Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Max Kinnings: I think I learned a really, really important lesson. You know, in terms of audiences always give your audience what they expect or what they can manage or, you know, their perception, play to their perception, to their point of view and not your point of view and what you want to do. You’ve always got to think about your audience and think about their expectations and their kind of enjoyment of your sort of entertainment product, if you like.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden. A podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and Entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Max Kinnings, has written the feature films Act of Grace Alley Cats and the Pagan King, as well as various Film projects currently in development, including a Film adaptation of his critically acclaimed play Wireless Operator. Hes the author of four novels, Hitman, The Fixer, Sacrifice and Baptism. Ive read Baptism and can tell you its a tremendously exciting thriller in the vein of Lee Child, John Grisham, Dan Brown, John le Carre and many other great novelists. Max is also the ghost writer of comedian and actor Rick Mayalls best selling spoof autobiography, Bigger Than Hitler, Better Than Christ. Max’s work will form the basis of a 1 hour documentary hes writing and presenting on BBC Radio Four, due for broadcast in June 2024, which is the 10th anniversary of Rick Mayall’s passing. Max was part of the writing team for the award winning Sony PlayStation game Little Big Planet Three. Prior to his writing career, Max spent twelve years devising advertising and marketing campaigns for music festivals, tours, comedy shows and West End theater productions. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Brunel University, London, where he also teaches. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s my distinct privilege to welcome the brilliant playwright, screenwriter and novelist Max Kinnings to StoryBeat today. Max, welcome to the show.

Max Kinnings: Thanks a lot, Steve. It’s great to be here and thanks for that lovely introduction. It, sounded sort of impressive, you know. Yeah, quite taken aback. Thank you for that.

Steve Cuden: I’m just going to guess you may know a thing or two. That’s what we’re going to find out.

Max Kinnings: Yeah, well, let’s find out. And I hope I do.

Steve Cuden: Indeed. So let’s go back in time just a little bit. Where did this idea of telling stories and writing them down and being a storyteller in written form, where did that begin? At what age did you start to think about that?

Max Kinnings: It started really young, actually. I loved reading. my mum was, an english teacher and she got myself, my brother, reading very young. So I kind of loved the process. I was, I’d always got my head stuck in a book. I became sort of intrigued in the idea of actually creating a book. So I remember I must have been only about seven or eight.

Steve Cuden: And you were thinking about writing books at seven or eight?

Max Kinnings: Yeah. I know it sounds kind of ridiculous, but, I started scribbling in this old sort of notebook. I think it was like an old ledger that my dad had, had brought home from his office or whatever. And I just loved this sort of hardback book. And I just loved the process of filling the pages with stuff that I’d written. And it all got a little bit kind of, horrific. I was really. I was obsessed with horror, and all the old sort of universal, pictures, movies, you know, the old sort of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, kind of Frankenstein, Dracula stories. And, I’d always want to stay up late. We used to, on BBC Two on Friday and Saturday nights when I was little, they would sometimes show some of these old horror movies. And, I’d always, you know, sort of plead with my parents to be let, you know, allowed to stay up late. And sometimes they’d go out and our babysitter would, maybe have a couple of sherries and fall asleep and we’d sort of flip over the tv and we’d get onto one of these old horror movies. And I became obsessed with that. And I think when I first started scribbling in this notebook, I was trying to sort of recreate this sort of scary sense of dread and doom that I’d seen in these old, horror movies that I loved. So, yeah, it’s quite young.

Steve Cuden: Do you ever go back and look at that old writing and think to yourself, this is where I came from?

Max Kinnings: Sadly, I don’t think. I know. I still haven’t got it. It’s lost to the mists of time somewhere in various house moves and whatever? I wish I did. I have all my old sort of notebooks going back about 30 years. So I, you know, I’ve got a lot of, stuff, first draft material in sort of scribbled form. Yeah, in a load of notebooks lying around somewhere.

Steve Cuden: So you have written in many different forms. You’ve written as a playwright a screenwriter, a novelist, and so on. Do you have a professional preference as to which of those three you prefer?

Max Kinnings: Well, it all depends what I’ve been doing recently. So if I’ve been working on a screenplay with somebody else and I’ve been collaborating on something, you know, maybe working with the producer or working with another writer or writers, you know, I will then love to start writing a novel, you know, and that sort of solitary process, bashing out the first draft and then polishing it and editing it and whatever. So. But then again, if I’ve been doing that for a while, I then kind of like the idea of collaboration. So it kind of depends on what I’ve been doing in terms of, if you ask me, if I had a favorite, it’s a difficult one. I love the solitary process of writing a novel. I really do. And there’s something, you know, you stand or fall, you’re on your own. It’s you. And maybe, you know, your agent or your editor or the publishers, you know, if you’ve been commissioned in advance, but generally you are on your own, you know, you stand or fall on what you do, on the page. But I love the collaborative process of, you know, writing a Film and also working on a play. I mean, you mentioned that I was a playwright. I’ve written two plays that have been produced. And I kind of fell into that, really, by other people saying, you know, we’ve got an idea. Do, you want to write it with us? So I sort of, you know, just fell into playwriting. But I do love the process of screenwriting and writing in a partnership. When I was working with, Rick mail on his spoof autobiography, that was very much a sort of partnership. And I’ve done ghost writing for. I’ve ghost written a couple of novels as well. And there’s a kind of alchemy I think you get, particularly when you’re writing comedic material, when you have that partnership.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Max Kinnings: I do love that. actually, that process is absolutely fascinating.

Steve Cuden: Well, comedy really kind of needs that bounce back from somebody else, or you’re maybe not 100% sure it works until you get in front of an audience.

Max Kinnings: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And that’s a little late in the game to be testing, but this is it.

Max Kinnings: And your collaborator becomes your sort of prototype audience. Yeah. And I love that, you know, if it makes you both laugh, it’s in. If it makes one of you laugh, you know, you’ve got to persuade the other one that it’s funny, and then it’s in. And if you can’t, it’s out, you know.

Steve Cuden: So, yeah, I’ve long said that the only definition there is of comedy is, does it make you laugh? Yes or no? If it makes you laugh, it’s comedy. If it doesn’t, it isn’t.

Max Kinnings: Exactly right. Exactly right, yeah.

Steve Cuden: So was there a point where you thought to yourself, I am really good at this writing thing and maybe I’d like to make it my career?

