Not that I am in any way against outbreaks of peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. I am very much in favour of both the above actually getting together over the Christmas period, so that we can all play the equivalent of football in No Man’s Land, rather than be locked into a permanent recreation of its court-martial-threatening aftermath.
Meanwhile, Christmas 2010 is the Big Deadline for my novel and me. We could – if we absolutely must – cleave to each other until the first week of January. (It’s a question of whether my holiday is ruined by one last rewrite, or my editor’s holiday is ruined by having to read me . . .) But basically when the Christmas Special mistletoe is swinging over the TARDIS, things really have to be in good order with the magnum opus. I completed the second draft in my cabin as I came across to Southampton and may always associate this book with missed opportunities to attend scarf-tying workshops (bring your own scarf) or sit at a dinner table in evening dress while wanting to hang myself with my napkin. (The napkin-folding session may have included a special how to tie a genuine Pierrepoint hangman’s knot section. I don’t know. I missed that, too. I was busy typing.)
Picture me, Dear Readers, locked in my little cabin and scratching at the printout of Draft One with a violent red pen. You are all aware that pages which may look passable, or even charming, onscreen turn into vile, vile, nauseating, heavingly awful sewers of rancid excrement as soon as they are printed off and their traumatised author can see them properly. (Which does lead me to wonder what nonsense we scribblers could get away with, if books all simply make journeys from the author’s screen to the readers’ and never hit the paper pulp.) Many’s the hour I have wept and snarled through trying to get the soggy to become snappy, the maundering to become sprightly, the utterly incomprehensible to become something communicative and suave, or simply not illegally bad. And then, of course, there are the rude bits – which have to be sexy, rather than silly, or crude, or impossible, or incorrectly funny, or incorrectly disturbing – or, ohgawdhelpus . . . The jury is still out, but I am moving on to Draft Three in the coming week. Once again, the pages will be printed off and – given that we are now much closer – if you go outside and listen very carefully at sunset with your children (or borrowed children, if you have none of your own) you will be able to turn to them and say, with due solemnity, ‘There now, little ones, that moaning and whimpering is the sort of noise you would make if you decided to be a novelist.’ Onwards.
XXXVIII
THE ONLY THING less fun than sitting with another round of pages to be red-penned and rearranged is doing so while ice complicates the inside of your windows and your immobile extremities slowly sting, then throb, then turn numb, then become perhaps irretrievably blue and fragile. Writing is not a mobile activity and – rampant hypochondria and/or genuine illness apart – historically, it seems to involve being in bed more than might be considered entirely reasonable. The onset of winter always reminds me of my early days as a scribbler, reading about all those Russian and Irish and Parisian writers’ lives in suitably louche and tormented novels, or short stories, or memoirs. One element they shared – beyond narcissism, absinthe abuse and athletic sexual angst – was the presence of one (or more than one) writer in a bed and occasionally putting pen to paper.
This week, I have a choice of bed-writing in a Holiday Inn or sitting next to a tiny portable heater in a university office so cold that no one else ever seems willing to occupy it. The office part of the equation means it’s time to meet Creative Writing students at Warwick University again, and time to be reminded again of how horrible it is to begin seriously considering writing as a profession. I spent years either being mocked by a gnawing desire to write, well . . . something. Or having ideas which were bloody terrifying, or unwieldy, or just plain beyond my technical capacities. Panic was never far away. I started to write before I knew what I was writing about and then fell into a pit of aimless and bewildered prose – or I scared myself silly because it seemed entirely unavoidable that my protagonist would be a man, or an older woman, or a child, or just someone other than me, when I didn’t feel up to creating someone other than me that morning – or else I’d need to write in the first person, or cope with a major timescale, or lollop off into an experiment in magic realism.
