>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves, and it’s my privilege to
welcome Graeme Simsion to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. The Rosie Project
is one of my favorite books of the year telling the sweet story of a man looking for love.
Graeme lives in Australia with his family and is a former IT consultant; and the Rosie Project is
his debut novel; and is already a bestseller in multiple countries; and he will be writing the
screenplay for the film that's being developed for Sony Pictures. Please join me in giving him a
very warm welcome.
>> Graeme Simsion: Thank you very much. I mean, for the first time in quite a while I feel like
I'm amongst my own people, okay? Because I've come out of an IT background, and I would
like to thank Laura and Deb who are selling the books today and hiding somewhere there is
Gail, my minder[phonetic] who keeps an eye on me doing all these sorts of things and of course
Amy, thank you much very much for that very nice introduction. Can you hear all right at the
back? Wow. You’ve got one of those fantastic sound systems that you don't even know it's
working and it actually is which is fantastic.
So let me just start with a short commercial. At some stage, trust me in the next 12 months, in
fact with Christmas coming up at some stage in the next three months you are going to need to
buy a gift for somebody. And you know what a pain that is. You are busy, you are sitting there,
you’ve got work to do and you’ve got to buy this gift, you've got to get in the car, you got to go
out, you got to think, all those annoying sorts of things. Well, let me put it to you at that point
you'll be thinking to yourself what can I give them that doesn't cost too much, is personal in
some way, has a story, an explanation that goes with it, is, you know, dedicated to them, it's
going to be appropriate for somebody between the ages of say 13 and 92; just a little aside
here, 92 is the oldest person who's read this book and given me positive feedback and she said I
just loved the sexual position scene, okay? So grandma's going to love this, okay? People who
like literary, people who like popular fiction, male or female, what can I give them? You think
thank goodness that day in October at Microsoft I bought those five copies of the Rosie Project
and you just pull one off. So let me just plant that idea in your mind. I will write anything
legitimate, legal, and in any color you want on the book to help solve all of your Christmas
problems. Okay.
So the important thing is we are going to finish by 2:30, okay? And I will allow some time for
questions and that. I plan to talk a bit, and I plan to do a little reading perhaps as well just to
give you a flavor of the book for that. How many people have read it? Hands up. Okay. That's
great. We're all sort of pretty much in the same boat. So I can do a reading and I won't be
telling you stuff you've known of before.
But let me just give you some sort of [inaudible]. I was working as a computer operator. This
was in the late 1970s. Okay. I'll wind the clock back a little bit. I did a physics degree. So I did
in the 1970s what people with a physics degree and other useless degrees like mathematics and
so forth did, they went into IT, or data processing as it was known then. And I have to say for
the young people in the room that was an incredible time to be in data processing. It's an
incredible time now, but it was a different incredible time because there were no programs, no
university programs, college programs in computing. So what you had was a bunch of people
who came from the widest amazing range of disciplines who were all, there was no computing
people, all just sort of lumped them together, then the three-week course, and then suddenly
we were all doing this sort of stuff, and there were a lot weird people in that stage. Anyway, I
got a job as computer operator. I had to start at the bottom of the heap loading tapes and
lifting 75 megabyte disk packs. It was a big deal. You had to learn how to do a safe lifting
course in it to do the 75 megabyte disk packs and doing that type of work.
And I took six months off from this arduous work to do a trip around Australia with a buddy in a
combi van. And while I was doing that journey I was reading Henry Miller and Ernest
Hemingway as you do as a young man. I was 21 years old, and I thought, you know, this can be
that hard. So I started scribbling the great Australian novel. And I wrote maybe five pages, I
showed it to my buddy, and he said, Graeme I think you've made an excellent career choice in
information technology and I think you got a career in that but don't give up the day job. So
realizing, and look, I knew myself what I'd written was garbage; it wasn't as easy as it looked,
and I proceeded to give up. By the way, if somebody could've tapped me on the shoulder, if my
older self could go back in time and tap the young Graeme on the shoulder and just give him
some advice he would've said two things: he would've said Graeme, it actually takes time to do
this stuff. You want to be, I wanted to be a programmer in those days, you want to be an
expert computer programmer? You think you just sit down and say have I got any talent for
this? Nah, I give up? No, you actually have to work at it. And particularly in a very competitive
situation like writing it's going to take a fair time, so I don’t just sit down and say talent, no
talent; you're going to have to work at it. And the other thing was: don't write about yourself.
Look, by the way, is there anybody here who has dreams of writing a novel? Now, what I want
you to do is because you’re not to go yes, me or anything like that, you just sort of go, eh, make
some sort of little signal. Those of you who are, by the way, greetings desk people. I know that
some people are watching this live at their desks. You don't have to make any signal because I
won't see you, but the rest of you just do it on the count of three. Anybody got an interest in
writing a novel? One, two, three. Oh, wow. Okay. A whole bunch of you which is probably
why you come to these of sorts of things.
So let me just roll the clock forward now. And it's now February of last year. I sat down, I
turned on the [inaudible] computer, and I typed the first words of the Rosie Project. Obviously
something had happened in between which enabled me to write which has turned out to be a
bestselling novel. Let me tell you most of what I learned I learned in IT. Most, by definition
because most of the time that I'd spent in that intervening 30 years I had spent in information
technology. So what I'd like to do with you guys is not give my standard spiel, my origin myth
about where the book came from in the normal way, but rather try to talk a bit about how my
career in information technology taught me stuff that turned out to be really useful because
when I sat down at that, to write that thing well, it was a bit like that line in Bridges of Madison
County, that everything I've ever done in my life has been bringing me to this point. Or if you
like a little more pragmatic view, you use what you got. And I was going to sit there and I was
going to use what I got, and there was enough there that I could actually write a novel. So here
I am.