Max Kinnings: Not really. I mean, I sort of. As I mentioned, I sort of wrote, as a little kid, you know, I just scribbled things in a notebook because it just sort of appealed to me. And I came, you know, and I was always. I enjoyed writing, creative writing at school, you know, if we did that in class. But, you know, when. When teenage time arrived, I was. I mean, you can see over my shoulder, I’ve got a guitar there in the room. I became really interested in music and, you know, for many years I kind of fancied myself a bit of a sort of proto rock star. It was never going to happen. I didn’t have the talent or the kind of drive, really, in that direction. But I had a band at school. You know, I like posing in front of, our 6th form bar at school and showing off and, you know, and all that sort of stuff. and I moved down to London when I was 18 to go to college. And. And I really thought that I was going to sort of make my mark as the sort of, I don’t know, the new Joe Strummer from the clash or something like that. He’s my hero of the time. And that never happened. But I did end up working in the music industry, doing advertising and marketing. And it was kind of around that time, I guess it must have been in my early twenties, that I really was sort of looking around subconsciously as much as consciously. I think probably subconsciously more than anything. I was sort of looking for a kind of creative outlet. And it was then that I’d, you know, during my time as a student, I’d really immersed myself in. I mean, I didn’t study literature. I studied a social science degree. I was studying criminology and psychology. But through that I got a real sort of fascination for literature and actually american literature. I got heavily into the beats, you know, Kerouac and Burroughs and Ginsburg and all these sort of writers and Hunter S. Thompson in particular. And I kind of loved that kind of gonzo style of writing. and that really, really appealed to me. And I think that kind of plugged into my interest in the music press, I was big, obviously, being interested in music. I read a lot of the music press, and I think it was Thompson and his sort of gonzo writing in, Rolling Stone and all of that. Ah, that really got me into reading literature. And it was sort of off the back of that that I thought, well, you know, with the typical arrogance of a young writer starting out, I thought, how hard can it be? Come on, I can have a go at that. And then obviously realized that it was incredibly difficult. But I kind of loved the process, actually. You just enjoy getting the material down, even if it’s not really going anywhere. If you enjoy that process, then you’re going to get better, I guess. You’re going to practice, and you’re going to get better.

Steve Cuden: So my students, and you probably can say the same about yours, they come in and frequently they think that it’s easy because they’ve seen television shows or plays or they’ve read a book or two, and they think that doesn’t look that hard to do. So I can do that. Anybody can do that. And then, in fact, you give them an assignment and they go, Oh, this is actually really hard to do.

Max Kinnings: Yes, this is it. And what they don’t take it, what they don’t factor in is that they think the writers sort of sit there, write a first draft, and the first draft is the last draft.

Steve Cuden: Oh, sure.

Max Kinnings: And that’s, you know, it all comes out in one, you know, all like, fully full.

Steve Cuden: Yeah.

Max Kinnings: And that’s the thing that always sort of. I think it’s quite a shock to Stuart, certainly shocked to me when I started writing.

Steve Cuden: I think of first drafts as you’re actually forming the clay that you’re going to sculpt.

Max Kinnings: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And that after that is when the actual art takes place. It’s after the first draft, so.

Max Kinnings: Right. I don’t know who said it. You might know, but somebody famous writers said, you know, all writing is rewriting, and it’s just so true.

Steve Cuden: It is true. The craft is in the original drafting and in understanding how the mechanics of it work and so on. That’s the craft of writing, but the art is in the revisions.

Max Kinnings: Yeah, yeah, that’s it.

Steve Cuden: I’m fascinated that you said that you’re influenced by the Gonzo writers, especially Hunter S. Thompson and Burroughs and so on, because you write more of meat and potatoes, not so much in the Gonzo style. But you know what? Now that I think about it, reading your work, that sort of is in there, too. It’s just you’ve got it played into your more genre style of writing.

Max Kinnings: Well, this is it. Nice. You’ve read baptism, which is. So when baptism came along. So that was about 2012, I think that was published. And back in about 2000, 2001, I had a couple of books published then. There was one called Hitman and there’s one called the Fixer, and they were much more satirical, much more experimental, and much more particularly hitman. My first novel was much more kind of gonzo. And it was very much the idea of the kind of, picaresque, kind of outlaw kind of characters living on the edge, living on the margins of society, taking drugs, living, a very dissolute lifestyle. In Hitman, it was kind of a reflection of the music industry in London in the nineties that I’d kind of lived through and worked through. And I wanted to try and capture that through a kind of neo beat, lens. So Hitman, my first published novel, I’d actually written a couple previously to that, that haven’t got anywhere. That was very much, you know, this kind of freewheeling, present tense, first person, kind of gonzo style. I’d been working in the music industry for many years and sort of doing the advertising and marketing for not just music, but also comedy and theatre as well. and I’ve been doing pretty well. I mean, my career was going well, but looking back on it now, I can see that I was kind of pressing the self destruct button in terms of that career. I take six months off and go backpacking around India and Thailand because I wanted to write a sort of travelogue. And I was doing everything that was really in readiness for trying to be a writer until finally I kind of, you know, gradually started packing it all in and sort of moving on from my career in marketing and advertising into sort of writing full time. Once I had my first two novels published, in I think, sort of 2000, 2001, so. But, yeah, it was very much that kind of gonzo styling, that kind of american style, that freewheeling kind of stream of consciousness, which I really got turned onto in terms of writing when I.

Steve Cuden: First started out, which is very much not what you wrote in baptism, which.

Max Kinnings: Is not freewheeling, which is very much not. Because what happened was I’d written hitman and that had got some great reviews, quite a lot of critical acclaim, and that was very much my reflection on the music industry. And it was like satirizing the sort of druggie subculture that had been reflected in the novels of people like Irving Welsh. And I was kind of satirizing that it was deliberately, comedic in the vein of Welsh. And then my second book, which was a two book deal. My second book was the fixer. And it came about, my sort of conception of. It came about around the time of reality tv. We had Big Brother over here, the reality tv show. Sure. I think that first day in about 99. So that was when I was writing this book and I was working with a lot of show business agents and show business managers. I just thought, how funny would it be, or how, satirical and topical would it be to have a show business agent managing a serial killer as though they’re a celebrity and bringing that same sort of knowledge and understanding of the market and the media and the public’s tastes. Because I remember back in the sort of nineties, there was some big serial killing cases over here. There was, Fred and Rose West, who were in Gloucester, and some horrific crimes were going on there. And then we had a doctor called doctor Harold Shipman. And he’d killed literally hundreds, I think.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Max Kinnings: And I noticed this thing. I think he killed something like 250 with, morphine. That he just as though he was helping these, these patients of his. He was basically finishing them off. And unfortunately, nobody ever really got to the bottom of why he was doing it because, he committed suicide in his cell before he actually came to trial. So the whole thing’s still a mystery. But I noticed that there was this kind of hunger in the media. And I was working in the media, obviously, as a media buyer. So I had to have an understanding of all the newspapers, and all the tv programs and their audiences. But I noticed in the sort of audience expectation of these serial killer stories, it was almost like there was a hunger for the news to be even more not just sort of explicit and specific about the crimes, but it’s also like a sort of tally of the dead. So it was like, Harold Shipman’s killed over 200. Could that make him the world’s worst ever serial killer? It was like, hey, you know, we’ve got the record. It was that kind of weird psychology that the sorts of, the public had to almost celebrate in a weird kind of way.

