Meanwhile, I look forward to being no longer poorly and therefore able to avoid the whole novel-writing issue in a more traditional manner – by dusting, making soup, staring, pacing, repainting the stairwell, dozing, crying, fainting . . . Even so, I’ll always eventually end up battering away at the thing until it batters back. It’s lovely and it’s mind-bending and I wouldn’t be without it. Onwards.
XX
HAPPY NEW FEBRUARY. I am in my typing chair, surrounded by scribbly bits of paper, bookmarkless books doggedly concealing facts that I need right now and data-sticks. You never can have enough backups when you’re writing a novel. Thieves may break in and steal your (at home) laptop and your (for travelling) laptop. Hideously unlikely interactions of sunlight and magnifying lenses may burn your ecologically shameful, printed-off pages. During an almost inevitable psychotic break you may melt, bend, stamp on or simply eat your auxiliary disk-drive and rats may gnaw to fragments overnight the disks you’ve hidden under your floorboards. Really you should deposit at least three or four storage devices in the safekeeping of your doctor, or your bank manager, or someone you can actually trust – and it would be good if you could implant a memory chip about your person, positioned far from any organs valuable enough for forcible extraction by teams of international spare-part thieves, thus keeping your precious chapters free from collateral damage by feral scalpels.
In short, the longer my novel gets, the more anxious I become about its safety and – lunging paranoia aside – the more likely it is that my computer will go into an operatic series of crashes before simply dying in my arms like a concussed gannet. (Readers will remember that I know whereof I speak when it comes to expiring seabirds.) By the end of the year, should all have gone well, my study will be almost impassable and the luggage for any journey beyond the corner shop will include a small fireproof safe.
Not that I believe my novel is any good. I never believe that. And my enduring levels of dissatisfaction can be difficult to explain: telling people, ‘I hate everything I produce’ seems a tad negative and also suggests that I’m happy to assault the dashing and generous reader with any old nonsense. In fact, I am – believe me – doing all that I possibly can to produce books that are as good as I can make them, and I do believe my work has managed to improve through time. I just never quite climb precisely all the way up my intended mountain – the route gets altered, or the mountain’s a bit to the left, or some of the heather’s squiff, if not actually broccoli when you look at it closely.
There used to be a delightful pair of older ladies who would attend readings in Edinburgh and loiter until the very end of the signing queue in order to lean forward (to be honest, rather drunkenly) and whisper to unwary authors, ‘Yes, but you could do better . . .’ Although it was always lovely to meet the pair of them and to see how much innocent joy can be derived from cheap boxed wine, a free evening’s heating and applied malevolence, their words were, of course, unnecessary. I already knew I could do better. I have always known I could do better. The one, solitary, mortal thing that I could not do any better is knowing that I could do better. I’m Scottish. I’m a Calvinist. My cerebrospinal fluid is – I like to imagine – awash with uniquely prickly lymphocytes whose sole purpose is to swim round and round my brain, endlessly carolling: could do better.
Okay?
Or rather.
Not okay. Never okay.
Which is, perversely, very much okay. This certainty of imperfection – in Scots and non-Scots, I’d have to point out – has kept generations of us busily working away, obsessing and convulsing, lest we should fail even more embarrassingly than we fear we might. People like me are always about to be fired, or unmasked, or mocked, humiliated, cashiered, bastinadoed, tarred and feathered and generally knocked about for being dreadful. Believing this too vehemently would – we must surely agree – be catastrophic, but harnessing the little monster in our chests that taunts and derides us can mean that we keep on tinkering and correcting beyond the point at which we might otherwise despair, or surrender, or worry feebly about the bleeding from our ears. We are, in short, a fretting and puzzling fellowship of imperfect perfectionists, flailing gamely through the variously delightful hells of our own making.
Having said all that, I wouldn’t have said all that if I weren’t moderately happy about the tiny amount of typing I’ve coughed up thus far. If I still loathed it as heartily as I did last week, I wouldn’t have been able even to discuss it with you. Had I met you in the street, I would have pulled down my hat and ignored you, weeping inwardly as I loped away to punch myself repeatedly on your behalf. Since then I have erased every repellent syllable of the bilge I managed to secrete over the festive period. (I never do remember not to write when I have flu and am tired, even if I feel I should be writing, even if I think I still can . . .) I have started again and am creeping forward between bouts of displacement activity, fourteen-hour jolts of sleep (which do rather eat into the working day) and startling hypnopompic hallucinations. All the above being par for the course. Already, I’m telling my friends about people they’ve never met, people they can’t meet, people who don’t exist, people I see in my sleep. As another brace of older ladies I overheard on a train put it so nicely: ‘It’s better than having your leg cut off.’ And how true those words are, even today. Onwards.