Back there I was operator; I got promoted to programmer; I moved into the specialist area of
database, which was fledging stuff, DMS2 on the Burrow[phonetic] 6700. So it wasn't even
relational database back in those days. This is [inaudible] databases. And I was the DBA. And
one day the geekiest guy in the whole department, I might add the smartest guy in the whole
department who was predictably the systems programmer, who wrote in DCL [inaudible] in
those days, there’s a deadline reach for you, he was the guy. He had the thick glasses, he had
the pants around the ankles, and those are the days where you all had to wear ties. He had the
pants around ankles, he had the bowl haircut, all those sorts of things, and he loped over my
desk and he said, Graeme I intend in enrolling in a master of business administration. Could
have knocked me over with a feather. I mean, the last guy you'd think who’d want to do a
master of business administration, I said why? I mean I hardly knew this guy; he was
[inaudible], he wasn't a guy I hung out with. He said, I believe I've been stereotyped as a geek.
I intend to acquire the knowledge to overcome that stereotyping. Which, if you haven't sort of
picked up on that, is a pretty geeky way of solving a problem. But I said well, that's real nice.
But why are you telling me? And he said, since you suffer from the same problem I thought you
might like to enroll in the course as well. Wake-up calls don't come any stronger than that, let
me tell you.
So I went off and I enrolled in a master of business administration, continuing to specialize in
database work and so forth. And he said to me, since we work together we should study
together. Okay. We will timeshare study with physical fitness. So we would go jogging six days
a week, and he would've done all the reading you’re supposed to be doing, all the pre-reading
and so forth, and he would have virtually memorized it. We would be jogging and he would be
giving me all the stuff about the J curve and [inaudible] economics as we ran. One day we ran
13 miles on a Sunday morning to my buddy’s, another buddy’s place where he was going to
give me a ride home and he talked nonstop. We get there and he says, not finished Graeme,
jog home. So that Sunday morning we ran a full marathon distance, and it wasn't until the last
five miles that he finally stopped. So he is a fun guy.
But he dropped out of the NBA, but I didn't. And as a result of that, not only did I continue to
develop my database skills, and I ended up writing a couple of books on data modeling, so
there's a book out there if you ever see it called Data Modeling Essentials. It's not the natural
companions of the Rosie Project for most people but maybe for you guys, okay? It’s in its third
edition and it’s a pretty well-known book on a data modeling. So I continued doing, that but I
also left my job and started, went out independent contracting, started to build up a
consultancy. So I've got a few management skills. We got two in my mid-40s. I was running a
consultancy which was doing a range of largely early end of a life cycle type of stuff. So we
were doing business process redesign, information systems planning, we’d go as far as
specification and project management, but we tended to be software independent. So we're
doing that type of work, we had 60, 70 people, offices in three cities, tech boom, things were
going well, and then I read the book that changed my life.
I read a book called, The Unkindest Cut by Joe Queenan. And Joe Queenan, American film
critic, and this is about how Joe set out to make a movie for 7000 bucks. He was trying to
emulate Robert Rodriguez, who famously made a film called, El Mariachi in Mexico, man’s
nodding, woman’s nodding, everybody’s nodding, who famously made a movie called, El
Mariachi in Mexico for 7000 dollars which he raised by selling his own blood. Now Joe didn't
sell his own blood, he used his credit card; but he went out, he wrote the script, he cast his
friends, he borrowed equipment, and he kept shoveling money into this thing to make it better,
and at the end of it he’d almost destroyed his marriage, he’d spent 50,000 bucks, and he made
a complete turkey.
So I finished the book, as you do, closed it, and I said to my wife, we’ve got it do this. And she
said something like what you mean we? And I had a sort of leverage point here because she
had wanted to be a write. From the age of eight she'd been filling in exercise books and
[inaudible] writing the novel. She’d practiced. She hadn't gone into IT or anything like that and
actually she had become a doctor. But she was still writing. She got the two books to the final
hurdle with a major publisher, she had an agent, and then she got a promotion at work and
decided she needed to focus on the day job and gave up the writing. I said, you know, you may
never see those novels in print but imagine seeing one on the big screen. She said, is this is
going to cost anything? No, of course it's not going to cost anything. [inaudible] mystic video
camera. It is just a little fun thing we do. You'll book, you will star in it, and we will cast all our
friends, we’ll use locations known to us, we'll have the kids in it, the cat, the whole thing. It will
be a time capsule. And on your 40th birthday we will show this movie and that will give us
something to do on your 40th birthday, time capsule, and she said, are you sure it won't cost
anything? Of course it's not going to cost anything. The mystic video camera, cast of friends,
okay. I think she said, okay.
But with great enthusiasm it took me four months to write the screenplay, which I did. And
then we shot it with all friends and that sort of thing, and to cut a long story short, it's a very
long story, on her 40th birthday, nine months later at 2 AM we finished the final edit, and that
night 300 of us piled into a movie theater, which we had hired, you hired a movie theater?
What did that cost? Didn't matter anymore we'd spent so much already. And we watched this
film and people watched it. It was a drama, and they didn't laugh in the wrong places and that
should've been the end of it except that the person who directed it, who I may well see tonight
because she lives in Portland, Oregon and that's where I'm going, the person who directed it
took it along to a film class. She was a film student. And the teacher said, the instructor said,
you know, because I went along too, there's a lot of things wrong with this movie like the acting
and things like that but she said, you know, you see you spent more money than you intended
on it, the smartest money you spent was using a professional screenwriter. And a very
dangerous seed was planted. And a year later I had sold my business.
And I would like to say, and naturally I immediately enrolled, by the way I went freelancing. So
I continued to doing freelance master classes on consulting skills because I’d learned a bit about
that and on data modeling. All around the world I was all over the US doing just like this tour at
the moment except that topic was data modeling, and I got to tell you, talking about my book is
a lot more fun.