Steve Cuden: It’s almost like it’s a game.

Max Kinnings: Exactly. It’s almost like it’s a game. And so I thought, well, I’m going to satirize that. That was the fixer. And so those first two books were very satirical, and very comedic. And I was writing my third book in a similar vein. Of this sort of satirical, sort of comedic look at the media and popular culture. And then 911 came along, and in, fact, the fixer, I think, was published literally days before 911 took place. And suddenly it had a profound effect on me, as it did obviously, for people all over the world. It had a really profound effect in that suddenly I was thinking, you know, and I was also doing marketing for sort of comedy shows at the time and working with comedy agents and comedy producers. And suddenly it felt like comedy couldn’t address this thing that was so massive. It was such a sort of cataclysmic, sort of not just physical event, but sort of cultural and psychological event and kind of wound in the public consciousness. It felt like comedy couldn’t kind of get there, it couldn’t quite reach it. And, suddenly I felt that writing comedy, writing this third, book, this sort of follow up, I kind of slightly lost interest in it. And it almost felt like writing comedy was a kind of flippant thing. I decided that I wanted to write something that was reflective of this terrifying new phenomenon of terrorism in the world that had been brought about through 911. And obviously in 2005, we had terrorism came to London in the form of seven. Seven, 2005. And that really kind of spurred me on. I’d been toying around with doing a bit of screenwriting, and I was still working in the media at that time. And I tried to finish this third novel, and it didn’t really happen. And then I happened on this idea, creating a character of Ed Mallory, as you know, who’s in the novel, baptism, who’s a hostage negotiator. And it was through that that I became really interested in the whole idea of, you know, reflecting the nature of terrorism as that was taking place within London.

Steve Cuden: But you gave him an interesting twist because he’s blind.

Max Kinnings: Well, this is it. So I wrote a version of baptism where he wasn’t blind, and I wrote this book. And weirdly, that book is actually published in Holland. I got a deal in Holland, and it’s called claustrophobia. And it’s a different version of baptism. And he’s a much more kind of derivative, typical kind of big drinking, kind of, dissolute sort of character. I don’t know if you remember tv show that was produced over here called Cracker. It was, Robbie Coltrane.

Steve Cuden: I’ve heard the name, but I don’t think I’ve seen it.

Max Kinnings: He’s a sort of psychological profiler, and I love the idea of somebody who can sort of psychologically profile people you know, I’d come up with this story and maybe I’ll talk a little bit how I came up with the story of baptism a little bit in a minute. But I came up with this character. And that’s very much my creative process, is I come up with characters first. You know, there’s that age old sort of question, is it plot or character that comes first? And I. I’m very much of the character school. So I came up with this character, Fred Mallory, this hostage negotiator. And as I say, this book was published in Holland, but I couldn’t get a deal in the UK. I changed agents, around that time because I just couldn’t get it. Couldn’t get it away. And I just wanted a fresh pair of eyes on it, really, as much as anything. And my new agent looked at it and said, look, I think the issue is your central character. I think you’ve got a great plot, you’ve got a great storyline. You know, you’ve got this. This terrorist hijack on the London underground. You know, it’s like the taking of Pelham 123, kind of, you know, updated for the noughties. And, you know, the kind of storyline was there, but the central character was too derivative. So he said, you know, why don’t you go away and think about what you could do with this central character? So I was sort of, you know, thinking hard about what I. How I could change this character. And at the time, I was working. I did it. I used to go up to the British Library up on Euston Road in London, from south London, because my wife and I just had a baby girl, and it was all pretty chaotic at home. And in order to write, I would get on the tube and I would go up to north London to Euston Road to the British Library, which is this wonderful, wonderful library in this, you know, great sort of, atmosphere of learning. And I used to really love going up there to work. And very close to the British Library is the royal National Institute for the Blind. Often sublime. People would be getting off the tube, as I would be, and sometimes I’d offer an arm, you know, just to help them up the escalator or whatever, and through the. Through the sort of ticket barriers and everything, and then walk with them to the Royal Institute for the Blind, which was right by the British Library. And I was doing this one day, and it was just around the time that I was trying to think of this new character, Fred Mallory, and the light bulb went on. It was like this idea of, you lose one sense and the other senses become much more attuned and much more sensitive. I was thinking, so I’ve got this hostage negotiator. So one of the things that you learn about when you research hostage negotiation is this concept of active listening. So you’re listening to someone and, as you’re doing so you’re sort of psychologically profiling them. And then I was thinking, so, you know, if this character doesn’t, you know, they’ve lost their sense of sight, would that enhance their active listening? Now, nobody has told me that, clinically or medically. That is a fact. But I kind of, you know, with a bit of artistic license, I took that to be the case.

Steve Cuden: I think it probably is the case.

Max Kinnings: I think it probably is, but I don’t. I don’t know. Is that. And I just thought, okay, im going to create a backstory for this guy that he oversteps the mark in hostage negotiation. It all goes horribly wrong. He is blinded whilst on duty, and then he comes back, and continues his job, but with this new sort of almost like kind of superpower, if you like that hes born out of his blindness. And I also kind of like the idea of having a central character in a commercial thriller who is disabled and has this very sort of different, sort of take on the world. And he’s still trying to come to terms with his disability and all these sorts of things. And it just made it a much more interesting central character. So I, rewrote the book. I didn’t change the plot very much, obviously. I sort of wrote in his origin story of how he became blind, you know, threaded this new character through the story And, you know, whereas before, I, you know, just couldn’t get a deal. Suddenly publishers were interested, because of this new character, because he was different, he was unusual. You know, he sort of people sort of seemed to, could identify with him more closely than just the sort of slightly stereotypical.

