How did that happen?

I was trying to explain this to two Lindas (Linda Sargent and Linda Newbery) at the launch party on Saturday. Ever since leaving the civil service, I have not only been writing but have also involved myself with a succession of small charities, usually doing civil-servant type things like the money or the minutes. A couple of years ago, with an eye on my wife’s possible redundancy and the uncertain returns from writing, I began to take a professional qualification. So when I went in to see my editor, David Fickling, about one of my books, the conversation started like this: ‘How are you?’ ‘Very well thanks – just heard I passed another set of accountancy exams.’ ‘Oh, you’re taking accountancy are you? Where might that lead?’ ‘Um, well, lots of possibilities. I could be someone’s finance director…’

It’s pretty much a rule now that when I go in to see David I get surprised by something. Sometimes it’s a plan of his. Or it’s a gorilla suit. Once it was a piano. This time it was the king-sized light bulb that went on over his head when I spoke. David knew The Phoenix was looking for a finance director.

(There was a bit more to it than that. Interviews and a little hard talk and waiting for other things to fall into place. But why spoil a good story?)

So that’s what I was doing at the Phoenix launch party on Saturday, a late-comer to the show, basking in reflected glory that was in my case largely undeserved, and trying to explain myself while two Lindas listened politely.

‘But…’ (the Lindas said.) How could an author also be an accountant? Weren’t the two entirely different?

We can all have an opinion on this. What, after all, does the word ‘account’ mean? It means ‘to tell a story’. And I’m not just being clever when I say that. Both roles mean you have to take a mass of material and turn it into a pattern that others will recognise. Both involve quite a lot of working by yourself – just you and the problem in front of you. Accountants certainly have to be painstaking and meticulous. Authors – well – not all authors are painstaking and meticulous (good God, no!) but you know there are times when it helps.

Numbers are not words. They have no rhythm. Or if they have, I haven’t found it yet. But just because you can do words it doesn’t mean you can’t do numbers too. I suspect that people who say they can’t do numbers are a bit like people who say they can’t sing. They can sing – or could, if they practised enough. Very few people are truly tone deaf. So I think very few can be truly number blind.

And why not have your accounts done by an author of fantasy fiction? More fantasy writers should be accountants on the side. After all, we seem to have got into our current economic mess largely because the money men wanted to write fantasy. Move over and let us have a go!

One day I shall write my great Accountancy Novel.

Well. I am no artist. I did my best, and I didn’t think my best was bad. But it didn’t speak to the DFC team and the story went into the ‘Ummm…’ tray. Then the recession hit, the DFC had to fold and everyone went their separate ways.

But you can’t keep a good thing down. I could see Muddle and Win, even if my efforts with pencil and ‘How-to-draw-Manga’ book weren’t working for anyone else. And after some of my other, more serious, literary projects had gone nowhere for a bit, I realized there was only one thing I really wanted to do. I settled down to put those pictures into words.

The words came. They were younger, and more funny, than most of my other writing. ‘Like P.G.Wodehouse,’ said my agent Ginger Clark, ‘Like Terry Pratchett’, said others. (Thank you all. With reviews like that I can die happy.) Yes, you can have a girl and a devil and a muffin all in the same story. Look. This is how. The words speak in a way that my pictures never could.

You can’t keep a good thing down. Muddle and Win will be in readers’ hands next summer. But something else will get there first. The writers, artists and editors of the DFC team couldn’t let their vision die either. They’re back. Their new story comic The Phoenix will be out in January. And I’m going to be right in there giving them a hand.

As long as they don’t ask me to draw anything.

Muddlespot is a little devil down in hell.  His job is to sweep up the remains of his larger colleagues who get ripped to pieces by his boss whenever the boss is unhappy with their results.  He is a contented little Muddlespot.  Until one day the boss finds that somehow there is no one else left to do his bidding, and Muddlespot gets sent up to Earth.  His mission (which he has no choice but to accept) is enter the mind of a girl called Sally Jones.  Sally is top of her class, always does her homework, always keeps her room tidy, is nice to everybody and liked by all who meet her.  And Muddlespot has to persuade her not to be any of the above any more.

