by Wilbur Smith
I decided to visit as many high street bookshops as I could and I started terrorizing the booksellers stocking my books. I’m not sure what I really expected to find. I thought there might have been twenty or thirty journalists and as many photographers hanging on my every witty word. I thought that I would see every bookshop in London jammed with my books and posters screaming, “A great new literary genius hits the shelves.” I thought, perhaps, even the Queen might invite me to Buckingham Palace for tea.
None of these happened. In fact, I found myself wandering from one bookshop to another looking for my book, and often I found it at the back with the children’s books or still boxed-up in the store room. Sometimes I would speak to the owners of the bookshop and pester them to display it in the front window; at other times I would take the book from the shelf, hide it under my coat and put it in the window myself. I was caught doing this by one bookshop owner and he phoned my publishers and said, “Keep that young author of yours out of my shop!” Others had phoned to complain as well. “Pain in the neck” was one of the politer epithets.
Finally, somewhat disillusioned, I headed back to Africa. I was in the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, sitting waiting for my plane, when, looking across the lounge, I saw a woman reading my book.
The thrill was so intense that the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I came out in a cold sweat as I watched her. She was turning the pages, and I was desperately hoping she’d burst into tears, or laughter—show some emotion! But she didn’t.
I pretended to go to the bathroom and passed behind her chair, sneaked a glance at what page she was on, came back and finally I couldn’t resist it anymore. I went and stood in front of her and said, “Excuse me, madam.” She looked up and said “Yes?” And I said, “That’s my book you’re reading.” And she said, “I’m terribly sorry, I just found it lying here,” and she thrust it into my hand.
That was my first reader, at least the first one I had met, and I came across as a stalker!
Things improved, after a fashion. A year or two later, with two or three books under my belt, I was invited to New York City to sign books at the Doubleday Bookstore. Now, the Doubleday Bookstore on Fifth Avenue was the largest bookstore in the world—twelve stories high—as big as the Taj Hotel. I thought that was quite an honor. I accepted with a smile, flew to New York and on the chosen day I left my hotel, caught a taxi and arrived at the bookstore. I think I was expecting all the staff to be outside ready to greet me and the general manager to be standing with arm outstretched, offering to shake my hand and usher me in. But no, I was standing on the pavement, once again on my own.
I wandered into the bookstore and thought, “What do I do now?” I saw a young lady behind the till collecting money from customers who were buying books. I joined the line and stood there, slowly working my way to the front, and when it was my turn, she said, “Yes sir, what can I do for you?”
I said, “I’m here to sign books,” and she said, “Oh, you’re one of those are you; and what’s your name?”
I told her, “Wilbur Smith,” and she said, “How do you spell Wilbur? With a U or an E?” and I said, “U.” She looked down at her piece of paper and said, “Yes, you’re on the list. Fourth floor. Take the elevator up, turn right from the elevator and you will find your table there with your books on it. Go ahead.”
I thought, “Well that’s a warm welcome,” but I went up to the fourth floor and sure enough, there was my table with a huge pile of books, a glass of water, lots of pens—and nobody to be seen wanting to buy my books. I sat there for some considerable time. Eventually, I looked across to the other side of the huge room and there I saw another author—a well-known writer of western novels.
He was sitting at a table like mine. And like mine, his books were a towering pile—but he was signing them, frantically. Yet the room was empty, there was nobody standing in front of him getting their books signed. I thought that was very strange, so I decided to find out what was happening. I went across to him and said, “Excuse me, who are you signing those books for?” He said, “It doesn’t matter who I’m signing them for. If I sign them, the bookstore can’t send them back to my publisher and I get paid a royalty.” I said, “Oh,” and shot back to my table and signed 300 books in something like ten minutes. I then had some time on my hands, and feeling smug and pleased with myself, I looked around and saw a whole shelf of Freddy Forsyth books. I thought, “Now Fred is a good man,” so I did him a big favor and signed all his books.
•••
Charles remained my publisher for many years. I trusted him implicitly, and we developed a strong and enduring friendship that eclipsed our professional relationship. When he contacted me after the publication of The Burning Shore in 1985 to tell me he was retiring from Heinemann after twenty-three years, everything had to change. The Burning Shore had been a turning point in my writing life. It was the first time I expanded my range and tested my ability by seeing the world through the eyes of a female main character, and Charles’s retirement sparked another epiphany: I did not want to lose Charles, not if there was a way I could keep him. I asked if he would consider being my agent. “Charles,” I said, “all my energy goes into researching and writing the books. But you have always looked after my contracts and developed my overseas business and seen me through my whole writing career.” Charles thought about it for a few days, and then told me he would be happy to act as my literary agent. He set up the Charles Pick Consultancy precisely for this purpose. His relationships with his authors were legendary in the business, instilling mutual respect and unshakeable loyalty. He was a fantastic guard against the unscrupulous checkbook publishers who would go out to poach successful authors from other stables. And now his energy would be employed in fighting my corner.
