Dah-dah-dah-Dum . . . And the next train isn’t the Glasgow train . . . it’s now for Edinburgh . . . then it’ll be the Glasgow train . . . No, Windermere next . . . Then Glasgow . . . Dum. Dah-dum, Dah-dum . . . That’s not so bad. Always wanted the easy parts of travelling, the strolling, a bass line lolloping along in the background and the other layers lighting up, winking in, making music.
Among the godchildren’s presents I hadn’t included a bespoke story, partly because I wasn’t sure if they might not have outgrown such things, and partly because building one for them would still have knocked me over – it was either dealing with the train journey to see them or dealing with the pages, I couldn’t have done both. One of the children is, in fact, happily typing (on a typewriter) her own stories now and so I got read to, instead of the other way around. Her brother and I enjoyed ourselves immensely – and we’re a tough crowd. And if this sounds twee, or middle-class, or dated, I would point out that both children are also computer-literate, that our fun cost us nothing, did us good and came from well-exercised minds that could have belonged to any class, colour or orientation. The stories made us happy, and why not have a corner in life that’s gentle, where people give each other things they have made? And why not keep your head nimble and feed it, especially if you’re young? Eventually, the world will nip in and give you a kicking, so you’ll need all the imaginative resilience you can get. (We won’t go into the fact that the child’s stories are scarily good and I will have to kill, or at least hobble, her a bit to prevent competition. She has been warned.)
And here I can mention that there is nothing like writing for those you love. Building something out of words, an intensely personal medium – something for someone you respect, someone for whom you care – that’s both a pleasure and a properly testing exercise. I have long argued that the writer’s relationship with the putative reader should probably be one of loving respect: it’s a way of maintaining a correct form of address. Having a literal someone out there for whom you would like to do more than your best, someone to please, can be helpful. There are risks, of course. Writing for children is splendid, but they will eventually grow up, things will, and should, move on. If you’ve ever tried writing for a lover, that can be intoxicating and wonderful, but it can also lead you into self-indulgence and, should the relationship founder, your deathless lines may end up all over the kitchen wall. Still, if you want to have a go . . . well, I wouldn’t be able to stop you. Writing from love and for love – love of the words, love of your species, love of specific joys – that’s a fine remedy for ills.
And it’s a reminder – Dum-dah-dum, da dah-dum dah-dum – of a deep pleasure in being a writer: the permanent music it provides. Sometimes having the benefit of a free head full of words offers as clear and complex a melody as any track I’ll ever play to cheer me. Sometimes the words are white noise, sometimes they can feel like being a kid again and simply happy, sometimes they’re an excuse for nearly dancing on a railway platform, sometimes I get paid for trying to put them down on paper, sometimes they’ll end up in a letter with a readership of one. And this is something we all have – it takes negative intervention (illness, fear, threat) to damage our music, muffle it. But it’s still there, waiting, singing inside. Onwards.
XLIX
TODAY I CAN’T speak. My body is clearly running through the dictionary of annoying ailments and, having dealt with the labyrinthitis, we seem to have staggered on to laryngitis, or a derivative thereof. I am hoping we won’t be exploring the whole of L, or that we can at least skip Lassa Fever, which is often much more annoying than patients would like, even in cases where they can afford ribavirin.
You’ll notice that I didn’t write I have lost my voice – partly because, as long as I can write, I don’t feel that my voice is lost; and partly because that is a phrase which always has a chilling edge for those of us who have spent decades trying to find, trap, tame and train whatever voice seemed available.
Being literally unhearable will frustrate me for a while, of course, but as I’ve spent all week watching grainy film of elderly care-home inmates occupying a space far beyond screaming, I know I have nothing to complain about. While I was starting to write, I spent a little over ten years working with various vulnerable groups in various facilities and watched the hard edge of Thatcher’s reforms stealing a little more comfort and possibility from lives each day. It’s impossible to forget the geriatric wards and homes where human beings sat and wept, pools of urine at their feet, robbed of all dignity, simply for being old and not wealthy.
I was working for an arts charity and would be sent in to talk with elderly people and collect reminiscences. (Sometimes we might even be allowed to do things that didn’t involve only the past.) I was, at the very least, a kind of company, something to do. In the good places with good staff, the ones that were managing in spite of it all, we would share the stories of who people used to be and this helped to reinforce their presence, their reality as individuals. In the bad places, the worn-down places, the holding cells for the inconveniently-not-yet-dead, no one listened. No one paid any attention when inmates would simply yell in despair, so why on earth would staff want to hear about former careers, children raised, trams driven through the Blitz, losses, hopes? It would seem wrong to treat living members of one’s own species with brutal indifference, so best to forget that they are members of one’s own species – don’t let them have a voice.
I specialised in working with people who were marginalised. After a while it became clear that society’s margins are far more extensive than its comfy centre. If you want to stay out of them, avoid falling ill, having a disability, having an accident, having an abusive partner, being young and poor, old and poor, or unlucky. Above all, avoid being unlucky.