But I continued doing that, and I would like to say I went straight into an undergrad course class
in screenwriting. But I didn't. I had a bucket list problem. I always wanted a PhD. So let's get
that done first. So I went back to school and I did a PhD in data modeling. And what that took
me into, the question I was asking was, people familiar with [inaudible] relationship modeling
that sort of stuff, right? The question I asked was when people do [inaudible] relationship
modeling are they doing description or design? Are they describing something in the user's
heads or are they coming up with something? So I did the biggest study ever of data modeling
practitioners. I have 479 data modeling practitioners that I interviewed or got them to do
exercises and all this. And because I was trying to say, were we doing design when we did data
modeling, I had to learn about design theory.
So I learned all this stuff about general design of theory which is a theory which comes out of
architecture, particularly engineering, and the conclusion after four years of work is data
modeling is design. So I got my PhD with those four words and walked away feeling I had
wasted four years of my life because I now enrolled in the undergraduate course program in
screenwriting straight from PhD to diploma. So it was a little bit of a come down. But I was to
find that the stuff I had learned in my PhD about the design theory turned out to be remarkably
useful, that in fact you could look at screenwriting as being a design process.
Now, so when I started, well I better tell you what, so when I started doing screenwriting we
were doing things like, I’m thinking of some principles of design that I could draw on. We were
doing things like putting scenes on cards, working top-down, and you’d put all the scenes on
cards and you'd shuffle them around on the wall, I call it the doing the cards. Then one of the
students would say, that I was working with would say, hang on. I've got a great idea for scene
17. And I'd say no, no, we are just doing the cards. So it’s top-down. But one of the things you
learn in design theory is that design is never purely top-down. It's always a bit top-down, a bit
bottom-up, a bit middle-out. So I would say, no, no, it's okay. Let's turn the card over, let's
grab that clever idea for that scene, let's keep it, let's turn the card back over.
Now, what was going on in my mind in a way was screenwriting problem comes up, apply
general design theory, but more than just applying it like I read a book, I actually felt like I had
experience in because even though I was in a different field, designing databases or doing data
modeling or business process design which I also did quite a lot of, those cards felt like a
business process. I just felt like I'd been there before. I had to learn something a little new but
I had a sense like being able to program in one language and learning another. You've been
there before; you're learning curve is just so much faster than somebody who's learning
programming for the first time. Or, the idea that design is never finished. When you’ve got a
design you can always make it better.
So while I was in this course a screenwriting guru came to Australia and he said, you should
never spend more than three months on a screenplay, and if you spend a year it’s just because
you're no good. Except design theory said the opposite. Design theory said: put it down, leave
it for a while, come back, you can make it better. So which did I believe? Because all around
me students were abandoning their screenplays. That's the advice, chuck it, start another one.
I spent five years on my one screen play and that turned out to be the smart move. And things
like design solutions lead to new design problems inevitably or almost inevitably. So when
someone says, I’ve got a solution to that scene, that fact that he's not supposed to meet the girl
yet, why don't we make him do this? No, but that will create another problem. Now people
would stop and say oh, it’s going to create another problem, forget it. Design theory says of
course it will. Solve that problem. That will create a problem too maybe. Solve that.
Eventually you’ll get to the end of a chain. So it's a way of working that I’d struck in IT all the
time. If you find a solution to something, it creates its own problem; you don't give up and say,
well that's no good a solution.
So I had all this sort of experience. Of course, what I actually needed was a topic, a subject.
And again, IT helps enormously because I thought, what will I write about? They say good story
comes out of character. All the people in my course had come out of come out of the arts. I
was the only guy to come out of IT. I thought well, if I want do something different, let's write
about an IT type of character, somebody I'd have worked with. And I remembered my friend,
who I was still jogging with all these years later, even after he dropped out of NBA we just kept
on jogging. I thought maybe take a character like him, that sort of uber-geek, and let's make
him the subject of a story.
So my very first class they said, all right, what we want you to do is take a character and write
a short story. What? I thought we were doing screenwriting? No, we don't want you to learn
the method yet. Write the short story. So that week I invented a story about a guy called Don
Tillman; I made him a professor of physics rather than an IT person just to be a little different
and because I'd studied physics. This was going to be, my idea for the movie was going to be a
drama. So I wrote a little story about my character, Don Tillman the physicist, and I based it on
something that happened with me and my buddy at one stage. And it's called The Jacket
Incident. It’s about a guy turning up at a restaurant where you have to wear a jacket but he's
wearing a hiking jacket, and he gets into a little trouble with this, okay? So what happens, I've
taken this along to school, before I even took it along to school I showed it to someone else
because this is the first fiction writing other than adapting my wife's work that I had done since
school. So 30 years. So I was a little nervous about it being shown to a whole bunch of people
who were better at this.
So I showed it to someone and they said, oh yes, that's a story about a guy with Asperger's
Syndrome is it? I guess. I mean a lot of people like that have never diagnosed with Asperger's,
but I guess. So I took it to class. And I said, this is a story about a guy with Asperger's
Syndrome. You know what? All they wanted to do was talk about Asperger's Syndrome. They
said oh, Asperger's Syndrome? Then why is he going on a date? I made the story that he was,
instead of going out with a buddy he went out on a date. It's his first date, he's wearing the
wrong jacket, things escalate, luckily he's got martial art skills, things get a little out of control
but the date sort of works out happily and he's moved on in his life. They said, would he be
going on a date? I thought that guys like that didn't like connection with other people. Oh.
He's drinking. I don't think people with Asperger’s drink. Right? And is he wearing socks?
Somebody told that ASPs don't like the feeling of socks against their skin so they don't wear
socks. All they wanted to do was talk about Asperger's Syndrome.
