Writing - what on earth for?

Well, you know what for of course. For when you get recognised and everyone realises that your work is of earth-shattering genius. Bids for the translation rights soar through the roof. You’re on the circuit - author talks, festivals and before long, TV chat shows, explaining to an adoring public what exactly you were trying to achieve and how it was you did it so well. You get home that evening and a well-known movie producer is on the phone. And the money comes pouring in ...

You never know. But ... probably not. Let’s face it, dreaming’s nice. But wealth is unlikely in writing. There has to be another reason.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life teaching workshops, and I know that people write for various reasons. Some do it to record their past for their families. Some do it to from a love of words, many for a love of books, some for the sheer joy of creation. Politics - that too. I don’t suppose many people would turn down the famous six-figure deal, but wanting a large sum of money is a separate wish altogether.

Success, though, even modest success, that’s another matter. Fame? Perhaps. Authorial fame is a low key affair, where no one knows your face except die-hard fans, and not many people want to know it either. Television, that great grabber-of-attention and creator of celebrity, tends to avoid the back-room boys and girls.

But your name - that can be known. Your name, your voice, your stories.

Over the years I’ve had my taste of both success and failure. When I started writing I ended up with a body of work which, if stacked MS after MS, would probably be taller than I was. No one read any of it except my dad and my girlfriend (sometimes.) After I finally got published I had success - quite a lot of success, really. That gradually tailed off and now, commercially certainly, I can be safely be regarded as a failure again. No one wants to publish my stuff. And yet - here I am, banging away, and not even looking for a publisher any more.

It’s a fickle old thing, success. Those who have it like to talk about the luck side of things rather less than the wanna-be’s, but luck is a genuine superpower. A good example is that perennial example of great genius, the demigod of writing himself, Mr Shakespeare. Sam Johnson said that he was kind to us, but that we were kind to him, and this is entirely true. Shakespeare was writing at a very particular time in our history. The language itself had only just been born - go back a hundred years and it was still more or less Olde Englishe, with all those cases and weird words and an entirely different grammar. If you write, your tools are language, and Shakespeare had a newly minted one at his finger tips. Boom! The same is true of drama itself. You don’t have to back from Shakespeare’s day very far at all and drama was still stuck in the rigid mould of the Morality play. Boom again! What a lucky bastard Shakespeare was. He had a newly formed language in which to write a newly invented form. It’s going to be a very, very, very long time, if ever, before anyone has that sort of opportunity again, in English anyway. Which is not to dispute his talents - because, wow, did he take advantage of it! Just to say - you and I can never be as good as he was, no matter how great our talents. If he was born now, he wouldn’t be as good as he was, either. He couldn’t be. The opportunity simply wouldn’t be there.

Genius needs its place and it’s time as well as its person.

You could say the same kind of thing for all the rock ’n roll groups that came out of UK in the 60’s - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who and so many others. The swinging sixties. Sexuality was becoming fashionable. Black music from the US was cheaply available on record. Education for the working class was widely available for the first time. Boom!

They were lucky too.

And me. I was lucky, albeit in a smaller way. At the time when I began my writing career for young people, the time was very ripe indeed for something new for teenagers, and it so happened that I was the right person in the right place at the right time. So yes - I’m one of the lucky ones, too. I had my day. It was a good day. But now the day is over ... but here I still am. And I do ask myself - what for and why?

Before talking about that, let me spare a thought for those of you trying to get your moment in the sun of a large, or even medium-sized, or perhaps even a small readership. What’s it like today?

I’m sorry to say, it’s a hard world to get published in at the moment, as I’ve found myself in attempting to change genres from YA to adult; and I’m afraid there is a very good chance that it won’t get much better in the medium and long term. This is a long term decline. Even when I was a kid, sixty odd years ago, we readers were definitely the geeks and the oddballs. I remember many years later at the Edinburgh Festival listening to a talk on the “future of the novel,’ and it turned very quickly into the future of the novelist. Everyone agreed that by and large, the best approach was the portmanteaux approach, in which writing is just one of several financial activities people need to keep themselves afloat.