On the margins, voices are muted or ignored. One gentleman talked using a machine, but would sometimes use it to tell jokes, so the machine was put away in a cupboard. How would you like it if someone prevented you from speaking, because you were thought to have used your voice too frivolously? But if you have cerebral palsy, it’s okay to remove your best means of expression. Just as it’s okay to remove the benefits you need to live. The people we don’t hear from can suffer without troubling us – we’ll never be disturbed by the details of their pain. Now and then there will be a documentary that provokes comment, or someone will murder too many people too openly. Of course, we couldn’t accept Dr Shipman’s behaviour or anything like it. Then again, we can choose not to consider that when elderly residents are moved from one home to another there is always a saving – the move kills a predictable percentage. It’s interesting to consider that caring for fewer people allows for savings and seems cruel, while making those savings in advance can mean there will be fewer people to care for and yet seems more civilised. I only know about this because it was explained to me once by a senior social worker. His voice was nicely modulated, reasonable, clear.
Sorry, that’s perhaps a little dark when the sun is shining and Prince Philip is still officially recognised as a useful human being, despite having managed to be ninety. Beyond having to croak at people, all is well with me. And I have spent my last meetings with the Warwick University Creative Writing students as pleasantly as usual, but with a new addition. I had already mentioned the qualities of the eye of a bird of prey – both to the students and elsewhere in this blog – and this week I enlarged on my theme. We were joined one morning by two Harris hawks, a gyrfalcon, a barn owl and a white-faced scops owl. Shakespeare wrote both about the lover’s eyes – which will gaze an eagle blind – and the poet’s eye. His lovers write – they no sooner fall for the object of their affections than they are producing letters and poems and words, words, words. They look from heaven to earth and earth to heaven – they are hugely and as-never-before alive, expressive, observant, soft and sensible. They celebrate themselves and their love in their voices. If we are young, we will in some way come to this, if we are old it will never quite have left u
s. For me, the writer’s and the raptor’s eye are – like the poet’s and the lover’s eyes – intimately related and it is valuable for us to consider them.
I had long wanted to bring writers into the same room with the reality of that raptor’s eye, rather than the metaphor: Here is something so deeply and perfectly alive that it draws the eye, that it makes the observer happy – can you make your words do the same? Here is a gaze about life and death, an utterly fixed purpose – does your work have the same purpose, the same strength of knowing its aim completely and completely committing to it? Here is something shaped by its needs, made beautiful and simple by the necessities of its life – is your work so beautiful, so uncluttered, is it powered by the heart of your needs, the things it would be life for you to say and death to stifle? Here is something that will meet your eye with a force you will always remember, that is made to reach its aim – can you meet your reader’s eye with the same power, will you always touch them? Here is an unshakeable focus, but around it there is only flexibility, fluidity, the ability to deal with the vast variable that is the sky – can you know the nature of your piece so well that you cannot lose it and yet adapt to its needs and your own? In what ways are you the bird? And in what ways is your writing, your voice, the bird? Here is a relatively small thing, a living thing that may come to your hand and be with you, but will also be still wild and its own. Hold it too tight, it will struggle. Hold it too loosely and you may lose it. If you treat it badly, it will object, it may leave you. If you are calm, it may stay. If you are skilled, it may even work with you, let you learn about each other. It is easy to love and easy to be afraid of. It can change you, the way you stand. It inspires respect.
Sometimes we are the falcon and sometimes we are the falconer. And sometimes we need beauty to feed us up and send us out into the world, to give us the strength to speak. And sometimes we can help others speak, too. The students are almost at the end of their course now, but before they graduate they’ll be leading workshops, beginning to learn how to pass this on. And now they can think of birds, if that would help them – we all need our inspirations. Onwards.
L
I HAVE A small blackboard in my study. On it, I carefully chalk all of the writing-related tasks I have not yet completed: essays, scripts, treatments, rewrites, short stories, letters, novel-planning, crying in a corner, talking to my kettle . . . There are days when I love this blackboard and its anal-retentive attention to detail: its tiny chalk-holding flange, its even tinier rubbing-out cloth; and there are also days when it feels like having a debt-collector in the room with me, smelling of broken legs and hardened hearts.
Having pretty much lost two months to illness, I am currently ignoring the board completely. I haven’t allowed myself to approach it closely, never mind study its listed assignments, or consider how many others I am hiding from myself by simply keeping them in my head. Off the board and in my brain, I know they will come adrift from their deadlines and end up getting tangled in each other, but I don’t care – a visible inventory would simply drive me back to the kitchen, where I would end up giving the kettle abuse. And actually my kettle’s very nice.
Why do I have such a deep and intimate relationship with my kettle? Because for twenty-five years, give or take, I have been a person who knows they have something to write. I have written when nobody wanted to hear from me, I have written when I could earn as much as £30 in a year by my writing, I have written when I was tired from my day job, when I was filled with the terrifying elation of a new idea, when I was starting my first novel, when I was starting my sixth novel, when I was rewriting something apparently insoluble, when I was trying to prove myself employable and when I was just fooling about until I could see what might happen. In all of these circumstances and more, what was the common factor? The kettle. As soon it’s inevitable that a writer must begin their first word, it becomes (almost) equally and conflictingly inevitable that the writer must do something else really quickly before scribbling breaks out. Hence the kettle: Tell you what, I’ll just go and make a fresh beverage – then I’ll get down to things properly. Absolutely. Of course I will.