So I decided, forget it. We're never going to say this guy has Asperger’s Syndrome again. The
other weird thing was they all laughed. They’re all killing themselves laughing. I said look,
there's a little light relief here, but it’s not meant to be a comedy. Well, as I developed my
story, which was about a guy searching for a wife but doing it the only way he knew how, a
geeky scientific sort of rational way, this drama which was going to be called, The Face of God
because you learn about physics, and more often being called the Clara Project I discovered
that people were laughing more than I wanted. I’d say hey, that was meant to be the light
relief not the whole point of it. And my comedy teacher took me aside and he said Graeme, he
said, if you are gifted with a character who can make people laugh don't waste it on drama. It's
much harder to write comedy than drama. TV comedy writers get paid double what drama
writers get paid. He says get out there; use this guy.
And I thought well hang on, isn't, are we laughing at a disability here? People have mentioned
the A word, I was saying this guy’s got Asperger's and we're laughing at Asperger's, and my
answer was this guy is different. Sure he's different. But he's not different in a way that's
worse. It’s the same, if I was Chinese, I'm standing at the front and I didn't speak English, I'd be
in heaps of trouble here. I'd be disabled, disadvantaged. But not because Chinese isn't as good
as English just because I'm around a bunch of people who only speak English. If you go to China
you have the same problem unless you speak Chinese, okay? So it's sort of a fish out of water
situation. It's not because English is better, it’s just because this guy has got a different set of
skills; he's wired a different way. He doesn't want to be different.
My dad can barely walk. He's disabled. He doesn't want to be like that. My hero Don Tillman
doesn't want to be any different from what he is. He would like the world to be a bit different,
but that's the way. So we're not laughing that way. But then people say, are we laughing with
him or at him? I’ll put it this way, neither. Imagine I tell you a joke. I say, three people walk
into a pub, an Englishman, an American, and an Australian. You know it's going to be a joke
about the Australian, don't you? Australian came third. The Englishman and the American are
going to do similar sorts of things or consistent things and the Australian is going to switch it all
around and reverse it. Now you don't know whether it's going to be to his or her advantage or
disadvantage. You might end up saying, what an idiot that Australian was, didn't get it, or you
might say, what an idiot the American and the Brit were. You don't know. It’s the unexpected
that we laugh at. This is a knife. We laugh at the unexpected.
So that's what's happening. Don is a guy who generates the unexpected. He's also an
observational comedy guy because if I stand up here and I do typical observational comedy
stuff, what's this about? What's that about, having to wear a jacket into a restaurant? Now, of
course the guy doesn't know what it's about having to wear a jacket in the restaurant but it's
pretending to be the person from Mars. Don is the person from Mars. Don really doesn't get it.
You're getting observational comedy about the world that we live in about the way we do
things and the lack of rationality sometimes behind that.
So I had my character Don, I had the Clara Project, and I worked on that using a lot of design
skills, also a lot of team skills. Screenwriting is frequently done in team type environments
where there's two or three of you working together. You talk about writer’s rooms and so on.
If you've worked in an IT environment where you are expected to be egoless, expected to be,
but you're expected to work in teams, to have your work reviewed by other people, then it's a
very natural way of working. Those sorts of skills transfer forward. Anyway, to cut a long story
short, the movie script went through five years of modifications during which it went from
being the Clara Projects to the Rosie Project. There's a design rule that says something like
design solutions often require holistic change, meaning structural change, and there was an
awful moment after two and a half years where I threw the whole thing in the trash and only
pulled out Don Tillman and The Jacket Incident which I had retained, left Clara in the trash, and
then the new protagonist, new love interest called Rosie. So there was some pretty hard pain
to go through but I figured that it had been a learning experience and that subconsciously I
would still bring a lot of stuff forward.
So in the end I had this detailed screenplay and I found myself a producer in New York. The
producer couldn't raise the money. So I got the screenplay back, and I then found the producer
in Australia. Producer couldn't raise the money. So here we are at the beginning of last year
and I said to her, would it help if I wrote this as a novel instead of a screenplay? Would that
generate some interest? And she said, Graeme, only if it was a bestseller. Why not? And I sat
down to try to write the Rosy Project as a novel. And, as I said, it was a little bit like all the
things I'd learned came to fruition there.
What do you need to write a novel? Well, you certainly need to be able to write a sentence.
You need to be able to write, I'd written so many records, so many consulting proposals, plus
academic papers, PhD thesis, two books on data modeling. I could write a clear sentence. I
could communicate, okay? So that was a good start. You need to have a story. I had a story,
and what's interesting is that story had come out of design. I had designed a story.
Screenwriting is full of rules of structure. If you read books like Syd Field’s book, Screenplay, it's
all about on page 25 the following should happen by page 10. We need to have met the
protagonist and we have the inciting incident at the end of the second act. All will be lost, but
the protagonist will realize that they were after something more important than what they
originally set out to get. They will go out seeking that; we'll be rooting for them, blah blah blah.
All these rules. It’s just like, it feels a lot like any sort of design process. So here I had a
screenplay that was designed sitting there, very detailed story complete with characters,
dialogue, and so forth.
You also need a skill which is the one the most novelists fall down on. You need the ability to
manage a big project. A lot of novelists can write 1500 words of beautiful prose or 3000. But
80,000 words they get lost. It's all over the place. It's a mess. They can't handle it. They keep
writing little bits and pieces. Well, I’d written my data modeling book, 130,000 words now, I’d
worked on a PhD thesis, I’d done a big programs, big databases. I was used to dealing with big
things that were more than you could hold in memory at one given time and you had to keep
paging out and doing those sorts of things. So I could do all of that. What I didn't have was
what was in my man's head. All the rest was in the screenplay. But I'd been living with this
character for five years, I had a pretty good idea of what was in his head. And I sat down and
with all of that stuff, some of which had come out of design, I sat down and I wrote the novel, I
wrote a draft of the novel in four weeks. [sound] Like that. I spent three weeks tidying it up
and send it to some publishers. I also entered a competition, which I was fortunate enough to
win. The publishers got interested, life went on from there.
