A Writing Pledge From Me To Me For The Future
I wrote this for myself but you can read it too if you like
The more I write, the more I appreciate the precision of language. I never disliked editing but it was only when I had got eight or nine books under my belt that I began to truly love it. Since then that love has only grown. It’s when you are editing that it properly hits you how the nuance of language can change the world: the astounding force and rollover impact of one surgically removed or altered word. You look at famous historical speeches or observations from devastatingly witty people and begin to see even more clearly why they’ve hit home and lasted the course. One of the reasons my books are better than my Substack posts is because I don’t just edit them like I’m their unforgiving drill sergeant; I kick the shit out of them afterwards, then pick them up off the dirt by their lapels and do it all over again.
I’m a bastard to myself when I write because, to my mind, there’s no other viable option. I was an idiot when I started writing for a living. Education? Five GCSEs at C grade (would have been four but I retook Maths) and one so-so BTEC in a subject whose precise identity the people teaching the course could never quite decide on. Home? North East Midlands mining village. “Natural talent?” Nonsense. Being an unforgiving bastard to myself when I write, increasingly, for many years, is what made me less of an idiot. Editing has become gradually more part of that process of self-bastarding. “This screw seems tight enough now, and my hand hurts,” the lazier part of myself will say, when I am writing. “Oh boo-fucking-hoo,” the bastard part will reply. “Shut your cakehole, get your hand back around that screwdriver and give it one more turn.” When I recently picked some passages from Notebook, the book I put together in early 2020, and put them on Substack Notes, it instantly hit me that some of them could be sharper and clearer in what they were striving to say. That’s ok though. It shows that I’ve got a tiny bit more brutal as an editor in the last four and a half years.
Being increasingly in love with precise and inventive language means I get even more than I once did out of reading great books - especially the ones that are beautifully written by people responding to a burning need to communicate, rather than, say, a burning need to create an easily consumed trend-conforming product on the pre-Christmas 3-for-the-price-of-2 offer tables in a chain bookshop. But it also means that I get more vexed in the face of sloppy language, especially the kind that spills from the internet like Conservative-shepherded sewage into an undeserving sea. I can’t think of another word that has done more damage to the craft of writing in recent years than “content”. Even if you’re using the word “content” ironically, or in a way that feels like a cute little joke, don’t. Every time someone calls writing - real writing that isn’t just mindnumbing corporate filler - “content” they’re pissing on someone’s hard work and passion. “Content” is Satan’s henchphrase. “Life hack”, too. That’s another. Life is not there to be hacked. Life is not a phone. Life is not an early 1980s computer Matthew Broderick is using to change his exam grades and accidentally trigger nuclear war. I’m anti life hacks. I don’t do them. But I think I could have, at one point, if I’d wanted to.
It says “The Sunday Times Bestselling Author” on the cover of my books. The truth of that is that in autumn, 2013, a book I’d written made it into the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list. A couple of the others I’ve written since then have made it into the top 30. But that’s about the size of it. I still quite like that book, the top ten one, and the one I wrote - for the same big mainstream publisher - directly after it. But after that I decided I wanted to write better books. I wanted to broaden myself, but also be more wholly me as a writer.
So nine years ago I chose to walk away from all of it. There was nothing like Substack around back then. I quit my newspaper column, banned myself from ever writing for the media again, and started writing more freely and posting it on my website. I chose to ignore the more lucrative and compliant options open to me of publishing what I knew would be an inferior and less authentic book. Instead, I decided to crowdfund books in which I communicated the things I really wanted to communicate, via an exciting new independent publisher called Unbound. I have now written seven of those. I sometimes forget what hard work that’s been. I sometimes forget that, while I’ve done it, I’ve also managed to move house - to wildly varying locations - eight times. During this period of hard work, in the depths of the countryside, I have gradually drifted from nearly all of the people I used to know in the media. The media is a place that feels approximately as far away to me now as the solar system’s coldest planet.