Steve Cuden: Well, we love characters that have to overcome difficulties and obstacles and conflict and challenges. And it’s one thing to put roadblocks in a character’s way. It’s an entire thing differently if the character themself has the roadblock inside of them.

Max Kinnings: Yes, of course. Yeah, absolutely. No, this is it. And so Ed Mallory became not only has he got this, issue with his lack of sight, but also he’s got this issue with not being able to come to terms with it. So he doesn’t want to use a white stick, he doesn’t want to get a guide dog. He doesn’t want to do all the things that you would normally expect somebody would want to do because he doesn’t want to admit to himself because he hasn’t come to terms with it. so, yes, he’s got, he’s throwing up these obstacles over and above the sort of physical obstacles.

Steve Cuden: And he has people within the police force who already know who he is and don’t like him.

Max Kinnings: Yes, that’s right. Yes. He’s known as a difficult character and that’s right. And people who, you know, he’s awkward and, you know, he’s someone who is. Yeah, he’s a difficult guy to get on with.

Steve Cuden: So, I’m curious, how did you know as much as you know about police procedures and, you know, how did you know about the tube and how all that works? How much research did you need to do?

Max Kinnings: Okay, so the tube. I was always obsessed with the tube ever since I was a little kid. And I came down to London. I came from a very small, quiet country market town in the, in the Midlands, in the West Midlands called Shrewsbury. And, you know, coming down to London with my mum and dad was just incredibly exciting. And the most exciting part of coming down to London for me was to go on the London underground. These incredibly deep tunnels, very narrow, you know, quite claustrophobic, still very much with their sort of, victorian architecture and some of their sort of art deco architecture from the 1920s or whatever, old and dark. And, you know, they had this very, very specific smell. I mean, people used to be able to smoke in those days, back in the seventies and eighties on the, on the underground. And there’d be this sort a smell of kind of, it was, it was, you know, like being on the waltzes at a fairground. You’d have that smell of electricity and the smell of, you know, the fumes of the engines, and you’d have the smell of the cigarettes. And I found it totally intoxicating. And I kind of. I’ve always been fascinated by the London underground. But I was also even from the, you know, when I first moved to London when I was 18, I remember thinking to myself, you know, this is so, it’s such a target. I mean, obviously we had the sort of bombing campaign of the IRA in the 1970s and eighties in London.

Steve Cuden: Right, right.

Max Kinnings: you know, and there was always a fear that the tube was this soft target for terrorists. And I always remember thinking to myself, it would be, I think, probably from watching the taking apellem 123, which is.

Steve Cuden: A favorite movie of mine, mine, too.

Max Kinnings: Yeah, it’s a great movie. and I remember thinking, God, it’d be really easy to take one of these trains back in the day. You know, they’d have a guard and they’d have a driver. Nowadays, they just have a driver, there’s no guard. But, you know, I just remember thinking, it’d be so easy to take a train. And I think this idea had sort of stayed with me for years and years and years. So that when I was thinking about, you know, writing a, commercial thriller, you know, leaving behind the kind of gonzo satirical comedy thing behind, and actually writing a commercial thriller that kind of plugged into the sort of fear of terrorism and everything, I just thought, yeah, it’s got to be. It’s got to be the London Underground, because it’s something I’ve always been fascinated with. But I also had to do a lot of research. And yes, I did research into the police, but I did more research, really, into the London underground and driving, you know, train drivers and the whole process of that. And I went along, there’s a little museum, there’s the London Museum of Transport, it’s called in Covent Garden. They have a little library there. And I went along there and, and they kind of befriended me, and they. And they put me in touch. There was like a message board for London underground staff, and they let me join that. And I spoke to drivers, and then one day they said to me, oh, you know, we can let you meet a driver on a train, and you can go up and down the northern line with this driver who’s sort of off duty, and he’ll answer some of your questions. And that was fascinating, talking about the London underground and all of that. And I remember sitting there and we were right hard up on the front of the train, right by the driver’s door. And, this driver that I was talking to was obviously off duty at the time. And I said to him, so, you know, what is stopping me at this point? Breaking that bit of glass there. And if I’ve got like, an Allen key, you know, just a common on garden Allen key, I can open the door, I can get into that, you know, into the driver’s cab. What is stopping me doing that? And just as he was about to answer, the person I was with, he was from the press office, London Underground press office, closed down the conversation and said, no, stop. And it made me realize, my God, you know, this is, this is something they’ve obviously thought about and are aware of, but it. But, you know, that that, was really very telling to me that. That it is a kind of soft target. And, you know, I don’t want to frighten your listeners who visit London and travel on the underground, but, you know, it was something that, you know, again, it was this sort of feeling of, my God, you know, this is something that hasn’t really been explored before, you know, certainly through fiction. so, yeah, I did quite a bit of research about the tube and the drivers and the whole process and the signal, system and all of that, because I felt that it kind of needed that. It needed that kind of texture of realism so that the reader could really kind of, you know, buy into the reality of that.

Steve Cuden: I don’t think today you can write a book like baptism without it feeling raw and right in your face. I don’t think that’s possible to succeed unless a, reader feels like they’re right there.

Max Kinnings: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.

Steve Cuden: So let’s talk about how you get to a book. That is to say, you have an idea. You want to do something in the tube. You want it to be about terrorism. So where do you begin? You say you start with characters. I get that. But then do you sit down and plot it out? Do you outline it? Do you know what you’re doing before you start?

