XLIII
THE POST BELOW refers to the occupation of the much-loved Hetherington Club for postgraduates at Glasgow University. The renamed ‘Free Hetherington’ occupation continued until August 2011 and was marked by a varied programme of events and lectures, shared responsibilities and imaginative cooperation. The occupation focused particularly on cuts to educational provision at Glasgow University and the imposition of higher student fees.
For the first time in many weeks, I am typing on a train. As I wandered the aisles, trying to find a functioning power point for my laptop, it all felt very much like home. In fact, it felt very much more like home than my home currently does. As you may recall, I have for some time been threatening to redecorate my flat in a meaningful way and with professional assistance, rather than just running up and down a ladder myself armed with Polyfilla, misplaced hope and magnolia emulsion. Long-term exposure to my own residence, something to which I am not at all used, eventually made chaos and dustsheets inevitable.
Meanwhile, I was sitting in on the recording of a radio sitcom, finishing the rewrite for a radio play, tidying a magazine essay and coordinating with the students who nominated me as their candidate for Rector of Glasgow University. So a quiet little spell for me, then. As the roofer (suddenly, I needed the roofer) and painter chatted, I lapsed in and out of consciousness, typed and prayed that order would restore itself before I got enough rest to rally and become distressed.
Actually, distress was a relatively distant possibility, given that my study and the books were safe. If you’re a writer and have ever undergone domestic disruption – been burgled, evicted, forced to renew your heating system, subjected to savage replumbing, joined by demanding and messy visitors – then you’ll know that scribblers, as a species, have curious priorities. The only thing I was able to find amusing about being burgled (on two occasions) was my instinctive rush to check that manuscripts and backups were okay. My priorities make sense to me, but might seem unusual to others. We all have something precious we’d rather not lose, which sustains us, allows us to be ourselves.
As it happens, the roofer also has what might be considered unusual priorities, by someone who perhaps knows little of roofers. Fred (that’s not his real name, but roofers need their privacy) is a chum of mine and, apart from being a proper artisan and craftsman of roofs, he is also an artist. He paints – in the sense of producing paintings, rather than refurbishing window frames and coving – sells his work and has recently been to Stockholm, taking in the qualities of light. Fred isn’t the kind of guy who’s supposed to take an interest in nineteenth-century European masters. If he was portrayed on telly, he’d drink too much, or be in some way criminal, because working-class people – like students, like the disabled, like anyone outside the tiny, perceived mainstream – only seem to merit public portrayals as blurry threats, or dysfunctional souls, lost among the deservedly helpless. At best, a low-budget British movie might remodel Fred as the golden-hearted, but comfortingly stupid father of an attractive and upwardly-mobile youngster. According to our current culture, Fred shouldn’t be widely and well read, shouldn’t be capable of analysing newspapers with amused cynicism and disgust, and shouldn’t be able to have coherent and interesting opinions on art, culture, politics, philosophy and spirituality, to name but a few. Fred would be great on The Culture Show, or The Review Show – he would be interesting, coherent and dignified. But he’s an autodidact with a working-class accent. And he’s a roofer. They wouldn’t want him. (And, I’d have to say, he has more sense than to want them.)
If I think about it, I’d estimate that 80 per cent of the real human beings I know are appallingly misrepresented in the media. For more than a generation, reality TV has focused on increasingly freakish freaks, intelligent drama has withered and the definition of current affairs has become depressingly literal, limiting itself to the coverage of car-crash celebrities’ couplings and media-induced meltdowns. It’s unsurprising that public policy has meanwhile become less and less beneficial to the public and our leaders have been drawn from a smaller and smaller elite.
Fred comes from a tradition of self-education and personal dignity that’s still lively in the west of Scotland, but which is, of course, under threat. I’ve lost count of the number of people I know who didn’t receive a great education, but who then simply went to their local library and started reading at A. This was possible, because they had a library nearby with an extensive stock of free books, free heating and reasonable opening hours. This was also possible because the culture surrounding them helped them believe that the getting of wisdom was worthwhile for its own sake and that it would help them to live better, not simply increase their earning potential – although it might do that, too. In the UK today, it’s harder for those who want to become more fully themselves to even start their journeys into what could be a lifelong process of education.
And, of course, universities and their students are under attack as never before. Students go into debt to pay for courses with decreasing levels of support from professional staff, while greater and greater teaching burdens are placed on postgraduates. Emphasis on revenue-generation alters priorities in such a way that the reputations of institutions and qualifications declines and a generation mortgages its future to emerge less fitted for adult life, less self-aware and less able to survive in a savage marketplace. This isn’t about ivory-tower notions and creating an intellectual elite – although the genuinely powerful elite always seem to manage to get a very thorough intellectual grooming – this is about making the most of our collective abilities and ensuring our commercial survival, as well as allowing fellow-human beings to achieve their fullest potential. The phoney internal markets and fake business practices which have broken the NHS, public transport, the BBC and primary and secondary education are poised to destroy tertiary education, too. They are the same business practices that have dragged the UK into recession, but still we are expected to trust them with our nation’s future.
