Julian Friedmann Interview

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Freddie by Manusha

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WriteWords talks to literary and screenwriting agent Julian Friedmann, of major agency Blake Friedmann, whose clients range from new hot bestelling novelist Joseph O'Connor to writers for the Bill and Bad Girls.

Tell us all about you and the agency

The Agency doesn’t specialise – we do film, television and books of all sorts although we tend to concentrate on literary novels and commercial fiction and upmarket non-fiction rather than children’s books and the book agents don’t tend to do science fiction or fantasy. We have four agents and three assistants and receive upward of 8,000 applications from writers a year to join the Agency. We take on relatively few new writers each year and therefore we need to be really convinced of the writer’s talent and earning ability before we’ll take them on. We do actually have quite a large number of relatively unproduced or unpublished writers at any one time but we have to be careful about adding too many to that list.

Tell us about your clients

They range from young to old, from experienced to inexperienced and many of them become close friends. It’s one of the nice things about working for yourself that you don’t have to represent anyone you don’t want to. We have some high profile projects like Joe O’Connor’s STAR OF THE SEA which was the biggest selling novel last year in Britain and Gilbert Adair’s THE DREAMERS which was Bertolucci’s latest film. At the other end of the spectrum we have first novelists and a number of writers who write TV series episodes like A TOUCH OF FROST, HEARTBEAT, THE BILL, EASTENDERS, BAD GIRLS and BOMBER.

What kind of writers are you looking for at the moment?

We tend to be interested in writers rather than pieces of work but I am becoming more focused on writers who have got something to say, who know how to say it in an accessible way, who have proved that they can work in the industry and deliver on a regular basis. In terms of subject matter we’re very eclectic.

Favourite writers?

My favourite writers (in a purely subjective sense)are probably James Thurber and Damon Runyan. This is probably because they were the writers who really got me interested in writing many decades ago. I don’t read nearly as widely as I should because with 200 clients at the Agency and all the material that gets offered to us I don’t really have much time to read outside work but I’m very fond of shows like COUPLING, SPOOKS and I really enjoyed the movie ETRE ET AVOIR.

What excites you about a piece of writing-

What excites me is very simple: when I get emotionally engaged with the character. No plot however dramatic can ever do what careful manipulation of the emotions can do.

How do you respond to unsolicited writing- do you give feedback?

We get too much material to give detailed feedback to everyone. If I read five pages of a script or a manuscript and decide I don’t want to take it any further I haven’t really read enough to give much feedback. I do encourage writers to set up writers’ groups or join writers’ groups and in ScriptWriter magazine we’ve published two articles on different forms of writers’ groups because writers do need feedback however we don’t get paid to provide feedback and if we gave detailed feedback on every submission we’d go out of business within a week.

A longer version of this interview is available to WriteWords Full and Community Members.
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Comments by other Members

Al T at 12:01 on 04 June 2004 Report this post

Hi Julian, many thanks for sharing your thoughts with us at WW. As an unpublished, unrepresented novelist, I found your last paragraph particularly interesting. We get so much contradictory advice on how to submit, but your view makes lots of sense.

Also, as someone who has previously submitted work before it was ready, I value your thoughts on that. Many of us are naturally impatient to kick off our literary careers, but it seems clear that we do ourselves no favours with excessive haste.

Thanks again,

Adele.