Christ, it was appalling. And, of course, numerous psychological logjams and nervous perils never entirely leave, but just at the point when I was as inexperienced as I could get, I was doing all the most punishing and self-defeating and unpleasant things that a writer can to themselves. I was worrying that my eventual readers would hunt me down and cause me harm. I was refusing to interrogate what had come to me to be expressed and therefore – unsurprisingly – finding myself unable to express it. I was doubting every word before it emerged. I was neither considering the overall structure and meaning of pieces nor really focusing on the practical details of making them communicative, in case they just melted away under scrutiny. I was, in short, being scared.
Being scared is perfectly normal when starting to write – it would be foolish not to have qualms about entering another person’s mind and perhaps not being as entertaining and moving and eloquent as one should when given such a splendid, generous and intimate opportunity. And handing over what is, in effect, a dream – that’s stressful. Here is something of me and from me and I have committed to it utterly and it is now nakedly in your possession and if it doesn’t please you, then I will have failed on many, many levels. That’s a hard thing to even consider, never mind putting it into practice. And yet, without asking our ideas to tell us more – and risking that they won’t – without throwing ourselves into the matter completely – and risking that our very best just isn’t good enough – then we never fully know what we can say and how we might say it best. We never find how good we can be and how we can grow beyond that. We don’t do ourselves, or our work, or our readers justice. Which would be a shame. And – scary though it feels to work passionately for absent strangers – it’s not coal-mining, it’s not being a nurse, it’s not marching in London to defend the possibility of being a student, even though there might be bother, or batons, or horses.
That’s the other memory Warwick University campus consistently awakes – one of being a largely pathetic, but occasionally active student. This is the place where I took part in my first demonstrations, first found out how large and unpleasant police horses can be, first realised that a policeman can shove you repeatedly in the back because he wants to, because he can, because it will annoy you, because he would like to start a fight, because he would always win the fight, because he’s a policeman and you’re not . . . It was an education. I wasn’t at Warwick studying Creative Writing – such courses barely existed then and I wouldn’t have dared go near one if they had – but I was studying. I was able to do so because I received a grant. No grant, no university: it would have been that simple. No three years to start learning how my mind actually operated, to become slightly familiar with how I think, to strengthen my ability to analyse and criticise and imagine, to present my thoughts with any kind of confidence. Who knows how long it would have taken me to begin writing without the university experience, or if I would have been able to subsidise myself before my writing earned its keep without the, albeit slightly evanescent, backing of a degree? And I am otherwise unemployable. And I do love writing more than almost anything else. And I am not in any way domestic, or fond of permanent children. So perhaps a life wasted, a life unfulfilled.
And yes, my life is – at a certain level – a big arty nonsense that can be sneered at from many angles. Being a student will always involve self-indulgence and silliness and blagging and there are other paths to enlightenment and confidence, but a university education isn’t something I would lightly deny a fellow-citizen. And the lack of an adequate primary and secondary education is already stifling, crippling and – I don’t mean this metaphorically – killing a generation of people I personally have no wish to injure.
Without anal
ysis and criticism, we can’t get to grips with what may or may not be wrong around us – without a muscular capacity to imagine, we can’t construct better alternatives – without support, we can find it difficult to believe what we have to say should even be heard, that who we are should be expressed: whether that might involve a sonnet that proves you’re as human as everyone else and therefore entitled to consideration, or a love letter, or a job application that changes your life, or the novel that sustains someone recently bereaved, or the joke, or the song that made someone smile after a shitty day, or the slogan that will tell a nearby policeman: Your jobs are next.
I’m all right. I got my education, my library books, access to my voice and those of others – so many wonderful others. Which is partly why I feel others should have that joy, too. Something to boost the National Happiness Index, minimal investment required. Onwards.
XXXIX
THE POST BELOW was written near the beginning of sustained protest actions against government cuts and capitalism’s dysfunctions. This was around the time that Alfie Meadows suffered a head injury as part of a demonstration and Jody McIntyre was shown being pulled from his wheelchair by Metropolitan Police.
I am tired. I’m almost too tired to talk about the things that are tiring me. Then again – as with bad dentistry, unpleasant personal experiences and unpleasant gentleman callers – there’s something minutely empowering about writing down the source of your woes and peering at them in effigy. It can become a small rehearsal for future change.
