Through a combination of accident and design, I have ended up with a male agent and a male editor – I work better with men. They’re both roughly my age – the way things are going, I’ll probably die before both of them, which will save any inconvenient rearrangements. My agent is willing to suffer and assuage my voluminous range of fears, will catch some of the hassle and madness that can accrue when working with others and can handle the full range of writing I produce. My editor is someone whose judgement I trust absolutely and I work on texts with him. That suits me. But it took about fifteen years for me to feel comfortable with either party as a collaborator, rather than someone who was putting up with me as a charity project. This would be why it’s very important that my agent also negotiates my fees.
Talking of which – back to that first advance. Miracles aside, if you weren’t a sexy-looking unknown during the late 1980s or early ’90s, the chances of your first advance being anything other than frighteningly tiny are slim. Try to be happy that you’re about to be published, that you’ll have free copies with which to amaze your family and hit your friends. Don’t stand there holding the cheque and thinking, ‘I’ll never earn a living, will I? This is a joke. I will never up give my day job and write, write, write.’
Yes, there you’ll be, still working to subsidise what you want to do and perhaps feeling tired and unappreciated. But, then again, your day job will keep you connected to the real world, and no one – not even me – can write, write, write all the time. That would kill you – trust me on this, it really would. And maybe you’ll want to get reviewed, which is a necessary thing. But then again, being reviewed badly or oddly, or even well, is quite disconcerting and weirdly irrelevant – it all refers to work you did so long ago . . . You may begin to realise that exposure isn’t called exposure for nothing. For a while – if all goes to plan – you may feel both pestered with fame and utterly and permanently invisible. You may despair of your work ever finding a little niche where it can grow and flourish. You may wonder if you’re any good, if it’s worth the bother, if you’ll be able to manage it all over again with the next one. Of course.
And yet – you’re a writer, you have written. There’s a book out there with your name on it. Imagine that. You did imagine that. Every word of that. And in the moments when you’re undistracted, you can feel that the other books are waiting, the ideas that will come to you to be expressed. This is a vocation – it called to you and you answered and now it calls in you. If you are quiet enough to hear, it always will. You have that and you are lucky, beyond lucky. Which is – I often have to remind myself – nothing to complain about. Onwards.
XLVI
WELL, THE ANTIBIOTICS weren’t exactly what I needed, should you remember them from the last blog. I had/have viral labyrinthitis and the only response to that is lying down a lot and taking pills to counteract the worst of the symptoms. The worst of the symptoms being panic attacks, nausea and generally feeling as if you are strapped to the prow of a ship in a Force Nine gale whenever you stand up or do something reckless like turning your head. And then there are the muscle cramps and the immense tiredness . . . this health bulletin seeming horribly appropriate as we reach what will be the last sketch of Stages in the Writer’s Career, which we might entitle: When You Have Been Doing It for Ages and Are Knackered.
And may I hope sincerely that all of you writing readers don’t take my precise path to being knackered. It is in every way not worth it and contravenes all the healthy and good advice I give to other people. Of course. Imagine the scene: I am being tended in Warwickshire by my mother. (You know you are ill when you are a grown-up and your mum is looking after you.) I shuffle about, sometimes check my email and take short strolls. I feel old. (To be fair, I am old.) I have forgotten many of my hobbies and the possible strain of arranging any of them leaves me worrying that I will worry and feel worse. (Labyrinthitis both causes and can be caused or worsened by stress. This will be funny. Eventually.) I am self-employed, but have done no work since my last blog two weeks ago. This doesn’t exactly mean that I haven’t earned anything for a fortnight, but it does mean that I’m further behind schedule than during the weeks building up to Complete Illness, when I was only moving at the speed of chilled glue. I assumed I was simply a bit poorly and tense – which is to say, my standard self.
I forgot one of my most fundamental rules, Dear Readers, which is that I have to look after myself in order for myself to be able to do anything. Even writing. I forgot that I am a horrible self-employer and should be dealt with by the kind of harsh arbitration that only ever really happened during the 1970s. Whole swathes of what used to be the TUC should be picketing me, even as I type. I also forgot that I need to arrange nice little outings and trips and inspirations, or just a few hours off for myself, to preserve maximum efficiency. I have mentioned this practice of inspiration at other times, when I was sane and functional. I can ignore it – I have ignored it – but I only ever do so at my peril.
It’s not the first time this has happened. One of the issues that must be addressed when you’re writing is the enduring conflict between other people’s agendas and one’s own. The urge to keep working while the work is there can quite simply steal your life. But it’s hard to resist. It may be that I want to watch a box set of Babylon 5, but perhaps someone else is offering me a bit of a trial in a new medium and now isn’t ideal, but the creative possibilities do seem interesting . . . Perhaps I have been working on some odds and ends for radio, and more than the average number of pitches have been accepted and I don’t want to now refuse tasks I have essentially been humbly requesting the honour of undertaking (the BBC requires precisely that attitude) for months, so the schedule thickens . . . Suddenly a novel-free year looks as if it may kill me before the novel that nearly killed me last year has a chance to come out. (This would, naturally, increase sales into the high dozens.)