The story is about how they get on.  It’s about how it is, in fact, really quite difficult to persuade someone who is the best and nicest and most likeable at everything to try being something else for a change.  And when our hero finally starts to make a bit of headway, there’s a lean, muscular, square-jawed, heroic angel called (cue the trumpets, please) Windleberry who gets sent in against him.  And after that the story’s about how they all get on together, and how the climax builds to the final, fateful confrontation over – the Muffin of Doom.

Written for 9-13s and any one up to the age of 93 who likes that sort of thing.  Like me.  Coming out June 2012 or maybe a little bit after.  Thank you, David Fickling Books.

(1) Well, it was last week.  Some of it’s still there.

Now…

Do you dare read it?

It’s horrible. It’s like wading out into an icy lake with the chill creeping up your body. You go slowly – so very slowly - and every line is agony. Who wrote this stuff? Could it really be you? You did this. How on Earth did you think you could get away with it? The lines are… (1) The dialogue is … (2) What you’re looking at seems to be the work of a tyro. Or possibly a madman. Ugh.

Actors, I am told, hate watching themselves on screen. The way they get through it is to look at everybody in the scene except themselves. The author, unfortunately, has no one else to watch. There’s no escaping what you’ve done. You must either put it back on the shelf, or plunge in.

But if you can plunge in (back to that icy lake again) you find after a bit that it’s not so bad. You stop noticing those mannerisms of yours that to begin with were so off-putting, and that most other readers were never bothered by and may not even have noticed in the first place. You might start enjoying the scenery. This isn’t half bad, after all, you may think. Not half bad at all. Some of it, anyway. You could almost forgive yourself.

And it wouldn’t be that surprising if, after a bit, you did surprise yourself. Some of it will be bloody brilliant.

(1) insert appropriate descriptor here. If these days you favour short, stark sentences, insert ‘gross’ or ‘florid’. If vice versa, insert ‘infantile’ etc.
(2) as for (1) but ‘fake’ probably covers all possibilities.

Why shouldn’t we? Some thoughts can be truly dangerous if written down. Even where they aren’t, a bit of censorship can still be a good thing. It challenges our storytellers to use their wits, rather than just telling things the obvious but lazy way. And we do actually expect storytellers (in all their forms) to push a bit beyond what’s normal and accepted. It is their job to take our imaginations to places where it is not safe for our bodies to be. They let us think ourselves into dramatic situations without the risk of getting into them for real. We may even allow a writer who shocks us to be newsworthy, that is, to become a story themselves.

But storytellers have only a very little power. They have to appeal to things that are already in our minds. They can’t make us go where we don’t want to go. Whether they are peddling fact or fiction, they must massage our emotions in pleasing ways. We are ready to weep, so long as we can feel uplifted by the weeping. We want to imagine ourselves coming into power, gaining riches, lying in the arms of another human who is beautiful. We like the little-person-against-the-big-machine story because it lets us see ourselves triumphing against the world that keeps us down. And we love stories about people we all know and whom we can gossip about – celebrities whose success we can somehow share by reading about it, and whose failures and foibles we can spit upon as we pass them humiliated in the gutter. ‘You thought you were better than us, didn’t you?’

So I’m with those who say: you can blame the press, but don’t forget who was buying the newspapers. I’ll go further. Why is political debate so nauseatingly sterile? Because we like ‘pompous ass makes fool of self’ stories much more than we do ‘life is terribly complicated and if you want something to change you’ve got to accept the consequences’. So a politician in front of a microphone simply cannot afford to take risks. And if you ever get depressed about the number of books in which young heroine falls in love with beautiful monster who wants to suck her blood – well, you’ve just got to accept that some stories are stronger than others. They’re the ones that tell us what we want to hear.

The first thing that happened, once I was round the corner and out of sight from the cheering crowds, was that I sat down and tried to draw myself a bit more map. Sure, I said to the fiery champing stallion of my creativity, we’re going to go on a charge. But this time, let’s just think exactly where you’ll be putting those feet of yours so that you can carry me flying to the finish in one glorious gallop. We don’t want to end up in the swamp again, do we?

