Fantasy Writer

Cooler King

If you had to fail at anything, what would it be? When I was relatively young, I wanted to be a writer. I can remember writing short stories (usually involving space and rockets) when I was 7, 8 years old, and I "rediscovered" writing in my mid-teens, in a forehead-slapping moment. How could I have forgotten this?

But as well as wanting to be a writer, I was restless and impatient, so when I wasn't immediately successful (like Françoise Sagan, say), I became somewhat disillusioned. But I kept writing. In the early days of this blog (and I can't be bothered to link to them) I posted quick summaries of my various unpublished novels. Ideas were easy to come by, until I was around 30, and now they're not. But another thing is that I ceased to believe in myself as someone with something to say, if you know what I mean.

In the spirit of putting myself into the skin of a 3rd party, an editor say, I asked myself, if this manuscript arrived on my desk, would I want to read it? And the answer was no. The same thing, more or less, happened with regard to poetry, which was something else I used to do. I realised, in my mid-20s, that I absolutely loathe poetry - especially my own. So I knocked it on the head.

When I was still at school, I had a vague ambition to be some kind of professional writer. I knew early on that the chances of being a Don Delillo, someone who has always made a living from being a novelist and nothing else, were remote, so I knew that "professional writing" would have to involve journalism or reporting or something.

But being feckless and lazy, I didn't fancy going to journalism school, working for a local paper, or doing any other kind of scut work. I wanted to leap over the dues-paying and become, say, and instant Alistair Cooke, or, more likely Anthony Smith whose series of Radio 4 talks, "A Sideways Look" I admired very much.

Both Cooke and Smith were masters of talking about one thing whilst really talking about another. At the height of the Watergate scandal, Cooke would give one of his weekly talks on the subject of something like saucepans... and only at the end of the 15 minutes would the penny drop, and you would realise he was actually talking about Nixon, and what a crook he was. I exaggerate, but you get the point.

Because just reporting the news wouldn't interest me; and I wouldn't want to get trapped into being some kind of specialist in politics or war. No, I'd want to just sit in my gaff and make stuff up. Unfortunately, this career path failed to open up before me.

But blogging is great, isn't it? Because you don't have to please anyone but yourself, and you can be your own Anthony Smith and take a sideways look at every bloody thing.

Then there's the other thing about writers, which is that - on the whole - they're all so damn ugly. Goodness gracious! Some of them, to quote Quentin Tarantino, look like they fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Ugly, fat, with Coke-bottle lenses in their unflattering glasses. Apart from JK Rowling, who is shaggable because she doesn't look actually horrific and is as rich as you-know-who, most writers I've seen are more Stephen King than Steve McQueen. Most celebrity mugshots show people looking at their absolute DUI worst, but look at Steve! Cool as a cucumber.

Film directors, apart from actor-turned-director types, follow pretty much the same pattern. Peter Jackson, for example. It's almost like a pattern: ugly, misfit people bring their fantasies to life on the page and on the screen. One of the big problems I had with that whole Lord of the Rings trilogy was the way it pandered to the worst elements of fandom - the shut-ins, the mad people in the cultural attic, the ones who love fantasy and sf and play role playing games, too.

I'm no oil painting, as you know, and I'm generalising a little too much (likely to upset Vulcans and non-Vulcans alike), but in the end, being a writer isn't the same as being a rock star, and the adoring fans of writers are not the same people, on the whole, as the adoring fans of rock stars. So if I had to choose, I'd rather be a "failed musician" than a "failed writer." And, frankly, and I wish I'd thought of it when I was younger, I think I'd rather be a "failed actor" than just about anything. I should have been on the stage. You know it.