Tue Feb 2 20:57:12 GMT 2010
When I was at primary school my days were dominated by two passions: firstly, the school's BBC Micro computer, which I spent many a happy hour tinkering with; and secondly the authorship of long, rambling stories that covered side after side of the yellow A4 sheets of scrap paper that my teachers handed out after the exercise books had been exhausted.
As I got older, these twin passions remained, subjugated to a degree by an explosion of enthusiasm for music and the guitar when I got to be a teenager, but present nonetheless. By the time I got to sixth-form college I saw my future consisting of one of two possibilities: either to study English and become a writer, or to study Engineering and become an Engineer. I mentioned the former to my A-Level English teacher, who was at that time giving me a couple of extra study sessions during lunch breaks and free periods to help me undertake an English S-Level examination. I think I was seeking encouragement from her, or perhaps just a bit of an ego-boost, but she responded relatively dismissively, telling me that "if you're going to be a writer, then you'll write". I remember this hurting at the time: as a capable and hardworking student I was conditioned for praise and support, and I was rather taken aback that she hadn't responded with warm enthusiasm.
I was reminded of this conversation last year when I happened to see the poet Ian McMillan performing as a part of Saltaire's 2009 Arts Trail. Ian's act was a mixture of autobiography and poetry, and he talked extensively about his early career which he spent careening between a variety of unsuitable positions whilst he struggled to provide for his young family. After each description of his dismissal from another hopeless job he noted, "..but I wanted to be a writer", and slowly, over the course of his act, my English teacher's words came back to me, and I wondered why, if Ian had wanted so badly to be a writer, he didn't simply sit down and write. Because that's all it is: getting some words on the page, day after day, building a world out of words.
Eventually, of course, Ian McMillan realised his dream of being a writer. These days, rather than attempting to make a living as, for example, a hapless builder on a Sheffield building site, he spends his time doing gigs at events like Saltaire's Arts Trail, and by all accounts he is making a splendid job of it. But Ian is not the only success story in this particular blog post, for I have also come to realise that, far from being someone who merely dreams of "being a writer", I actually really am a writer. I don't mean to say that I have been published, or that I make my living out of writing; but insofar as the most important part goes, that of actually putting the words down, I'm already there. A somewhat astonishing statistic: so far, in keeping this blog over the past six years or so, I have written over three hundred thousand words. That's two or three good-sized novels, based on word count, and that tally doesn't consider my various other writing outlets, such as the daily journal I keep, or the torrent of semi-coherent prose I churn out for challenges such as Nanowrimo.
I recently read a book called How To Be A Writer by author and publisher Stewart Ferris. In the book Ferris makes a clear distinction between "being a writer" and "being a writer for a living". To illustrate the point he presents a pyramid-shaped diagram which consists of a very small space at the apex for the superstar writers whose glossy-covered hardbacks consistently occupy the best-seller shelves in highstreet bookshops, and a huge great space at the base for the feckless layabout writers who are content with leaving their literary outpourings festering in anonymity forever, lacking either motivation or confidence to foist them on the reading world. The thing I liked most about this diagram is that it demonstrates that writing, and hence being a writer, is orthogonal to fame and fortune. As my English teacher noted, ten years ago, if you're going to be a writer, you'll write.