The latest issue of The Author has an article written by me, Before I forget. Here for blog readers is the unedited version. The events mentioned happened a while ago as I have been waiting for the publication of the magazine before posting, but the sentiment is still valid.
Before I forget
The other day, on the touchline of a junior
football match, a friend praised a book of mine he had read on holiday. We were
chatting, watching the game as it unfolded, and I happened to mention an
evening I'd enjoyed on the quayside in Newcastle. ‘Oh, did you see
Emmanuel there?’ my friend joked. I had absolutely no idea what he
was talking about. To my immense embarrassment, he reminded me that
Emmanuel is the street-wise villain of my Newcastle-based thriller. I felt
fraudulent, as if I was passing myself off as the author of a book written
by someone else. Certainly I felt far more dissociated from the story at
that moment than the friend who had just read it – he had a better claim
on Emmanuel and the rest of the characters of 11:59 because, even though I'd lived and breathed their very
existence for eighteen months, not to mention being the sole parent of every
single one, frankly, I'd forgotten almost everything I ever knew about them.
Currently, I'm doing talks about and readings from my
novel Mr Stephenson's Regret. In
particular I've been talking to Women’s Institutes about the
Stephenson Women, the neglected heroines of the railway pioneers’ story. I speak
for an hour or so without reference to a crib-sheet, note-perfect. But
there is a cloud on my horizon. In a few weeks I'm scheduled to talk to The
Stephenson Locomotive Society. In my nightmares I am fielding a
barrage of questions about the specific innovations made by the
Stephensons to ensure The Rocket beat all other locomotive pretenders to
the ultimate prize at the Rainhill Trials. At the time I emerged
from my three years' research on the subject I could have faced John
Humphrys on Mastermind. Not now.
At least the book is there to remind me of what I used to know (and perhaps in
the final analysis that’s why we write) but what still remains on the page, what
once seemed seared on my brain, is not after all indelible. I've moved on
to the next thing.
Writers are learning’s prostitutes.
Or my kind of writer is. To all appearances we are thoroughly absorbed
in our subject, and we do take trouble to be at least superficially impressive,
but we are learning and turning tricks to get by. We keep an eye out for
glitter or material we can shine and polish. Another eye on the clock. Our work
is potentially contagious.
More generously (while staying with the contagion
metaphor) we are carried along by temporary enthusiasms that become
unignorable inflammations; they smart and smart until they stimulate the
writing of a book, if only to ease the itch. I can't write at length about
anything until I feel that need to scratch.
I've found you can just about blag it on the books
you've already written and almost forgotten. The real problem comes when
the itch for the next book starts before you've finished the one you are
writing. That’s where I am now. It has taken me too long, far too
long, to get to where I need to be on the psychological mystery that
emerged from a temporary obsessional interest in the subject of erotomania. The
need is not yet satisfied, but another, quite different, has
emerged from somewhere in the shadows and it’s pricking
me, pricking me.
Married couples are
said to be subject to a seven-year-itch, the period where a possible
alternative love comes calling. Writers are serially faithless lovers, seduced
by alluring encounters with fascinating possibilities into one intense affair
after another, compelled to engage, to scratch and scratch out. As with
affairs, there is likely to be as much pain as pleasure involved. In my
experience there seems to be a three-year-itch for ‘the next big idea’. This is
what I'm suffering now. I have to resist it – I can’t let myself be
distracted. Like Odysseus on his voyage I'm up for the new experience but I
must avoid being blown off my present course. Tie me to the mast – I can't
respond to this siren now. Not yet. Not yet.
