The Writing Life

A friend with ambitions of his own to write once held my book in his hands with a look of incomprehension on his face as he counted the pages.

"How did you find the time to write so much?" He asked me, "I’ve got loads of ideas for a book of my own but between the wife, the kids and my job I hardly ever get the chance to sit down at my desk and write. How do you find the time?"

Easy.

"Bad personal hygiene." I told him, revealing one of the greatest secrets of the writer. He looked at me, mystified. I went on. "If you don’t wash that often then it’s really hard to get a girlfriend and consequently all your time is your own to scribble away."

Okay, so maybe there’s a little bit more to it than that. But having a lot of free time is a definite advantage if only because you generally have to write a lot of really bad stuff before anything good comes out the end of your pen. When I first sat down to write in earnest I felt my story was a winner but my style came out as a regurgitation of everything I’d ever read. Tolstoy mixed with Enid Blyton mixed with Jack Kerouac. It takes time to find your own voice.

Or alternatively you might be born with enigmatic expression and a lively wit but a fw thousand words into your book you find that you actually have very little to say.

The latter problem I avoided by throwing myself hurtling myself across the planet on trains, planes and bullock carts. Over the last 8 years I’ve rarely stayed still for more than three months at a time, hitting more than 30 countries and diving head first into the most absurd situations I could find. The only visible benefit of all this is that I’m rarely short of material. In fact the struggle has more often been to get it all down on paper before Time comes to reclaim the memories, piece by piece. A good memory is probably a prerequisite for most writers but the longer an experience is left unwritten the more imagination will be called upon to fill the gaps.

It’s been the writing style itself that I’ve found most challenging. There are just so many traps for the novice writer to fall into. Very often I’d come up with a great turn of phrase to describe something and then realize with a sigh that I was distorting the truth just to make it sound good. It’s tough to fit real life into a sentence.

Another trap is to take the short cut of the mercenary journalist - to take one step up by putting someone else down. However, the fact is that any arrogance on the page is going to alienate the discerning reader anyway and the rest of your words will be read from a hostile distance. If he doesn’t just toss it in the waste paper basket.

And that would be the greatest failure of all. The whole point of writing is to communicate. It’s a unique format in that no one would ever let you lecture them for ten hours straight - but when they read your book they dedicate themselves to your message from beginning to end. With such liberty to preach it can be all too tempting to become a little pompous.

"You can’t feed your conclusions to the reader," An expert writer once told me, "Either they get the gist of what you’re saying or they don’t. If you add little explanations at the end of each story you’re just going to insult the intelligence of the reader."

When the form gets too be too much it’s a good idea to take a look at your content once more. Life itself is the source of all writing and the best way to get material is just to immerse yourself in the great flow of the human world. I feel that my best writing has always been when I troubled to understand someone else’s story, be it of an individual or a culture as a whole. It’s an act of love to interest yourself in the lives of others. This dedication can lend a beauty and depth to your words that’s hard to achieve when engrossed in describing your own affairs.

The quip at the beginning of the article about the life of a bachelor was tongue-in-cheek but the life of a writer is a lonely one and is often reserved for the shy and the gruff. The eccentric and the somewhat socially-inept. A friend well-placed within the publishing world once explained to me why writers like to have agents to sell all their work.

"You’d be amazed how many writers stutter or mumble when they speak," He mused, "They don’t look you in the eye and are often about as charming as stray dogs. They limp or they smell or they wear clothes that don’t fit them well. They sulk or they throw tantrums or they look down on whoever they’re speaking too. So when it comes to getting a contract they usually need a well-dressed, suave agent to make a good impression."

I doubt anyone in their right mind would choose writing as a way to make a living. I once read in a spoof dictionary that writers are defined as ‘people who think there’s money in books’. We all hold onto the hope that are mania for scribbling down thoughts will one day pay off. But like painters, musicians and other artists, we do what we do because we can’t help it. There will never be any final recompense for all the thousands of hours we’ve invested in our work because the work was reward enough in itself.

I look at it as a kind of yoga. Through writing I can drag screaming thoughts and feelings from dark cells of my mind through to the merciless daylight of the blank page. It’s like giving birth. And sometimes just as painful.

The pen acts as a bridge between imagination and reality. The whole thing is really like a love/hate affair. Some anonymous writer once said:

"I love the writing. It’s the goddamn words I can’t stand."

However it’s the medium I’ve chosen and it connects me more to real life than anything else. Without a pen conducting words onto the page I sometimes think I‘d probably just float away.