“You must keep your authors close,” he once said, describing his philosophy. “You must become a sort of nanny to them. You must know their marital problems. You must know their economic problems, their work problems, their blocks when they can’t write some days. You become their nursemaid . . .”
Well, I didn’t need a nursemaid, but Charles went from tough publisher to even tougher agent. Soon he had negotiated a lucrative new contract and moved my work to Pan Macmillan, previously my paperback publisher. In the contract, he’d outlined the number of books that would be published, their advertising budget, how the adverts would run, and so many more advantageous nuances that I’d never considered before. My head spinning, I called him up. “Charles,” I said, “you’ve been cheating me all these years!”
He laughed. “They were good terms Wilbur, but these are even better—that’s what a good agent is supposed to do.”
He had been an incredible publisher and he was an even better agent.
•••
On the day I begin a new novel, I look into my bathroom mirror, shave the stubble from my jaw and stare into my eyes. For six months, a story will have been developing in my mind. I have done my reading. I have done my research. I know how the first ten pages will look and feel written down. As I shave, I repeat the opening to myself, over again, listening to it, tuning it. It is a little ceremony I have devised, a petition and a prayer. Where those ten pages will take me, I do not yet know, but, when I have finished shaving, I settle in my study and write them, without looking up. Only then do I set off into the unknown. Writing is a voyage of discovery. You’re familiar with the port you’re leaving from, the islands you intend to visit along the way, but the destination is obscured by the haze of distance.
“How do you do it, Wilbur? How do you become a writer?”
It’s a question I have been asked many times over the last fifty years. At my glibbest, the answer has always been “luck”; at my most practical, it has been that I “sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, or a screen, and start writing.” The truth is, there is only one first step to becoming a writer: you must want to do it above everything else. Anything less than total commitment, and you will f
all at the wayside, because the business of telling stories is long and lonely, and only those people willing to climb that cliff face alone will make it. If over fifty years of writing has taught me anything, it is this: the process of wresting characters and plot onto the page is at once the most soul-destroying exercise imaginable, and the most exhilarating activity life has to offer. To get to the joy of it, a writer must break through the punishing barrier of solitude that can stop the best of us, and the only reason to put yourself through that torture is if you have a story you passionately want to tell. My books have all been works of passion, right back to my abortive first attempt. They must be, because in the beginning you’re writing them on stolen time, after hours or before you go to work, over weekends while the rest of humanity is carousing and having fun. Writing is invasive. It is a task that demands stamina and time. Sometimes the words flow like a river in flood, at others they trickle and have to be clawed out of the dry river bed. A writer must endure it all, and have faith that the story is good, needs to be told, entertains, and is something to which they can be proud to put their name.
Even now, I still doubt I can do it again. The thought of a marathon eight months behind a desk, forging a novel out of the pig iron of half-formed ideas clattering around my mind, the enforced separation from loved ones and friends as the process becomes a barrier between us—these are things that unnerve me as I lift my pen. Every time I declare it will be my last, but then I start another novel, and I fall in love with writing all over again. It’s a compulsion, perhaps a sickness, but writing is also a way of ordering life.
Like hunting, the secret to good writing is tenacity. Without willpower and purpose, a novel will never become manifest. I assemble my books painstakingly word by word, building a narrative edifice that I hope will be appealing to enter, but often I receive letters from would-be authors saying, “I write for three days, realize it’s all nonsense, then have to go back and rewrite it.” This is the first fatal trap all writers should avoid. A writer should get it all down straight from the pen or keyboard without looking back. Spontaneous writing like this comes from the unfiltered, animal part of the brain, one’s instinct, and therefore has real value. Each of my drafts is unique. Each one encapsulates a part of my life, a part of my thinking that I will never be able to revisit. When I read back old material, I can picture myself as I was then—reading Sean and Garrick Courtney, now, is to see myself as a thirty-year-old tax assessor; or The Dark of the Sun takes me back to the Inyanga Mountains. Novels become monuments to our former selves.
The best ideas cannot be chased down. Instead, you must wait for them and given time they will present themselves. Often a character will emerge out of the shadows, demanding I tell their story—which is what happened with Golden Fox and Bella Courtney. Sometimes a character will change of their own volition, escaping my direction. I have learned not to plot a novel in detail—too rigid a plan can stifle its animating force. If you start with an ending in mind, it’s possible you’ll obstruct the writing by conniving the story toward that end, rather than giving the characters freedom to determine where they end up. My characters sweep me along on their journey; they are responsible for the action—the tensions between them, their private motivations, their loves, hates and jealousies, all the elements that bring life to a novel. If you know the characters well enough, the story will tell itself. As for the destination, you’ll glimpse it when it’s on the horizon. A novel’s ending is instinctive: you let it come to you, trust it and write it down.
The true writer must find joy in words, in their music, and acknowledge their potency: “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind,” said Rudyard Kipling. Words can start wars, they can ignite love affairs, they can bring down civilizations. The world has been torn apart by words spoken by evil men; they are more powerful than any weapon, at once dangerous and sacred. The skilled writer can employ words to devastating effect, conjuring hope and hopelessness in equal measure. They can amaze and delight, fill your mind with strange and wonderful thoughts—or they can lay you low, make you moan and weep. A writer must respect language, cherish it, treat it with love and care, put it to work parsimoniously and with precision. Words are diamonds, the writer is the diamond cutter.