Max Kinnings: I did. I did, yeah. Very much so. I wrote my first two books pretty much without outlining. And it was only really by starting screenwriting. I had a bit of interest from a couple of sort of independent producers in my first two books. And, I got to know someone whose books were published about the same time who’s a screenwriter, a good friend of mine who I’ve written with in the past, a guy called Mark Pie. And, you know, Mark was like my mentor in terms of screenwriting. And so he suggested various books that I should read. He’d written a lot of television by that stage. And so I started reading about the process of screenwriting. Not novel writing, but screenwriting. And obviously outlining is so important for the process of screenwriting. And so suddenly it was like, I’m not just going to write my way into a story as I have done in the past. I want to write an outline for this story And I actually outlined baptism initially as a film. So, I had this outline and I had it, you know, it was a big sort of excel spreadsheet where I had. Because obviously each of the chapters has got a time code, and so some of those chapters are kind of overlapping. So you’re seeing the same events from different perspectives and different points of view. So, yeah, I outlined it exhaustively. Having never really outlined it, I suddenly became a massive converter and sort of evangelical for outlining. But I have to go back a little because there was something that happened to me. I’d come up with the idea of Ed Mallory as this character of this hostage negotiated character. And I was actually thinking of another story where, the home secretary of the british government is kidnapped. And I was beginning to develop that story when seven seven, the terrorist attack on the London Underground, took place. And everybody can remember seven seven, because obviously it was an appalling bombing campaign and terrible loss of Life. What a lot of people can’t remember now is that exactly two weeks after seven seven, so this was the 21 July 2005. Another four bombers tried to set off their explosives on the London Underground and repeat the same attack, but their explosives didn’t go off right and they fled. So now, at the time I was doing jury service, at, a court in central London, and I was travelling up from south London on the London Underground on the northern line. And it was very paranoid and very frightening because there were these four bombers that were on the loose. London was on high alert. There were police everywhere. You don’t see armed police very often in London, but they were all tooled up and it was a very, very scary time. And I was in the tube going up to do my jury service, in the morning, the day after. So this is the 22 July 2005, and suddenly the tube stopped. Now, often the tube stops for a couple of minutes, you know, because of a signalling thing or whatever. This was a rush out tube. It was busy, it was packed full of people and it stopped. Two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, nothing. The driver comes over the intercom and says, we’re stuck here. I’ve got a red light. I’m, not getting any information from the signal office. Don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll keep you updated. So, went to about six, seven minutes, eight minutes, nine minutes, ten minutes and 25 seconds. People are getting pretty frightened. I mean, everybody’s sitting there with newspapers, which is the front page. News is these terrorists are on the loose. Everybody’s crammed in this tunnel, you know, hundreds of feet underground. And I remember sitting there and I was a bit frightened, you know, I think everybody was. And the thing I really noticed and remembered was how normally in London people, especially the commuters, they’re quite an unfriendly bunch. They don’t retalk to each other. There’s very little kind of camaraderie. There’s people, you know, that they have their little kind of social bubble sort of around them. You know, they’re reading the papers or reading their books or nowadays looking at their tablets or their phones. And suddenly I noticed after about ten, 1112 minutes, that, sort of kind of psychological facade began to drop away and people started talking to each other. And I’d lived in London for years. I’d never seen them. And I remember people laughing nervously, this nervous laughter, and, you know, the driver kept updating us and saying, look, I’m still not getting any news. And, you know, I don’t know what’s happening. People getting increasingly frightened. Some people wanted to talk. Some people just wanted to sort of hibernate. They wanted to sort of, you know, shut down and go into themselves and, you know, almost sort of pull the newspapers around them. And I just remember thinking to myself, I’m a writer. This is frightening. And, you know, I’m a coward by anybody’s estimation, you know. But I remember thinking, I’ve got to remember this. I’ve got to remember this feeling, this psychology of this, this tube train and this sense of fear and uncertainty. And, you know, after nearly an hour, we were there for nearly an hour. So it was really. People were getting very tense. People were really getting very nervous. There were a few tears. They brought all the trains sort of bumper to bumper in the tunnel and they evacuated us down the trains into the tube station that we just left.

Steve Cuden: Outside of the trains?

Max Kinnings: Yeah, no, in the trains. They put them all together and we walked literally the full length of these trains.

Steve Cuden: Inside the trains, inside the trains.

Max Kinnings: And we walked all the way back through all these trains that they pulled.

Steve Cuden: Oh, my goodness.

Max Kinnings: Back to the platform. And it was. It was a tragedy because the police had mistaken this brazilian electrician called Jean Charles de Menezes. They’d mistaken him for one of the bombers and they’d killed him. They shot him in the. In the next train up from ours. The train ahead, right. They thought he was going to let off. He had a bag with him. They thought he was going to let off some explosives and they shot him. But at the time, we didn’t know this. This only became common knowledge later in the day. And at the time, everyone thought that they killed one of the bombers. And there was this really frightening kind of gung ho spirit that all these kind of commuters had of, like, good, we got him. We got one of them, you know, and it was. It was real kind of bloodlust. And again, I saw this sort of psychology of these people. And it was like, my God, you know, this is something I’ve got to try and kind of latch onto, you know, as a writer and try and explore. So that was a really formative experience for me, you know, very frightening experience. But something that made me think, right, I’ve got this character, but I haven’t got the right setting for him. And my, you know, that plugged into my fascination that I’d always had for the London underground. And I had this experience, you know, which was very frightening. And, you know, and I felt a sense of anger almost against these people, you know, and I wanted to explore that world. So that is how baptism came about through this sort of personal experience. But then also the psychology of this central character. And that’s when I really started mapping it out and outlining it meticulously.

Steve Cuden: How many pages was your outline?

Max Kinnings: Well, my outline was, I mean, long, about 30, 40 pages. and then I also had this kind of. I had this Excel sheet where I could drag things around in time, you know, because it became very complex because, as I say, I would have. Certain incidents would be seen from different points of view overlapping in time. And so my time codes weren’t always fitting as they should. And so it became. Yeah, there were points where I was thinking to myself, why have I done something as complex as this? You know? I wish I kept it more simple. You know, it was. It was really making my brain ache, you know?

Steve Cuden: But it’s also a mystery, so it has to have some complexity to it.

Max Kinnings: This is it. Yeah, this is it. And I kind of like. I don’t know. I kind of like that kind of immediacy. I like. I’ve always liked stories that take place over a very short period of time.

Steve Cuden: Why do you think that is?

Max Kinnings: I don’t know why that is. But, yeah, I like the fact of seeing an event play out and seeing it through different eyes and different perceptions and different points of view. And, you know, to some people it’s not a big deal. Other people, it’s utterly terrifying, you know, and just seeing this same event through these different lenses, I think. I mean, I also like. I love writing, you know, stories which are just from one point of view. I’ve written three novels just in the first person, you know, so I kind of love that. But I also love this idea of seeing one event through multiple points of view.

Steve Cuden: Well, I think you’ve done that quite brilliantly there. I’m also curious, you said that you originally wrote baptism, or you thought about writing it as a screenplay.

Max Kinnings: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And you’ve also been a screenwriter? You’re a screenwriter and you teach screenwriting.

