Way back in the early part of this century, when I wrote my first six books, there was always an accompanying feeling that there would be bad and scary consequences - financially, professionally, personally - if I failed to complete or made a mess of them. The feeling that’s accompanied my most recent eight books, and particularly my most recent six, has been different: that feeling is that I’m literally writing them to save my own life. Of course, I finished the last of my first six books thirteen years ago, so perhaps I just can’t remember stuff I felt at that time as well as I think I can. Also, I am very aware that I sound overdramatic: it’s unlikely, even now, that I will actually die just because I don’t complete the writing of a book. But I can state with absolute certainty that there has been something more visceral and trancelike and perilous going on more recently, like nothing’s going to be quite right until I resemble a blindfolded hypnotherapy patient on a high wire stretched between two buildings: the one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright which is full of interesting archives I want to explore and the one whose damp windowless rooms and contents I’ve long since tired of. I keep wondering if this will change. Last year, I finally proved to myself that I could finally write and publish a novel and just about still be a person at the end of it. “Maybe that will do the trick?” I thought. But no. I’m midway through another and it’s just the same. Terrifying. Euphoric. All-consuming. Panic-inducing. Transformative. The mantra “If you don’t do this to the absolute best of my abilities your whole life will fall apart” is repeated every hour on the hour by a horned demon, crouching in the eaves. He’s got an egg timer, looks like someone I think I used to know and smells vaguely of fire. Should I be worried about him? Probably not. The truly worrying situation would probably arise if I arrived at my desk for a morning’s work and discovered he was no longer there.
“Write what you know” is the advice most commonly given to budding authors. There are worse starting points. As a fairly unworldly 26 year-old East Midlands male at the dawn of the 21st Century who’d never been to Central America, with a dad from Nottingham and a mum from Liverpool, writing in depth about the experience of a homeless grandmother in Tijuana in the 1800s possibly wouldn’t have been the wisest place to start my first book. So instead I wrote in a not especially exploratory way about being a teenage knobhead on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border in the early 1990s. Descriptions of a subject whose texture and shape is so familiar it’s tasteable in your mind can be a helpful place to kickstart a narrative. But I can’t help thinking “Write what you want to know” is a more rewarding philosophy on the whole. I write to learn. Each one of my latest five books palpably changed me. I hope for that to be even more the case in the future. It might mean that my novels start to take longer to gestate. I’ll have to accept the risks that come with that. I don’t want to just slouch lazily against a life I’ve lived. Every time, the book has to take me to some place new. I’m writing it to find out what happens, to discover where I’ll end up next.
Just as there’s something strangely liberating about reaching an age where it would be logistically impossible to achieve some of the life goals you once dreamed about, the plain fact of the diminishing years in front of you can push you into a new decisiveness as a writer which can present a surprise ticket to creative freedom. I used to get stymied and stifled while writing a book, purely because it was not one of the other six or seven books that I wanted to write. Now I take a different approach: I choose a book I want to write then write it. Inevitably it will cover many of the other topics I’m intrigued or excited by, as well as the main one, because I’m a terminal scatterbrain and see no enriching point in writing about things that don’t intrigue or excite me. When I’ve done that, I chose and write another book, which will also cover many topics that intrigue or excite me, including what seems to be the main topic but isn’t actually the main topic but which some people will mistake for the main topic and be disappointed there isn’t more of, all the while not realising I’ve not written the book for them but for me and for other people who are similarly intrigued and excited by the other topics sneaking in subversively under the awning of the main topic. If I am lucky, this pattern could continue for many years, maybe even - if I am very lucky indeed - right up to an end point that onlookers will not use the phrase “tragically before his time” in describing.
