporate presentation to the board and you present it and you feel a certain sense of satisfaction that you did it well, there are similarities with finishing a chapter and and and feeling that sense of accomplishment that you did something and you're proud of it.

Speaker 3: 16:50

And that's, to me, is the essence of you know doing what you like. So I suppose in corporate life for me it was the balance between what you enjoy and what you need to do. I think the reason the balance wasn't there for me was because in my career in London as a geek, I was always good at the technical stuff, which was lucky, because I absolutely did not fit in with corporate culture. And so you look at the balance and say, actually, you know, what is it that you enjoy? So I did learn to handle myself and I was a freelance consultant for a while, which made it easier, but you still need to present to the board and navigate politics and so on. So I guess for me it was you know how do I? Is there an off-ramp? Is there a way for me to find a way to actually refocus my life on the things that really mattered to me?

Speaker 2: 17:49

because I just didn't enjoy that aspect of of corporate culture I think many people listening to this will be agreeing with you, especially the organizational politics piece, which I've yet to meet. I've met a few people who don't mind it, but it's not pleasurable for most. How do you think your background helped you to be ready for this process, both of writing and also the publishing and the promotion piece that you're in now?

Speaker 3: 18:21

I think, publishing.

Speaker 3: 18:22

So what a lot of aspiring authors don't realize is that publishing is a business and so you have to be professional in the way you approach agents and publishers.

Speaker 3: 18:35

You have to treat it like a job or to treat it like a business. And I think it helps that I had the corporate background, so I learned how to interact with this Again, especially as a geek. I learned how to interact with people in a professional way, even if it doesn't always appeal to me or suit me or I don't agree with you know the way they do things. It also helps that you have a network, and when you have a network and you need to promote something and you have some goodwill from that network, it always helps because they will tell their friends and the people they know about your book and the people they know about your book or share it or whatever. But I think, all in all, there's nothing that quite compares to the writing itself. That's just being an introvert sitting by yourself. I sit in my writing shed at the end of our garden and write, and that's something you know, as a geek, I've always done, so I guess my typing skills are very good.

Speaker 2: 19:48

You've gone back to your natural habitat. Yeah, I think that's really interesting what you said about a network and that in all of our lives working lives, professional lives whether we like it or not, having a network is actually really valuable to us and it's really important. So for you now, sitting in your shed in the garden in the middle of the North Sea, it's still important that that big network that you built through your career is there. People have respect for you, they have goodwill, they want to share what's happening, and I think for all of us it's so important that we remember that and that our network is not just our LinkedIn list, but it's the people we've connected with and built relationships with and worked together, and just so important and work together and just so important.

Speaker 3: 20:40

Yeah, that's another thing that I didn't realize the importance of until I kind of came across it. But I live in a small village on an island, a village of 150 people. The island Linisfan is a very popular tourist destination and so I run a Facebook group with about 41 000 people in it and I've run it for eight years and it was amazing they say it takes a village and it. It was amazing to see the support from the people in the village who, you know, supported me and told all their friends about it. But also the facebook group people were posting pictures of the book that they bought and telling their friends about it and I kind of as the island influencer, I suddenly had this platform I wasn't even aware was going to help me, and that was amazing in its own right in its own right. And then people in the area because the book is in part set in Northumberland in the UK people in Northumberland were getting excited about it. It got coverage in the local newspaper in it. So that network and being part of a community, both virtual and real, was also quite important.

Speaker 3: 21:59

And again, these are not things that I really thought about when I looked at kind of the publishing process Later on, I kind of realized and I started working that angle. But it was really nice to see. And the other thing you kind of realize from that is that I've been doing a lot of work to support the community here for free. I've developed a tourism website I never charge anyone for it. I've been managing the Facebook group and providing advice to people, answering questions all these years and there's a lot of social capital and goodwill that you can get from people just saying, yeah, we like Danny, we're going to support his book launch. And that was absolutely amazing. I'm really grateful for that support.

Speaker 2: 22:52

Well, it is also a very good book, so you've made the job easy for them to support. I will say it many times One of the things I'm curious about along this journey, you've experienced quite a bit of rejection, and how did you overcome those moments of rejection?

Speaker 3: 23:10

Yeah, so there were dark nights of the soul moments in the process, but, as I said earlier, you do need a certain level of delusion to be a successful writer. You absolutely have to believe yourself from the very start and I think what really helped was that my delusion was reaffirmed and reconfirmed several times along the journey. So my first book, which was absolutely horrendous. So when you send your application or your submission to an agent, you usually send a cover letter in the first three pages and if they want to see more which is quite rare they'll ask for the full book. So my first book when I submitted it, the first agent I submitted to wanted to read the whole thing and it was an appallingly written book. I don't know what he was thinking, but that was kind of a first, a first step. And then in that conference that I mentioned, three agents wanted to read the whole thing and the feedback was always your writing is good. And then, you know, I went through the same thing with several books. There was always some interest, but not quite enough, and there was always good feedback, but not the right. So I think literary agents are really nice people on the whole, one exception all the ones I've met or interacted to are really nice people and they usually tend to not really provide the kind of feedback that would necessarily help you, because they want to be nice. So what I was missing, especially from the people who read my entire books, was solid feedback about story structure and how to work a novel into something. That's a bit extra.