Max Kinnings: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And I’m quite curious. Are you planning to take baptism and turn it into a movie somehow?

Max Kinnings: it’s been a lot. You know what it’s like. These things take a long, long time. For many years, it was optioned to an independent company over here. And, we even did a spec trailer for it, which you can see on YouTube. You know, we sort of spent a weekend on a tube carriage in a big marquee, sort of, you know, shooting this spec trailer, which with the producers then tried to use to get other financiers and producers involved. Then during lockdown, I, wrote it as a sort of four part mini series. And it’s still out there. It’s still, you know, I’m still trying to get it away. So, yeah, it’s, It’s something m. I’ve sort of adapted it as a movie and a mini series, and, you know, I just. It’s a work in progress.

Steve Cuden: You know, I think it would make it terrific. You know, it’s very visual, the way you’ve written it. So I think it would make a terrific motion picture of some kind. Whether it’s a series or a single movie or whatever it is. It will be not cheap to make, I don’t think, because of the location. of it. It’s underground in the tube. And while you can build sets and make some of that happen, some of it, you really have to. To go out in the world and do.

Max Kinnings: Absolutely. No, I think it would. And maybe it’s that. I think that it would be quite expensive, but, Yeah. Thank you.

Steve Cuden: Are you very much into, in your other books, action or some kind of action y kind of storytelling? That’s what it seems like you’re great at.

Max Kinnings: Well, it’s funny. I mean, I wrote a sequel to baptism called Sacrifice, which is the same ed mallory character. And, again, you know, it’s very similar. It takes place over one day. It’s multiple points of view. It’s very violent. you know, there’s a sort of, there’s a political scene to it, as there is in, baptism. But it was funny, you know, I had this intention to write a series of novels, and it never really happened. I kind of enjoyed the process of writing baptism sacrifice, but it was almost. It felt like I’d sort of got that out of my system. And then at the same time, I was writing a thriller called Alley Cats, which was a sort of low budget thriller set around the sort, of underground bike racing scene in central London. And so I wrote that as a thriller. And I had a, you know, my first movie that I’d co written was also a thriller. And I think I got to a point where I sort of felt that I was all a bit actioned out. I’d kind of, you know, I sort of enjoyed the process and I loved writing it, but I wanted to go and do something else. And I think that’s it. That it’s. I kind of not lose interest. But once I worked in one area a lot, whether it’s, you know, screenwriting or novel writing, you know, I’m sort of keen to get into another area. I enjoy sort of moving around a little bit. And so as much as I enjoyed writing those thrillers, I decided that I was going to try something else. So I wrote, a historical action movie set in Latvia in the 10th century, which was a fascinating process, and that was just a kind of paid gig that I got, but I loved it. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Not too many people sitting around thinking to themselves, you know what? I’ll write something in the 10th century. Oh, and by the way, let’s put it in Latvia.

Max Kinnings: Well, this is it. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I was approached by a latvian production company for which this story was that, it’s their national legendary.

Steve Cuden: Ah.

Max Kinnings: so, you know, and I felt a lot of, you know, responsibility on my shoulders, you know, to work on that.

Steve Cuden: Well, yeah, yeah. Because you’ll have a whole country down on you if you don’t get it right.

Max Kinnings: Exactly. You didn’t. I didn’t want to get it wrong, so, yeah, I was just kind of jumping around and funnily enough, the book that I’m writing now that I’m working on at the moment is a return to the kind of baptism, sacrifice. It’s not the same universe, it’s not the same central character of the negotiator. but it’s that same, you know, multiple points of view over a 24 hours, ah, period.

Steve Cuden: Do you, when you’re writing do like I do, which is I actually see the movie playing out in my mind’s eye, and then I feel like I’m a reporter, almost a journalist, and I’m reporting from the field. What I’m seeing in my mind is the same for you.

Max Kinnings: Totally. Yeah. And I think that’s it. And I think if you’ve got that sensibility of a screenwriter alongside being a novelist. I think you. I think. I think novice do it anyway, obviously. But, yeah, completely. I completely see it playing out well.

Steve Cuden: There are novelists that write purely emotional things. They don’t. It’s not action at all. It’s not genre at all. It’s very much internal, or it’s very much feelings, or simply interactions between people, and it’s not full of movement. And the same thing with playwriting. Playwriting is, an entirely different beast, sort of the same thing, but quite different in the sense that you’re having characters talking to each other endlessly, potentially throughout, the course of a whole show. I mean, my favorite play of all plays is waiting for Gato, and it doesn’t really go anywhere. That’s why you’ve never seen waiting for Gato as a movie, because it doesn’t move forward. It just keeps talking and talking and talking, which I think is phenomenal, but wouldn’t make a very good motion picture.

Max Kinnings: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s interesting you should mention waiting for God, because I’m working on this documentary, this radio documentary about, Rick Mail, who, I think, in terms of an american audience, you probably know him from the young ones, which I think played on MTV and also drop Dead Fred and things like that. But he was, a lifelong Beckett fan and actually did waited for Godot in the west end of London in 1991, which, weirdly, I’d done the advertising for when I worked in media. And, Yeah, I mean, that’s just a wonderful. A wonderful piece. And,

Steve Cuden: But that’s a real difference between a play which can go vertically, versus a movie that has to move horizontally. It’s got to move forward or it dies like a shark.

Max Kinnings: Yes, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: It has to move forward.

Max Kinnings: It has to move forward. There has to be that momentum, that kind of kinetic momentum. But even within that, I’ve become sort of fascinated in projects that kind of, you know, Film projects that kind of break that paradigm.

Steve Cuden: Like what?

Max Kinnings: Well, sort of. So buried. Is it the Ryan Reynolds movie? Sure. The entire movie takes place in a coffin buried in the dirt.

Steve Cuden: Indeed.

Max Kinnings: There’s a Tom Hardy movie that Steven Knight wrote called Locke.

Steve Cuden: I’ve seen it.

Max Kinnings: Yeah. And I. So I kind of, like, I know exactly what you mean by, you know, you need that kinetic momentum. But I actually admire those filmmakers who try and sort of break the paradigm, try and do something very different within the form.

Steve Cuden: So I think they try to move the emotion forward so that it’s still moving forward, as opposed to waiting for Gato, where they talk and talk and talk and talk. And yet you’re getting the entire universe in the play. But it doesn’t really move forward. They remain in one place the whole time. Nothing goes forward, nothing happens.

