I’m not one of
those lucky people who just sat down and wrote a book without any training. I
dithered and procrastinated and raged and feared failure and came up with all
manner of lovely dream-blocking strategies including serving up self-hate for
not ‘just getting on with it’ in great dollopy portions way before I ever put
pen to paper. My favourite way of upping the ante on true self-loathing was to
go into our local library and read the first pages of books by people I was at
university with. Long defensive conversations about why I hadn’t actually
written a novel with people I’d told I was going to became another outlet for
my creativity.
Shoulda/woulda/coulda written a novel Image courtesy of imagerymajestic at FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
It seems
astonishing to me now. If I’d used all that negative energy to sit my backside
on a chair and snap up the laptop, I’d probably be about five novels further
on. I still have moments when I sit there like a constipated cow, imagining all
my peers with their fingers fairly flying over the keyboard, tapping out three
thousand words a day while I look at a white screen and wonder if I’ll have a
remotely entertaining thought again. Ever.
Like most things
in my life, I’ve had to learn and then graft to make progress. Luckily, I
discovered the online writing programme at the UCLA (University of California).
It took me a good six months to enrol in case I was paying for proof that I was
lacking the talent to do the thing I wanted most in the world. Happily, this
turned out not to be the case. Aside from the lovely people I ‘met’ in my
virtual classroom, the most fascinating thing I discovered was that whenever I
added in something based on a true event, no one believed me. Of all the
hundreds of events squeezed out of the fictional fantasy box in my aching
brain, the minute I wrote about something real, it was as though everyone from
Texas to California did a collective sniff and went, ‘Nah. That just wouldn’t
happen.’
So these things are not going to appear in
my books:
Last day in
Sydney after six weeks writing and researching a guidebook. Ambling along Manly
to Spit walk admiring the view. Man jumps out on me stark naked except for
T-shirt over his head. (Frankly, the manhood was nothing to boast about, so I
could see an argument for deploying the T-shirt elsewhere). Instead of running
away, I shout and bellow until he is convinced I am more deranged than he is
and runs for his life.
Win first prize
at York Writing Festival for my novel’s opening line ‘I was wearing the wrong bra
for sitting in a police cell’, then ditch fabulous line in final version of the book.
Live in Tuscany
in isolated farmhouse in a field of sunflowers. Get back late one night to find
house ransacked. Call local gamekeeper who bursts in with his pistol, slamming
open doors and swinging into rooms, James Bond-style.
Take bus to the
jungle in Thailand. Follow small boy on a moped. He beckons to me to cross the
river. I look for bridge, boat, sigh, then lift my rucksack onto my head.
Children sit
down without arguing and get on with homework. Son gaily accepts that as he is
only thirteen, 15 certificate games and films are not for him. Daughter accepts
that as son is two years older, it is perfectly reasonable for him to go to bed
much later.
I’ll leave it to you to sort the fact from
fiction…