Well, okay. The big moment, publisher offered me an advance for the book. I had four
publishers bidding so I was able to get a pretty good advance. I got 1.8 million I think. I'm
kidding, I'm kidding. I'm in Australia. I got three days consulting fees. So it wasn't going to
change my life. But in September of last year, so not long ago, my wife and I were doing a walk
across England from coast to coast, at the narrowest point, obviously; 16 days though and just
before we started my publisher called me up on the cell phone and said, Graeme, we are going
to take your book to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is where all the foreign rights get sold. And
I said cool, what does that mean? And he said, well, I knew sort of what it meant, he said, well
at the moment, we're just going to send it out to all the scouts and agents. They will read it,
decide whether any of their publishing clients might be interested; it will take six weeks and
then at the actual book fair we might get an offer. Cool. Nothing to lose. So we start walking.
Three days into the walk we haven't had any cell phone reception. We’re up in the Lake
District of England, as a warning for you, and we come into reception areas and boop, boop,
boop, all these messages. Graeme, please call. Graeme, call me. Call me urgently. I need to
make a decision. I had to make a decision. Oh. Call him back. What happened? 48 hours after
it went out a German publisher had read it and offered an advance for the German translation
rights. Six figures, euros, 24 hours, take it or leave it. I was about to learn the publishing
industry, they’re drama queens. You work in business. How many of you have got a business
side of what you do and so forth? Business deals are not made like they're made on television.
They're made by people sitting down relatively calm; they're going through contracts, lawyers,
all that sort of stuff. It's not, take it or leave it. We'll auction it. But the publishing trade
doesn't know that, and they run it like it is in movies. So once it was out there, there was this
feeding frenzy and over the rest of the walk, every morning I'm on Skype in some corner of a
pub that’s got Wi-Fi going what? Is that Yen? Or is it dollars? My wife said, oh.
But at the end of the walk we had 12 deals signed up including all the big players, Simon
Chester in the USA was delighted that they won a three and a half day auction with the most
arcane rules about how you go about doing it, but watch the drama, they won that. And we
had another dozen or so offers on the table that were just still escalating and more stuff to
come and I was able to order a beer and say, not that you would ever want this to happen to
you, goodbye to the day job. And off it went. So I was out of IT at the end of last year, and
since then we have sold the film rights, Amy mentioned, and life has continued on. The book
was published only two weeks ago in the USA so I'm sort of watching it crawl up Amazon. We
just did a survey, about 100 in Amazon, but it's an Indy Booksellers book. It's already sort of
hitting the top 20 of the Indy list and hopefully it'll carry on like that.
So I want to do a reading for you. I thought I might do a slightly longer reading than I normally
do. Is that okay? All right. So this is Don Tillman. Don Tillman morphed from being a physicist
into a geneticist in the story, okay? So he’s now a geneticist, but I gave him a first degree in
computer science. I thought it was important to show. He decided he didn't want to be a
computer science geek so he became a genetics speak. Okay?
So this is Don, and he's being asked to give a, this is going to take about 5, 6 minutes, okay?
Don is being asked to give a talk on Asperger's Syndrome by his buddy Jean who thinks it would
be a good idea for Don to give a talk on Asperger's syndrome because he might learn
something.
>>: Through lunchtimes was sufficient to research and prepare my lecture on Asperger’s
Syndrome without sacrificing nourishment, thanks to the provision of Wi-Fi in the medical
library cafe. I had no previous knowledge of autism spectrum disorders as they were outside
my specialty. The subject was fascinating. It seemed appropriate to focus on the genetic
aspects of the syndrome which might be unfamiliar to my audience. Most diseases have some
basis in our DNA though in many cases we have yet to discover it. My own work focuses on
genetic predisposition to cirrhosis of the liver. Much of my working time is devoted to getting
mice drunk.
Naturally, the books and research papers describe the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome, and
I formed a provisional conclusion that most of these were simply variations in human brain
function that had been inappropriately medicalized because they did not fit social norms,
constructed social norms, that reflected the most common human configurations rather than
the full range.
The lecture was scheduled for 7 PM at an inter-suburban school. I estimated the cycle right at
12 minutes and allowed three minutes to boot my computer and connect it to the projector. I
arrived on schedule at 6:57 PM having had Eva, the short skirted cleaner, into my apartment 27
minutes earlier. There were approximately 25 people milling around the door in the front of
the classroom, but I immediately recognized Julie, the convener from Jean’s description.
Blonde with big tits. In fact, her breasts were probably no more than one and a half standard
deviations from the mean size for her body weight and hardly a remarkable identifying feature.
It was more a question of elevation and exposure as a result of a choice of costume which
seemed perfectly practical for a hot January evening in Australia. I may have spent too long of
verifying your identity as she looked at me strangely.
>>: You must be Julie, I said.
>>: Can I help you?
>>: Good. A practical person. Yes. Direct me to the VGA cable, please.
>>: Oh, she said. You must be Professor Tillman. I'm so glad you could make it. She extended
her hand, but I waved it away.
>>: The VGA cable please. It's 6:58.
>>: Relax, she said. We never start before 7:15. Would you like a coffee?
>>: Why do people value others' time so little? Now we would have the inevitable small talk. I
could have spent 15 minutes at home practicing aikido. I’d been focusing on Julie in the screen
at the front of the room. I looked around and realized that I'd failed to observe 19 people.
They were children, predominately male, sitting at desks. Presumably these were victims of
Asperger's Syndrome. Almost all literature focuses on children. Despite their affliction, they
were making better use of their time than their parents, who were chattering aimlessly. Most
were operating portable computers devices. I guess the ages were between 8 and 13. I hoped
they had been paying attention in their science classes as my material assumed the working
knowledge of organic chemistry the structure of DNA. I realized that I'd failed to reply to the
coffee question.
>>: No.
>>: Unfortunately, because of the delay, Julie had forgotten the question.