Besides, you don’t look so much like a fiery champing stallion at the moment. You look more like a stray from the Donkey Sanctuary who’s only too glad of a bit of creative procrastination. So let me plan. Your time will come.

The Planning Department said Not Fair. They’d done their stuff already and didn’t see why there had to be more. Strike action threatened.

Fiery steed said of course he could charge, if I really wanted. It was just that right now didn’t particularly feel like it.

The Anti-Procrastination Police went to look for their whip.

Negotiations broke down, the Planning reps walked out and the APP found their whip in Lost Property. Self and Stallion looked at each other: ‘Swamp?’ ‘Swamp.’

And here we are.

The going is slow and sticky. A pitifully small number of words get written each day. Some days there’s a little leap onwards from the last bit I wrote. This is the writer’s equivalent of jumping over a ditch: I know what I want to happen in the gap, but I’ve no idea how to do it. Not yet. I’ll be back to sort it out later. In the meantime, gotta keep going. ‘Keep going’ is what matters. And as for that fiery steed – he’s not much use in the swamp. It’s not him carrying me, in here. It’s more the other way around.

Keep going. We’ve been here before.

We know that at some point these mists will lift. The way will clear and we will be running – yes, galloping - over the broad uplands towards the finish. We will write ‘The End.’ We will cheer and award ourselves homecoming treats. And then we go back along the muddy trail we have left, cutting the corners, hammering in the signs, building the bridges, the street lighting, the metalled highway along which readers will speed in joyous career, never guessing with how much labour and loss this route was first laid.

(Enough metaphor for one week. But all my writing happens like this, and every writer will know what I mean.)

It takes as long as you take to write it, Lauren.   Which depends on several things.

-    How long the book is.  My shortest to date is 40,000 words.  My longest is 150,000.  That’s a difference of three or four times the length to start with.  And some writers go on for hundreds of thousands of words.

-    How much care you want to take over writing it.  No sneering here: there are a lot of bad reasons for taking a long time over writing.  And it IS possible to write a 100,000 words in six weeks.  But it usually shows if you do.  Some writers take ten years, carefully and painstakingly going over the text, waiting patiently for the ideas to emerge from their little dark burrows.  They take all that care over their work. I’d say that shows too.

-    When you think you’ve finished.  Which is quite hard to say.  Granted, a book that’s published and out there is almost certainly finished, but even that’s not always sure.  If it isn’t published – if it went out and got rejected and its ghost still haunts your disk drive – why, who’s to say that you might not start over again?

These unhelpful thoughts aside, I’d say that since I gave up my career I’ve produced, on average, about one book a year in a form that I thought was ‘finished’.  That’s slower than many authors, and certainly not as fast as some people say you need to produce if you want to be successful as a writer of light fiction.   On the other hand it seems to be plenty fast enough for my editor, thank you, who has been good enough to publish five of them and may yet be persuaded to do one or two more.  And it’s a lot faster than I managed while I was a civil servant (three books in seventeen years, writing in fits and starts as it pleased me.)

Could I be faster?  Yes I could.  Would it be any better for me if I were?  I doubt it.  Certainly I don’t think my writing would be better.  That counts with me.

‘When I consider men of golden talents,
I’m delighted, in my introverted way,
To discover, as I’m drawing up the balance,
How much we have in common, I and they.

‘Like Burns, I have a weakness for the bottle,
Like Shakespeare, little Latin and less Greek;
I bite my fingernails like Aristotle;
Like Thackeray, I have a snobbish streak.

‘I’m afflicted with the vanity of Byron,
I’ve inherited the spitefulness of Pope;
Like Petrarch, I’m a sucker for a siren,
Like Milton, I’ve a tendency to mope.

‘My spelling is suggestive of a Chaucer;
Like Johnson, well, I do not wish to die
(I also drink my coffee from the saucer);
And if Goldsmith was a parrot, so am I.

‘Like Villon, I have debits by the carload,
Like Swinburne, I’m afraid I need a nurse;
By my dicing is Christopher out-Marlowed,
And I dream as much as Coleridge, only worse.