So. Let’s start with a small woe. I am tired of my printer. It’s a tiny gripe in these days of mayhem and threatened water-cannons, but for more years than I’d like to mention my printer has been the Nick Clegg of office equipment. It promised it would fax – it has never managed to send or receive anything like a fax. It talked to me through my computer in a cloying and yet convincingly masculine voice (until I turned that bit off) about switching it on when it was switched on and connecting it when it was connected and supplying it with paper when its paper supply was entirely adequate and, above all, it told me big, fat, narwhal herds of lies about ink. When it could still talk it would warn me, within hours of receiving new cartridges, that my coloured ink was low and that my black ink was exhausted and that swingeing cuts in page output or desperate foraging for cartridges must immediately ensue. I used to believe it. Then I got curious, let things run and discovered that, on average, my ink supplies actually last three months longer than my printer is willing to admit. Now it can no longer nag me audibly, it constantly pesters my computer with alarmist messages while displaying its own scrolling alerts across its irritating little display screen. Since I’ve decided to switch brands, it also repeats dire threats relating to my use of non-proprietorial inks which have voided its warranty, threaten its health and may cause me to become sterile shortly before the building implodes. I hate it. It’s only still in my office because – beyond being a money-grabbing, conniving company shill – it is, unlike Clegg, basically functional and I need it to hiccup and whine its way through what I hope will be the last paper draft of the novel.
I am also – let’s be careful here – not tired of the novel, but certainly tired because of the novel. I can’t quite remember which draft I’m on, but all of them have seemed to involve struggling and fumbling on the living-room sofa (the living room can often reach habitable temperatures) and slathering recalcitrant pages with red scribbles, or else thrashing and grim silences in bed (also occasionally warmish) or simply giving up, pacing, consuming medically unwise quantities of caffeine and then starting in again with thicker socks, a different soundtrack on the stereo and a hot-water bottle. I spent – for example – Saturday evening, Saturday night and the early hours of Sunday tickling, wheedling, gnawing and praying through my last 200 pages – again – before crumpling like a wet manifesto and texting a chum in another time zone for moral support. (It’s important for writers to cultivate chums in enough locations to cover their usual writing/panicking/despairing hours. I know from bitter experience that you don’t want to be stuck for a week in Hungary with a manuscript that reads like a migraine and no one you can call.) Even as I type this in my suitable-for-middle-age glasses and cardigan with washable elbow patches (Christ, how did this happen?) I can feel myself folding deeper into scraggled monomania. When I go outside I simply fall over – either because of the sheet ice and uncollected bin bags underfoot, or simply because my brain can no longer sustain coordinated movement while obsessing with adequate enthusiasm over the twiddly bit on page 308.
I have reached the point at which I can’t tell if the book is all right, or vile, or moderately interesting in parts. I can’t even tell how many fingers I’m holding up. (That’s a trick question – I’m not holding up any, I just haven’t noticed yet.) In short, I’m almost ready to hand the thing in. I have corrected and smoothed it and almost tested it enough to be slightly confident that it will be consistent under variable conditions. I’ve worked it over in hotel rooms and on trains and in my house. I’ve leapt at it with energetic vigour and while begging inwardly for a minor but debilitating injury that would hospitalise me just enough for a wee rest. I’ve peered at it while in a sunny mood and while trying not boot my television through the window on learning that my government really has decided to screw everyone with whom it is not on first-name terms.
I hate to repeat myself, but none of the fun I’m describing above – and it is fun, it is beautiful fun, it is the time of my life, it is years of sheer bloody joy and a mercy and an income and a way of being useful – would be happening if I hadn’t had a chance at tertiary education. And I’m tired of turning on my television, my radio, going and talking to my friends, the people I work with and counting off those who wouldn’t have got to university, who wouldn’t have been able to go back to study in later life, who wouldn’t have been able to train for what they do best under Cameron and Clegg’s new fee regime.
