Nobody Likes A Try Hard


I have recently made a breakthrough. It happened while sitting on the terrace of a bar facing the beach at Tangier, the spot where Tennessee Williams got down a first draft of that masterpiece of neurosis, Cat On A Tin Roof. Perhaps the perceptive old soak had left some writerly energy behind, hovering there in front of a view of beach and sea and modest cranes and rubble. I put pen to paper. The old man having a pub lunch with his friends, I finally knew what he is going to order. Salmon. He wants the salmon. And then I went on scribbling, telling myself I could go on. It's foolhardy really: the choice of salmon just doesn't ring true.

I would love to say that I'm a published writer and sit back and finish my drink. I would love not to have to tell you that I'm trying. Trying my best. Like those poor schoolkids who only ever get high marks for effort.

You can see Morocco from the Spanish town of Tarifa. You stand by the sea and think about how that's Africa you can see over there, presenting itself in a rocky horizon. A mountain sits on a cushion of mist. You can see the rocky detail of shrub and shadow. You think: if I'm supposed to be a writer, then I need to describe this. Your mind goes blank, as it does every time you have this thought. I would like to be a painter, so that I might fuss over my palette until I got the exact nuances of the colours of the sea. I would like to live by the sea for a year and learn how to write about it. Can you get grants for such things? That's Morocco over there. I tried not to worry about whether I'd locked the door to the flat properly, tried not to ponder what it is that I'll have forgotten to do at work, tried to forget about Easyjet. 

We took the giant catamaran, a powerful beast that got us to the other side in a mere 35 minutes. At least it wasn't a plane. I spent the journey standing on the deck, scanning the sea for dolphins or whales. I saw one, a dolphin. I saw  the dark shimmery back of its body, saw its tail, a quick splash back into the water. Had it jumped out when I wasn't looking in the right place? Did I wishfully hallucinate this animal? The animal we put on posters with quotes about how there are some nice things in life, it was the same colour as the water it slipped into, dark and somehow like glass. A good omen, I hoped. I am still hoping.

After a day largely spent in a happy daze wandering the streets of the city, getting lost in the medina, feeling floaty and unsure of what thoughts were trying to get at me, I found myself sitting in a small bar with my two friends. It was a favourite haunt of Francis Bacon, back in the days when Tangier was a hotbed of bohemian licentiousness, and the ink flowed. Another fascinating old soak. When you enter that state where you're trying to remember what it was you were worrying about, it is liberating to imagine that upper-crust wheeze with which Bacon used to release his honest and uncompromising pronouncements. If you want to be normal, whatever that is, then please go ahead, but if you don't, if you're not cut out for it, then don't get involved with normal worries. The thoughts that had been sneaking up behind me on my stroll through the city, hassling me like a needy tout but unable to say anything precise, they were about the future. Normal worries, and very boring too.

At least I have the salmon. Satisfactions can be relative. Someone should have told Mick Jagger about that. Although I very much get where he was coming from. We live in a world where the spaces that can be filled with troublesome knowledge are proliferating. It is very interesting to have reached the mythical sounding age of thirty-seven and to see where the arbiters of normality propose I should be. Two years ago I read an article in The Guardian telling me that I had reached the optimum age at which to be alive. As if this concept were not depressing enough in its own right, the thing was published in the Money section. At thirty five you have reached milestones like buying a house and having children, and those children don't need quite so much looking after anymore, and you're financially secure and still have the excitement of getting to the peak of your career ahead of you. That happens when you're thirty nine. It seems I have little choice but to whole-heartedly shun any normative concepts of adult progression. I'll have to try something else. Yes, try.

We stayed in a hotel in the medina in Fes. It was just around the corner from the butchery section. After nearly witnessing the swift end of a squawking white cockerel, I soon found a way of avoiding this part of town. An old town it is, a labyrinth of narrow alleyways barely touched by the sun but hot with the fug of humans and other animals. Donkeys are dragged through the bustle, laden with goods or waste, kittens munch on a chicken's head, food gets piled up, things are put on sale, leather flavours the walls, spaces open up and trees appear, and then it narrows down again and you get lost and a disordered chorus of voices ask you where you want to go. This is the thrill of trapped exploration. You say very little but your mind buzzes. Looked at from above this sprawl of chaotic maze is massive.

And it makes you think. This medieval city offers a metaphor, one that makes you want to sit down and catch your breath. It tells you about the sickening labyrinthine repetition of thought. In the rhythm of your footsteps forceful questions get asked: what are you going to do? How are you going to survive? When are you going to write that book? How? What are they going to do once the old man has ordered his salmon? When? How? Will there come a day when you admit that you've been kidding yourself all along?

