I’ve always wanted to be a writer. When I was in my early teens it was poetry. When I was an undergraduate I thought it might be novels. When I was in my twenties I thought it might be comic pieces.
But it’s never quite come to be. And now I’m approaching 50. And like many people approach 50, I would guess, I’m looking back and wondering where the time went. Some people are dismissive of the notion of a mid-life crisis. Of course one of the things that’s often observed about such a thing is that it doesn’t happen at mid-life. This isn’t my mid-life unless I’m going to live into my nineties. My wife might be able to expect to do that — one grandmother was over ninety and the other was over a hundred when she died, her father, now in his early nineties, still has a living elder brother. My family are not so long-lived. Three score and ten might be my legitimate expectation — there or there abouts.
So this isn’t a mid-life crisis. It’s more around the two thirds mark, we can guess. And I’ve got this far and never actually written anything. Well, never actually published anything. I’ve written lots and lots. I definitely write therapeutically — which I seem to have read is a good thing. Behind me on the shelves of my Ikea Billy bookcase (a piece of furniture which, looking back, will probably come to define the early decades of the millenium) are maybe twenty or thirty journals filled with my scribblings. In my dropbox account — as over the last twenty years digital has come to almost completely replace analogue methods of reading and writing text — I have a file called “text.txt”, several of them in fact, some of them hundreds of thousands of words long.
So it’s not that I don’t write. I don’t edit much. I don’t re-write. I don’t re-shape. Maybe that’s the reason that I haven’t written anything that’s come to anything. That’s what I mean I suppose when I say “published” because in these days it’s perfectly possible to write something that isn’t published but forks some kind of lightning on the web. That’s what I’d like to do I suppose. I’d like to write something that forked some lightning.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. (Dylan Thomas)
The other thing thing that I’ve done of course is that I’ve read a considerable number of books by authors which claim to help the reader become an author. And I have favourites which I go back to, again and again — even though, manifestly, none of them have actually worked (yet). When I first graduated from university and was working as trainee auditor in Bedford (the one in Bedfordshire, England), I bought “Becoming a Writer” by Dorthea Brande. Her advice was to write every day, no matter if you thought you had no time, you would find that you had some, albeit ten or twenty minutes. If you genuinely thought that you had no time, her suggestion was to get up just fifteen or twenty minutes early and to write without any thought about what you were writing. And I think, I did that for a time. Writing on a portable typewriter, which I must have gotten for a Christmas or a birthday before I went to University — a present bought again with the idea that I should become a writer.
And now that I think about it, some of the words that I wrote on that typewriter in that damp, unheatable, ground-floor bedsit in Bedford did fork some lightning. I used the typewriter to keep a diary. And my girlfriend found it, and read it. And in the diary I was saying that I wasn’t sure that I should be with that girlfriend and then, when she’d read that, I wasn’t.
So, over the next thirty days, I’m intending to try to write at least “One page, printable” every day (this is on the advice of another writer, Terry Pratchett). In the spirit of Dorthea Brande (and Natalie Goldberg, who is very much in the same vein) I’m not going to restrict the subject of the posts. But I am going to try to make them slightly more readable, postable, publishable than the therapeutic ramblings that fill the journals stacked behind me. Who knows? Some of them might fork some lightning.