My father was a good teacher; he lived with the dilemmas of writing and talked about them all the time. If I joined in his dream, he gave me a lot of attention. What I did do, under his aegis, as he sat in his armchair in the evening underlining phrases by Tolstoy, was write. I learned some discipline, developed a vocabulary, became used to arranging words into sentences in an order that seemed right, and then sentences into paragraphs. I always had a dictionary and thesaurus open on my desk.
I learned how slow and frustrating writing could be and, I guess, learned to get past this to other pleasures. I learned to use my experience of school, family life, friends, in my writing, and I learned how to remake that experience, in my imagination, into stories. I learned to see, from reading my own work, when it worked and when it didn’t; when it sounded right or like me. I learned to think of writing when I wasn’t at my desk, going over stories in my mind, testing them for potential.
I learned the habit of thinking as a writer and became acquainted with the usual doubts and fears, the isolation, self-belief and bloody-mindedness required. And from the rejections I received for my articles, stories and novels I began to learn something about the practical aspects and difficulties of making a living out of what I wanted to do.
*
In my mind or on paper, in various states of preparation — they might be notes, lists of words, character sketches, or scenes or paragraphs — I have numerous ideas which I poke now and again, for signs of life, to see whether I might get round to writing them, whether there’s any urgency or necessity there. That is why, I guess, if I have an idea, I like to start on it immediately, whatever else I’m doing, when the ideas might ‘run’, and before I can persuade myself it’s really no good. As time passes and I move away from the original impulse or inspiration, I’m less likely to write the idea. It no longer seems important. This way I can work a lot, which I like. But I often work too quickly and the piece might seem rough or unfulfilled, an effect which can have its virtues.
*
Of course, during the day, you write in different moods: sometimes intensively, unstoppably; at other times with self-hatred, or with bad concentration, indifference or boredom; sometimes an idea catches fire and there is an easy pleasure, and so on. These moods might follow in rapid succession. All you can do is sit through it all, knowing that different things are possible at different times, aware that the one thing you cannot do is find reasons to stop prematurely.
As with anything creative, so much of writing seems dilatory. What are you doing all day but dreaming, or dozing on the edge of boredom? Sometimes you follow whimsical or downright stupid ideas to see where they might go. You let pieces of work drift or hang about the house for months before abandoning them, or using them elsewhere; you worry, walk about your study, picking up books at random, leafing through art catalogues, hoping for something to occur. You think: if this was being filmed what would there be to see but a bored bloke doing nothing much? If you try to hurry up you slow down.
Sometimes all writing seems tiresome. You add something to a piece and the whole thing changes. Everything else has to be altered. It takes off in another direction, just when you were starting to get satisfied. Taking something out can have a similar effect.
A good deal of writing, most of it in fact, is craft: cutting and ordering and replacing material, trying it in different places, looking at it again, and going through this process repeatedly, alone and with others, until you think you’re going mad. Most writing is mostly about giving the reader the right information at the right time. The reader’s attention, like all attention, is sustained by withholding. This is partly an editor’s skill and can be learned. What you’re trying to do is to look at what you’ve done as objectively and coolly as you can, which is almost, but not quite, impossible.
Yet, somehow, eventually, things get done. People, fools usually, even say, ‘But you’ve written a lot. You must be very disciplined.’ I am still surprised that anything is finished at all.
It’s as if I imagine there’s another, ideal way to work, if only I could find out what it is. But this might be the best way to do it — haphazardly, in a sort of chaos hedged by hope, while waiting by the window to see my children’s faces when they come home from school.
I wouldn’t measure the quality of a day’s work by the number of words written. The writing might be slow or slower but I’m more likely to see a good day in terms of fruitful ideas which take the piece forward. It is the idea which is significant. The writing itself becomes luxurious; I can enjoy messing around with words and seeing whether they lead to other words.
I have been a man who is always about to go into a room and write. That’s where I’d rather be, most of the time. Sometimes I think everything else — and everyone else — is just getting in the way. I have, at least, learned to write anywhere and at any time: in cafés, on the train, in a car when travelling. Before, I could only write at my desk, with my ‘ritualistic’ objects around me.
My study is full of notebooks. My bag is full of notebooks. My coat pockets carry little notebooks. There are notebooks beside my bed. There are pens everywhere. Most of the notebooks are half-empty; in many I have only written on the first page. If I succeed in filling one I am delighted. Every time I buy a new one I want to write in it immediately. Clean white paper offends me; I want to scribble on it. My job is to turn white paper into half-dark paper.
Soon the notebooks are battered. I stick my wet umbrella on top of them. I write on trains or lying across the back seats of cars. I guess I like being a writer more than I like any of the other roles I have. If I take the notebooks with me, I can be a writer all the time; the further from writing I get, the flatter and more without purpose I feel, as if I don’t know who I am.
*
Writing, or any imaginative act, feels sensual; it feels — perhaps it should feel like — a bodily act, rather than an intellectual one. The movement of the writing hand on the page reminds me of someone drawing a model, looking up, moving between inner and outer worlds. How you turn the page round as you go, how you add; the page with its arrows, additions, notes down the side, underlinings, circles and coffee rings, can look like a drawing. Ink on your fingers and jeans. Your materials matter; the whole thing matters. Fountain pens become a part of you, as the nib changes over the years. Love letters should only be written by hand. Children don’t learn to write on typewriters or computers; you can’t scribble with them. You can’t write at an angle or turn the page upside down; everything turns out looking the same. They are for journalists.
*
Ray Bradbury says in Zen and the Art of Writing, ‘The artist must not think of the critical rewards or money he will get for painting pictures.’ It would be difficult to disagree with Bradbury here; you can never know in advance what people might want. The integrity of the writing itself has to be the important thing. But it cannot be the whole story. Even if it is unconscious, there is the desire to speak and, in any writer, that which he believes speaking will bring him, in the world, with others. What are you using these sentences to do? How do you expect them to reward you, both in the world and in your mind? Any working artist will have to have — at least — sufficient drive, motivation, energy or ambition which will make her want success more than almost anything else.
Freud, with characteristic good sense and a certain amount of condescension, writes of the artist’s belief that his creativity will bring him ‘honour, power, wealth, fame and women’s love; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interests, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis.’