There are some readers who prefer some of the books I wrote before I made my break from the more conventional way, and I’m 100% cool with that. I’m glad not everyone shares the same opinions. That said, those people are wrong. And that’s not just an opinion. It’s a fact. It’s a fact backed up by the feedback I get about my more recent books - which, when it’s enthusiastic, always contains a deeper level of passion and connection than feedback for the earlier books did - but I don’t need that feedback to know it’s true. After all, I wrote both sets of books - the earlier obedient ones and the later, better, disobedient ones - and I can remember what writing all of them felt like. Finishing a book you’re quite happy with which fulfils a brief and makes sense is an extremely different feeling to finishing a book in which you’ve said what you needed to say in precisely the way you wanted to say it, without deviating, or watering anything down “for the market”. There’s a deep knowing to it, a different kind of pride and gratification. It’s a feeling I would not swap for any number of sales. And I will continue to say the same thing, forever, even if I am living under a railway bridge in a cardboard box.
Are you hearing what a stubborn person I am? I mean, just imagine: if I’d carried on writing inferior and more conventional but pretty decent books and doing what people told me to, I would probably own a house by now. Maybe I’d be less tired, and have between seven and nine fewer grey hairs. And if I’d held on to those contacts I had in the film industry and media, who knows? Maybe one of the less good books could have been made into a film that vaguely resembled it starring someone with nicer teeth and shinier hair than me.
But none of that would have happened. It wouldn’t have happened, because I didn’t want any of the feelings to happen that I knew would have inevitably accompanied writing those books. Because I’m me. Some people say my more recent books are “genreless” but that’s not true. The genre you will find them in is ‘Me’. This is in contrast to my earlier books, which resided squarely in the genre of ‘My Serviceable Approximation Of What Other People Think Me Should Be With Occasional Flashes Of Something More Unique’. The problem with working in the ‘Me’ genre, though, is it tends to take a bit more out of you, emotionally. By nature, you give a bit more of yourself. We’re all like that, my family. We’re constantly worried about ripping people off, sometimes to the cost of our own wellbeing. I see it in my mum all the time. She gave everything to her primary school teaching job, was always the last member of staff to go home. Now she makes brilliant art that people love and charges barely enough to cover the costs of the materials she uses to make it. "This is wonderful,” people tell her. “I want to cover my entire wall with it.” Then she goes back to her studio, tells herself none of it is up to standard, refuses to call herself a proper artist, and wears herself out trying to improve. That is her definition of retirement. You don’t grow up watching something like that and not let it seep into the fabric of your being. This newsletter you are reading right now is long because I want to give the people who support my work the full facts, the full nuance and complexity of the situation. My brain is going to hurt when I’ve finished writing it but I don’t want to short change anyone. I don’t want the feelings that go with the uneasy knowledge that you might have ripped someone off. That’s another part of why I have chosen to write the books I write rather than continuing to write the books I used to write.
Thursday was a bad day for me, and I think Substack is partially to blame for that. In recent months I’ve become increasingly excited by the support I’ve received here, by the new readers who are arriving daily, by the knowledge that my books are now being read in Virginia and Oregon and India and New Zealand and Poland and New South Wales and South Korea. To me, Substack has begun to feel like Truth, like a new weapon in the battle against the surface bullshit that is rotting away culture, everywhere you look. It feels like the opposite of someone in the publishing industry or media not reading your book then arrogantly telling you what your book is. It feels like the opposite of selling your book via your big opinion-churning zeitgeist mouth or some influential friends who didn’t read your book but said something flippantly positive about it publicly. I go to the post office every day and send my books to these far-flung places where my Substack subscribers live then hear from the people who receive them and it feels utterly undeniable. I think, “Maybe this long cut I have taken, all this work, is finally paying off?” But Thursday put everything into perspective. Thursday was the day I received my latest royalty payment from my publishers. I won’t tell you what the figures were because that’s not what I do, nor what I was brought up to do. I will, however, say this much:
I am definitely not struggling to feed myself, nor pay my rent or bills, nor to purchase presents for the fast-approaching birthdays of those closest to me, nor to blow some cash at a good secondhand bookshop, and feel enormously fortunate because of that, especially in the United Kingdom’s present economic climate.
If I was surviving solely on the earnings from my books, and neither Substack nor the subscriber system I operated on my website prior to it existed, my situation would be markedly different.
If people messaging you every day from around the globe and telling you how much they enjoyed one of your books and that they are recommending it to all of their friends does eventually lead to a groundswell of sales, that groundswell is not yet making itself known on a spreadsheet in the offices of my publishers or literary agent.
