by Alan Bissett
Little boys who aren’t good at football or fighting have to find self-worth in their own imaginations, and so mine was concerned chiefly with writing and drawing. A Beano-style comic strip about my mischievous little cousin Scott was a hit with my extended family. I’d imitate Oor Wullie and The Broons, my first attempt to write in Scots, and design choose-your-own-adventure novels like the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I wrote a whole series of superhero comics based on me and my friends, with myself as the ninja-like Biscuit Boy, who could mentally control digestives. Writing stories was something I did whenever we were given free play in class, or when rain meant we couldn’t go outside. It was the thing I did when I went home. It was what I was praised most for by teachers. In Primary Three I won first prize as part of the school’s Robert Burns celebration, with a recital of J.K. Annand’s ‘The Crocodile’, which I can still remember word for word to this day. A writer, I’d decided, was what I was going to be.
In Primary Six I had my first ever encounter with another writer. We met like two lizards with florid throat displays. The top brains of our year group were placed in a composite class with some Primary Sevens, who generally wouldn’t talk to us, so of course exuded a faint glamour. One day, our teacher, Alison Shanks, set us the task of coming up with a ghost story, which naturally I threw myself into, concocting a tale about a spooky river which flowed up the side of a mountain. Mrs Shanks read it to the class, who clapped approval, before she read out a story by Lindsay Gardner, a Primary Seven. It was about a girl home alone, whose doorbell was rung again and again by a man selling jade figurines. We held our breath each time the girl went back to the door. It was atmospheric, ambiguous, creepy and stylish. I didn’t know what the hell a ‘jade figurine’ was but it sounded great! When the teacher had finished, when the story released us, the class went wild, whooping and cheering. Lindsay blushed and looked at her desk, and I regarded for the first time someone who was better at me than the thing I was best at. Since I can’t find her on Amazon, I like to think that Lindsay – my first ‘influence’ – is now writing superb murder mysteries under a pseudonym.
Let’s make no bones about this, at Falkirk High School I was geeky. The very things that make you stand out in a good way at primary school – intellect, imagination – make you stand out in a bad way at secondary school. The conformity, the sudden obsession with who to be seen with and what clothes to wear, is crushing to the spirit of those who can’t keep up. This was terrible for my self-esteem but great for my writing, and I cast myself in the role of the romantic outsider, cut adrift from society, as revenge for upbraidings on the football pitch. Yes, I have read Catcher in the Rye.
In Fourth Year I wrote a story called ‘The End of the World’, a short, simple piece produced very quickly that used only dialogue and sparse description. It was about two five year-old children, Marshall and Jenny, sitting on a wall at a swing park. Jenny looks up to Marshall because he’s a few months older, but Marshall abuses this privilege, trying to impress her with a fib about how he’s visited ‘the end of the world’ which lies beyond the line where the sky and the ground meet. It has monsters and lions, he tells her, and a man called Arthur Haveabanana, who gives you a banana. Excited, she begs him to take her, but he refuses, for her own safety, not wanting to tell her that the real reason they can’t go is because he’s not allowed to cross the road. ‘Another time,’ says Jenny, before they run back to the house. ‘Yes,’ sighs Marshall, ‘another time.’
The story seemed to me, at fourteen, a little juvenile, and was written as an experiment, a sideshow to the epic, Tolkien-esque novel I was planning in my head. My English teacher, Georgina Young, however, loved it, and read it out to the whole class. They listened and kept listening, then at the end went wild the way my Primary Six class had for Lindsay Gardner’s jade figurines. I can still remember them all looking at me for the first time as though I wasn’t a nothing any more. I wanted to feel that again, and again, and again, but couldn’t quite understand why this particular story had enjoyed such an effect. So I went back to writing about vampires.
Now that I look back on ‘The End of the World’, with two decades’ worth of experience, I can recognise certain elements that weren’t in my horror stories: realistic dialogue (for two five-year-olds anyway), characters properly differentiated from each other, a power dynamic in flux, the lack of genre clichés, an organic twist in the plot, and an atmosphere of sadness that avoided being maudlin. Mrs Young told me that she’d started to read it out to all of her classes, even the Fifth and Sixth Years – mainstream success! – but the school environment can take back as quickly as it gives and before long my head was back under the parapet.