>>: No coffee I explained. I never drink coffee after 3:48 PM. It interferes with sleep. Caffeine
has a half-life of 3 to 4 hours, so it's irresponsible serving coffee at 7 PM unless people are
planning to stay awake until after midnight which doesn't allow adequate sleep if they have a
conventional job. I was trying to make use of the waiting time by offering practical advice. But
it seemed that she preferred to discuss trivia.
>>: Is Jean all right? she said.
>>: It was obviously a variant on the most common of formulate interactions. How are you?
He's fine thank you, I said, adapting the conventional reply to the third person form.
>>: Oh. I thought he was ill.
>>: Jean is in excellent health except for being six kilograms overweight. We went for a run this
morning. He has a date tonight, and he wouldn't be able to go if he was ill.
>>: Julie seemed unimpressed. In reviewing interaction later I realized that Jean must've lied to
her about his reason for not being present. This was presumably to protect Julie from feeling
that her lecture was unimportant to Jean and to provide a justification for a less prestigious
speaker being sent as a substitute. It seems hardly possible to analyze a such a complex
situation involving deceit, supposition of another person's emotional response, and then
prepare your own plausible lie all while someone is waiting for you to reply to a question. Yet
that is exactly what people expect you to be able to do.
Eventually I set my computer and we got started, I set up my computer and we got started 18
minutes late. I would need to speak 43 percent faster to finish on schedule at 8 PM, a virtually
impossible performance goal. We were going to finish late, and my schedule for the rest of the
night would be thrown out. I'll give you just a little more.
I had titled my talk, Genetic Precursors to Autism Spectrum Disorders, and saw some excellent
diagrams of DNA structures. I had only been speaking for nine minutes, a little faster than usual
to recover time, when Julie interrupted.
>>: Professor Tillman? Most of us here are not scientists, so you may need to be a little less
technical.
>>: This sort of thing is incredibly annoying. People can tell you the supposed characteristics of
a Gemini or a Taurus and will spending five days watching a cricket match but cannot find the
interest or the time to learn the basics of what they as humans are made up of. I continued
with my presentation as I have prepared it. It was too late to change and surely some of the
audience were informed enough to understand. I was right. A hand went up, a male of about
12.
>>: You are saying that it is unlikely that there is a single genetic marker but rather several
genes are implicated and the aggregated expression depends on the specific combination
affirmative?
>>: Exactly. Plus environmental factors. The situation’s analogous to bipolar disorder, which,
Julie interrupted again.
>>: So for us non-geniuses, I think Professor Tillman is reminding us that Asperger's is
something you're born with. It's nobody's fault.
>>: I was horrified by the use of the word of fault with its negative connotations, especially as it
was being employed by someone in authority. I abandoned my decision not to deviate from
the genetic issues. The matter had doubtless been brewing in my unconscious and the volume
of my voice may have been increased as a result.
Fault? Asperger's isn't a fault; it's a variant. It's potentially a major advantage. Asperger's
Syndrome is associated with organization, focus, innovative thinking, and rational detachment.
>>: A woman at the rear of the room raised a hand. I was focused on the argument now and
made a minor social error, which I quickly corrected.
The fat woman, overweight woman at the back?
>>: She paused and looked around the room, then continued. Rational detachment? Is that a
euphemism for lack of emotion?
>>: Synonym, I replied. Emotions can cause major problems. I decided it would be helpful to
provide an example, drawing on a story in which an emotional behavior would have led to
disastrous consequences.
Imagine, I said, you're hiding in a basement. The enemy is searching for you and your friends.
Everyone has to keep totally quiet, but your baby is crying. I do it an impression as Jean would
to make the story more convincing. Wah. I pause dramatically. You have a gun. Hands went
up everywhere. Julie jumped to her feet as I continued. With a silencer. They're coming
closer. They’re going to kill you all. What do you do? The baby is screaming. The kids couldn't
wait to share their answer.
>>: One called out, shoot the baby. And soon they are all shouting, shoot the baby, shoot the
baby.
>>: The boy who asked the genetics question called out, shoot the enemy.
>>: And then another said, ambush them.
>>: The suggestions were coming rapidly. Use the baby as bait. How many guns do we have?
Cover its mouth. How long can it live without air?
>>: As I'd expected, all the ideas came from the Asperger's sufferers. The parents made no
constructive suggestions. Some even tried to suppress their children's creativity. I raised my
hands. Time’s up. Excellent work. All the rational solutions came from the ASPs. Everyone
else was incapacitated by emotion.
>> Graeme Simsion: There you go. Australian accent and all. If you like audio books, by the
way, the audio version, this is read by an Australian. His name is Dan O'Grady, which you might
think is Irish, but he's well and truly Australian. So he sounds awfully like me, I'm afraid. So
guys, we've got 13 minutes and eight seconds for questions if anybody would like to talk, ask
questions.
>>: So are you planning another book?
>> Graeme Simsion: Am I planning another book?
>>: Or are you going to use the same design process?
>> Graeme Simsion: Yeah. Good question. Am I planning another book? Will I use the same
design process? I've written two more books, drafted, and I'm working on a third which will in
fact be the next book; and it will be a sequel to the Rosie Project. So the other two, and I did I
use the same design process? I didn't actually go as far as a screenplay, but yes I used all the
screen writing processes to come up with story. So I'm now someone who uses consciously
designed process for story.
It's interesting these two different cultures. Both screenwriters and novelists have to come up
with story but novelists do it in a garret by themselves and screenwriters do it in a collaborative
situation. My observation is you get better story out of a collaborative situation. The
screenwriters, in my humble opinion, are better at story; and the novelists frequently have
beautiful prose sometimes but one of the criticisms, particularly in much literature fiction, is
that the story doesn't hold up as well as it could. So yeah, I'm using the same process to get
tight story. Somebody moved? Yeah.
>>: What are some of your favorite actors or writers in comedy? And what you think of Jerry
Seinfeld? Because he does a lot of observational comedy.
