You might occasionally blanch at the language I use, the metaphors and analogies I’m employing, or the way I construct my paragraphs - but on the whole you’re pretty happy with the big picture.
As a writer, that’s nice to know. It massages my fragile ego nicely.
All writers have fragile egos to one extent or another.
Writers like me - who haven’t reached the giddy heights of fame and fortune - tend to have the most fragile of all.
Anyone who works in the creative arts tends to suffer from it. It’s part of the job.
Actors, painters, singers, dancers and writers: we’re all basically hoping what we do is appreciated, enjoyed and above all wanted.
When I’m writing, it’s coming from the heart, so when you get rejections or knock backs, it hits home heavily.
Every story I write - everything I put on the page - is personal. And pretty life consuming while I’m writing it.
You’d like to think you were creating a masterpiece, but there’s a part of you more likely to worry it’s a disaster of epic proportions.
I call this the black little voice, which chips in every once in a while and makes you doubt yourself.
It’s very important to ignore him, as he’ll drive you crazy.
Some people try to drown him out with drink or drugs. I prefer to ignore him the way you tune out interference on the radio when a song comes on that you like. I only resort to intoxicants when the knob breaks off.
Quick, let’s move on as fast as possible, so he doesn’t notice what’s happening and ruin the flow I’ve got going…
Every writer is emotionally attached to their work, so when you send your baby out into the world for analysis and appraisal, you’re filled with a strange combination of dread and mindless optimism.
You hope the little fella will stand on his sturdy little legs and walk in a straight line, without bumping into the furniture too much. You know you won’t be able to stand behind him with your arms outstretched, ready to catch him if he falls, so you spend an anxious time waiting to hear a cry of startled pain or gurgle of excitement.
This is otherwise known as feedback.
I guess that’s why I decided to take this project on.
At least I’ll only spend a short amount of time on it, so if nobody likes it the blow will be far easier to deal with. No harm, no foul. Only a weekend lost.
The labour will be over quickly and the delivery won’t be too exhausting.
Besides, I’m actually enjoying this immensely. It beats watching Lost repeats any day.
Having said all that stuff about fragile egos and rejections, let’s not get it out of proportion, shall we?
There’s nothing worse than listening to some arty type, tragically bemoaning their lack of success, the long hours they’ve put in suffering for their art, and how under appreciated they feel.
When I talk to folks like that, I have a fancy to line up some junior doctors, policemen and firemen while they’re gabbing away about not being appreciated - and let them pound on their stupid faces for a couple of hours.
I first discovered a desire - and a degree of talent I'd like to think - for writing at school. English classes were always my favourite, despite being sat next to a rather obnoxious fat boy called Clive, who liked to pick his nose with my Star Wars pencil.
I was thirteen and had a BMX - which was the coolest thing in the world.
I remember we were given a project to create an outline for a book we’d like to write. To me, this sounded like a fantastic idea and I threw myself into it with abandon.
The TV was switched off, the pencils were sharpened to a lethal point and the BMX was left out in the garden, one wheel spinning forlornly in the breeze.
Four weeks later my masterpiece was complete.
I’d been reading Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings and was heavily influenced by it, so my project was a searing epic full of wizards, magic and dubious plot developments.
I thought it was wonderful.
It had maps and character descriptions. It had a run down of the plot and a detailed back story. It was the blueprint for a novel so epic, it’d make The Bible look like a pamphlet. It was a labour of love.
I handed it to the teacher - who looked a little worried by the size of it - and wandered off to buy sweets, secure in the knowledge an A grade was on the cards.
‘Twas not to be.
In the end, I received a D - because the teacher felt it was too long and didn’t conform to the assignment we’d been given. And she was right.
We were told to write two thousand words.
I’d written nearly twenty five thousand.
Including all the folded maps I’d drawn, the thing was enormous. I had to carry a bowling ball under my left arm to balance the weight of my school bag under the right.
I took the D with the kind of grace and acceptance any thirteen year old would demonstrate. I stormed home with a face like thunder, kicked the cat and snapped the arms off all my Star Wars action figures.
I got my first taste of rejection at a young age, but the disappointment didn’t hold me back or depress me for too long.
It was that wonderful time of life where let-downs are usually forgotten about once the cartoons come on.
My mother wasn’t quite so pleased when she found out I’d failed the assignment and the cartoons were withheld in no uncertain terms for a couple of weeks.
As I reached my late teens, I found my capacity for invention on the page was, if not quite limitless, then at least relatively prolific and I started to write more, convinced a best seller was just around the corner.
Everything I wrote was crap, of course.
At eighteen years old, you like to think you’ve already arrived at all the answers to the important questions in life, and have a solid and unshakable belief you’re great and the rest of the world just doesn’t know it yet.