It was a quiet wee triumph, though. A step.
Round about then, what it meant to be a teenager really kicked in. In May of 1990 I met Allan, Moonie and Toby, who were a good three years older than me and had all left school. We lived near each other in Hallglen, a scheme in Falkirk built in the mid-Seventies, set on a hill, where each box of a house is of the same white pebbledash as the next. You can see it clearly from the window of the Edinburgh–Glasgow train, just before Falkirk High station. ‘The Lads’, as they called themselves, took me under their wing, in the pitying, brotherly way that older teens sometimes do. As thanks for this patronage, I worshipped them. They all had jobs and disposable income, they drank alcohol, and they’d had actual sex with actual girls, all unknown concepts to me. I listened to their stories about work and fights and club nights with rapt fascination. Each evening, at six on the dot (after Neighbours), I’d change out of my school clothes and charge straight down to Toby’s, and we’d hang about in his bedroom or Allan’s living room and spend our time on a general ripping of the pish, to a soundtrack of classic rock, maybe a Bruce Lee, Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarznegger film to round the night off.
Then Toby passed his driving test, bought a car, and suddenly the whole of Scotland was open to us.
I remember those nights as being some of the most exciting of my life, even if, as youngest, I was the designated runt. Everything moved so fast. There was something new to see every day. We were loyal and we believed in each other. Together, our world felt limitless. Moonie introduced me to The Simpsons and David Bowie; Allan to Subbuteo and spaghetti westerns; Toby to Pink Floyd and Clive Barker, who became my first obsessive literary crush and who dictated my subsequent reading of Stephen King, Thomas Harris, H.P. Lovecraft, James Herbert and Edgar Allan Poe. The inside of my head grew strange and dark, all sorts of ghosts and madmen drifting through its purple drapes. I started to dress all in black and grow my hair long and think of myself as a creature of the night. If you are a teenage boy in this stage at the moment, my message is this: don’t worry, you’re going to be fine, but only once you realise that women aren’t the enemy, Jim Morrison’s poetry is rubbish, and that colours are nothing to be scared of.
In Fifth and Sixth Year my writing started to move, thanks to two hugely influential English teachers, Eileen Gibson and Mollie Skehal, who believed in young people, encouraged free thinking and offered the sort of purely literary pleasure which most kids avoid because ‘it’s boring’. I was no exception, and resisted what they called Good Books, but a great teacher can unlock any text for anyone, and this is how I was introduced to Arthur Miller, Norman MacCaig, Thomas Hardy, Tennessee Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thanks are also due to Georgina Young for Shakespeare, John Graham for Chaucer (and Joyce Lidgertwood for telling me in First Year that I was ‘being silly’ for putting a used condom into a story just because Stevie Miller had dared me to). What came at me from all of these writers, as my mind was trained in how to read and talk about Good Books, was a sense of realism, of the natural complexity and drama of human emotion. No demons were to be found except those of a character’s own making. This, in its own way, made things more exciting because I could sense more truth about the world being presented to me. The danger the characters were in was mor
e human, more tangible.
But I still liked things with fangs.
In 1993, in my final year of school, a supply teacher called Alison Armstrong, herself an eminently published writer of short stories, formed a Creative Writing group with Mollie Skehal. Our Sixth Year English class jumped on it, and, sensing my appetite for writing, Alison gave me a copy of Rebel Inc. magazine, published in Edinburgh by Kevin Williamson and featuring stories by then-unknowns Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Duncan McLean and Laura Hird. The cover showed Malcolm X holding a rifle. The stories all had swearing in them and were set in Scotland. This was a brew of a different order, dirty and provocative. I had absolutely no reference points for this kind of thing. Two of the writers in Rebel Inc, Gordon Legge and Shug Hanlan, were even from the Falkirk area. Alison encouraged me along to a poetry and pints night upstairs in Behind the Wall, where the main reader was the poet Janet Paisley. She lived in the village right next to Hallglen! A real poet! Alison introduced me to people by saying, ‘keep an eye out for this boy in the future’, which felt like huge praise to my shy seventeen-year-old self. She took me to an open mic night in Edinburgh – Edinburgh! – and I stepped onstage just the once, just to see what it felt like, told a joke about a guy going into a shop to ask for a wasp then sat back down to amused applause, a brief whiff of affirmation, before the actual poets went back to the mic.