Ever since When the Lion Feeds, I have treated writing as my job. I keep set hours, maintaining the structure of what I am trying to create and how I create it. Some people write in fits and starts and edit and rewrite as they go along, but I have always been a gusher. My first responsibility is to get the story onto the page, and only then will I look back and edit when I can see it in context. It is the spontaneity of the first draft that appeals to me. Hemingway thought differently: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-nine pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” For him writing was rewriting. For me, the first draft is where the magic happens, where all the important creative decisions are made, when I’m in the thick of it with my characters, swept up in their story in the same way as my readers will hopefully be. It is the purest experience of writing a novelist can have.
Spending so long immersed in a novel’s story can be a wearying endeavor, but the writer must learn to manage their own spirit. A strong spirit is a writer’s most vital resource, because if he cannot give his heart to his work, then he cannot expect his readers to do so. Writing a novel demands sacrifices which can take their toll. You lose perspective and a grip on the real world. There comes a point when I step away from the page, begin to see the flaws, decry the entire rambling concoction, and declare my intention to scrap it and start again. Now, because I’ve done it so often, I can anticipate the warning signs, and it’s time to take a week, or even a month, off. I travel, take myself out of the story, revisit reality, and return rejuvenated.
Knowing how to pace yourself is difficult for an aspiring writer. I have learned to recognize the point of creative exhaustion and stop before I end up writing myself into a corner. I never keep on writing until I run dry. Sometimes I stop midsentence, so I have something to continue with the following morning. Often, I will go to bed worrying over a section of the novel, a problematic passage or a moment of transition when the plot is changing direction. I sleep on it and usually the solution appears from the mist when I look in the mirror to shave the next morning. Somehow, my subconscious has untangled the threads that my faltering waking mind could only further twist and knot.
The writing impulse is fed and nurtured by a love of reading. My passion for reading has never dimmed since those days on my father’s ranch and at boarding school when books were all I had. My tastes have evolved over the years, but they remain true to the enthusiasms of that young boy colonizing the school library in the Natal Midlands almost seventy years ago. Looking back, I am proud to see myself as a link in a great chain of storytellers going back to classical myth and beyond. It has often been said that every plot has already been written, that there is nothing new, and I am a firm believer that this is true. Across the years, I have drawn from classical conflicts but what every new writer must do is put a unique interpretation on the elemental plots, set them in a new age and give the protagonists fresh conflicts to resolve. Being steeped in the stories of the past is the best education a novelist can have—whether that be the Biggles and Just William books I devoured as a boy, the novels of C. S. Forester and H. Rider Haggard I consumed as a young man, the works of Hemingway, Steinbeck and Lawrence Durrell I still go back to, or the classical tales of the Bible, Greek myth and William Shakespeare.
The writer who has toiled over his story, who has turned down invitations, shunned family and friends so that he can lock himself away with imaginary characters for months on end, must have nerves of steel. He must have Kipling’s “If” as his motto, be prepared to risk it all on a game of pitch and toss, and treat triumph and disaster in exactly the same way. There are many talented writers who have weathered countless rejections before seeing their novels succeed. A writer must be thick-skinned, or
else be ground down by the weight of opinion. After When the Lion Feeds was successful I was hailed as an “overnight” success, but my first novel was rejected by numerous publishers! However, this is nothing compared to some other authors. Louis L’Amour was rejected two hundred times. Zane Grey was told he had no business even bothering publishers, but his books have now sold 250 million copies. Catcher in the Rye was rejected; The Chronicles of Narnia were rejected; D. H. Lawrence felt so dejected that he self-published his work in Italy before Penguin took a chance and published Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Margaret Mitchell collected thirty-eight rejection letters for Gone with the Wind, and nobody dared take a risk on publishing Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. When it was finally published, it became the most widely read book in modern African literature. J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel was turned down by all the publishers in the first round of submission. “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull” was the verdict of a publisher on William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which went on to sell over fifteen million copies.
Books are as individual as people. There are no rules, no templates and no guarantees. More often than not you’re inviting grief into your life if you write a novel and want to see it published. But that does not mean you mustn’t try. As in every enterprise, in achieving every dream, as in the very business of life itself: do not ever give up! Fortune will favor the brave.
When I started writing, I was told by people in the industry, “You’re too late, the day of the book is gone,” so I said, “Well that’s fine, I’ll just soldier on.” I’ve been writing for over fifty years now. I was lucky enough to miss the big wars and not get shot, but also lucky enough to grow up among the heroes who had served in them and learn from their example. I was lucky to live and write when books were an essential part of society and people were not distracted by cell phones or tablet computers. I have lucked into life continuously. I have ended up in situations which have seemed appalling at the time, disastrous even, but out of them have come another story or a deeper knowledge of human character and the ability to express myself better on paper, and so to write books which more and more people have read and continue to read.