XXI
NOW THEN. FIRST off – thanks to those of you who offered expressions of fellow-feeling after my last blog. We are, I like to think, all in this together, and although having written other books with some degree of success may be helpful when you drop off into the abyss of the next one, it can also seem a burden and is certainly, in many very real ways, irrelevant. When we stand at the start of a book, it’s not unlikely that we’ll all have the distinct impression that we’ve forgotten to dress and people are looking – and we’re up a pole – and covered in angry, greased bats. It may be that we now know how we staggered to the end of the previous books, but that doesn’t mean we’ll have a clue whether we’ll navigate this one to its close or simply expire halfway across its nasty patio, still within sight of its cheap front door.
So here we all are – united and yet hideously isolated by our own bewilderment. And by ‘we’ I mean those of us who are attempting to type anything – not just those of you who share my species, and with whom I can enjoy a delicious commonality of experiences and dreams. Please feel free to keep reading if you are not a writer, but bear in mind that I will now address you as if you were . . . The point is, it’s ridiculous and beautifully unwise of us to even attempt a novel, and anyone who says the process isn’t grisly, or won’t become so fairly soon, is a big fibber. In my opinion.
Should you be interested, I have clattered out the initial lump of my novel and am now letting it cool – partly so that we can both recover and partly because Other Things have intervened.
Let us discuss Other Matters, beginning with a flashback to some time in the early ’90s. Picture me standing, a tyro scribbler, in the London garden of Brian Patten, thinking, ‘Ooh. I used to read you when I was at school.’ But not saying this, because poets can be sensitive about their age. Mr Patten was a lovely host, but did surprise me by breaking off during our conversation, digging into his pockets and telling me something along the lines of, ‘This is what you have to watch for. And this. And this. See?’ Out of his pockets he produced . . . almost nothing, mild bits of fluff and nonsense. ‘This.’ He waved a palm lightly dusted with what in Scotland we would call oose and continued. ‘This is what stops you writing. All the other things. They get everywhere. Everywhere.’ And back into his pockets went his fists and on he searched.
I sort of knew what he meant, but as – at that stage – I was still working part-time and believed that a Great Big Full-Time Writer like Mr Patten really had acres of space in which to mentally gambol and invent, I didn’t take him too seriously.
He was, of course, right – the main thing that stops you writing when all you technically have to do
is write is the apparently gentle stream of minute, but utterly interrupting interruptions. Slowly, all your available pockets do fill with tasks you must perform and which are not proper writing. Some of them are lovely and yet all of them are in the way.
Every morning, for example – if I’m actually anywhere near my home town – I must pick up my mail from its maximum-security PO box and then sort it for anything that I might want or understand. Often there are small but necessary contracts and I have to admit that most of them are beyond me, but I do still have to puzzle through them and sign them and parcel them up for posting back. In any week I’m sent four or five books that I haven’t asked for and will only have time to read if I do nothing else and, believe me, it breaks my heart that I’m probably not going to give them a quote for their cover, or review them, or mention them in some significant way (the people who send the books think I move in influential circles and cannot be persuaded otherwise) or treat them nicely. I do take some of them home and mean to look at them and then . . . six months later I find them at the bottom of the To Read pile and they stare at me and make me guilty as we run together to the Oxfam shop. This means I’m a bad person, I know that.
And then there are the new writers whose manuscripts need to be supported, and I got support when I was new and so there has to be time made for them, for references and feedback and thinking. And then there are occasionally the students – they need feedback, too. And then there are the emails to and from two different email addresses, very often requesting replies, or attachments, or treatments (I have no idea why some people insist on calling a synopsis a treatment, but they do) or some level of coherence.
And then there are the train tickets to be booked – and then the other train tickets to replace them, when my plans change and the discount I got for being early turns into a penalty charge for jumping the gun. There are festivals that want information about my technical requirements (I usually have none, but saying I have none takes time, too) and hotels that want me to pay for rooms and make reservations rather than turning up and just crying at them on the night, and then there’s the checking and double-checking of both the arrangements I’ve made and the ones everyone else has, because – believe me – if I don’t double-check I’ll end up marooned on a rainy Sunday in a disused bus shelter in Ilfracombe. Maybe.
And all this – I do realise – is connected with my being lucky enough to be in work and with my head above water, but it does make me slightly demented before we even add in the things that I do partly because they’re interesting and partly because they are ‘profile-raising’ – all of which seem to involve huge amounts of preparation and remembering (when I can no longer recall anything that isn’t actually strapped to my body and very clearly labelled) before I straggle about hither and yon and do gigs, or record radio things, or end up being alarmed in a television studio.
