Eating Humble Pie

The other day I was walking home with a friend who is a visual artist. ‘What are you doing at the moment, Brian?’ she asked me. ‘Oh I’m just finishing the re-writes on my latest novel,’ I told her. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked. ‘Well,’ I explained, ‘when the first draft of my novel is finished, I send it to my editor and she reads it, suggests a series of changes that need to be made and then sends it back to me for re-drafting.’

My friend stopped in her tracks and looked at me in horror. ‘But how dare she!’ she exclaimed. I stared back at her in bewilderment, wondering if I’d said something I hadn’t intended. ‘How dare she!’ repeated my friend, positively bristling with indignation. ‘I mean, it’s your novel, right? Who the hell does she think she is telling you how to write it?’

I considered embarking on an explanation of the art of editing but decided I was probably wasting my time. My friend is a fully paid up member of the school that sees the artist as a semi-divine being whose unique vision must never be tampered with, even to the slightest degree. There are a lot of people who believe this – particularly in the field of contemporary visual art.

The truth is that good writing is about communication not mystification and the first person a writer needs to communicate with is his or her editor. So if your editor thinks your your second chapter is a bit stodgy, then maybe it’s worth looking at it again. It’s that simple.

One of the most famous examples of creative editing is, of course, Ezra Pound’s work on T S Eliot’s The Wasteland. Most people agree that T S Eliot was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, if not the greatest. The original draft of his poem, The Wasteland, was over twice the length of the final version. The cuts were made largely at the suggestion of fellow-poet Ezra Pound, to whom Eliot sumbitted the work for editing. Was the integrity of Eliot’s vision lost in the process? Clearly not.

Eliot had the wisdom to take on board Pound’s suggestions. Not all authors are as accomodating. I once overheard a fellow writer at a publishing party saying, with considerable self-satisfaction, ‘I told my editor, I’ve never written a book by committee yet and I don’t intend to start now’. He was an author for whom I had a great deal of respect but I saw immediately that he was probably a real pain to work with and I can’t help noticing that his sales figures have been on the slide for a number of years now.

I have a certain amount of first hand experience of what it’s like being an editor since I take part in a number of schemes to help developing writers. I do this because I believe I have something to contribute and because I enjoy it. I certainly don’t do it for the financial reward which is often fairly minimal. But every now and again I encounter an aspiring writer who, instead of considering my suggestions calmly and either accepting them or rejecting them, throws an almighty tantum and starts asking how dare I. Right away, I know that the writer in question is unlikely to have a glittering career ahead of them. Because, despite what my friend the visual artist believes, the one thing you really need to become a successful author is the ability to eat humble pie. And when your turn comes, there’s nothing else for it: you just have to get out your spoon and tuck in.

That Eureka Moment

People often say to me, ‘It must be so satisfying to hold in your hand a book that you have written,’ and of course it is. It’s even nicer to see someone else hold it in their hand, though it’s probably best to keep your excitement to yourself. I once saw a woman reading one of one of my novels on a train. I hadn’t been a published writer very long at this point and I couldn’t restrain myself from going over to tell her that I was the author. She looked at me in alarm and, clearly convinced that I was some kind of pervert, began wordlessly backing away. Lesson learnt!

For me, the most satifying part of being a writer is not the finished product; it’s when the plot starts to come together in your head. You’ve had this idea for a while that seems as if it might turn into a novel, but up until now you’ve had no more than the starting point. Maybe it’s a character or a situation, a time or a place, or even just a mood. It doesn’t matter. You can feel it there, like an itch. Every now and again, you scratch it. But it doesn’t go away.

Then one day, you’re sitting on a bus, or in a café or getting your hair cut and gears start shifting in you head. Perhaps it’s something somebody sitting opposite you just said; or perhaps it’s the colour of the wall you’re staring at. Whatever the reason, a big lump of plot starts rising to the surface of your mind, like a shipwreck being released from the depths of the ocean after years of silently gathering barnacles.