This might be why nobody likes a try hard. They make us long for ease and space. When we read a book or listen to a song, we don't want the smell of factory fumes, we want something sublime and self-forgetful. What is it you're walking past whilst getting gnawed by thoughts? It is people living by their wits; it is colour and energy, the accidental byproducts of the struggle for survival. The old man fiddling with something small and electronic, white sparks dancing near his hands, is long past the age when we're supposed to reach the pinnacle of our careers. It is unlikely that such a concept will ever infect the minds of the grubby kids who offer us a cheery 'bonjour.' At five in the morning we are briefly awoken by the call to prayer from the nearby mosque. The sound is intense, staticky and deeply earnest. I understand the appeal of religion, of ritual: it can be a way of paying respect to a slippery but demanding part of ourselves. Perhaps it is our imaginations demanding to be fed. Perhaps we should just call it our hunger for art. The word is pliable- stretch it whichever way you wish.

One more thing as I struggle to bring this ramble to a close. I recently joined a group on Facebook called 52, which provides a different prompt for each week of the year and is an excellent opportunity for experimentation, especially for a lazy soul like me. Some of the poems I've posted on the blogs were responses to these prompts. I've had some very constructive feedback. It makes me long for a patient editor all of my own. If you've read this far, you'll understand why. While I was in Morocco, the prompt was to write on the subject of 'names.' I tried. What I produced felt small and mean, faint-hearted. And I think that's because I strained, made too much effort, was too conscious about the whole thing. There's a reason why so many writers (and artists, like our hungover friend, Mr Bacon) get working very early in the morning and take advantage of their dozing states of mind.

I wanted to get this written before I start back at work. It is a wandering ramble like the warrenous medina at Fes. This writing is work I have chosen for myself. To do it satisfactorily, I have to step away from modern assumptions. Too many targets and you end up shooting yourself.

Thus life as a foreigner suits me well. Today is Sunday, it sways with ambivalence. Instead of fretting about the things I'll find out I've forgotten to do, I'm going to take my notebook to a cafe, sit and sweat, write what happens next now the old man has opted for the salmon. Hopefully I'll keeping going until I get to the stage where I can cut that whole section out. It's worth a try.

The Whys and Wherefores of an Accidental Blogger

I've written a novel. This is something I have long wanted to be able to say, and now I can. It is 197,708 words long. It took me six years to write. Over a year ago, I put the final full stop to what felt like a more than passable draft. Never having been one for the hard slog, the sense of achievement I felt was unfamiliar and heady. The process had been slow. I certainly didn't rush it. There had been the usual wild swinging between ecstatic rapture and sickening self-doubt. There had been hours spent propped up on pillows in bed scribbling in notebooks, then a joyous slashing of superfluous material, and the lovely neatness of typed words. There had been the barely repressible hope that things might be slightly different afterwords. And for a while they were. I put that final full stop and for about an hour I was filled with ebullient relief. I had done it. I was someone who had actually written a novel. I was happy and satisfied and braced for the future. What praise was to come? What success? At what point was I going to be able to give up the day job?

I've written a novel. It's still a pleasure to be able to say 'have' instead of 'want to' at parties, an almost harmless confidence boost. A small boast. I had read all the stuff about how tough it is for people starting out as writers these days, how brutal the landscape is out there. But I have long been expert at ignoring such things. I would get myself an agent without much fuss. I would get published too. And the day job, well, it would be thoroughly bearable, a trusty foil to the big, important stuff.

Of course, it didn't take long for me to discover that my little boast was nothing more than a small child's scream in a full-blown hurricane. No-one really hears you. I have sent off my letters and synopses and extracts of the book and I have learned the jargon of literary rejection. 'We don't feel your book is...,' and all based on 50 pages. And the internet abounds with people in my predicament, slightly crazed and desperate, doing strange dances of self-promotion on the thin ledge of remaining hope. And you feel like you are waiting for a lover who´s never going to return home. You wait and you age. This sounds dramatic, yes, but time ticks by while you wait. Time ticks by and life congeals into a shape you might not necessarily have chosen.

And how are you going to keep writing? You certainly don´t feel like you can quit that day job.

