The award-winning screenwriter Jesse Armstrong has said a writers’ room can feel like “walking on the moon” when it is working well, but has admitted to experiencing impostor syndrome during his career.
Armstrong was behind the hit HBO drama Succession, starring Brian Cox as the global media tycoon and family patriarch Logan Roy, who sets off a power struggle among his four children.
He is also an Oscar nominee for co-writing The Thick of It spin-off film In The Loop with Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roche, and has won TV Baftas for his work on Peep Show.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs to Lauren Laverne, Armstrong, 55, said: “When a writers’ room is working well, it’s like you’re walking on the moon.
“You’re suddenly released from the thing that could take you a week to figure out at your desk on your own.
“You’re suddenly bounding around and picking up rocks and everything’s veined with gold and it’s like you can have these golden moments of the ideas coming from everyone and you’re all on the same wavelength and it can feel quite magical.”
He added: “You can get really good days and hours working writing alone, but when it’s not working and you feel you’re not going to equal the best version of the thing you’re trying to make, I would find that very, very difficult.
“The theoretically consoling idea that ‘oh, it’ll be all right because you’ve done it before’, actually becomes another rod for your back.
“You don’t know how possible it is for me to be a really bad writer because you don’t see all these drafts where it’s really bad.”
Succession, which won 19 Emmys including outstanding drama series and nine Golden Globes, concluded in 2023 with its fourth series.
Despite the numerous accolades, the writer said he still experiences impostor syndrome.
He said: “All the good writers I know that I’ve ever met are riddled with self-doubt and lack of certainty about whether what they’ve just done is good.
“I think you go in maybe with this 70% feeling that it’s like: ‘Oh, this is going to be a disaster and I’m going to be exposed as the fraud I always thought I was all along’.
“You need that 10 to 20% – if you’re lucky, 30% – feeling of: ‘If I could do the version of this which I think it should be, it could be really great’.
“I think maybe that little bit of confidence that you know that that’s how it feels, maybe that grows in you.
“Also, knowing that the negative feelings are not necessarily true.”
The full Desert Island Discs interview can be heard on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.
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