Campaigning environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth, author of Real England, gives Dan Cadwallader advice on telling stories about the real world.

Paul Kingsnorth doesn’t look like a revolutionary; he’s tall, skinny, wears small yet tasteful glasses and has a mop of scruffy black hair. Yet in a strange kind of way he is a revolutionary. He is currently at the forefront of a new movement in environmentalism, and his books, One No, Many Yes’s and Real England, are thought-provoking examinations of our times. But more than this, they are compelling reads becuase unlike many political tracts, Paul finds the human angle to political stories.

Early influences

Paul's influences are wide-ranging, from Hemingway to Robinson Jeffers, but the figure of George Orwell seems to loom particularly large. “His essays are fantastic and books like Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia I found really inspiring in terms of seeing how you could write non-fiction and tell stories of the real world”.

While Orwell’s leftist politics no doubt rubbed off on Paul, it was at University tha he first became involved with politics and the environmentalist movement. This was early nineties, at the height of the road-protest movement. The ethos of protecting sights of natural beauty and character has influenced his work ever since.

Political writing

I ask Paul if he thinks more young writers should be dealing with social-political subjects.

“I think they should be, but I also think they should be dealing with them in a certain way. There are a lot of political books out there - there are loads of books about the environment for example - but there aren’t enough books about the human story behind them. There are a lot of books about the bigger picture, it’s not that they’re bad books necessarily, but they’re not often books that draw you into human stories which is what I try to do with my writing”.

Telling human stories

One facet of Paul’s writing that has drawn a lot of praise is his ability to scale down the “bigger picture” into stories that are more human, concerning individuals and their problems.

“Most people aren’t really interested in politics, they’re not interested in issues; they’re not interested in being told how to think. But they do get a strong impression from seeing what happens to places they know, hearing stories from real people. What we all connect with is empathy for other human beings, so if you tell those stories in that way then I think it’s a more powerful idea”.

It was this desire to tell human stories and take environmentalism away from the idea of corporate sustainability that led Paul to co-found (with journalist Donald Hine) The Dark Mountain Project. “It’s about bringing people together to force a cultural response. You start with the assumption that the world is changing really radically, far more radically then we think it’s going to, and we’re probably not in control of what those changes are going to be. The aim of it really is - well,  it hasn’t got particular political goal but the aim is to bring people together to respond to that change and start a cultural movement.”

Advice for new writers

Finally Paul has a little advice for aspiring writers:

“Never give up. If you really believe in something you should do it. Its very hard to make a career out of writing. It’s very hard to make money out of it. You shouldn’t see writing as a career or as a job, you should see it as something you’re passionate about. If you’ve really got a story you need to tell you should tell that story. Tell it the best you can, get it published as widely as you can, and never give up on it."
    

Paul Kingsnorth on narrative non-fiction