I don’t think I’m being entitled or self-important in confessing that I had hoped that, by the time of this, my 50th year - or, as one of my equivalents in the literary world of the 18th Century might have called it, “old age” - and after writing 15 books, the situation might have looked just a tiny bit rosier.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned. Actually, there’s no “maybe” about it. I am old-fashioned. I am frightened of ApplePay and think Prince died last year. But I feel confused when I look at the disparity between the financial rewards brought in by books - books that have been loved and acclaimed and are still out on the shelves, doing well - and those brought in by writing with regularity in a digital space. I have now become more comfortable with charging money for my work online and have finally allowed myself to believe that work genuinely brings people pleasure but still feel a touch embarrassed about it, in a way that I definitely would not feel if my books started to bring me greater security. As well as a reflection of being old-fashioned that is a reflection of my faith in books as the real business and my ultimate belief that everything I write here is essentially just a portal to them.
So Thursday was a bit of a heavy bump down to earth for me. But one of those can be useful from time to time. Earth is nice. People who forget what earth feels like are often flying towards a much more devastating impact. You see recurring patterns in your writing life after a while: “I’m doing well!”, “Oh, I’m not doing as well as I thought!”, “That’s ok - success is bullshit anyway, and makes you soft!” Every so often a day like Thursday comes along and reminds me that the publishing industry is f***ing harsh and those who don’t court it, flutter their eyelashes at it or play the games it demands stand little chance of progressing to that mythical next level where a book takes off commercially and really starts to take care of your future security. Exhaustingly hard work with statistically little reward can hurt. But I get plenty of other rewards every day - the process of crafting a story itself, for example, or witnessing the way total strangers understand it - and consider them a luxury. I also feel fortunate to have the publishers I do: publishers who genuinely get what I’m doing and let me do it in my way. They are not perfect, and there are elements of publishing with them that make it harder to get a book working for itself, unchaperoned, in the world, than it might be with a bigger, more conventional publisher. But I feel immense gratitude towards them. I can’t imagine where I’d be, writing the things I do, without them, just as I now can’t imagine doing so without Substack.
Why should my work be more widely appreciated, when, during their lifetimes, that of so many of my heroes wasn’t? My bookshelves and record shelves are more or less a museum of the cult and the misunderstood: people who created, obstinately, for themselves, work whose true artistic valued wasn’t widely recognised until decades later. I brought my niche, my outsiderness, on myself by choosing to make my writing the priority and banning myself from the rest: the knocking on doors, the being anywhere near the London media, the being a “personality author”, the having literary friends who can plug your novels, the having a Twitter account, the exhausting promotional tours that leave no time for writing itself. I wanted to do it this way. I am happy where I am, being semi-reclusive and writing books that are loved by a small-ish number of people rather than liked by a vast number, and I will not let myself be distracted by society insidiously trying to convince me I shouldn’t be happy where I am. I’m not trying to write for everyone. I’m writing for me, and the people who I might like my writing.
But I admit there are problems that go with the territory and I’m still trying to work those out. (Do we ever stop trying to work stuff out, as writers? I hope not.) One is my tendency towards overwork, exacerbated by the demands of the obdurate choices I have made and rooted in my background and my experience that going the extra 25 miles is the only way to make a full-time writing career work. Another is the uneasy relationship between overwork and the delayed gratification that is part and parcel of writing books. I had been aware, before Thursday, that a comedown was on the horizon. How could it not be? I’d written two novels in a year. Some people take a decade to write one. Neither of these novels was rushed, and neither involved me holding anything back in my determination to make them exactly what they needed to be and push myself to a new place. The second one, in particular, threatened at times to reduce me to a desiccated pile of assorted twigs. Simultaneously, I have been caring for a disabled partner and signing and packing up hundreds of books every month, to the extent that my local post office has come to view me as a comedy figure, some kind of permanently bustling one-man Barnes and Noble. “Who ARE all these people you’re sending them to?” Becky from the post office asked. “They’re brilliant people,” I replied.
Right now, because those two other novels aren’t yet published, some days it can feel a bit like I dreamed them. Like all those stories and thoughts just floated off somewhere, into the clouds, without being read. “Why does all of what I do never feel like it’s enough?” I ask myself. I work hard, then, because I don’t see the results, what my brain says is, “Ok, so I obviously need to work harder.”
