Fevered Musings on Being a Charlatan -
I was *this close* to coughing up a blog entry chock-full of mesmerising and urgent writing advice, but before I touched fingerprint to keypad I came to my senses.
Why the hell would anyone want writing advice from me? Indeed, what makes anyone truly qualified to critique, dismember or otherwise judge, with any degree of authority, another person's work of art?
I’m glad you asked.
I was fortunate to have two books slip through submission hell and land in the actual factual world of overcrowded, cutthroat publishing, but does that make me a good judge of what might sell or even be deemed successful? A thousand times no. Plenty of people have written and read more than I have. And I have an even dirtier secret to confess.
I once did an MA in creative writing.
That may not sound a particularly sordid admission to you, yet to some in the cobwebbier corners of Twitter’s #writingcommunity that makes me persona non grata numero uno, the Mary Antionette of writers, tossing the self-published scribers their crumbs of Victoria Sponge (I mention self-publishers because, in my experience, this demographic of writers are the most vocal in their criticism of writing degrees; I don’t subscribe to the simple school of thought that says self-publishing is only for writers who can’t find traditional publication - I know full well that thousands of indie authors chose this route for both editorial and remunerative control over the integrity of their work, like Charles goddamn Dickens for example).
I shall not be handing out writing tips to anybody today. I am unworthy. Let us not forget, ladies and gentlemen, that my MA was two years worth of advice. Disgusting, unwashed, heathen advice. And, as we all know, having once been a student doesn’t automatically make you a teacher. My visiting lecturers and novelists and tutors were happy to dispense their wisdom for a price, and here I was considering shovelling on their advice to others FOR FREE. The nerve of me.
Besides, frankly, a lot of that advice sailed far over my head. I distinctly remember William Boyd telling me that the best time to write was ‘after luncheon and before cocktails’. I don’t even know where to begin unpacking that.
Therefore, after careful consideration, I will not recount any well-trodden cautionary tales about how I almost abandoned my first published novel (my father died, leaving me with a book about a fictional dead dad which suddenly felt like the most disrespectful act of memory-sacrilege I could commit) and then, years later, picked it up again and saw exactly the level of editing it needed to work. It’s too cliche, anyway, to say: Give it time. We all know that unrequited love and writing are the same thing, so to say that the only cure is distance is so obvious it doesn’t need regurgitating. Besides, the tagline for a Paul Read masterclass could hardly be ‘The only way to help your writing is by not writing’.
I will also not be advising you change your systems should you feel in a rut or backing that statement up by informing you about my current method of working, how I write a set number of words a day not knowing where the story will take me until the characters themselves inform their creator. I won’t be telling you how exhilarating it is to find my own story surprising me, that writing myself out of corners, jazz-style, is the most liberating way of working I’ve ever found.
I won’t be telling you to write, write, write like you’re king of the page, and then hack and pare it back knowing that you’re not fit to even lick the boots of a reviewer for The Mail on Sunday. I won’t tell you that you absolutely must write with unparalleled arrogance and edit with humility, because that’s too clean, too soundbitey, too the-title-of-this-article.
And I absolutely, one-hundred-percently, will not be suggesting you read omnivorously from a variety of texts that entertain and intimidate and sometimes even appal you. That advice is just plain terrible. Everybody knows that reading is the opposite of writing.
Okay. Okay. You got me. I’m being facetious. But, look, the thing is, there is no rule book, right? I wish there was. There are character arcs you can map, three act story-lines you can try to follow, adverbs you can snip out, darlings to kill, all those classics, but you have to make the mistakes in order to get better. My first two or three books will never see the light of day because they suck so hard they have a gravitational singularity and an event horizon that even light cannot escape.
Also, and most importantly, just as no child is the same as the one that came before, neither is your book the same as anyone else’s. New parents nod fearfully, listen to everyone’s advice, and then ignore the lot of it. At least, the sensible ones do. You’ll do what works for you. That’s the only way.
So I wholeheartedly don’t recommend anything. In fact, I don’t recommend writing full stop. It’s far more fun to sleep or get drunk.
Except for one thing. I feel I owe you one piece of advice if you’ve got this far. And it is gold, it really is.
Here we go. You won’t regret this.
You know when you go supermarket shopping when you’re ravenously hungry and end up buying loads of high-fat crap you can barely carry to the car? By that same principle, never, and I mean never, ever, write when you’re feeling horny*. Stick with that one piece of sterling wisdom, and you’ll be sparing us all a world of embarrassment.
You’re very welcome.
* Unless you write porn. Which, in general, is bad writing. Take a cold shower instead.
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