‘In comparison with men of golden talents,
I am all a man of talent ought to be;
I resemble every genius in his vice, however heinous—
Yet I write so much like me.’

SELF: Yes, yes, yes, oh, all right, yes to that too. Maybe, definitely not, no, that’s totally unfair… A nurse? What kind of nurse? I don’t dice. I do dream sometimes, but not for that reason. And no, I don’t write like Ogden.

I only wish I could.

For a start, what is it called? Camp Chrism? Camp Succour? Camp Fire? (surely not!) What’s it made of? If the path to Hell is paved with Good Intentions, what material do angels use to roof their Nissan huts? I have a suspicion they too may use Good Intentions. It seems to be a downward looking sort of material. And then they form squads and jog up and down singing things like:

WE’RE the finest angel CREW
WE’VE got bells and smells for YOU

The camp is run by angel NCOs. Camps everywhere are run by NCOs, although they may sometimes masquerade as scoutmasters or holiday leaders. This must be true even in Heaven. They’re loud-voiced, hardbitten types. I’d say they should be cynical and corrupt, but of course angels can’t be either. Maybe they’re just reticent, which is as close to being cynical as an angel can get. And they bear the marks of the Good Fight. What would those marks be like? Can an angel have a wooden leg? An overwhelming dislike of certain brands of body spray? Or are the scars simply moral ones, which manifest themselves in a tendency to twitch nervously when they hear phrases like ‘On the other hand…’ and ‘Look at it from my point of view…’

As for the training: there would be lectures, certainly, about the perils that await on Earth; there would be weapons drill on harps, trumpets and fiery swords. I have a feeling that there should also be role play, which the recruits would be hopeless at because being angels they are of course all possessed of the single and unalterable Truth and the idea that they could be anything other than they are is very very difficult for them.

Ideas please. To be offered in the knowledge that I may shamelessly pirate anything that makes me laugh.

We come. Those of us who have done this before know that it is fun to do. (We also know that the lunch is quite good.) The lawyers and engineers turn out in truck loads. I am astonished to discover how many different types of engineer it is possible to be. There are doctors, psychiatrists, the armed forces, financial services, gap year excursion organisers, a music agent, a couple of guys from TV companies and a man who is now a most eminent astronomer but whom I know - because I was an accomplice - to have mis-spent much of his school days in Napoleonic wargaming. There is also one author.

(Knowing my school as I do I should have expected a strong team of investment bankers, but for some reason there aren’t any this year. There aren’t any accountants either, which is astonishing. I assume that the bankers are still hiding and that the accountants know where the food is even better.)

The rest of us take up our positions at our little desks around the central atrium and the boys are released into us in batches through a long afternoon. Some of them make a bee-line for a specific career. Most drift uncertainly past the tables. They glance down at the books I’ve scattered on mine to prove that an author is what I really am, and then they drift on again. The trick is to nail one with your eye and start talking. Once you get the first, the crowd forms around you just as if you were a street artist. And you can keep going for as long as you have any voice left.

They’re interested. (Who after all, wants to be a banker? Dad’s a banker and he’s still hiding in the cellar.) And they do quite a lot of writing at this school: mostly short stories, for which there are organised competitions. Some are working on playscripts or even poetry. ‘I’d like to be a writer,’ one says, ‘but my careers adviser says it’s a hobby, not a career.’

Deep breath. This is what I’m here for.

It can be a career, I say. But there are some things you need to know.

And I talk about the money (or lack of it), the security (or lack of it), and maybe also a bit about the odds against any one piece being accepted for publication. I talk about having a regular job, and how far that can be combined with writing, and the differences it made to me when I left the civil service to follow a writing career. ‘Anyone here want to get rich?’ I cry, several times during the afternoon. ‘Then go somewhere else!’ Go and talk to the lawyers and the engineers. The best I can say for myself is that I have a deal on my next book. As an author, I am alive for a little bit longer.

I’m not here to turn anyone off writing. Creative writing is a holy thing, to authors and schools alike. If you enjoy it, if you feel you do it well, then you must go on doing it. But if you want to be an author, take a good look at the Ancient Mariner here. That’s why they’ve given me lunch.