On writing.

How dare I have an opinion?

Morning, campers! It's been a while. One month to be exact. A couple of days before Christmas I took on a brief and the subsequent head-scratching left no brain space for my happy sideline. We presented the concept yesterday (a hundred slides in a hundred minutes, pitched to a hundred clients around the world in little Zoom boxes with oddly uncool ‘cool’ backgrounds) and now, HUGE sigh of relief, I'm back at the typewriter.

Yes I do have a typewriter, and here it is -

- Cormac McCarthy owned this particular model and I adore it.

In the box to the left of my Olivetti is a Rabbit. Not a dead bunny, nor a sex toy, but a pocket-sized hands-free voice-operated AI interface that uses natural language processing to understand social contexts, learn my habits and predict my needs. It can translate any tongue simply by listening to the world around me. It can use my apps and social accounts, order me a taxi or a bunch of flowers or a pizza (American Hot, thanks for asking); it can write a song, a movie or a novel, call in the troops if I get splattered in an avalanche or dial me in to a radio station in Whanganui. I’m keeping it in the box because it'll be obsolete by next Tuesday.

The Rabbit R1 is just another tool like the lump of green metal in the picture. The Olli Lettera 32 is brainless and harmless (but it hurts my fingers), smells like my mum's old sewing machine and needs its ribbon changing every other week, but I love it to death. A version of this very machine transmogulated more creativity and magic than that little leporine gizmo in the brown box will ever dream of. Doubters, read any page in All the Pretty Horses, then tell me that I’m wrong.

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So, January 18th seems like a good day to take stock. A year ago I sent out Radar Love, my first piece on Substack. It was, in fact, the first piece I'd ever shared that was written just because I wanted to. And I mean REALLY, even going back to school days and my short stint on a magazine.

Writing simply for the telling, with no commercial imperative. My idea twelve months ago was to send out one article (or blog or bulletin or Barry or whatever you want to call it) every week for a year, mainly to see if I could. See if I could stick to the process. A couple of thousand words squeezed between work hours, stick them up on Substack on a Saturday, click send, then wave them goodbye. I figured if I could manage that for a year then maybe, just maybe, I had the muscle to manage a Proper Book. Call myself A Writer.

So here we are. You and me. That first post went out to 12 friends, of whom only 75% actually read it (Substack gives me the stats, guys, but won’t name the guilty parties). But hey, nine readers is better than no readers, and getting even one ‘like’ is a great feeling. To know you’ve connected. Apparently the most ‘reads’ I’ve ever had on a single day was 540 on December 2nd. Which seriously fries my brain, but is also very odd because I didn’t even post on that day. I assume it must have been Head-butted by Jesus, which went down quite well and was written around that time but I can’t say for sure.

That said, the most ‘likes’ I’ve had for any one bit of writing is 18, so I’m not exactly holding my breath for the Booker.

I've just done my sums and it seems that in one year I've published (by which I mean delivered by internet) 110,000 edited words. That doesn't include all the drafts and aborted stories along the way. So going back to my original intention, it seems I do at least have the capacity to generate enough words. My little rabbit tells me (squeaky muffled buck-toothed voice in a cardboard box) that 100,000 is the upper word count for a big fat literary novel. Hurrah!

Of course word count means bugger all, and most weeks as I hammer away at the keys I've got a particular John Hegley poem on a loop in the back of my head. It goes like this:

Bad news

when i used to write my daily news
i nearly always went over the page
and the boy sitting next to me never
(for him three lines was a good endeavour)
but one day he wrote three and a half pages
and he said to me SEE
you're not the only one who's clever
and he went and showed it to Miss
and Miss showed it to the class
look at all these words she said
they make no sense whatsoever

In truth when I sit down I rarely know what I'm actually going to say and I certainly don’t know what shape the words will take on the page. When I started my Confessions last January I was concerned I'd be dry by Springtime but somehow the stories keep on bubbling up from the depths. Age helps, and post-Catholic guilt.

