I recall once seeing an interview with the comedian Peter
Kay, in which he was asked about a poll having voted him the country’s funniest
man. Kay dismissed the idea, pointing out that it’s an impossible thing to
judge, and that the funniest man in the country could easily be someone like a
milkman nobody’s ever heard of, perfectly happy telling jokes to his friends.
It's possible that the same could be true of writers. The
greatest and finest writer of the most beautifully moving prose in the history
of the English language could easily be someone who died in the 1930s having
only ever written for her own pleasure, never showed her work to anybody, and
whose name will never be known or remembered.
If you’re good at something, if you enjoy doing it, if
it’s how you want to spend your time, do you really
need the outside
validation of others?
Perhaps for some people the answer is no, you don’t.
But I think to many of those for whom writing it an
ambition, there is often a need for it. A craving, even. A desire, often a very
strong one, for what you do to
mean something to someone else. To have
some external reassurance of the fact that you can do this, and you have not
been entirely wasting your time.
All of this has, of course, been gone over many times, by
far finer minds than mine. Perhaps most famously, by Orwell in his essay ‘
Why I Write’, which I first read in my late teens and which certainly struck a chord
with me for his confession that “
Sheer egoism,” was one of the main
driving factors behind it. “
Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be
remembered after death… It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a
strong one.”
I’ve never really thought about it in terms of wanting to
be remembered after death – what happens while I’m still here to enjoy it is
far more important to me! – but that egotism he writes about is of course a
factor.
The thing with writing is you can keep fooling yourself
for your entire life that you might one day ‘make it’. Fairly early on, most
people realise that they are never going to be an astronaut, or a footballer,
or a pop star. But you can keep pretending into old age that you might, just
might, one day write a great work of fiction which people will want to read.
I don’t remember precisely when I first knew that I
wanted to be a writer. But it has almost always been there, from a very young
age. When I was in the early years of primary school I found that I could write
stories, I enjoyed writing stories, and to some degree at that stage I probably
did it better than most of my peers did. It was something for which I had a
talent, and which I was aware other people eventually made careers out of, so
perhaps that was something I could do. Sometimes this sat alongside other
ambitions – wanting to be a writer
and a fireman, for example, or a
writer
and a Formula One team manager. But wanting to be a writer was
always in there.
I’m middle-aged now, and I have been very fortunate
indeed to have had a life in which I have been able, while not exactly making a
full-time living from it, to tell stories as part of my professional career. By
writing non-fiction books, feature articles, and making radio documentaries. Forming
narratives, telling stories, making people interested in knowing what happened.
Keeping them following along to the end of the tale.
But it’s not quite the same as writing fiction.
I am better – much better, really – at writing
non-fiction and putting together radio features than I am at writing fiction. When
I am constructing those narratives, I do it well – I do it bloody well,
actually, so there – and I do it confidently, like crafting some intricate
piece of needlework. But despite all these years –
decades – of trying, I
have never been able to find the same sense of fluency with fiction. Not as an
adult. It’s like trying to do the stitching one-handed.
I have never stopped trying, though. Because I am under
that delusion I mentioned earlier, that I might one day crack it. That I might
somehow suddenly stumble across the idea, the way of doing it, which will give
me the golden ticket to the chocolate factory of having a novel published. Now
I’m in my 40s the rational part of me has started to think that if it were
going to happen, I’d have done it by now. That I have reached the extent of my
limitations as a writer.
But even with that rational part tugging away at one
corner of my mind, I can’t just
stop. Wanting to be a writer, wanting to
be a novelist, is a key part of who I am. Even if I tried, I don’t think I
could make it go away. The ideas would always be there, simmering away, and I’d
always be thinking
maybe this one,
maybe this time…
It’s true, though, that I have tried a
lot of
ideas. Serious ones, silly ones. ‘Literary’ ones, trashy ones. Contemporary,
historical, science-fiction, horror, first person, third person… I have never
found the right formula to make it click. The story which will make people want
to know what happens next, and be well-written enough to bring them along on
the journey.
But…
But…
But…
I have mentioned on this blog more than once over the
past few months that I was sitting on a secret. A commission. A real-life,
actual commission to write a piece of fiction. Not a novel, something shorter,
but still…
It was finally announced by the publisher and went up for
pre-order online earlier this month so, as the saying goes, I’m “so glad I can
finally talk about this.”
I realise it sounds incredibly mercenary to think that
making money out of something gives it value. But it’s not really about the
money, as such, as nice as it would be to be able to make a full-time living
out of writing. (I definitely don’t think I will ever reach that stage). But it
is that sense of validation, as I mentioned earlier. That someone, with no
reason to think favourably of me for any reason, took a look at a submission of
mine and decided it was up to a professional standard.
So yes, finally, after all of these decades of trying, I
am going to be the author of a professional work of fiction. And what is it,
you may ask…?
Well… I suppose it was inevitable. It’s this. Of
course
it’s this. What else, really, was it ever going to be…?
Coming in 2026, from BBC Audiobooks –
Doctor Who: Star Flight!
