The writer strikes back

It sometimes happens in journalism that you pitch a story idea to a new magazine, and get a positive response from the editor, and then….

… you come to the last paragraph, which reads something like: “As we are a small start-up magazine, it will be impossible to offer you money for your work, but I hope this doesn’t lessen your desire to contribute.”

In fact, it increases my desire to buy a bazooka and fire off a few shells at the magazine’s office, but I now have a better strategy. I send the editor a short YouTube clip featuring a very spiky and acid-tongued American writer called Harlan Ellison. The clip is called Pay The Writer.

Writing: hell or heaven?

Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me!

So said Thomas Mann, who then went on to write about 50 books, none of which I have read. His point, echoed by many other authors, is that he felt driven by some mysterious force to keep writing, like a slave to the blank page.

George Orwell, as always, summed this up perfectly: Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Orwell took this to the extreme; it could be argued that he died for his writing. He wrote 1984 while living in a remote, unheated cottage in Scotland, not the ideal place for a man with chronic tuberculosis.

He initially hated the book: “…a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely”.

The great thing, as Orwell realised, is that the first draft of any book is inevitably a mess. Writing the first draft is just something that has to be done to get to the next part, which is editing, organising, understanding, cutting and pruning, which is the fun bit.

“Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job.”, said Orwell, and he didn’t have a word processor to help him.

My first draft took five and a half months, after which I set the manuscript aside for two months, and came back in great trepidation to see what I had written. It was garbage, but mindful of Orwell, I considered it to be salvageable garbage. I did a second draft in two months, set it aside again, then began a third draft, and something finally clicked. I finally became in charge of my story, and what needed to be added, removed or recast, became clear. I cut about 10% of what I had written.

Omit; that is the essence of art. – Oscar Wilde.

More pruning and more polishing, and I had something I could live with. It had taken a year.

I would never have made it through without the encouragement I gained from reading and rereading what other novelists said about their craft — Orwell and Mann, Truman Capote, Jackie Collins, Richard Condon, Knut Hamsun, Garrison Keillor, John Grisham, Don Marquis, and many others.

After my novel was published last year, I’ve exchanged views with many writers on what it takes to write a novel, and so now, rather than answer them all individually, I’m going to explain the process here, with plenty of help from all the writers whose wisdom I have collected.

For example, what novelist could fail to feel inspired and more certain of their work when they have absorbed the truth in this extract:

You, however, should not write anything you do not believe. The premise should be a conviction of your own, so that you may prove it wholeheartedly. Perhaps it is a preposterous premise to me — it must not be so to you.

I’ll come back to the guy who wrote that a little later…..