On the scene, all the talk was about one particular writer starting to pull ahead of the pack: Irvine Welsh. The name seemed to float in and out of the smoke. Long before Trainspotting became a film classic, I was energised by the novel, as well as The Acid House and Marabou Stork Nightmares, which were about a Scotland I recognised, one that wasn’t the Broons or tartan but which spoke in the natural voice of the working-class. My voice. I’d presumed before that this kind of writing wasn’t even allowed, given that teachers had always marked my essays with ‘colloquial’ each time an informality crept in. I started sketching stories about some of the guys in Hallglen, the hard guys and shaggers, but the characters would always end up falling into another dimension. Couldn’t keep those pesky alternate worlds out of Hallglen.
My final two years at school were ones of uncertainty about my future, exam stress and acute emotional confusion. I had a bright, creative mind, but was not a diligent student, and the romantic outsider role had become subsumed by that of the adolescent depressive. This was especially acute given I’d stayed on at school to the point where only the university-bound sons and daughters of the middle class remained, all of whom seemed so assured and confident. I liked many of them but I wasn’t one of them, and couldn’t share the faith they had in their own destiny. No one in my family had ever gone to university. I didn’t even know that sentence was a cliché at the time, it was just a fact. Sure, I wanted to be a writer one day but I hadn’t a clue how to go about it. My dilemma was this: should I leave school and get a labouring job in Falkirk, as the Lads had, or head off, terrified, into the unknown? Everything in Hallglen was reassuringly familiar, but I could sense that the Lads all hated their jobs and that this would become my inevitable fate. Life for a working-class teenage boy, furthermore, is tinged with the very real possibility of violence, and I’d started to feel Falkirk pushing in at me from all sides, sharply.
Seeing as you’ve just finished Boyracers, you’ll recognise this situation. For the record, I really was nicknamed Alvin back then (the Lads already had one Allan and didn’t need another).
In 1993 I just scraped my way on to an undergraduate degree course in English at Stirling University. It was only twenty miles from Falkirk but an entirely different world. There I was, fully absorbed by the middle classes, whose voices and mores and codes were quite alien to me, with no Plan B and only the fear of going back to Falkirk to spur me on. I figured that, like Steve Guttenburg’s character in Police Academy, I’d just stay until they kicked me out.
I loved it. Of course I did. Just as Steve Guttenburg’s character, once he gives it time, loves the police academy. Four years later, to my shock, I’d achieved a First Class Honours degree in English and Education and my self-confidence was burgeoning, all the insecurities of school banished, and before I knew it, I was out into the real world.
For the first half of 1998, when I was twenty-two, I worked as an English teacher at Elgin Academy in the North East of Scotland. The work was enjoyable but the volume of it crippling. Rejection letters for my stories were coming thick and fast, and I soon realised that if I was to remain a teacher, I would never improve as a writer. For this reason, in the second half of the year, I started a PhD thesis back at Stirling University to give my mind a good workout.
My mind, however, turned out not to be the Goliath I’d presumed it to be and working it out, unfortunately, was among the most disheartening experiences of my life. That’s no comment on the teaching staff at Stirling Uni, who’d always conveyed excitement, and were thus exciting (the stars in this regard were David Punter, Rory Watson, Glennis Byron, Jackie Tasioulas, Judy Delin, and Angela and Grahame Smith) but there I was, aged twenty-three, facing three long years stuck in Room 101,1 lost in a thicket of critical theory, surrounded by people who were all much, much cleverer than me. I was living on next to no money, working in Waterstone’s every Saturday and Sunday to meet the bills, which, of course, kills a weekend life for someone in their early twenties. I could feel my confidence ebb again. I’d decided I didn’t want to be an academic but I was training myself to be nothing else. The rejection letters were even more plentiful now. As Ray Liotta also says in Goodfellas, ‘This was the bad time’.