It wasn’t always thus. I remember seeing an old ad someone posted a while ago on one of the socials, of Alan Garner appearing in an advertisement for some product or other - back in the days when successful children’s authors were so well known they were able to up their incomes by promoting unrelated products. Imagine!

A few more markers of that general decline ... an editor saying to me how their publishing house was doing well, but was having to publish two or three times more books to make the same profit. The same editor saying to me - still quite a few years ago now - that they really loved their job but that sometimes it was a bit depressing, working in a dying industry.

Wow.

And to get up to date, someone was telling me recently how book sales have dropped by some remarkable figure (was it 50%? Surely not ...) over the past few years! ... and also the story about how many thousands of books are published each year, and how the percentage of them that sell over a hundred copies is in single figures!

... well, those last two may be apocryphal - I don’t really know - but you get the picture. When you go into a bookshop, it feels like you’re drowning in books. But sales? ... dreadful.

There’s always TV of course. For a great many years that’s been the place to go to make a decent income. But (sorry) the story there is gloomy as well. Netflicks has discovered that you can recycle old shows and people hardly notice. Apple and Amazon have all the money, but they don’t make all that much TV over here. Brit TV production is on its knees.

Hard times in the city indeed.

Various reasons come to mind. Novels have suffered from increasing competition for down-time for decades, if not actual centuries. Once it was just radio. Then, movies as well. Then, TV. Now it’s games, too. AI. Phones! Add to that our shortening attention spans - scrolling your phone is just so easy. If you want to relax or crave a dose of mindless entertainment, there are better things to do than curl up with a good book.

Hard, then, to get published, but not impossible by any means - publishers need a lot of books to make their money. But what sort of books? My agent has been telling me for a while now that publishers are very ‘risk adverse.’ Which means? - that they don’t want to publish something that won’t make them any money, preferably quite a bit of it. Those family firms that published something because they liked the writer or thought they showed promise are gone, snapped up by those dinosaurs who are so risk adverse. Very nice if you like writing that sort of thing ... not so good if you want to be a bit of a mud lark, mucking around in the tides and turning things over to see what crops up.

Small publishers do exist of course, usually dealing in specialist markets. People of colour have their publishers. Politics have theirs. There are also a few general publishers, such as Bluemoose, in west Yorkshire, who I mention as they’re very local to us, as well as their general excellence.

But still - it’s so hard! So, again - Why spend so much time doing something that’s so hard, for so little reward, that so few people will see? I have a friend, a visual artist, who has been a working man all his life, despite a great love for creating art works. He just couldn’t bare to get involved with all the pricks who dominate the art world - poncing about, writing nonsense about something that’s only meant to be seen ... a bunch of vapid, middle class vapes. Just couldn’t bear it. Now that he’s retired, he has all the time in the world to do his art - and he is, with a vengeance. He gets involved in it in a proper, old fashioned frenzy, disappears for weeks if not months, focussed utterly on his work.

He’s never sold a single thing, except to friends. Barely ever even put anything in an exhibition.

‘All I want to do is make beautiful things,’ he said. ‘I don’t care if no one buys them. I don’t even really care if no one ever looks at them. I just like making them.’

He does indeed make beautiful, striking and unusual things. I can vouch for it. But - that’s very purist, isn’t it? I can relate to it up to a point. Writing is something that I love doing. It’s a wonderful feeling. It’s creating something and that can feel like magic. But not all writers even enjoy writing. My friend Stephen May, the novelist, always claims he hates it.

‘I hate writing,’ he says. ‘But I like having written. I like being a writer.’

I can relate to that. We live in a world that is largely beyond our control. Democracy seems to deny us even the little voice we felt we used to have, and the world is spiralling away from us. Creation is a form of control ... an activity that can give you personal satisfaction in a world in which you may seem largely irrelevant.