Max Kinnings: Ah, yeah. That’s right. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And that’s why it’s so wonderful, because you just get lost in the language of it.

Steve Cuden: So what for you makes great dialogue? Great?

Max Kinnings: That’s. Blimey. that’s a big question. I think it needs to, you know, it’s character, isn’t it? I mean, you know, it’s got to be true to the character. And it’s got to be that kind of interaction and that kind of interplay between two or more characters or even one character, you know, speaking to themselves, I guess. But, yeah, it’s that sort of believability. One of the things I notice, you know, teaching creative writing, is that, students very often starting out in the world of writing, overwrite dialogue. They always overwrite. They put too much in. And particularly in screenwriting, you know, they don’t tell the story visually enough. They try and tell it. They try and deliver all the exposition through dialogue. And that always seems to be a fundamental issue.

Steve Cuden: Sure. It’s called a movie. It’s supposed to move, not talk.

Max Kinnings: Exactly. And I think, I don’t know. You have these wonderful stylists like Tarantino, and you could just listen to the dialogue for hours. Although I think he sometimes overplays it. But maybe needed a bit of an editor there. But who’s going to?

Steve Cuden: But he’s an iconoclast, and he can get away with it. Just like the Coen brothers can get away with it.

Max Kinnings: Exactly.

Steve Cuden: And what I see sometimes in young people like you’re talking about is they see and admire and get real up on someone like a Tarantino or the Coen brothers. And so they try to emulate them in some way poorly. And they’re masters, and it took them a long time to get to that point where they couldn’t have that kind of dialogue. And it’s really fascinating.

Max Kinnings: Yeah. No, no, absolutely. And this is it. And sometimes you need to overwrite. I’m a firm believer in overwriting, particularly in terms of dialogue. Just writing way too much and then remembering that old adage, you know, arrive late, leave early, you know, in terms of a scene. So you might have a load of dialogue, but actually so much of it, you can just cut away and find the sort of beats that you’re looking for within the drama. And just focus on those I teach.

Steve Cuden: And I believe in. And it’s not my concept, though. I totally believe in it. That if it doesn’t move the story forward or expand our understanding of the character, you cut it.

Max Kinnings: Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: And then you get down to as fat free as you can in your storytelling with both dialogue and action.

Max Kinnings: This is it. And I’m a firm believer in that. And I think, I think that’s what I learned from screenwriting. I mean, I think I learned more about sort of novel writing and story structure and narrative generally from studying screenwriting. Where every second has to count. You know, sort of economic imperative as much as anything. And I think that’s right. And I try and bring that kind of mindset of the screenwriter to the world of novel writing. Because, you know. Yeah, absolutely. If it’s not doing anything, it’s just sort of idling there on the page with no reason to be there. It’s got to go. It’s got to go.

Steve Cuden: The worst thing is when a writer writes, Hello. Hi. How are you? It’s great to see you. I mean, nobody cares. That’s why you cut right on in on what the heart of the matter is.

Max Kinnings: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Cuden: I’m curious. What is your thinking in terms of the best way to pitch a story to either a producer or a publisher? How do you go about pitching yourself so that the story is sellable?

Max Kinnings: Well, it’s one of those things that, it’s really difficult because if you’re constantly sort of second guessing what the market is, sort of looking for filmmaking and novel writing, you’re always going to be kind of slightly out of date. Because as soon as you’re seeing something that you feel is where the market’s going, by the time you’ve spent the. Whatever it is, two, three years writing a novel or two, three years maybe developing a screenplay with producers or whatever that thing that was the zeitgeist, or you thought was the zeitgeist has moved on.

Steve Cuden: Indeed.

Max Kinnings: So I think it’s dangerous, isn’t it, to try and second guess the market? My thinking, my mindset in terms of sort of pitching ideas and pitching projects is, yes, it’s useful to have an element of topicality to what you’re writing. And you don’t want to be writing. You don’t want to be on the sort of tail end of a kind of fad or a, scene. You don’t want to be on the tail end of that. But I think you just have to pitch it in terms of a unique character. I think that’s the key, actually, is the unique character. But, you know, the telling of their story in a sort of unusual way. And I think, you know, in terms of pitching people, it’s almost like they over pitch. I think sometimes they write too much. That’s something that I’ve. It’s a weird irony of the creative industries that I found certainly in sort of, in terms of publishing and filmmaking, is that, you know, it’s all about the narrative. It’s all about, you know, starting off with the words on paper. But a lot of the executives and a lot of the people that you deal with, the publishers and the editors and the producers, they don’t like reading. You know, they’re busy people, and they don’t want a big wad of paper that they’ve got to plow through.

Steve Cuden: True.

Max Kinnings: They want to look at something that’s going to, like, pitch them the idea in half a page.

Steve Cuden: Absolutely true.

Max Kinnings: And that in itself is an art form. You know, I know some great writers and they can great, you know, construct wonderful stories and wonderful characters, but they can’t write a pitch and, like, a really good log line or they can’t write a really nice, sort of, like, short synopsis that’s going to really knock everyone, you know, out. They can’t do it. It’s a different mindset. It’s actually much more to do with advertising and marketing and media, really. It’s. You’re selling it, you know, as an idea.

Steve Cuden: I think it was, Abraham Lincoln who, and I’m paraphrasing it, of course, but I think he once said to someone, I apologize for the length of this letter. If I’d had more time, it would have been short.

Max Kinnings: Brilliant. Yeah, that’s it. That is totally it. Yeah. Because the more you edit, the more you get into that mindset, the shorter the thing will get.

Steve Cuden: And I think, personally, short stories are the most difficult form to master. And then you can take it all the way down and say that Haiku is the most difficult form of all 17 syllables, I believe it is. To tell whatever you’re telling, that’s hard to do well. I mean, you can do it, but it’s hard to do really well.

Max Kinnings: Oh, yeah. absolutely. And one of the things, through teaching screenwriting, I teach a short film class where the assessment is like a ten minute short film. And I become, having not really known a lot about short films many, many years, you know, from when I first started, I love the short Film form. I think it’s wonderful. And I know a lot of, ah, for example, alley Cats, the, the movie that I wrote, we started, we, you know, we wrote a short film for that as like a proof of concept that we sent out to producers and we got work through that. I think it was through that process of writing that ten minute short Film script, I really got into the idea of telling short stories. And actually, I think the short Film form is wonderful. It really is. The things you can do in just a few minutes in terms of characterization and narrative are absolutely fascinating.