I need a PA. I don’t have a PA. I can’t afford a PA. I’ve only ever met one PA I really liked and thought was excellent, and he belongs (perhaps literally) to Derren Brown and therefore has much more fun in an average day than I could muster for him in a lifetime. So no PA. As someone once said to a friend of mine at the kind of party I don’t attend, ‘My people tell me you don’t have any people . . .’
But do you know what saves me? Saves what’s left of me, anyway? More of the same. (And this isn’t just because I’m a Calvinist and the solution to Too Much Work must be More Work.) Either I don’t earn a living, or I have to do what I have to do and find ways to make the best of it – at least in part because no human being should ever have to Personally Assist me, even for money: it would be awful for them. So, in the midst of Too Much Mail, More Mail occasionally means that people who’ve read a book of mine – and who are overly pleasant and supportive – will write me letters and/or send enclosures that are almost always not frightening. And this is cheering and means that for a while I can be less stressed about things which are all manifestations of good fortune and not really stressful in themselves. I can remember that I really have always relied on the kindness of strangers. If they don’t read me, all this stops. And since it hasn’t stopped yet, I can also fall back on the old, old ruse of using More Writing to make Too Much Writing feel like Calvinist Fun. So, running alongside the novel, I’m encouraging a little radio drama – and when I’m doing one, I can pretend I should be doing the other, and vice versa. It’s not ideal, but it’s very much better than nothing. Onwards.
XXII
AND HELLO FROM my hotel room. I can’t remember how many hotel rooms I have occupied since I last wrote to you, but they have been numerous and various and have served to confirm me in my belief that I should stick to the same chain if I can, because then I’ll always be at home – in somewhere relatively cheap, neutral and suitable for typing. The beginnings and drafts of all my books have, quite frankly, spent more time in hotel rooms than even the most energetic WAG.
For those of you who read the previous blog, my cunning plan to divide my time between the play and the novel (while doing a bit of stand-up and a show in Bath) came somewhat loose on its hinges when the play won, became indecently insistent and ended up monopolising all the parts of last week that I didn’t spend either flailing about a stage or hurtling across railway platforms. The play is now with its intended recipient and he has agreed to take care of it – it’s probably already peeing on his carpet, chewing his shirt collars and bleating endearingly when he puts it back into its box. For which I, of course, apologise. Naturally, once he’s asleep, it will creep out and drink his blood. But only in an affectionate way. Very high-maintenance, plays. And relative peace is descending between meetings – I’m in London, which is where meetings happen, and muggings, obviously, which are just a kind of vigorous meeting . . . Anyway, I’m overdue for another chat with the novel. A new section is rattling about and needs to be expressed. But, before I start, I thought I’d look at the process of putting one word after another – the process that no one but the author really sees – the process that it’s difficult to examine properly, even in one-to-one sessions with students.
So. This won’t end up in my novel, but let us say that I have the feeling there’s a man about the place and that the place is a room. I wouldn’t normally start with something that vague – it would generate an insane amount of rewriting – but this will at least demonstrate that, having written, we can scrabble around and see what the words suggest in the way of playmates they might need and paths they might want to follow. With or without preparation, the picking and grinding and staring that will now ensue are inevitable – prior knowledge would simply make them more informed.
So.
So all over again.
A man and a room.
Right.
A man walks into a room.
We’re off then. He’s a man, definitely a man, not a lady, or a unicorn, or an urchin – not even urchin-like characteristics – unicorn-like, then? Does he seek out virgins? Not that I’m aware of. Was he at any time a lady? Nope.
A man walks into a room.
Sure it’s not the man? Bit more definite – the man. That being the definite article, and so forth. They’re both rather boring, though. What about – our man? I quite, for no reason I can put my finger on, like our man. It has implications.
Our man walks into a room.
Present tense. Feels appropriate. Doing a lot in the present tense at the moment. Will we argue with the present tense? Not just now. I feel there is something – research, preparation – that tells me things will be revealed about our man, and if he is in the present tense, he will learn of them with us in real time and this seems a good thing. I will keep it for now.
Don’t know about the a, though . . . The bounce in our man seems to render a room rather flat and translucent. He isn’t a translucent chap. I don’t think it’s the room, either. I think it’s his room.
Our man walks into his room.
Hmmm. Walks is, of course, appalling. Apart from the
fact that we may just need the man in his room and may simply assume that he got there in one of the usual ways according to the laws of physics and no entering is necessary – walking is just tedious.
Hopping?
Yes, well, if you’re not going to be helpful.
Limps.
Oooh, I quite like limps – he may have been to places and done things, our man. He may limp. I may hear the thump of that through a thin carpet and into a wooden floor . . . But I’m mainly having a problem with into his – it is slightly difficult to say and therefore to think – it is gluey and unmelodious, somehow. Into his . . . I don’t like it.
On Writing Page 8