On Writing

by A. L. Kennedy

  And now, Dear Readers, as we wait in Washington Union Station, I must leave you. I have a few more days of woodland scribbling to try and get my characters into physical synch and all shiny for the end of their book, and then I will begin the long journeys to Oregon and New Mexico. More landscape, more scary food and more sitting and writing . . . Onwards.

  XXXV

  DEAR READERS, I have just got lost for a dizzied ninety minutes within something like 200 square yards of Santa Fe. Last night I spent another goodly portion of time (I don’t know how long, I had forgotten to wear my watch. I had, in fact, temporarily mislaid my watch . . .) trying to enter my loaned apartment. As it turned out, I couldn’t open the door because it wasn’t the door to my apartment. I live somewhere else – somewhere with a lock that my key can open. I would have become tearful, but I was tired and dehydrated and coated with (hoping to ease my withering skin) what turned out to be hair conditioner and not body lotion. Oddly, it seemed to work quite well and was fragrant. After a while, all the little travel bottles look the same . . . In short, I’m at 7,000 feet where the air is thin and water boils too quickly to make you a nice restorative cuppa that isn’t lukewarm, and am writing to you from a fragment of my former self. Happy, but a fragment.

  I’ll get to the happy later – the drive to defer gratification: it never wears off, even when I’m crumbly and my oxygen levels are below par. First let me take you through a wibbly, retro flashback, à la Alfred Hitchcock, to somewhere around 5,000 miles in my past – or someone else’s past, at the moment I’m not sure.

  Two weeks ago, my novel and I plunged once again into the muggy near-death experience which is Penn Station, all set to trundle off, Steampunking it for Chicago and Portland, Oregon, then LA and Santa Fe – not a plane in sight and all was almost well. I wasn’t expecting North by Northwest – the 20th Century Limited stopped running long ago, in every sense, but even so . . . it was something of a shock when I met my roomette. Did I in any way suggest that US train cars were roomy last time we spoke? Did I? The Amtrak roomette – ugly, ugly, ugly word – is quite small in the way that leptons and quarks are quite small. It has no room for most of the normal activities a human being might expect to enjoy: standing, breathing, thrashing in and out of a foetal position while begging for an aneurism to intervene . . . Up and down the passageway as you sink into a compression-induced fugue state you will hear the tiny cries of other passengers as they contemplate their own accommodations, or simply wonder numbly: Where the fuck did they put the rest of it? And roomettes are designed for two – even the ones which incorporate a prison-style sink and toilet combo that also acts as a handy set of steps. I feel I cannot be alone in believing this would remove every shred of helpful mystery from even the most resilient relationship. I cannot think of anyone I love enough – and I do have large capacities for affection – to spend hour after dank hour with them while learning too much about all their previously adored places in what amounts to a cross between a tea caddy and a commode.

  There were, of course, compensations. There would have to have been.

  First Compensation. Train travel has allowed vast tracts of America to limp past at a wonderfully detailed pace. I have watched a misty pink sunrise across gentle Indiana, seen the farms and autumnal dells of Wisconsin, the wheeling perspectives of corn fields, pumpkin fields, harrowed earth and prairie roads. I have sat and stared out at the Columbia Valley cliffs, seen the sun set on the rolling Pacific Coast and the surfers’ bonfires lighting up thereafter, watched the tawny plains of Montana and North Dakota, the blue distances and wind-worn mountains of Arizona and New Mexico . . . I mean, I could go on, but you’d get bored. I should also have witnessed a setting sun in the picturesque Glacier National Park, but massive delays – this is Amtrak – meant it was dark long before then and the sun had, in fact, burnished and gilded the delightful brown oil-processing facilities of Shelby, Montana. Shelby granted us a ‘fresh-air stop’. These have generally brought me both relief and anxiety. I come from a small town myself, and I know they’re hard to escape. Many’s the time I have alighted from the high, safe, silvery railcar and felt that tingle of panic: what if the train just moved on without me: this is somewhere you’d never be able to leave: this is a kind of nowhere: this is fading amateur murals declaring the dangers of drugs: this is stray yellow dogs and hand-painted signs reading ‘Cold Beer. Good Food. Band every Saturday Night.’ This is a savage place in a savage time. Local newspapers along my routes wrote of electoral candidates who hadn’t bothered attending community debates, of foreclosures and soup kitchens, unprecedented demands for assistance, homelessness. Outside the windows, a nation has fallen in two.