For more than two years, readers have been asking me why there is no audiobook of Villager, and when it will finally appear. At a conservative estimate, I’d say I’ve had a couple of hundred messages along these lines since the book’s hardback release in spring 2022. On Thursday I thought about these messages as I read an email from my agent detailing the reasons why audiobook companies have rejected the novel (““too niche”, “too complicated”, “too literary”). Once again, that refrain, “Why is it not enough?” went around my head. Why is it not enough to write a book that thousands of people have read and a lot of those people have loved? Why is that not enough, in the eyes of the publishing industry, to merit an audiobook? I think about the things people said about Villager when it came out, which my publishers put in the front of the paperback.
“Why is this not enough?” I wonder. William Boyd liked my book. William Boyd, whose novels helped make me fall back in love with reading when I was 18. Teenage me wouldn’t have imagined for a second that wouldn’t have been enough. Teenage me would have imagined that as the thing that allows you to say, “Ok, my work is done here” and retire.
Why I was this book - the best book of my life to that point, which, as I was writing it, made me feel like I was in some kind of trance involving my entire body and soul - not enough? Why are all these things I am putting so much of myself into not making more of a difference? And what would it be like if I’d put less into them? If I’d taken less pride in them? It is generally at this point in the cycle of thinking that the voice I loathe appears: the one that tells me how much easier my life would be, had I taken that other route.
But what I know, as much as I know anything about my writing future, is that I will not pay heed to that voice. I do need to work less hard than I’ve been working recently, and look after my health a little better, but I will not hack my own writing life. I will not be the flimsier, less tenacious, less dignified creative person the distracted modern world wants to make me. I will record my own audiobooks, at home, and upload them onto Audible myself. I will then write another novel, for me, again, and for the people who I know will love it. I will NOT write it for industry or potential sales. I will do my best to make it better than the last book but I will not “talk to the right people” or whore it around in the way I’m shown is necessary.
I will make this operation smaller, and even more stubborn, if I need to. I will keep making it more me, less brandable, more varied, less compromising. I will take everything more and more into my own hands, if need be. I will write in fear of my future and embrace that fear because that is what I have done in the past and it has always worked. I will write the best book of my life and leave it vacuum-sealed in a cave, to be found two centuries after my death, if it comes to that.
I will not be pushed around or patronised by the people I used to let push me around and patronise me because they were more middle-class and educated than me and whose opinions, due to that, I falsely believed came from a loftier and more important place than my own.
I will continue to work hard on learning and improving.
I will remember that one thing I’ve never thought while reading a great book or listening to a great album or looking at a great piece of art is “I’m really glad this person remained cautious while they were creating this and made sure they weren’t perceived as difficult or weird.”
I will reject digital culture’s demands that I should be primarily interested in the surface of what I do and not the core of it.
I will not view social media as any realistic barometer of my creative success.
I will have faith that the best way to promote your work is via your work, but I will not expect anyone to read my work, nor demand that anyone does.
I will not bow to pressure and support the potential commercial growth of my writing by doing things I wholeheartedly believe will make my writing worse.
I will remember that uncompromising love and care and passion plus time is the true equation.
I will honour and trust this long cut I have chosen because I chose it for important reasons, a long time ago, and because those reasons are more important to me than ever.
If you’d like to purchase Villager and contribute to its eventual success, 75 years from now, when the groundswell of support behind it finally reaches the tipping point, you can do so here, with free worldwide delivery, via Blackwells. My other Unbound books are 21st-Century Yokel, Help The Witch, Ring The Hill and Notebook.
My next novel, 1983, which I wrote for me, and for the people who I thought would enjoy it, will be published on August 8th. The next one, Everything Will Swallow You, is currently funding. I get to edit it soon and I can’t fucking wait.
Wow. Just wow! I will re-read this post for courage whenever I feel the world screaming at me that I’m doing everything wrong. Your books make me feel less alone in this world. I believe this is the purpose of art. Thank you!
Thanks for this, Tom. I could have substituted ‘artist’ for ‘writer’ and ‘painting’ for ‘writing’. The commodification of creativity is such a powerful aspect of our society. Even without pausing for breath, critics and members of the troupe of creative commerce begin categorising the work; boxing it up, tying a ribbon around it and ringing up the till in their minds. Dostoevsky said, “Money is coined freedom” but there is an even greater freedom, I have found. It is trying not to satisfy the expectations of others. Frankly, it is not my business. Recognition is something to be happy about for sure, but it is not an absolutely necessary element to be happy and have a fulfilling life. There is a book written by 2 Japanese authors, Kimishi and Kota, entitled, “The courage to be disliked” which has been helpful for me to better understand this important lesson. Keep on dancing to your own wonderful tune.