John Niven was in L.A. in the days running up to Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Knowing that a Trump win would mean a whole lot of pain for humanity, he decided to find any possible silver lining and rang his wife in England to tell her to start placing bets. Similarly, when the lead character in his new book, The F*ck-it List, is told he has terminal cancer he decides to make the best of it — by killing the people who’d wronged him. In his Lockdown LitFest interview he talks about the pros and cons of writing screenplays and books, explains how being on set as a writer is like being a spectator at an orgy and reveals what he did with his Trump winnings.