  Second Compensation. Amtrak staff behave with extraordinary and democratic levels of courtesy, charm and attentiveness – this being all that prevents their benighted cargo from re-enacting Night of the Living Dead within moments of boarding. Their kindness quite literally keeps everything going. En route announcements blend humour, menace and levels of enjoyable psychosis, and I certainly never will ever dream of spitting at fellow-travellers, nor will I alarm children, wander about with my shoes off, or smoke. I am fully aware that smoking on a train will involve my being disappeared to Diego Garcia and not heard of again. So hello to Paul, Victor, Louis, Tiffany, Joyce, Moses and everyone else. Yes, I remember their names; the last fourteen days have been, among other things, a crash course in hardcore friendliness.

  Third Compensation. Friendliness. I usually see this as a threat, but Amtrak is determined that I should adjust and embrace it. Apart from being thrown on the mercy of uniformed strangers simply to survive (and I’m aware that I wasn’t trying to sleep in coach accommodation – I have seen the coach sleepers, they will haunt my dreams . . . ), Amtrak is determined that everyone should sit together, be together and eat together. If they ran the UN, then ceasefires would be gruelling and yet weirdly binding. Antisocial curmudgeon that I am, if I wanted to receive actual hot food on a plate I had to batter along to the dining car and be forcefully seated at a table with three other people, all of them terrifyingly convivial. Before I could even sit down I was barraged with other people’s personal details, affection and warmth, and I suspect it has altered my make-up, perhaps for ever. I now find I am unable to eat without first reciting, ‘Hi, I’m Alison. I live in Glasgow, Scotland. Not Glasgow, Montana. I am both travelling and working. I don’t fly. I am writing a novel. It is book number thirteen. I am right-handed, forty-four, single, I have no children and I don’t drink. What about you?’ And so hello to the lady who worked in one of the many posh Minnesota rehab clinics. Addiction, like any illness, is an income-source in the US – it will bring you bills, not help. If you’re wealthy, you may recover. If you’re not, you’ll die. And hello to the mother of a serving soldier who has survived Iraq and Afghanistan, and hello to the WWII veteran who listened to her pride politely, although his war was not like her son’s war – destruction all they have in common. And hello to the man amazed by his country’s capacity only to destroy, and then apologetic that he’d talked about it for so long. Hello to all the decent and friendly and promising human beings currently being shafted by their government, much as we are being shafted by ours. People like Wayne, who asked me for money in LA Union Station, which is a poem of a building, extravagant in the beauty it offers everyone who enters it, First Class the only class available – the product of a lost philosophy.

  Fourth Compensation. The first draft of my novel was finished aboard the Empire Builder: my pages and I trundling together somewhere in the dark, I think across the little bit of Idaho that protrudes north between Washington and Oregon. We were not riding the 20th Century Limited, I was not Eva Marie Saint and neither was my novel Cary Grant, but we did sit quietly for a bit, side by side, and enjoy the end of our initial adventures. And in the morning, car 2730 celebrated with me and we had hugs – all human beings together. Onwards.