Writers can generate industrial quantities of procrastination before their first sonnet is rejected, or their first novel-outline-plus-sample-chapter is exorcised, burned and its ashes buried at sea. Are my pens facing north? Or magnetic north? What’s that funny noise? Oh look, it’s raining outside. My fingernails need cutting. I think my computer is going to break, better get it checked. Do I have toothache? Will I have toothache? I should call Whatshisname. The possibilities lend new meaning to the words eternity and purgatory.
When I began writing, distractions were all low-tech. I had to worry about typewriter ribbons and correction fluid, for God’s sake. There was no possibility of spending an apparently productive day making backup files, defragmenting already tidy hard drives, emailing, watching online movies of cats falling over, or playing virtual patience. (I once tried a more sophisticated computer game and, after many months, had managed to advance my character by one level and put him into a loop of crouching, rocking and saying, ‘Oh, no.’) Nevertheless, I could still burn away whole pre-Amstrad weekends in keeping busy, rather than writing. Ever rehung and filed your clothing along a colour gradient, or cleaned all your grouting with a toothbrush? I have.
R.L. Stevenson once said that he didn’t like writing, he liked having written. And I think I know how he felt. The act of writing is delightful, once you’ve entered into the proceedings, it’s simply that – like many other intimate, involving and tiring activities – writing creates nervousness, fumbling and an intense desire to run away before it can really take a hold.
I do love to write and I worked out relatively quickly that I should pre-empt as much of my delay and dismay as possible by removing sources of distraction and rendering myself as comfy as a Calvinist can be, prior to embarking on my opening sentence for the day. I then reached the point where I had to earn my living by writing, rather than the less-profitable avoiding-writing option. This means that, over the years, I have developed, abandoned and refined various preparatory manoeuvres to ease things along – the typist’s equivalent of dinner and a tastefully naked European movie to follow. Before I could afford a comfy chair, I propped myself up with pillows and cushions. I made myself a cuppa, all ready in advance. I eliminated noise with nice music. I conditioned myself to associate pieces of music with having already started to write and went through – as time passed – more and less complicated routines of exercise, or meditation, or horrified staring. And there are, naturally, the time-honoured favourite forms of self-deception: I’m not really starting, I’m just mucking about for a bit. I’m going to write this, even though it’s not what I’m really meant to be doing and therefore a bit of fun. If I finish another page I can have a treat.
Now, perhaps because I am old and tired, I may kick off by doing a bit of voice-work to wake myself up, I may embark on a new project by having a thorough wash and brush-up, or I may just tell myself: Here we go, then.
I am aware that there are writers who successfully avoid ever having to write at all. Whatever creative energies they may possess have been completely absorbed by displacement activities. These activities often include dressing, sounding and standing (if not drinking – in fact, usually drinking . . .) like an author, and so these individuals can seem far more convincing as artists of the well-turned phrase than many people who actually have been published. When I was starting to write, I found this type very confusing. Indoors, I was bewildered by both writing and not writing. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to, or if I really wanted me to, or if anyone else wanted me to. Out in the world, here were these amazing excuses to never bother about such things again. Their path was a temptation. But I did realise it also led to a horrible, horrible dead end.
I have, in my professional life, met numberless writers who seemed paralysed by their own desire to write, who had intelligent and reasonable excuses
for not starting, not committing, not getting on with it, who could trump any arguments or suggestions I might make towards putting anything on paper. It is nice to win arguments, but not if it means you deny yourself the chance to do something beautiful and intensely alive. Win or lose, you have to be in the game to play it, and writing is a game which can deepen and enrich any player’s experience, moment by moment. We can all feel we’re not really up to it on any given day – and sometimes we’re right, we should take a break. But not writing – that would be like not speaking, not touching, not kissing. Pauses are probably unavoidable, but perhaps use yours, enjoy them, shorten them until you can find their edge. We might look at it like this: kissing is good, but kissing after five or ten seconds of well-informed waiting – that can be better. Onwards.
LI
SO. WE HAVE together gone through the process of researching a novel and then preparing to write, starting to write, continuing to write, finishing, losing the author’s marbles, finding the author’s marbles, rewriting, tweaking, discussing the cover of, hammering out the cover blurb for and generally the entire genesis of a novel. Next month the bloody thing – wearing its cover and blurb – will actually appear to annoy people in person. To those of you who have been around throughout, thank you for your company and support. (And a big hello to all those of you who think I’m a Left-Wing fanatic who should be shot as soon as possible. Somehow, the fact that you are of that opinion makes me delighted that you can manage to hold it of harmless old me.) Given that we’ve been trundling along for some considerable period now, I would imagine that a number of you have also completed projects. If this is the case, I hope they prosper.
On Writing Page 19