But week on week there's no plan other than just to sit and write. I’ve come to love it, but I didn’t at first. It took a while to stop thinking of it as a job. Or a duty. Writing classes at school were always rubbish, weren’t they? Thing is, and I know it sounds selfish, but it seems to me you can only ever write for yourself. I did try, at first, to write more - what's the term? consciously? no, conscientiously - always thinking about the audience, always thinking about the premise, trying to create a form that would please all (nine) of you. But that early stuff makes my toes curl. Trying too hard: to please, to be funny, or clever, or literary. Ugh. It’s icky.

Perhaps you have to go through all that shit before you find a voice. If that's the case then there’s a lot to be said for just ploughing on week by week, putting in the hard yards, the column inches. My mate Stephen King agrees. A thousand words a day, he reckons. He’s written a great book on writing. It’s called, wait for it, On Writing. It’s an eye-opener for a would-be writer and (who knew?) very funny. Totally recommended.

The other thing I promised myself a year ago was to read War & Peace. I wonder how many words a day old Leo Tolstoy churned out. He could have done with a Rabbit, probably. But I did it! Along with a thousand others. I joined a slow reading group* on Substack and we chipped away, one chapter a day, for 360 days. Turns out it’s not that tricky to follow, it’s just ungainly and unappetising to look at (but good for posing in coffee shops with). Guess what? War is hell, and the nobility are up themselves and treat the peasants like shit (who knew?). But all in all I reckon Tolstoy is one of the good guys. Doesn’t half bang on about Napoleon though.

One more recommendation (bloody hell this is turning into a book review) is Shattered by Hanif Kureishi**. It was through Hanif that I discovered Substack in the first place. When I heard about his incident I went searching for him and found him blogging on this platform (via his son) from his hospital bed. We talk quite a bit about disability in this house (Cathy runs a user-led organisation that supports people who society decides are ‘disabled’) but in Shattered you have a world class writer telling you warts and all what it’s like to lose your independence overnight. God rolling her dice, and all that.

Talking about Substack, it’s changed a hell of a lot over the last twelve months, and not in a good way. It’s got video now FFS, and ‘chats’ and people posting pictures of their fucking cats and labradoodles and what have you. For a while it was about writing. I guess a good thing couldn’t last.

Anyways, I’ll carry on, but I’m thinking the theme might change. I hope you’ll stick with me, even if I do get a bit cussy from time to time. It really is great to get a little heart every now and then. Or a comment. Or a criticism. Interaction! We all need it. I need it. This room I’ve lived in since lockdown is way too small. I miss the water cooler. I miss The Agency! I dream about Imagination all the time (there, I said it).

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This year’s New Year Resolution: to be a writer. It feels a lot like how I felt when I first started directing. It took a long while to feel like I could call myself A Director, and even now - forty years on - I still cringe a little bit because I’m clearly not Steven Spielberg, but I remember the day, when I had ten jobs under my belt, that I realised for good or ill I was indeed a director. So. Same-same. You just gotta put in the hours.

I never put in the hours at school. When my mum died I found my school reports. Like my Substack stats, they make uncomfortable reading. Particularly when I got to the seventh (upper sixth), when clearly I’d given up. The only thing I enjoyed was working on the school newspaper. I did the layout, mainly, and smoked, and caused arguments. Here’s the only page from the report I dare share -

I was good at Letraset, apparently. But the bit that cut me was: “he can write with vigour and accuracy; he certainly has interesting ideas”. I held that in my bleeding heart for years. Terry ‘Toots’ O’Toole wasn’t my teacher, we’d didn’t know each other, we’d never met until I worked on the paper in my last year. He was the editor and Head of English. I didn’t study English. But that one line in that very shitty report meant the world to me. I’m eight years older now than Toots was when he died (too young) but it’s only now - 45 years after he wrote it - that I’m prepared to listen to him.

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* The slow read of War& Peace is here (not too late for 2005) directed by the lovely Simon Haisell: Footnotes & Tangents

** The Kureishi Chronicles are still going - please read -