Is creation enough? My friend doesn’t care if his work is seen or not - so he says. I understand that there can still be pleasure there, but I’m not sure I can go all the way on that.

Writing, of all the arts, is above all a form of communication and I, and I assume most other writers want a readership. It may be a small readership, it may be a large one. Which brings us to another reason for writing: You have something to say.

It’s a thing. Finding out what to write was a very hard thing for me - the thing that took me longest, I think. I thought I’d write funny stuff, as I do dearly love a laugh; instead, somehow, I ended up writing really quite serious stuff - often issue led stuff. That was a strange experience, because the stuff I seemed to be good at writing, wasn’t at all what I thought it was going to be. I was never a great activist, although I had plenty of opinions. But somehow, out of a part of myself I had no idea existed, these books emerged that were about something - that gave silenced people a voice or shone a light into dark corners. Strange! I felt very lucky, because that’s something I always admired. And still do. Fiction around politics is one of the hardest things to do, because whilst stories are very good at asking questions, they are usually fairly lousy at giving answers. Articles and essays are the form for giving opinions. Fiction, on the other hand, at it’s best, explores.

Exploration. I think for me that’s the key. I often imagine writing as being like a small boat afloat on an ocean, and behind it and underneath it, unseen, is a huge net, And you’re steering the boat, but beneath the waves, all sorts of strange and wonderful creatures are getting caught up in your net ...

When I was starting out, my favourite form of practice was sitting down with a phrase, or a word, or a very simple idea, and just setting off to write ... and something would come out of it where there was nothing before; a story. I still do that from time to time - my book Sikes was written like that. It’s the root of most of the Tales of the Unexpected; and now that I no longer have to turn a penny with my writing, it’s what I’m doing again.

It’s like venturing into territories unknown every time you sit down to write. It’s map making. Trying to catch what your unconscious mind is making of the world around you before you’ve even realised it.

.... when it works, anyway.

So to end, let’s take a look at Substack and what that might have to offer. Most of the new forms that have cropped up over the past twenty or thirty years are for visuals or sound in one form or another, but they do offer some new ways of looking at story telling with the written word. When Twitter came out I found myself using that to write very short stories, and I found that the form did force a particular kind of rhythm and structure onto the work. I did some TV in that area as well, trying to incorporate gaming into it. All new forms change things somewhat; and Substack too has certain quantities in the way it works, that present opportunities for how we tell our stories ...

One of the biggest problems with contemporary publishing is how slow it is compared to how the quickly the world is changing - like tectonic plates moving under lightning. It can take two or three years to get anything published, so if you want to write about contemporary events, there’s no certainty it’ll even be an issue any more by the time the book comes out. But here, we can. That’s an opportunity, but a rather dangerous one. Dangerous because Substack = no editor. A good thing in one way, since they are all now under instructions to make books go for as wide a readership as possible which, for me, robs books of one of the few advantages they have over more expensive forms. But on the downside, it means that every book out here is the ‘Director’s cut,’ and we all know how what a load of shite that usually is.

I have a piece in mind around what’s happening in Gaza. Not ‘about it’ in the sense of being factual - this will be a fictional piece, set in a world like Gaza, but not Gaza - the only way I can talk about something that I have so little experience of. A sort of sideways story.

I could write it, of course, and work on it, and do things with it and see what it does and where it goes, and then post it here when it’s finished. That might produce a better book, but no one would see it for a year or more. There’s another way of going about it, though, which is to write a chapter a week and publish it as it emerges. Dangerous for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it might not work as a book. That happens often enough, and it can happen again; I quite often abandon things if they’re not working. For another, I do usually have to go back and over and over my chapters and re-edit them to get them to work well. I change my mind about things. I put new things in that I hadn’t though of at the time. I make a mess of something up and need to go back to sort them out ...

So it might fail, and it might be a mess. But it’ll be a piece based on opportunities that Substack has brought to the table in a way that publishing is unable or unwilling to take on. An experiment! I do like an experiment.