  XXXVI

  AS I WRITE, two comedy TV progra
mmes, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, are hosting a non-shouting political rally in Washington, and outside my New York hotel, Central Park is filling with nippers dressed as a variety of demons, ghosts, witches, insects, pirates and cartoon characters. It’s the Halloween weekend, US political discourse has appropriately crumpled into a terrifying shouting match within which anyone can say anything – the loonier, the better – and there is, of course, at least one witch (retired) on the campaign trail. Having just trundled round the country, reading local newspapers and meeting regional reporters as I progressed, I am aware that conventional politicians are, at best, simply mud-slinging and, at worst, dodging arrest and/or releasing whatever witless and scary mouth-noise their reptile brain can conjure, secure in the knowledge that they will never have to defend any assertion, no matter how manifestly unhinged. Journalistic oversight is scant – and seems to come largely from the two light-entertainment shows above – and many candidates are being held in seclusion lest they tell waiting reporters that the Liberal Media Elite are controlled by al-Qaeda elk (those aren’t antlers, they’re communications antennae), that Obama’s healthcare reforms cause cancer, that Jesus hates left-handed people – all of whom could choose to be right-handed if they really wanted – and that gravity is only a myth put about by atheist ‘scientists’ in order to restrict the righteous and their natural ability to fly.

  This isn’t my country, but I am aware that UK politicians borrow all their plays (even – if not especially – the cruel and dysfunctional ones) from the US. Never have I been more tempted to opt out and join the merry throngs in the park, possibly dressed as (why not?) Scooby-Doo.

  ‘Do you think UK politics has plunged into a new nadir of secrecy, sleaze and sadistically damaging cuts?’ WrIdunno. ‘Do you feel that while recreational fiction – a vital source of imaginative exercise, energy and companionship – is being devalued on all sides, political fiction is setting us adrift in a hideous bubble of dangerous crap?’ You have scoobysnax? Me want scoobysnax. ‘You do realise you’re not really a cartoon character, right? You’re a forty-five-year-old adult. You have responsibilities.’ Scoobyscoobydoo . . .

  I should, of course, never be trusted when I’m hopping about on the moral high ground. I am not a moral person – I am much more comfortable saying that my objections to political bullshit are professional. I have spent more than a quarter of a century trying to use words in ways that are communicative and precise. I have led I can’t begin to count how many workshops and one-to-ones with the hope and intention of increasing accuracy and fluency amongst others, and have seen how liberating and powerful language can be when operated with honesty and generosity. (I know I’m in the fiction business, but honesty of approach and an understanding of reality are vital in the writer’s relationship with the reader: the reader does agree he or she will be lied to, but nobody wants their intelligence insulted . . .) I also know that human beings are malleable and porous – subject us to malign and distorted fictions and we do not prosper, we become cruel. We can go very, very deeply wrong.

  I have also spent more than a quarter of a century defending my corner of the arts against ridicule, censorship and cutbacks. As of Monday, I’ll be returning – slowly – to a country where the arts have gone the way of education, adequate healthcare, transport and the rest. The means of communication that the electorate can use and enjoy are becoming more and more inaccessible, while the fantasies of those who seek to influence us become more and more powerful. As a reader and a writer and a voter and a person, I would rather this were not the case.

  Sorry for being glum there, but I do get tired of the people I vote for acting like occupying forces as soon as they gain power, and if I don’t tell you about it – remember, I’ve been in a lot of railway stations and trains in the past weeks – I will end up simply ranting and twitching at strangers in public places, which will render them uneasy. And it’s not too late – that’s the thing about imagination: wake it up and feed it and it’ll change the world. Always.

  Meanwhile, my own circumstances are not too gloomy. I am newly forty-five. (Like the pistol – as they delightfully say in Santa Fe . . .) Which is fine by me, and I am scribbling all over the initial manuscript of my novel and swaying, as usual, between tentative thoughts that the thing might actually just work and the impulse to seek out someone who will beat me severely for even attempting to impose upon the brains of others with more of my rancid nonsense. Yes, my last blog was all gussied up (not by me) with an air of finality – but you and I know that the end of the first draft is barely the beginning of the tinkering, fiddling and fretting, the rewrites large and small and frantic and middle-of-the-night and despairing and problem-solving and problem-generating – the ones that maintain continuity, the ones that adjust backwards for something you didn’t quite find out until page 230, the ones that seem just a much better way of getting from A to F, the ones suggested by reading work-in-progress to audiences of (I must say) remarkably tolerant strangers and the ones that simply save me from myself.