This lump of plot – I can’t think of a better way to describe it – is usually partly made up of your own experiences. You find yourself thinking, ‘Yes, of course! Like the time I was in Amsterdam and I lost my wallet and I met that French guy; my character, loses his wallet and then he goes back to the place he last remembers having it and there’s this French guy who says to him….’ And so it goes on.

I love that experience. But that’s still not the best bit. For me, the reall thrill is when two or more lumps of plot suddenly come to the surface. You don’t necessarily see the details of how they’re going to fit together, at least not immediately. You just know they are going to, and that the whole big stew of possibilities that’s been simmering away in your imagination for all these weeks is actually going to turn into a viable story.

I get so excited when this happens, I rush to the nearest computer to get down as much of it as I can while it's still fresh. Once, I was in the bath and I jumped out without waiting to even wrap a towel around myself. (Don’t try and visualise it!) I rushed into my study but the moment I put my wet foot on the polished floorboards, my leg arced out from beneath me and I came down on the ground with an almighty thump. I knew right away that I’d broken my ankle. But it didn’t stop me. I crawled over to the desk, pulled myself up onto the chair and began hammering away at the keyboard. Only after I’d got it all down, did I ring for a cab to take me to Accident and Emergency.
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The Inspiration Test

I recently read a blog by a young writer who was depressed because he or she (I don’t know which) wasn’t feeling inspired. So I thought I’d address the thorny issue of inspiration once again. It’s something I used to worry about a great deal when I was younger and I know that some people never get past it.

I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was still a child and whenever I mentioned this ambition to adults they would always say the same thing: ‘Well, if you’ve got something to say, it’s bound to come out in time.’ This comment was meant to be encouraging but it invariably had the opposite effect on me. I used to think, ‘But what have I got to say?’ I got it into my head that only if I discovered some important truth about the meaning of life, could I ever hope to fulfil my ambition of becoming an author. For years I despaired of learning this truth.

Then one day I read that the secret of being a successful writer was to write what you see. At first, this only confirmed my worst fears and I asked myself, ‘What do I see that’s so special?’ But then it struck me: everything I see is special because it’s unique to me; it’s my particular point of view. All I needed to do, I realised, was to have confidence in my own observations and describe my experience of the world.

Of course, that didn’t answer the next question that confronted me. How do you come up with stories? But in the end I worked that one out too: you make them up. That’s what writers do, after all. They make up stories and tell them in their own words.

So what about this business of inspiration? Does it even exist at all? Well yes, I think it does. But I also think that a lot of people get confused about what it means. Last year, for example, I was giving a lift to the friend of a friend of my daughter – let’s call him Roger. Roger is the kind of person who likes to think he knows a great deal about literature. On this occasion he was very drunk and determined to talk to me about writing, even though I just wanted to get home and go to bed.

Roger could write a book, he informed me. Nothing would be easier. But he wasn’t prepared to do so at the moment because he had no intention of writing something commercial. He would rather die than do that! No, he was only going to write when he had something worth saying - when he felt inspired.

A few years ago I carried out my own test on the phenomenon of feeling inspired. This is how I did it. I did a page of writing when I felt inspired and put it in a drawer. Then, a few days later, when I was feeling uninspired, I did another page of writing and put it in the same drawer. Three months later I took them both out of the drawer and I couldn’t work out which was which. I tried to tell Roger about this test but he wasn’t prepared to listen.

The truth is that feeling inspired often has very little to do with the quality of the writing you produce and a great deal to do with your physical state at the time. Maybe you’re experiencing a caffeine buzz, or coming down with a virus, or falling in love, or suffering from a hangover.

Real inspiration, on the other hand, is something that comes through the process of writing itself. It happens when you stop agonising about whether you have something to say, whether you feel inspired, whether you have any talent, whether or not you are going to succeed, whether you are superior or inferior to other writers, and all the other nonsense that fills people’s heads (mine included), and just get on with the process of trying to devise stories, create characters, develop plots, describe settings and manufacture dialogue.

If you do that, inspiration will eventually arrive on its own. It will come because in the act of writing you have lost the burden of self and in doing so you have at last made yourself into a true servant of the muse. As soon as you reach that point, inspiration will begin to flow like water bubbling to the surface from some deep underground well.