>> Graeme Simsion: Yeah, yeah. I've got to tell you I hardly watched any television or went to
any movies while I was studying screenwriting, which sounds a little crazy, but I only did the
stuff I had to do for school because I had a day job; and I was trying to get the level of expertise,
if there's one lesson I took, which I didn't mention from my previous career, it was: it takes a
long time to get seriously good at something. And I figured I would have to spend as much time
on screenwriting as on data modeling to get to that level that I'd been at. So I just didn't watch
TV except when I had to and so on. But I have seen the Seinfeld. I haven't actually been living
in a cave all of that time. Yeah, I love Seinfeld. I love observational comedy. People often ask,
which actor would you like to play Don Tillman? Washington Post, which gave a very nice
review last Sunday I think it was, last weekend said Paul Rudd, Steve Carell is a name that
comes up, that's sort of what you expect, but I learned making a lot of short films during my
screenwriting learning that sometimes a great casting director can cast against type, can give
you someone you'd never think of. Russell Crowe in a Beautiful Mind, I mean, who would've
thunk it? And yet they can be the stunning sorts of results. So, yeah. I've got one here, one
there. You’re first.
>>: So how closely involved are you to the adaptation of the book?
>> Graeme Simsion: How closely involved am I to the adaptation?
>>: Since you spent your whole life getting to this point and writing this book? I'm guessing
you want to be close to the film adaptation?
>> Graeme Simsion: Yeah. How close do I want to be in the film adaptation? I'll tell you. Most
authors, in my observation, want to be close to the screen adaptation of the book so they don't
ruin it.
>>: Right.
>> Graeme Simsion: Okay? So they're in control freak mode. Okay? This is my ego, this is
perfect. Do not ruin a thing. And they’ve got a whole bunch of producers there and they just
try to fend off unsuccessfully, always. Unless, unless, unless, maybe, maybe if you are EL James,
50 Shades of Gray, or JK Rowling, you are so powerful that you can do that. But for most
writers, most authors, they're fighting a losing battle. My story’s totally different. I wrote the
screenplay first. So when the studios came knocking and said we'd like to adapt your book I
said, matter of fact I've got a screenplay right here in my back pocket. And they said, isn't that
sweet. We'd like to adapt your book. And we will get our favorite screenwriter in to do that.
And I had an agent by this stage and the agent said that's the way they work. I said oh well, I
guess they won't get the screenplay, they won’t get the book will they? They said, oh, send us
in the screenplay, looked at it and said, oh. It's okay. Yes, I spent five years on it. It was my
primary deliverable before it got translated.
So I got the screenwriting gig, signing pictures, agreed to the screenwriting gig, I get two
redrafts which means with their input I can do two further drafts. At that point they’re free to
bring on other writers but the credit, and I get paid for the screenwriting, the credit would be
arbitrated by the Writers Guild of America if there's any dispute about how much is me, how
much is somebody else. I'm very happy with that arrangement. But, unlike most authors, I've
got the screenplay here, and I understand that filmmaking is a collaborative enterprise.
It's like putting, look at it, it’s like getting a new application in. Someone's going to design the
database, someone's going to write the code, someone's going to design the user interface;
you're all going to have to work together to get this sucker done, and you're going to have to
make some compromises and someone's going to say, if you fully normalize the thing it’s not
going to perform. And you say whatever it's going to be and you’re going to have to slug that
out. And the film producer’s going to say, you want it set in New York City; we can't afford the
to film this thing in New York City. We can't have that shot that you want or whatever.
Sometimes it’s that; sometimes it’s we’ve got to have baseball in it or whatever it’s going to be,
our sponsor wants him to drive a BMW, who knows.
But I’m used to working that collaborative thing. I feel I’ve made my artistic statement, my
solo artistic statement with the book, and now I'm looking forward to collaborating with these
guys and so far I think they were a little surprised. They may be watching this recording, but I
think they were a little surprised when I turned up and didn't say don't touch the book. In fact,
the first thing they said was, I wonder what would happen if we took this scene out? That was
my favorite scene in the whole book. But instead of saying no, don't touch that scene, that’s
the best scene in the book, why do you want to take it out? They explained; we talked about it,
we did some design work, and the next morning three of us came back with the same answer of
how we could move that scene and make the whole thing work better. So I enjoy that. But it
does mean the letting go and saying this is a collaboration. And again, it’s something I learned
in IT not from, they don’t teach you that in novel writing courses. Yes.
>>: You were mentioning drama earlier, and I'm curious if you now feel that you're stuck in
here because you're very funny. So I’m wondering if you're stuck in a comedy that>> Graeme Simsion: Yeah. One of the worries I had, let me tell you. When you've got a couple
million in advances you don't worry too much about being stuck in a groove at this point. You
say, whoa, suddenly I'm living the dream. I'm able to give up my day job. I get to be a full-time
novelist, but there is a concern that you get typecast that you can only write comedy. And let
me tell you, I'm not sure I can write comedy if Don Tillman isn't in it. Very few writers I think
are gifted more than one comedic character in a lifetime. It takes this talent to do that and not
a little of talent to be able to make up new comedic characters routinely. I mean the
screenwriting analogy is if I was asked to write an episode of The Simpsons, could I do it? Yeah,
I could. I'm not saying it would be the greatest episode ever, but I could do that. If I was asked
to invent a set of characters as good as The Simpsons, could I do it? Not even close. Not even
close. So once you’ve got the character, I think of John Mortimer and Rumpole of the Bailey or
something like that, if you read that type of stuff, where the characters in sitcoms just get used
over and over again.
But I was, I wrote a short story about the same time as the Rosie Project came out and it was a
drama. It's actually up on the net. It's called Pretentiously, Three Encounters with the Physical,
it’s about a guy running a marathon. It's actually me, okay? It's about a guy running a
marathon, almost dying running a marathon, so it's quite dramatic, it's quite stylistic and it uses
first, second, and third person, past, present, and future tenses. So it's quite literally in its own
way. And that came second in a competition and got published all over the country because it
was one of the major newspapers runs it. So that was fantastic to just have something in there
as a brand-new writing nobody ever heard to say not only have you got the book but here's a
little thing that says I can do other stuff.