And then there are the rewrites. Rewriting is as much a part of writing as being mugged is a part of walking about in an urban environment at night looking happy. Sorry, I’m feeling a little bitter about the wrong kind of rewriting. The right and improving kind is a gruelling delight, as I feel we have established. Anything of mine will have been rewritten until it squeaks before anyone else has to put up with it. On collaborative projects, there will then be necessary changes that deal with technical issues, changes of location, or cast, lack of funds – the possibilities are horribly variable and numerous and yet oddly fun. There are also the good ideas and happy nudges from people who are providing a healthy outside eye on a piece of work. I can be joyful about all of these.
But then there are the other kind of rewrites – the wrong kind. Many of you out there may also be familiar with these and will be wincing and twitching already. These are never to do with the script and always to do with whoever is demanding them – and, trust me, they will always be demanded. They come from people incapable of suggestion. They will be required to address the demanding party’s personal difficulties with their lives, their need to feel involved and powerful, their need to crap on other people’s days, their need to add hours and weeks and even months to projects which might at one point have been pleasant and alive. Sadly, no literary process can ever cure any of these ills and so the demands can and will continue until the writer does the only thing the writer can do – he or she withdraws, accepts that vast effort has been wasted, that the struggle has been in vain and that the script, text, article, limerick is now a dog’s breakfast that cannot be saved and is nothing anyone would wish to bear their name. At which point everything will always become the writer’s fault and they will be, for ever after, branded as ‘difficult’ – even if they are already folded into a pretzel with the strain of accommodating increasingly self-contradictory and mentally peculiar instructions. One scriptwriter friend of mine counts it as a victory if he gets through the terminal conversation without crying – and he’s a veteran of the Korean War . . . If nothing else, the stress and personal off
ence this kind of nonsense builds up can remind the author that he or she really does still care about what ends up on the page. And it can act as an emotional reminder for future occasions when work is questioned and probed by others. There’s all the difference in the world – and it’s more than palpable – between the sting of someone noting a weakness you missed and the stabbing pain of someone deciding to wedge something witless into your personal sentences because they had, for example, a funny relationship with their dad.
As my years of writing pass, I find that the only thing I really resent, regret and generally deplore is the number of months – perhaps even years – that I have wasted on projects that could have been okay if everyone involved actually wanted them to happen and to be as good as it can be. Choose your collaborators wisely, would be my advice. And – then again – take no advice from anyone who can’t take their own. Onwards.
XLVII
WELL, I AM still not what you’d call healthy, but I’m not as ill as I was when I last blogged. Every morning I take a handful of pills and every evening likewise, and I no longer feel as if I am going to fall off the world if it goes any faster. I am operating through the tail end of labyrinthitis, while I nurse a brand-new sinus infection and submit to a regimen of major antibiotics to knock out the H. pylori that my doctor had forgotten to tell me was busily swimming about in my interior and preparing to give me stomach ulcers. I can breathe and see and the tinnitus has stopped, so I can hardly complain, although naturally I am complaining at every possible opportunity – it fills in the time I would usually spend overworking. Yesterday – while I was feeling suitably sorry for myself – I received a letter from HMP Long Lartin, a prison which houses, among others, a number of inmates who are being detained without trial. They haven’t had their day in court, their guilt or innocence has not been established, because they have fallen into the legal and moral vacuum that holds people who are thought to have been associated with terrorist activity. You’ll probably be aware of how strangely easy it can be to end up somewhere more or less unpleasant, more or less indefinitely, and branded as a terrorist threat. Recent revelations about those held in Guantanamo tell familiar stories of information obtained under torture, of captives taken for money, of minors and pensioners being detained, of a number of innocent Uighurs held prisoner for years and of how simply choosing to wear a particular brand of watch can be seen as definitively incriminating. It’s somehow unsurprising that for some time the Navy spokesman for Gitmo was one Lt Mike Kafka.
My letter was from Syed Talha Ahsan, a man with Asperger’s syndrome, who campaigned for, among other things, the release of former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg. Ahsan has been imprisoned since July 2006 following an extradition request from the US Government, using the 2003 Extradition Act. The act means that requests do not have to be supported by any prima-facie evidence. He has not been found guilty of any crime in the UK.
Perhaps you find all of this as disturbing as I do, but Talha’s letter wasn’t about his situation. It was a letter like many others I receive from a writer who wants advice. Talha Ahsan is a writer: a poet who wants to transfer his skills to short fiction. He doesn’t know when he’ll be extradited and so wonders if a correspondence course would be a good idea. He tells me another prisoner has now been held in detention for thirteen years – plenty of time for study – but perhaps he doesn’t have that long, he has no way of knowing.