I would sit for seemingly endless hours perched on a chair (nowhere as comfortable as this one) tapping away on a rapidly aging electronic typewriter, which was slower than the shifting continental plates and needed its ink ribbon changing nearly every day.
I was fully convinced I was creating masterpieces at every turn. That my prose was blinding, my observations striking, my characters well-rounded and my plots Machiavellian in their brilliance.
In reality, what I was writing were bad knock-offs of the authors I liked at the time:
James Herbert writes a book about killer rats, I write a short story about killer hedgehogs. It was called ‘Spine Slaughter’.
Robert Ludlum writes about a secret agent with no memory, I write about a covert ops soldier with no memory.
And so it went on.
Ream after ream of rubbish.
Page after page of recycled plot devices and one-dimensional characters, displaying no originality whatsoever.
I would have made a great Hollywood studio executive…
You may think I’m being hard on myself but trust me, I’m not.
Memorably, one of my stories started with this particular piece of astounding prose - original grammar included:
‘He was dead, and he knew it. His lungs were ruptured, and his brains leaked, all over the road. He’d received the bullets straight into his body without screaming, as any man of his mettle should do.’
See what I mean?
Horrific.
How the hell do you ‘receive a bullet’?
Was it gift wrapped in a bow and sent from an absent-minded uncle?
Terrible, terrible stuff.
At the time I thought it was potentially award winning.
The ego was swiftly knocked out of me as I started to send some material out for consideration.
I’m sure it was considered… considered a good substitute for the tea-coaster on the editor’s desk, that is.
I must have posted out roughly seventy or eighty copies of my dreadful short stories, film scripts and novellas, before finally getting the message that I was eith
er monumentally untalented, or so far up my own arse I could see the plaque on the back of my teeth.
The desire to continue dwindled and I put my writing on semi-permanent hold.
I did quite a lot of writing at university, as most students do, but it was all flowery hogwash. A lot of pretentious observations on the rise of the post-modernist text in contemporary literature, or the role of hegemony within 18th century fiction. The kind of stuff only utter tossers would read outside the confines of an undergraduate degree. So while I’d put the writing career on hold per se, I still hadn’t managed to remove my head from my arse.
Anyway, three years of university rolled by and despite soiling myself in front of my peers, it was a hugely enjoyable experience.
I won’t bore you with tales of these years, as one man’s university experience is more or less the same as another's:
Essays, drinking too much, waffling lecturers, pretentious conversations in seminars, sex with anaemic art students… that kind of malarkey.
At the end of my degree (if you’re really interested, I walked out with a 2.1) I went into full time employment and found it very boring indeed.
I needed something to keep the old synapses functioning, to prevent them drying up like a worm caught in the mid-day sun. So I returned to writing, armed with a bit more life experience and more big words in my vocabulary.
What I wrote was better than my teenage efforts - if not by much.
Bad rip-offs were replaced by original stories, but I did have a tendency to use too many words.
Where only a brief description was needed, I would launch into verbose and obese sentences that sounded convoluted and meant nothing.
Here’s an example:
‘The tenuous link the restaurant had to the halcyon days of yesteryear were exemplified by its archetypal furnishings and nostalgic uniforms.’
Gah.
If I wrote that sentence now, it would read:
‘The restaurant looked like it did in 1958.’
Yet again, I sent my product off to literary agents and publishers - and yet again received countless rejections. All of them as valid as the one I got for the psychopathic hedgehog story several years previously.
Malaise set in once again and the Writer’s and Artists Yearbook went back into mothballs.
To fill the gap, I started amateur dramatics with a local company, and played a particularly fine country bumpkin in that year’s pantomime Mother Goose.
I thought acting was easy.
I later learned it was pantomimes that were easy and proper acting - in proper plays with proper characters - was most definitely not.
There’s nothing quite like drying on stage during Death Of A Salesman to let you know you’re probably not cut out for the stage.
Remember we talked about time and how it goes slower when you’re not enjoying yourself?
Well, time stops completely when you walk on stage, forget your lines and see an ocean of faces squinting up at you, expecting their money’s worth.
It eventually took a panicked member of the stage crew to whisper the line to me, which I delivered in a voice so strangled the audience thought my character had been poisoned.
When the play ended, I removed my costume, went straight to the nearest pub and proceeded to blot the incident out - with remarkable success.
With my acting career buried in an unmarked shallow grave, I turned once again to literary pursuits.
Not quite like the last time, though.
I thought I’d try a spot of journalism and started writing non-fiction for a variety of magazines. These stories were short, to the point, contained no flowery words and were all my own work.
I sold three in six months.
I made a grand total of two hundred and fifty quid on all of them, but it felt like I’d made two hundred and fifty thousand.