So you're learning creativity, by the way, and creativity theory which I learned, which ties in
with design is the great artists tend to do a lot of stuff. They tend to have very high outputs
some of which is garbage. Any Bob Dylan fans here? Yeah. Not all of Bob Dylan's work is great
unless you are a really, really, rusted on Bob Dylan fan. But he's very prolific. Same with
Picasso. These people are at the top of their games, just did a lot of stuff. They kept doing it;
some was good, some wasn't so hot. You do lots. Yeah?
>>: I have a question about the condition again. The main character.
>> Graeme Simsion: Yeah.
>>: Do you have feedback from people who are sensitive to the fact or perceiving that>> Graeme Simsion: Yeah. The Asperger's thing?
>>: And how do you respond to that?
>> Graeme Simsion: Okay. The Asperger’s community, the day, I launched, okay, go back.
Before I even published the book, the third person to read the book, the first person outside my
family was my buddy who had inspired the Don Tillman character. And I asked him how he felt
about the book. He said it’s the greatest book I've ever read. I have tears in my eyes; it should
get a Nobel Prize. So that was a good start. He related to the character. He could see where
he was coming from. But it was positive because it was written in first-person I got some
endorsement that actually managed to get inside the head reasonably successfully.
Then I sent it out knowingly to I think four people who had kids with Asperger's Syndrome and
one who identifies as having Asperger's Syndrome herself, and unknowingly to two other
people who had kids with Asperger's Syndrome. They were [inaudible] readers who I just didn't
know had Asperger's Syndrome. Hundred percent positive feedback from them because the
Asperger's guy is the hero; but then on the launch night of the book I'm up there, finished the
launch, bookshop, loads of people, friends and family, the first person who walks up to me says
hi, my name is Dan. I've got Asperger’s Syndrome, and I've got a problem with your book.
What’s the problem?
He says, on page 22 Don Tillman says, I don't want a woman who’s mathematically illiterate.
The correct word is enumerate. Don Tillman would not make that mistake.
I was able to say well, actually people have met, any mathematicians here? Mathematicians
will actually use the term illiterate to mean something broader than enumerate, not that you
can't add up, you can't even do calculus, you moron.
So he said, oh. That's fine then. I'll have three copies.
So that was, why three?
And he said because I want to give it to my friends to show what it's like to have Asperger's
Syndrome.
And the most moving comment I've had about the book was someone asked me to sign the
book. She said, my brother was diagnosed in his 40s with Asperger’s Syndrome. He'd always
struggled in life. He'd never been able to keep a job. But now he had a name for it, and the
family in supporting him all went out and bought books on Asperger’s Syndrome and tried to
learn as much as they could. And then he died. And afterwards she said it was only after he
died and we read the Rosie Project that we had an idea of what it must've been like for him,
which I was enormously flattered by, but the thing is most articles on Asperger’s by people
much more expert than I am, I've not studied it, I read a bit now because I've had to because
people ask these questions; but the Don Tillman character came out people I knew in IT
[inaudible] and there’s one Don Tillman every math department, every physics department,
they came into that. Not out of any book on Asperger's Syndrome.
But now that I've read up on it, it's all saying, we observe this. People with Asperger’s do that.
Not, this is the way they think, this is what's going on, this is what it's like to be it. So that was,
I've always said, up until recently I'm not a, does Don actually have Asperger's? I thought, how
do I know? I'm not a psychologist. But one of the world experts on Asperger's and I had lunch
together; and Professor Tony Atwood, Asperger’s guru said Graeme, Don Tillman has
Asperger's. So he's been diagnosed now. He's on the spectrum.
If I ever get problems with it it’s people who’ve got kids who’ve got autism. Serious hard
autism. And now because Asperger’s is seen by psychiatrists at least as part of being the autism
spectrum then they say, well Don's autistic then. He's on the spectrum. And you can be Don
and totally functional. I swear you will work with people who are as Asperger as Don and they
have families, they have good relationships, the hold down jobs, they're happy with their lives.
But if you work in Microsoft Research I'm sure you've got people around you who work, I
certainly in IT and [inaudible] had those people. And those, and that's the Don Tillman of the
book. We are laughing with him. We’re not laughing at some kid who can't speak. That's a
completely different thing. A different level. Yep. Probably last question, actually.
>>: Did your buddy know that the Don Tillman character was based on him when you wrote
the book?
>> Graeme Simsion: Well, he said at first well, it can’t be based on me. It's not called Don. He
said, well my name’s not Don.
But obviously this incident.
Yeah, it was different. You've got the apricot ice cream disaster; when it happened to me it
was peach.
As though everybody's got an ice cream disaster in their lives, presumably you had
an[inaudible] ice cream disaster. What was your flavor of your ice cream disaster?
But his family said to him, that’s you. But it isn't. Because I’ve had a bunch of other people
come up to me and say, you based Don on my dad, didn’t you? You based Don on this person.
Are you sure? I had some in turn up at a session and say, I came to ask you the hard question,
did you base it on my brother? Because her brother had worked with me. So there was a fair
bit of Don around me. People say it’s like being in Sheldon Cooper's head. You get that
question. I say a character, I've heard this said [inaudible], a character’s a third someone you
know, a third yourself, I’ve said to inhabit the guy, and the third you make up. I think that's
pretty true of Don Tillman. So there's no live Don Tillman out there. Sad for some women who
write to me and say I'm in love with Don Tillman. Truly. Okay. I look at the time. First rule of
public speaking is always finish on time. I'll be delighted to answer further questions over your
freshly purchased copy of the Rosie Project. Thank you very much.