On writing (and wronging)

 People often ask me "John, where do you get your ideas from?"

Of course they don't. No one ever asks me anything about my writing. They aren't interested. 

But never-the-less it's a good question. The answer is I don't know. I would guess that it comes from the forty odd years I spent out in the wilderness actually doing some living: all of the pain, the misery, the mundanity, the bliss, the failure, the booze, the sex, the films, the books, the art - all of the stuff that I experienced, each knock and dent incrementally changing me, warping my world view, my values, the things I love. 

I'm very grateful to my forty years of ignominious failure, the consistently swerved opportunities and the snubbed futures. It gifted me with a lot of material. I find the young me baffling. The sheer timidity. The desperate need to look cool and the rampant impostor syndrome. All the things I wrote and painted and sang that I showed to no one. I maintain that the reason I can't drive today is because I couldn't stand the idea of anyone seeing me take a driving lesson. Mad stuff. 

I thought talent will out in those days. And I think it did then, even if then as now, your talent finds it a lot easier to out if you're young, rich and super-connected. But I buried my talents in the Biblical manner and nobody ever caught a whiff of them. I remain terribly frustrated with younger me. What was I doing? What took up my twenties? I can't just have been in the pub. Surely not. I can't have just been working in shit jobs and obsessing about my first girlfriend, who dumped me in a way that was so impressively brutal that I have to write about it one day. Seriously. It was like she dragged my heart out of my chest with an apple corer. But yeah, I think that's what I did do. Job, pub, obsess. Job, pub, obsess. I played in a band. We did about four gigs a year. We recorded demo tapes. I sent them to no one. Job, pub, obsess. I drew cartoons and somehow ended up an illustrator for Dazed and Confused magazine. I was too shy to go to London and meet them. It fizzled out. The editor of Deadline magazine, a nice man named Frank, contacted me. I never replied. MADDENING. I would have loved to have worked for Deadline. What was fucking wrong with me? 

In my thirties there was more pubbing, more jobbing but less obsessing. I would start to break bones fairly regularly and stop dying my hair. I made several pop records but we never sent them to anybody. Not once did we contact a record company or a journalist or a DJ. Not once. I just ghosted around, a plastic bag in an up-draft. I wrote a book. I didn't send it to anyone. I STILL haven't sent it to anyone. It'll need a bit of work. 

Its a genuine mystery to me now. I mean, it was a pattern. I would do something and I would either hide it or sabotage it. I would have enough artistic interest to produce weird, knobbly works of art, but as soon as they were complete or somebody showed any interest I would contrive to destroy either the work or the relationship. I do the opposite to this now, as I'm ever mindful of it, and now I will put up with almost anything for the sake of a few quid or a finished piece of work. There is no dignity at all in being freelancer. And a writer is the lowest of the low as everyone thinks they can do it. Its just a matter of holding a pen, after all. Even I think I can do it. On a good day, with a following wind. 

So that's where the ideas come from: these distended fallow years where I appeared to be wasting my life. That was when I was secretly becoming a writer, though I didn't know it then. I was paying rent, I was sharing houses, I was watching films and reading books, I was drifting in and out of relationships, I was becoming a Londoner, I was becoming a human being. That's where the ideas come from: from your ideas about yourself. It comes from what you say, what you know and how you approach the world. Every one of these things is shaped by your life experience, your version of the truth and your sense of taste. 

In a story like The Cell Farmers, for instance, the genre is sci fi but the sort of sci fi I prefer is nonsense sci fi - Colin Clive pulling a lever and screaming "It's alive!" while Van Der Graaff generators spark madly. Or Robbie the Robot and the pastel velour of Lost in Space. So when I imagined the clones in this story they are grown in giant kilner jars and float around in amniotic fluid like pickles in brine. And because of my own sensibilities I imagined a scenario where the clones, through endless refinement and nuanced genetic manipulation, want nothing to do with us. They see us as stunted and bestial and despise the world they are born into. 

With The Narwhal we're sort of in sci fi territory again, and there are lashings of comedy and slashings of body horror. Its about a London city boy, an Audi driving banker, who hankers after the ultimate penis substitute: a penis substitute. It was reversed engineered from a single image: a giant, blood-spattered penis knocking into a series of spindly tables with vases perched on top of them. I have no idea where that image came from - one day it was just there. I love it when that happens because then I can see the story. For The Narwhal the whole thing came vividly and obviously - it was a gift. 

A story like Passed Out in Pimlico was entirely reverse-engineered from the poor quality pun of its title. Its a What If..? story - what if, at the end of Passport to Pimlico, Pimlico had stayed French? And then I turned it into a sprawling Dystopian version of The Warriors, where an Englishman had to try and make his way through the bizarre Franglais City State, being heckled all the while by Charles Hawtrey, and accompanied by the skinheads from the Early 80's animated Weetabix commercials. It's pretty wild. You don't have to have seen the 1949 Ealing classic to enjoy the story - I think - but there are lots of references to it that may enhance your enjoyment of the text.

I wrote it before Brexit and it seems subtly changed by our strange new context. Another story - Gavage - seems slightly heightened by our National Europhobia. It features a chirpy cockney chef who has made a career out of increasingly ill-humoured ribbing of French cuisine, until a French Anglophile invites him to his farm in order to taste the ultimate taboo of French cuisine - the ortolan. Of course the whole thing descends into mystery and horror. I like to rattle through the genres in a way that is probably very bad business. People seem to need to know exactly what they're getting these days - and a celebrity endorsement from Keith Lemon stickered on the front seals the deal. But I can only go where the story takes me. My stories are dictated to me by my poor life choices, by my prejudices and peculiar tastes and the limits of my talent and practice. For better or worse no one else could write them.