I’d found something of a niche for myself and intended to exploit it. Opportunity knocked when my girlfriend of the time - who’d later become my wife - cut out a clipping from the jobs section of the local paper, advertising for a copy-writer at a marketing firm.
It was one of those companies who get jobs in from clients, knock up the required advertising copy and charge extortionate amounts of money for the privilege.
I liked the job as soon as I got it.
And I still do.
I’ve worked there ever since and my need to write is serviced by the material I produce.
Chances are you’ve read some of it yourself - if you're in the UK, anyway.
Every so often I’ll catch a glimpse of my work in a magazine or on a billboard and a feeling of pride will wash over me.
The only thing wrong with writing this way - thinking up copy for marketing purposes - is that it tends to be quite soulless.
When you work in marketing you’re essentially bullshitting for a living…
The job of the marketer is to sell the product and nothing else.
Never mind if said product has been recalled to the factory six times, or independent research has shown it breaks after more than ten uses. Your job is to make it sound like it’s the best thing since sliced bread and that every home should have one. Or even two, if you’re very good.
It may go against all your instincts to say that this brand new vacuum cleaner is so powerful it can change the axis of the earth’s rotation, but you’d better damn well put it down on paper like the client asks - otherwise you might find yourself with a P45 and a future likely to suck harder than the vacuum actually does.
It only takes a while before this has a negative affect on your creative output.
I was getting to the point where the whole thing was depressing me more and more - when I woke up one Saturday morning with the idea to write a book in one sitting.
Which brings us bang up to date, doesn’t it?
Writing the right thing - clumsy sentence structure there, my humblest apologies - is sometimes crucial to the success of a product and sometimes not, but writing the wrong thing can be a disaster of epic proportions.
I was nearly sacked a couple of years ago because of a missing L in copy I’d written and proof checked before sending to print.
The text was for a large metropolitan college, who’d paid a king’s ransom for a prospectus that would amaze and delight anyone who happened to pick it up for a nose through.
It was a stunning combination of amazing photography, showing how great the college’s facilities were (faked) and equally brilliant copy about how its courses were far, far better than anyone else’s (lie).
One of the subjects this thing advertised was Public Services.
A course that existed - as far as I could tell - to teach the young people of today how to be the soldiers of tomorrow. Which no doubt involved learning how to drink too much beer, pick fights with the night club bouncers and catch gonorrhoea from the local prostitutes.
Now you know the title of the course, I’m sure you can work out why that missing L caused such a fuss.
Yes, a hundred thousand copies of this weighty tome went to the local populace, and emblazoned in bold Helvetica font on page 48 was the course information for:
Pubic Services.
Two-Year Course.
Learn all about this fascinating area and prepare yourself for a job in the field!
Oh dear.
There were phone calls, there were meetings, there were arguments in hallways. It really is incredible how one letter can cause a catastrophe of such magnitude.
I personally thought a two year course spent delving around in someone else’s genital region sounded quite appealing, but I was in the minority. It would be the type of course any aspiring pornographic film star would have jumped at the chance to be on.
I was called to my manager’s office like a naughty school boy who’d been caught wiping bogeys on the class hamster.
He proceeded to tell me - at length - about the importance of proof reading and how mistakes like this can damage the company
’s reputation.
For my part, I sat there silently, desperately trying not to laugh as he described how the principal had rung him wanting to know why we were selling his college as the kind of place that encouraged sexual deviance.
…it could have been worse though.
I could have accidentally added a letter F to the Performing Arts section of the prospectus, which would have had the college advertising:
Performing Farts.
Two year course.
Improve your skills and entertain the public.
I managed to talk my way out of that mess in the end.
I passed the buck successfully onto the printing department.
It wasn’t difficult as they’re a strange bunch down there - all cross-eyed and twitchy. The ink fumes addle their brains over a long enough period of time, I’m led to believe.
God may have cursed me with a brain that gets me into trouble, but he also blessed me with a mouth that can get me out of it again.
I’ve always been very careful with proof reading since then and I make sure my writing never contains any silly spelling mestakes.
1.39 am
15170 Words
Blimey, it’s getting late.
I was going to mention when midnight passed (and make some half-arsed gag about it, probably) but shot straight past it without remembering.
I’m pretty happy about that, it means horrible old mister clock is losing his grip on me as I get further into the book.
With any luck, I’ll have forgotten about him completely by the end and will live the rest of my life in the peace and tranquillity of the relaxed and inattentive.
In the meantime… it’s now Sunday, the day of rest.
No rest for Mrs Spalding’s little boy, though.
He’s still got a lot to say and hopefully the time to do it. I suppose it all depends on that bastard on the wall.
How are you doing as we head through the night?
I’ve bumped the heating up a bit as there’s nothing more annoying than catching a chill in the wee small hours.
Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) Page 5