Which is why a portion of my last few weeks have been spent trying to air some of these issues as part of the Rectorial debate in Glasgow University. The media found the idea of a Kennedy (Charles) versus Kennedy (A.L.) clash attractive, as the ingenious and admirable students who nominated me knew they would, and both Kennedys have been able to speak about the need for free education and radically altered priorities. Our team haven’t been playing to win – we won’t – we’ve been playing to try and alter the agenda. The students would have made better speakers on their own behalf than me, but it has been an honour to collaborate with them. They will go on occupying the Hetherington Club in a spirit of cooperation and real education and they will go on opposing the Glasgow University cuts. They have no choice. They’re fighting for something precious they’d rather not lose, that sustains them, that allows them to be themselves. In many ways, they’re fighting for their lives. Onwards.
XLIV
I’M LYING DOWN. This is as close as I get to a hobby. Over the weekend I attempted to establish sleeping as a further leisure activity, but I’m afraid that the vast list of things I have to do before most days break – or, indeed, I myself break – made that impossible. So lying down and working: it’s almost as good as a rest.
Not that I am complaining about being in work. Being in work is a good thing. Being in work when you are self-employed and me – and your employer is therefore almost as mentally sturdy as Charlie Sheen – is a less good thing. Not that I’m in any way chemically enhanced, or unhanced. I can forget why I’ve ended up in the kitchen again and am holding a single shoe without any assistance from prescribed or clandestinely imported substances. When I shake my head my brain thumps against its sides like a neatly parcelled corpse in the boot of a slewing car.
Meanwhile, I have been asked to write a little about the typist’s progress from hoping-to-be-published-anywhere-at-all-ever to dear-God-shoot-me-just-in-the-shin-then-I’ll-get-a-day-off. This is, of course, both a happy progression and s
omething that should be much better organised in my case. Here, I’ll try and look at what we might call the very early days. The awful and wonderful early days.
So, to begin at the beginning. My own experience of starting out was haphazard and almost certain to fail. I didn’t really intend to write, I was simply living in a tiny, cold bedsit with no other ways of being constructive. (And if your only way to prove yourself useful is by producing a steady trickle of maimed and ugly short stories, you should probably take a good look at yourself.) I joined a writer’s group and then remembered that I don’t like groups. I sent off stories without really researching my target magazines, which duly returned my efforts, often accompanied only by a scribble on a square of paper slightly smaller than a commemorative stamp. I had occasional successes and an encouraging letter of rejection, or – dear God – an acceptance, or – good heavens – not just a free copy of Quentin’s Quarterly Gallimaufry, but a cheque for twenty quid could light up my month. I was more often disappointed than not, but I was also learning that I cared about this. I cared so much that I would start again after every sad envelope flopped in, write something else, forget that it hurt to be knocked back.
I was writing by hand with later multicoloured corrections as nervousness and tinkering racked up rewrites. Rewriting in the days before personal computers was something of a grind . . . A bit of planning before I’d started and then stepping back for an overview would have helped me much more than altering things blindly and investing affection, rather than criticism. As it was, I ended up with page after page of Jackson Pollocked nonsense. I didn’t know any better. I wanted advice, but I was afraid that someone well informed would simply tell me I shouldn’t bother because I was incurably dreadful. I felt lonely and pointless and hungry.
If you’re at that stage now, then you have my sympathy – it’s horrible. And it’s worse now – opportunities to get involved with tutoring, or reviewing, or workshops are evaporating, the publishing landscape is ever-shrinking, as are advances, there are fewer magazines out there and fewer anthologies, there are fewer places for new books in bookshop chains and, yes, it may be that you don’t ever get published and reach anyone’s shelves. You may be a risk that someone would have taken ten years ago, while today you seem unaffordable. You may be a good writer, but unlucky. There may be a day when you fold that set of ambitions away and turn your mind to something else. We have to consider this.
But if you haven’t given up yet, I can say – and I think I am being honest about this – that even this initial grimness needn’t turn out to be 100 per cent horrible. Really. It needn’t. When everything about writing is a slog and you seem to be getting nowhere, your lack of pressing demands from numerous admirers does mean you have the time to sit back and consider why you’re putting all this effort into what appears to be an unrewarding relationship. You’re flinging out the best love letters you can, you’re breaking your heart and no one’s answering, but on you go regardless . . . why? If your answer is that you love what you’re doing and couldn’t abandon it without being someone other than yourself, then you probably have to keep on. You would be less than yourself if you did otherwise. The certainty that you have to write can be a pain in the neck, but it’s also a great, firm truth to build around – the shysters and manipulators and compromise-peddlers won’t be able to shake you later, if you fasten yourself to that.
And if you are eventually successful and your work as an author does take off in one direction or another, it’s not unlikely that there will be other times when, for other reasons, you come to doubt if the effort is worth it, or if you’re suited to it. Your experience in those first, hard times will be there for you then. If you’ve not had enough money and not had enough support – or any support – if people have thought you were crazy and yet you’ve pressed on regardless and tried to learn your craft, then it could be that you just are a writer. If you’ve taken notes and practised observation and made horrible mistakes and pondered giving up and listened and puzzled and fretted and wasted your time and woken at three in the morning being shaken by the best idea you’ve ever met and fought sentences for days until they’ve actually rolled over and let you win, then you may already, deeply know that you’re a writer. You certainly know that you kept writing, even when you had no reason to. You know that writing calls in you, that it’s a good thing, a life-changing thing, and that you’d be foolish to ignore it.