When I write back to Ahsan this evening, I will tell him what I would tell any other writer – that courses aren’t necessary, that the idea of teaching creative writing is relatively new and, in some cases, simply a way that institutions can make money from the hopes of would-be authors while delivering very little of use. As beauty and happiness and sex have all been commodified, so, to an extent, has imagination. A whole plethora of courses, magazines, DVDs and computer programs have sprung up to extract funds from people who would formerly have simply found themselves unable not to write and would have proceeded accordingly. Those same people rarely have funds to spare and should, above all, be defended from shabby tricks, spurious ‘methods’ and intellectual manipulation. I’d be the last one to suggest that artists should be indulged, or that their whims should be taken more seriously than anyone else’s. Still, I have to say that writers – especially new writers – are horrifyingly vulnerable. They are caught up in a passion they can’t yet control, they are generally unable not to read whatever they can find, unable not to seek any kind of guidance that might reassure, unable not to chase the sense of an unexpressed voice in their lives, unable not to embrace the joys and pains of a way of life devoted to making musics and wonders and worlds for others. This means they can be very easily abused and, of course, makes the abuse repellent.
Fortunately, just that voracious reading and experimenting and searching and fretting will eventually turn them into writers. It will fit them for a life of changes and of perpetual education. In twenty-five years of writing I have come across countless hopeful authors who doubted their abilities because they hadn’t gone to university, hadn’t a library of How To books, hadn’t sat at the feet of a master and imbibed wisdom in a suitably furnished study. In fact, they were no more or less able than the others who had done many, if not all, of those things. There are courses that are worthwhile and books that are helpful, depending on the writer’s personality. There is still a little free assistance out there, despite the unending cuts, and more-established writers are often quite generous with their time if they are asked for it moderately nicely. I would also recommend Raymond Carver’s Fires, a book which prepared me for writing before I even really knew that I wanted to be a writer. Chekhov’s letters, if you can find them, are full of insights, humour and proper humility. R.L. Stevenson’s essays on fiction are wonderful, passionate, sensible and humane. Reading a book about writing written by someone of whom you have never heard, who wants you to visualise gardens, or polish your aura, or indulge in make-work exercises, or shut your eyes and try scribbling with whichever hand would be least natural might not be a good bet.
I will tell Ahsan these things. I have never met the man and only know him through his poems, tender and fierce pieces that deal in part with pleasures he can’t have: a choice of food, the touch of a lover’s skin, the ability to be wherever he would like. I know that writing has always been a consolation to me, a refuge and a source of strength. I know that writing can express the humanity of those who are written out of life elsewhere. I know that the simple act of sending a letter to a prisoner can change him or her and how they are treated. Amnesty’s and PEN’s work is centred around the effectiveness of the written word. But how do I talk about these things to someone enduring something I can’t imagine and know that I couldn’t withstand? How do I talk about the humanity of writing, that it is a triumph of beauty, when humanity’s treatment of Ahsan has been so ugly? Onwards.
XLVIII
SO I’M WALKING along a railway platform in Lancaster and it’s all good. The rain falling is not heavy rain. My train should have gone clear through to Glasgow and has nevertheless decided to end things here, but there’ll be another option along any time. I have been assured. The bag I am carrying is light and comfy and I am not ill. I am not even a bit ill. Last night I did my one-person show in Liverpool – first gig in a couple of months, since the labyrinthitis took hold. I didn’t fall over, or blank out, the audience seemed pleased, and my hotel for the night was very cool in the nice way, not the way that means I had to break out the emergency foil blanket which, yes, I do carry with me in case of nocturnal freezing. And my iPod is – Dum-dah-dum, da dah-dum dah-dum – playing me ‘I Want You’, because this is a morning for being cheery, yet mellow. I tend to play Elvis Costello on the way to events, for a touch of drive. Mr Zimmerman is more suited for occasions when the work is done and I need to walk slightly slowly and even with a minor drag-step, because this is one of those days when I can appreciate my job.
Yesterday I spent an hour and a half ta
lking to an audience about what I love, which is working with words. I am, in fact, paid to keep words around, tend them and give them to other people. My performance was happening as part of the Writing on the Wall Festival, so I was pretty much singing to the choir, but still it’s always great to be in a big room full of human beings who are exploring alternatives to what can often appear to be the Standard-Issue Way of Thinking: What happens if we don’t agree that TV was invented to let us hear strangers yelling about having sex with relatives or how we are constantly threatened by dangerous scum? What if we don’t believe our newspapers, or do maintain an affection and respect for our own species not currently shared by many with power in public life? What happens if we have free imagination?
Before my Liverpool trip, I was up in the Highlands – Dum . . . Dah-dum . . . Dah-dum . . . Dah-dum . . . – saying hello to my godchildren. Of all the people I would see more often if I didn’t work like a fool, the godkids would rank among the top five. If not four. Or three. They are excellent people, as are their father and mother. I turn up at their house like a guilty, custody-granted realparent with too many disreputable presents and mumbles of ‘I know, it’s been a year . . . I was thinking about you . . . And I was ill. And did you get my postcards?’ And they behave like normal individuals who have been getting on with their lives. Apart from the Dr Who-watching, dog-walking and eating portions of our days, we spend a good amount of time talking nonsense, because we have all – in spite of, or because of, our educations – been encouraged into alternative thinking.
On Writing Page 18