Speaker 3: 25:17

And there's a motto that I've learned over the last three years that really helped me, and that was you're not done yet. So you finish a book, you think you're done and actually you probably need a lot more work. You need to break through that barrier and continue working on it and continue improving on it and continue improving it and maybe get feedback along the way and improve it some more. And the other thing I did which is kind of a it's a bit of a segue, but that really helped me was I spend a lot of time every time I finish a book. I spend it's a bit of an obsession, but I spend a lot of time analyzing the Amazon reviews on that book and I was really interested in the fact that most of the bad reviews were about pacing. So it was either too slow I didn't really have any interest in what happened in the middle, the saggy middle syndrome, or I did like the end. These are kind of three and it was always, almost always not always, but almost the vast majority was about pacing.

Speaker 3: 26:31

And so I thought to myself what would happen if I write a thriller but I treat every chapter like it's a short story, because usually when you read a novel you've got the starting point, the end point, you kind of know where the end point is and you go through a lot of steps in between and I thought how do I keep people interested throughout the book?

Speaker 3: 26:56

And that's what I did with my last book, and that was based on that obsession of just seeing what people didn't like about books. There was an interesting kind of conundrum here, because I knew what I write wasn't your standard templated thriller book and these are the things that sell. And I knew I had a lesser chance with agents. And if once you have an agent, then they go to publishers and then the publisher can, at several steps, reject it anyway. Even if they accept it, then it goes to their team and they might reject it anyway. Even if they accept it, then it goes to their team and they might reject it again. And so I knew I needed to kind of find someone who would love the book as much as I do, and that happened. So it's yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:52

Going back to your question about rejections, so, yeah, a combination of unfounded self-belief up until the point where it was founded and and just carrying on, and and just the fact I really had to write yeah, yeah, but, and and I think the way you were willing to learn and critique your own style and change it and learn from others and learn from others' rejections, I think is really powerful to really say to study. You were studying the craft and I have so much respect for that as somebody whose own book is in early draft and has gone back to do some writing training. So I am working with a writing teacher at the moment because I think it seems easy to write and then you write and think, oh, I don't know how to take this to the next stage, where actually it's going to be very good and easy for people to read the interesting thing for me about feedback was that I got really useful feedback from a lot of people.

Speaker 3: 28:57

But you also have to realize that in writing, a lot of the money that's made in writing is in the industry that's kind of flourished around it are people helping writers and you have a lot of people offering book critiques and support and so on.

Speaker 3: 29:16

There's always something valuable to be found in critique, but you also have to be critical of the critique, because I remember I sent my book to someone, to an editor, to get their view of the book and was it any good or not? And in hindsight the person was a failed novelist and I think what their book was missing was the thing that my book was missing, which was that bit of extra, and they couldn't provide me with the feedback I needed, because they helped with the craft and they helped with the basics. But it's that extra step that you really need to find the right people. So I know this is this is more of a work podcast, but if if there are any writers listening to this, um, you kind of need to be a bit critical of the critique as well and understand what you're looking for and double check who you're asking to critique your work.

Speaker 2: 30:28

I think that, first of all, I think it's asking for critique is really important, and those of us I'm definitely one of those with thin skin sometimes don't want to ask because we're frightened of what we're going to hear that actually critique is helpful to us. And the other thing I think you're saying is that when we seek critique, it's really important that we filter it, because the person's critiquing from their own world, and that may not be the world that's going to help us, but also that we ask for feedback from somebody who's more experienced or more knowledgeable or is going to be able to provide us with that stretch and help us you know, come out of that comfort space or the place where we're stuck.

Speaker 2: 31:15

We need an expert at that point and, and at many points in everyone's careers actually, it's really important to go and get that help, um to you know, to go and talk to a senior sponsor, to a mentor, to a coach who's going to help you work out what it is that you need to get to the next level. So I think there's a great crossover there.

Speaker 3: 31:34

I absolutely agree with that. I absolutely agree.

Speaker 2: 31:40

Yeah, so we're drawing to the close. I'm curious and would love you to just say a bit about the novel and just tell us a bit about what it's about.

Speaker 3: 31:53

Okay, the premise of the game is that the children of five billionaires are kidnapped by a self-styled Robin Hood group and only one will come home alive the child of the parent who pays the highest ransom.

Speaker 3: 32:11

And then all the money will go to good causes and in a way, if you want to kind of put it in philosophical context, it's a thriller. But it's also an example on a really wide scale of the trolley experiment, which is an ethics exercise that first-year students do, where there's a trolley bus so it's an American example that is hurtling down a track and you're standing on a bridge and you're looking down at the trolley and it's about to run over five people and there's a lever next to you that can redirect the trolley and if you do, it will go onto a track where it kills one person. And so the ethics question here is should you do that? Is it down to you to decide who lives and who dies? And in the same way, the question in the game is right. So we've got the children of five billionaires and if four of them die, the money that the ransom will raise will save millions of people. But is it justified?

Speaker 2: 33:26

Danny, all I can say is I've known you for a long time. It's a bit of a nervous thing to read a friend's book and you know you want it to to be good, but you're a bit nervous because what if it isn't? And as I said at the beginning, it's a showstopper. It's absolutely fantastic and we'll certainly be putting links to it in the show notes and I wish you every success with it and I hope now you can maybe relax a bit, although I imagine that you're getting ready to get back writing after everything you've shared today absolutely, and thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 34:04

It's a pleasure to be on your podcast, jeanne thanks for joining this episode of making sense of Work. If you enjoyed it, please go and subscribe, rate and review. If you have a topic you'd like me to explore in the podcast, please follow the show notes and send me a message.