When I started this blog, a mere three days ago, I did so partly in a spirit of cynical timidity. Slightly throwaway and flippant, as if I were too cool for it. And I´ve never been cool. I have, on the other hand, suffered from what often torments many a daydreaming drifter- that is: awkwardness, distractedness, a general bemusement at the workaday world. A person who is happy to sit in an empty room pulling words out of the air might well not have the mettle and chutzpah that the world of promotion and marketing seems to demand. I want someone to take my work from me and make something happen. I want to be able to wallow in shambolic musings, to stomp around cities with new scenarios playing through my head, to sit and put words down on paper or screen, a mug of tea lazily steaming at my side. I want things, I imagine them, and I worry.

If you haven't been published, how do you know if you're any bloody good?

The workaday world. The world of the nice and necessary and functional and measurable. I remember spending a morning watching interviews with Christopher Hitchens. He had just died. In one he says: 'One way to deal with contradiction is to admit it.' And here I freely admit it. Because I also only want to create work that speaks to me, that I might enjoy reading myself. I do not want to write something nice and salable, I do not want to appease the market. The market is like a strong animal that has been placed in a room shaped by the limited movements it has thus far made in its life. This doesn't mean that the animal might not one day want to stray further, to run, to dart about in unpredictable directions. I want you to like what I write and then I really don't care if you don't. I write from a need to connect with imagined worlds. The writing I love takes me somewhere I recognise but didn't realise existed- and it does. If it's been imagined, then it exists. The connection is necessary. It brings beauty where there might only be the workaday. And if I'm not published, I don't care.

Proust says: '[The] labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to...(and please excuse the brutal editing here!)...the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.' I loath boasting and arrogance. I feel very strongly that it is up to others to say whether you are any good or not. And this knowing humility can be crippling. I quote the great Proust here to show what it is I love about art and why I feel the pursuit of putting words together in different ways is worthwhile. We might just put them together in a way that goes beyond the constraints of conversation or essay or blogposts like this one. We might just be able to express part of the depth and scope that makes up a human being and cannot be put across in the normal codes of language. And so I won't say sorry. I want to the part of that. I want to try.

And you might wonder what's the point of all this when the world is always teetering on the brink of destroying itself, when people are needlessly dying and Kim Jong Un is unleashing psychotic cruelty over the citizens in his care. Russia is posturing in Crimea, legs astride, hands on hips, ooh so very macho. And if we try to understand it all, we start unravelling a ball of string made up of human greed and cruelty and stupidity and selective faith. The workaday world. The world of 'terminology for practical ends.' So why sit in your bedroom writing about why you like writing? What good can that possibly do?

In his book Straw Dogs, a book with which some people take highly defensive issue, John Gray says: 'We cannot be rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition. So why not accept it?' This seems clear to me. Everything we chase after and strive for, kill, maim and torture for, is ultimately a figment of the imagination. You think you own your house and garden but no-one can really own a piece of the earth. It's just a game we're really really keen on and so we pretend that it's true. You can't control other people. They'll tell you they believe what you want them to believe, they'll put their bodies where you want them to, but you aren't in control. The most you can do is break them, but that's not the same thing. And so, if all this is imaginary, then surely we can only get away from it through the imagination? How else can we understand what it is to be someone else but through the exercise of our imaginations? The solitary act of connecting with imaginary worlds is also an act of empathetic connection with all human beings. Empathy, I say, which can be very different indeed from it's cousin, sympathy. To know what it is like. Don't we all have that curiosity somewhere?

I am not a high flyer. My CV shows a drifting life. I certainly don't claim to be remotely intellectual. I write from the imagination and I write about the people who are never quite going to make it. I am interested in the people who have hopes for a better, bigger, happier life but can't quite get that. It seems that an awful lot of us are in that position. And we want to be heard. Things like this blog allow us to be heard. We wait for an agent, a publisher, a magazine to get back to us. But we won't let them be in charge of anything. We won't submit to the workaday world.

A bit more from Marcel: 'The only voyage of discovery...(ahem)...would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each them beholds, that each of them is.' He had to pay from his own pocket for the publication of the first volume of his great work.

I read pieces in newspapers where writers talk about where they write. They rent offices, have rooms devoted to that purpose, they have sheds in their gardens. Cork-lined rooms? I write wherever I can- on public transport, at work, in bed, on the toilet. I will keep writing. We should all keep on writing. I have got a new selection of exercise books and every morning I try to scribble something in them. I drink tea. I muse. I try not to think about the hours of jobwork ahead. Who knows how many years it will be until I can go to parties and correct myself when I stray into boasting?  'I've written a novel,' I'll say. Then, 'No, hold on, I've written two.'

And there are many more. There will be many more.