A survival instinct kicked in. In early 1999 I started attending Stirling Writers Group, who met in the Cowane Centre, to see if I could revive my moribund ambitions. The tutor there, the poet Magi Gibson, saw enough potential to start hot-housing me, and within a few months the group had become a well-functioning unit of strong, ambitious writers, feeding off a shared energy and critiquing each other’s work. We improved rapidly. Above us, Scottish Literature was undergoing a renaissance. The Rebel Inc. generation had come of age: Trainspotting’s huge success had meant international exposure for a whole host of Scottish writers. The cultural moment was palpable and vibrant. In the library of Stirling University, when I was supposed to be researching my PhD, I went to the Scottish Literature section and devoured James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Ali Smith, Iain Banks, Des Dillon, Tom Leonard, Edwin Morgan, Jackie Kay, Alan Spence, William McIlvanney, Ron Butlin and A.L. Kennedy. The range of their experiments, the array of very real Scotlands which they presented, the sense of identity, the force of their language, the truth of their politics – all of it converged with a new momentum I’d started to achieve in my own writing. Under Magi’s tutelage I abandoned fantasy and horror altogether to tell stories about the very thing I’d struggled to get away from: my class. It released something in me. Things gathered speed. I was suddenly shortlisted for competitions, published in magazines, read out on the radio. I was still only twenty-four. Magi took me on tours of the Scottish live literature scene with her – to the Borders, Aberdeenshire, Glasgow. I became her secret weapon, and I started to enjoy the experience of performing, of encapturing an audience from a whole other part of the country and playing about with them. My work grew more verbal, stronger, conscious. I was on the move.
All or nothing: it was time to seize my chance. A bored postgrad, I had both the time and the motivation, and was aching again for that freedom and fun I’d felt tearing around Falkirk with my best friends, nothing else to do but talk about bands and chuck film quotes at each other. The point of innocence was disappearing in adulthood. I’d soon be too old to even remember those years with any clarity. Falkirk, a place I’d thought I’d finished with, had decided it had not finished with me. All things needed was a catalyst, a spark, for things to really take flight. That spark was a short story called ‘Boyracers’.
In 2000 Magi and I had started to organise a regular poem and pints night in Stirling called
Growwl. It’s worth saying to anyone who laments the absence of a creative scene where they are: make one. We found a venue, the backroom of a bar whose name I can no longer remember, advertised to other writing groups, and were besieged by the initial turnout. Our star reader, the novelist Des Dillon, was someone whose work I very much admired for the way it reflected the energy, and not the deprivation, of working-class life. I wanted to read something that would really impress him. I sat down and wrote a story of perhaps 1,500 words about some of the stuff which Toby, Moonie, Allan and myself had got up to back in the day, gave it the title ‘Boyracers’, and when my time came I stood on a chair and read the thing aloud with all the belief I could muster. I’ve never forgotten the volume of the reaction. After years of dreaming, it was finally happening, I could sense it: I was becoming an actual writer.
Des took the story away and published it in Cutting Teeth, a magazine he was editing at the time, and both Magi and my then-wife Caroline told me that they suspected there was more material to come, if I just pulled the thread …
And so, buoyed with enough youthful confidence to power a small town, I opened up my memory and Boyracers came roaring out with all the force of a debut album by a Northern rock n roll band.
The novel was published by Polygon in September 2001, coincidentally the same month my PhD thesis failed. I was twenty-five, the age at which Stephen King had published his first novel, Carrie, which pleased me no end. Boyracers has never been out of print, a remarkable achievement for a release by a first novelist from a Scottish independent publisher. It rode on what was perhaps the last wave of the spirit of Rebel Inc., just before centralised bookselling and the default middle-class setting of British literature made novels about the Scottish working class unfashionable again. That it has reached its tenth anniversary, given these conditions, delights me.