  And why is it that I can enjoy these happy torments? Because I got an adequate education, because I grew up in a house with access to books, was a child who could visit my local, well-stocked library and know it was full of wonders, unguessed-at beauties, the dry, exciting, papery scent of other worlds, because I got into publishing in 1990 when it was (barely) possible to bring out a collection of short stories as a first book, because there were magazine and anthology opportunities there for me which now no longer exist, because I could make ends meet for the first decade during which my writing did not in any way support me, because I was immensely lucky and a workaholic.

  I would like today’s new writers to have the chances I did – better chances than I did. I would like today’s readers to have more choice, a wider variety of voices and subjects and characters. I can’t say that I currently think they will. I also can’t say we are powerless to alter our circumstances – imagining change is the first step towards creating it: the first act to reclaim our strength is only to think, to practise the habit of thinking, of exercising our interior liberty. Onwards.

  XXXVII

  WELL, IT HAD to happen eventually – I am surrounded by washed and ironed clothing and accompanying wreaths of condensation. I am listening to the silvery banjo stylings of Mr Steve Martin, as relayed to me by my personal (heavy on the bass) CD player, and reclining on my purchased-along-with-the-flat-because-it-is-huge-and-therefore-irremoveable sofa in what I am reliably informed is still my very own address, with none of my furniture subject to governmental compulsory purchase in order to fund another bank bailout or repairs to the Conservative Party offices. In short, I am home.

  My novel and I did, in fact, run from room to room calling, ‘Honey, I’m home!’ until we realised that at least one of us was an inanimate – and, as yet, unpolished – object and then got all bashful and had to have a cup of tea.

  Being back home is, naturally, lovely. I had left brand-new socks waiting here to delight me and I can lie in for ever without anyone at any time yelling, ‘Room service!’ and forcing me to be me at too nasty a speed. It is also, of course, depressing: if I’m stuck here for more than four days I’m going to get bored, or have to redecorate, and why is no one barging through in the morning yelling, ‘Room service!’ and cleaning up after me? Although, oddly, the flat isn’t that dusty, given that I have been away for three months. For reasons I cannot explain there have only been massive accumulations of dust inside my fridge. This is a mystery I’m sure only Penn & Teller could explain with any kind of clarity.

  Since we last spoke I have bobbed back over a strangely kind Atlantic and – finally – stood on the port side and watched completely healthy and alive gannets flinging themselves about in search of fish. (Long-term readers will remember that I was scarred, perhaps for ever, by a dreadful succession of gannet-carrying, gannet-death and gannet-burial-at-sea mishaps, which mightily amused the lovely town of Ullapool, but which will
mean I am never again able to look a gannet in its mad-blue eyes without flinching and, at the very least, offering up a herring as a belated apology.)

  Meanwhile, the first requests for Book of the Year nominations are coming in from assorted newspapers, I am wearing a coat indoors and it must therefore be nearly Christmas. I am not a great fan of the festive period – I hate the colour scheme, I hate the waste, I hate the mass-media implication that anyone not gathered round a glistening and bonhominous board with seventy of their dearest and loveliest is somehow an irredeemable failure, I don’t want to send cards to people with whom I would otherwise never communicate, I don’t think recycling the cards afterwards is really the point – why not simply not send them in the first place? – I hate the Celebrity Special Xmas Editions of ‘Are You Smarter Than a Pebble?’ and even if I were a hyper-devout Christian (or perhaps especially if I were) I would be aware that the 25th of December was a fairly random date selected for a variety of politico-religious reasons and means we are all celebrating something deeply pagan, as well as our ability to shove the calorific equivalent of a fried rhino into our heads at every meal. One mince pie and a good sing-song and I’m more than done with the whole thing.