Way back when I was at my beginning I summoned up the courage to find my local Writer in Residence – we had one, funded by the Scottish Arts Council – and he read my material while I felt nauseous. Then he showed me how to make cocoa. Thinking back on it, making cocoa is probably all he could think of to do with someone who was clearly a ball of pure tension and liable to cry, if not faint at any moment. I’ve been in his position since and it’s hard to be correctly tender and correctly firm with someone who’s just handed you an armful of their dreams – cocoa might not be a bad distraction. Someone who has fully committed to their work, pressed everything they can into word after word – because half-measures won’t cut it – will have more than a little interest in what you think of the results.
I sat and pondered my gradually cooling mug while he talked me through the two or three stories I’d handed over, and was factual about their flaws and kicked the crap out of one of the endings – I still remember – and generally bludgeoned me. I was sore by the time we’d finished, but I felt wonderful, too. Here was a writer who was talking to me as if I were a writer. I wasn’t a good writer – what I’d done was full of flaws and holes and silliness – but somebody qualified had read my work and thought it had enough merit to deserve close examination.
I left knowing how to make cocoa (I still use his method) and feeling bruised. But I also knew it was all right. Somehow, it was going to be all right. I would start again, and again and again. I would rewrite.
Which is why I wish you the very best attentions of a reader you can trust. Quite possibly this won’t be all thirty-eight variously deluded members of your workshop, or your partner, or a secretly embittered relative, or a stranger on a bus, or anyone you have to pay. You’ll need somebody who cares about writing, who wants to help, who probably wants to pass along the help they received when they were starting out. I wish you a Good Reader. Onwards.
XLV
THE POST BELOW was written during the first bout of labyrinthitis and while my immune system declined without my particularly paying attention.
Those of you who indulge in Twitter as well as this blog will be aware that I’ve spent the time between my last piece and this being mainly in bed and feeling like someone who really does need to take things more easily. Several people have, in fact, shouted at me to that effect and I am taking their advice. April may be the cruellest month, but I am planning to render it civilised and to take my antibiotics in a regular manner.
Meanwhile, let us progress – if that’s the right word – from last time’s little sketch of the writer’s Very Early Days to the Less Early Days. One might expect that these bring with them inrushes of professional assurance, public acclaim and cash. Well, no. Not unless your first book is not only accepted for publication, but also instantly taken up as a soul-clattering work of genius that should be sold to every sane and able citizen. Which is unlikely.
Your Less Early Days will bring you – if all goes well – into contact with your first agent, your first editor and your first advance. These are all fine things which you will need, but they will also be at least a little terrifying. Back in the Precambrian Era when I was a neophyte scribbler, publishing houses weren’t quite the fortresses they are today and you could almost get by – or rather in – without an agent. (And editors eager to save cash could almost persuade you to do so.) Nevertheless, even I had worked out that signing a contract without assistance was something I should never do. My first ‘agent’ was entirely self-appointed and had a habit of accumulating injuries while ‘not drunk’, or providing the
inadvertent floor show at social/literary occasions by – for example – igniting a whole box of matches while fumbling to light her cigarette. As I am inept enough at social/literary occasions without additional chaos, I sought to divest myself of her attentions – especially as I hadn’t asked for them. And, believe me, there are few things more embarrassing than writing to an editor who has just rejected your first attempt at your first novel, in order to explain that the manuscript was sadly returned to someone only claiming to be your agent . . . My second agent was more successful, up to a point, but managed to let my foreign rights rest with my publisher. Allow me to begin a new, important paragraph about that.
Never, ever, ever sign away your foreign rights. Foreign rights allow you to be published abroad and in translation. They give you to the world and the world to you. And they mean you earn more money without doing more work. Unless you are the Archangel Gabriel with new instructions for mankind, if your publisher retains your foreign rights they won’t particularly have the time or focus to promote your work elsewhere. Your agent needs to do that for you. Really.
Of course, choosing an agent is tricky – and horribly important, as they represent pretty much your only path to an editor and a published life. On the one hand, you need to select someone who will suit you, who will be about the same age as you (this is a long-term business) and who will support you in the ways you need. And yet, at the start of your career you probably have no idea how best you should be supported, what kind of person you would get on with in this capacity and – above all – you will be pathetically grateful if anyone even replies to your begging letter, opening chapter and synopsis. Happily, someone who likes your work will probably be a good fit for you: the person who produced it. Likewise, the editor who is excited by your writing will probably share many of your interests. Still, I think it’s a good idea to avoid compromising too deeply, too soon. If your agent can’t remember your name and doesn’t listen to you, or seems anxious to rework you into someone else, then perhaps go elsewhere. With your editor, you’ll have no choice – unless they’re flirting with you, but not committing to a contract – so an amount of grinning and bearing it may have to take place.
On Writing Page 17