Steve Cuden: Well, you were in advertising, and commercials are really tiny short stories.

Max Kinnings: Exactly. Exactly. This is it. And I think it was coming from that background that kind of made me realize, you know, you’ve, you know, if you’re writing a commercial and you’ve got 30 seconds and you can’t go over that 30 seconds, you can’t be 31 seconds, you know? And, so I think it was probably that discipline that really, you know, that I took forward into, certainly into screenwriting for sure.

Steve Cuden: Indeed. So I have been having the most marvelous conversation for a little more than an hour now with Max kinnings coming to us, in Pittsburgh, all the way from London, and I’m gonna wind the show down a little bit. So I’m wondering, in all of your experiences in the business of writing or in movie making, are you able to share with us a story that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or maybe just plain funny?

Max Kinnings: Okay. When I was five years old, okay, so this, this might feel, oh, you know, this isn’t in the industry, but actually it’s something that I’ve sort of taken with me into the industry. When I was about five years old, I was out in the garden at home after school, and I found some acorns, and I picked up this acorn, and I was a bit of a nerdy kid, sort of lost in my own little world, and I dismantled this acorn. Okay? And so, you know, you’ve got the, you’d got the stem and the cup of the acorn and the seed and the seed coat, and I managed to sort of, you know, almost dissect this acorn, and I took off the seed coat and then I managed to put it all back together again. I remember being very, very excited about this, and I thought, right, I’m going to take this into school in the morning. And they used to do show and tell, you know, where you’d bring something in, and you’d show it to the school. And so there I am the following day, in front of a big, sort of infant school, you know, hundreds of sort of five and six year old kids and teachers and everything. And I’m thinking, I’ve got something really fascinating here. You know, there it is in the acorn that I’ve got with me, and, you know, sweaty in my little hand. And they, said, oh, you know, Max has got something that he wants to, you know, bring up for show and tell. So I walked up to the top of this, school hall, stood there, and then it hit me that what I got in my hand, this little acorn that I was prepared to dissect in front of the school, meant nothing to anybody because nobody could see it. It was absolutely tiny. I can remember it really clearly now, however many years later, thinking, oh, my God, I’ve completely misjudged this. Nobody’s going to be able to see it. Nobody’s going to understand what I’m doing. I’ve completely blown it. And so I had to sort of abandon ship and walk back. And I think I learned a really, really important lesson in terms of audiences always give your audience what they expect or what they can manage or their perception, play to their perception, to their point of view, and not your point of view and what you want to do. You’ve always got to think about your audience and think about their expectations and their kind of enjoyment of your sort of entertainment product, if you like. So, you know, when I’m thinking of audiences, I’m transported back to my little five year old self, standing there with my sort of dissected acorn at the end of the class in front of hundreds of people, just looking at me, thinking, what is he doing? And so I think that is a kind of weird little story that kind of comes back to me every now and again, which has kind of informed a lot of my kind of writing and creativity.

Steve Cuden: Well, there’s no doubt, even if you want to write for yourself, which I think you should, to a certain extent.

Max Kinnings: Yeah, yeah.

Steve Cuden: You still should consider the audience in.

Max Kinnings: The equation, and if they can’t see your acorn from the back of the school hall, then you fail.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s a very telling story and a whole career has bloomed from that.

Max Kinnings: Yes. Well, yeah, let’s hope that’s right.

Steve Cuden: That’s wonderful. So, last question for you today, Max. Along the way, you have given us an enormous amount of great advice and lots of food to chew on as far as a career in writing and, being novelist and screenwriter and so on. But I’m wondering if you have a solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give to those who are maybe starting out in the business, like your students, or maybe they’re in a little bit and trying to get to the next level.

Max Kinnings: Well, again, in terms of advice, you know, I’ve got all sorts of sort of little bits of advice here, there, you know. But I think the best advice I could give to anybody in terms of starting out as a writer and a creative generally, is to sort of listen to yourself and find out where and when you’re at your best and most creative. You, know, some people, it’s late at night. Some people, it’s first thing in the morning. I had a great colleague who told me that they always have the laptop by the side of the bed because they believe that writing and creativity is very much, you know, you’re in the dream state. And actually, if you, you know, as soon as you wake up, rather than getting up and getting on with your day, you actually sort of use the sort of residue of that dream state for your creativity that can work really well. So, you know, for some people, they like a glass of whiskey. Some people like to the endorphins of exercising, you know, going for a run. You know, for some people, they might want to smoke something or take something or whatever it might be, I don’t know. But for certain people, for all of us, I think creatives, we need to listen to ourselves and our sort of subconscious, and our conscious and work out when we are at our most effective and when we are at, our best in terms of creativity, and then keep recreating the zone, getting into that zone. and I think that is the best advice that I could give, is find out when you’re at your best and where you’re at your best, and sort of recreate that environment as much as you possibly can, because there’s nothing worse than just trying. And, we all have to do it sometimes when we’ve got a deadline, sometimes you don’t have the luxury of being able to choose your moment and you have to just sort of grind out the work. But I think it’s very important to have an understanding of your own creativity. And when you’re good and when you’re.

Steve Cuden: Not, I think that’s a, very, very wise advice, because there are early morning writers, there are late night writers, there are people that have a certain set pattern. There are people that write whenever they feel like it. There’s all kinds of different ways and what works best for you should be something that you focus on. Let it be best for you.

Max Kinnings: Absolutely. yeah. I also think getting a cat’s useful.

Steve Cuden: A cat?

Max Kinnings: A cat. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Unless you’re allergic.

Max Kinnings: Unless you’re allergic. Yes. In which case, don’t. But, yeah, I always think writers and cats seem to go well together.

Steve Cuden: I fear that I am terribly allergic to cats, so I I would not have a cat. A dog, yes, but not a cat.

Max Kinnings: Ah, there you go. Yeah, same thing, I’m sure. It’s just nice to have that sort of different kind of, like, mindset around. Definitely. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Max. Kidding. This has been so much fun for me, and I’m just thrilled that you’ve spent more than an hour with us today on StoryBeat And I can’t thank you enough for your time, your energy, your wisdom. And for those of you listening, go out and buy hitman or the fixer, sacrifice or baptism and read Max kinnings, because I think you’ll find him to be absolutely entertaining and, just a joy to read. Max, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Max Kinnings: Thank you, Steve. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you. And, yes, keep up the good work. It’s a great podcast.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat If you liked this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Tunein, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.