At the leisure centre where I did most of my swimming as a small child, seven miles north-west of Nottingham, you had the big pool, the small pool and - as you emerged from the changing rooms - a much smaller shallower area of water which I realised, after some initial confusion, was solely intended for the rinsing of feet. When I was very young, my parents found me sitting in this intermediate area of water and told me that it was a mistake to do so, since it was squalid, unpleasant and served no useful purpose, especially when there were not one but two actual swimming pools which were an insignificant and - even for a four year-old - easily negotiable distance from it. When I think about most - although not all (hashtag) - of social media nowadays, my thoughts turn back toward this footbath. You’ve got life (the changing rooms and everything on the other side of it) and then you’ve got writing, either in article (small pool) or book (big pool) form, and then you’ve got social media (footbath), which though not completely without use (getting the crud off your feet before doing something more healthy), is ultimately squalid, unpleasant and not a great use of a person’s time. Nowadays, when I am in a negative frame of mind, I find that the abundant evidence of many people’s clear preference for hanging around in the footbath over the big pool or even the small pool can be an obstacle to my motivation in writing books, especially in writing books that attempt to push forward and twiddle a few more buttons than books I’ve written in the past. Who specifically will give a fuck, in an era when the footbath has won? This, thankfully, is a “footbath is half empty” state of mind that I tend to snap out of fairly quickly. That footbath, its squalidness and shallowness and the way people frequently mistake it for life, is one of the reasons it’s absolutely vital that we keep writing books, that we deploy them to question and understand and empathise, continue using them to explore multiple sides of a story, to understand the complexity of the human condition. Books are the antifootbath.
I’m not going to write an epic experimental novel and leave it in a cave, despite intermittent threats I have made to the contrary. We’re not on this planet to isolate ourselves from our fellow humans, much as certain regions of the internet, and chance encounters with the most brutal examples of our species, can make doing so appear to be a solution to the frequently troubling condition of being alive. Writing a book then receiving the feedback of someone who read every bit of it and really got what you worked hard for months, maybe even for years, to say is part of the same family of experiences as chatting to a friend about a shared passion during drinks or a long walk: one of the ones that make you go “Wow, it’s great here, on earth, sometimes, isn’t it?” I think there’s a healthy place you can be where you’re not a literary island, separated from your readership by a moat and drawbridge, yet you simultaneously ban yourself from reading your own reviews on the Good Reads website. But the process of writing always has to be the primary focus, not concerns about the reception of what the process led to, because the process is where the biggest joy of all is reliably found. Every time I get properly into the writing of the book I am reminded, excitably, of this stone fact, often after losing sight of it because I’m still promoting the previous book and have my head still in that more than I would in the ideal artistic world that we do not live in. A few weeks ago, I tentatively tapped the accelerator of my new book while releasing its clutch and, because of some thoughts I was chastising myself with, my new book would not move forward. My previous novel had been what I considered my best but it hadn’t significantly altered my life. What if this one was going to be a worse novel? Less epic? Less unique? Merely… amusing, without being memorably built to withstand the potholes of time. That’s never a state of mind whose exit you talk or think your way to; there’s one way out of it, and that’s via the pen. I wrote and I very quickly remembered: THIS is what it’s all about. The buzz of creation. Saying and doing things you haven’t before. Letting theme and plot emerge from the process of playing with ideas. Soon, I began to have enormous fun, and soon after that, I began to feel it was the most exciting thing I’d ever done, definitely as exciting as the last book, maybe more so. And as long as I feel like that, isn’t that more important than anything? Of course it sodding is. Because you do it - you have to do it - overwhelmingly, mandatorily because you want to experience the whole artistic spectrum of what it is to be writing a book, not because you want to know how the universe will receive and rank that book.
Why write? I’m not actually asking myself that. Of course I’m not. Not any more than I would ask myself “Why not voluntarily cut off some of my own limbs?”
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That analogy with the swimming pool is SO accurate, so on-the-nose, it made me wince. Time to get out of the footbath! (Even if others prefer to stay there)
A very enjoyable essay. So much honesty, integrity and self-awareness. I don’t think anyone ever said that the writing process was easy; it is to be respected by readers and got through by writers! The best writers are driven by imagination and can’t rest until they have finished the book. Virginia Woolf took that to the extreme. You describe the process so well, thank you, and I can’t wait for the result!