And this makes me more tired than I can say. As tired as hearing the word ‘free’ – as in ‘Free Education’, when we never have had ‘free’ education, just as we don’t have ‘free’ healthcare – we all pay for both, in advance, and have done for generations, because it was thought that both ensured the social cohesion, the stability, the economic security, the intellectual development and the moral centre of our country. Soon England and Wales will rely on charities to educate its young people. I hope Scotland will continue to pursue a wiser course – I hope it can begin to demonstrate how much wiser, but I truly would rather it didn’t have to.
And it makes me tired to hear kettling described as a method of crowd control; if it controlled crowds, it would be routinely used on football supporters – they turn up in crowds every week, but react rather more badly than most when penned in a crush for hours without explanation. Kettling is designed to punish insurgents – sorry, demonstrators. (Including potentially dangerous wheelchair users and schoolchildren.) It humiliates, panics, frustrates and its results are entirely predictable – anyone who wants a fight will get one, and God help those who didn’t. Like Alfie Meadows. Tired, tired, tired. But I’m writing this with an income and a good life and a fresh book nearly finished and plans for next year – which is more than I could have dreamed of when I was twenty. I’d like more twenty-year-olds to end up with more than they dreamed of – not head injuries, not stupidly wasted energies, not a lack of hope. And we can arrange that. To quote William Beveridge, ‘The door of learning should not shut for anyone at eighteen, or at any time. Ignorance to its present extent is not only unnecessary, but dangerous. Democracies cannot be well-governed except on the basis of understanding.’ Britain was in ruins when he wrote that, in debt and shattered after years of war, but its government respected its people, its government remembered it wouldn’t exist without its people and it acted with justice and it acted with grace. And it could do so again. As Beveridge also said, ‘. . . that which is made by man can by man be prevented’. Onwards.
&nb
sp; XL
HAPPY NEW YEAR. I sincerely hope that all goes well with you and that you’re not nursing a Public Service ninety-day redundancy notice, or wondering if your children have a future, or wondering if you have a future, or wondering if you can pay your fuel bills, or sitting in a heap of recalcitrant snow. Or perhaps you just have flu. I have the distinct impression that being, if not happy, then grimly amused will be one of the lower-cost items we need to get us through the next twelve months of support-slashing, book-burning, rioting, outrage and attempts to divert our attention with shiny things. Are there any more royals who could get married? Is there a long-running soap opera that hasn’t suffered mass casualties and apocalyptic emotional trauma? Could the few, loveable survivors get married? Could said survivors front populist campaigns to generate massive phone-in votes for new bills that favour the reintroduction of trial by ordeal, serfdom and the twenty-four hour projection of Sky News onto the surface of the moon? I suspect that if we don’t laugh – and come up with some imaginative ways of saving ourselves – then our only other options will tend towards tears and self-loathing. And, as a Scot, I can confidently state that both become extremely tedious extremely quickly.
I have been as jolly as I get during the festive period. Those among you who are self-employed will be aware of how annoying public holidays can be: you want to get on, maybe you have to get on, and yet everyone you deal with who has a Proper Job has suddenly disappeared . . . or been fired . . . it all seems very peculiar . . . To pass the time you may even try resting . . . something bound to induce the kind of felling medical difficulties that always appear when you stop working . . . I duly ran a comb and mallet over the last paper rewrite of the novel, loaded the resulting stack of hope, fear, loathing and scribbles back into the computer and then consigned it to the ether (I’m with TalkTalk, I won’t use the term ‘sent by email’ with any kind of confidence) just before Christmas. As the last files disappeared – perhaps for ever – I felt my body weaken, crumple and search about for some really trail-blazing infection. Oddly, all it could come up with was a mimsy little bout of sinusitis – perhaps I was tired. So I settled back with a box set of Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies and some mulled Ribena, suffering no more than stabbing pains in my forehead, which prevented me from regularly exclaiming, ‘God bless us, every one!’ and wondering when our first new workhouses will be constructed.
On Writing Page 15