My Writing Tip.

 My Instagram page is basically young people from America giving me writing "hacks", unsolicited writing hacks, as I don't follow any of them and have never heard of them. That means very little these days, of course, as I've heard of nobody. If you're under the age of 35, and not related to me, it's unlikely I've heard of you. That's my bad, of course. But I'm still getting to grips with the 20th Century and there's this whole new century, a sprawling, multitudinous, nightmare century, that's already more than a quarter over, and featuring, I read this morning, a good chance of the end of the world thanks to the good people at AI. First they steal your content, then they pulp the first editions, THEN they destroy all human life. But, you know, finding out you would look in the 80's is hilarious, so, I guess, Boom Boom Bye Bye. 

Some of these young people appear to be agents! That's depressing. But not as depressing as the advice they're doling out, which is, "Have you tried being Sally Rooney?" Christ. 

Anyway, that's an expansive and unnecessary preamble. A decent editor would have winnowed out all of that guff. The gist is: I'm old, I fear change, and I'm not going to get an agent any time soon. So, if I'm utterly wrong about the modern publishing industry how do I have the temerity to pass on the gift of my doubtful wisdom. Well, people ask me. They want my advice. I've written three books. I must know something about it. And of course I do. I know one thing. 

This week I've been painting. I bought a canvas. I put a base of Raw Umber on it. And I sat down to paint a picture, in this case a portrait of Edgard Allen Poe. It's for a thing. A thing I'm doing. And as I squirt the acrylic on the palette: Titanium White, Cadmium Red, Raw Umber and Raw Sienna, Sap Green and Permanent Green Light, I start to panic. Because I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to paint. I load up a brush and apply it to the canvas and I do this again and again and eventually, a few days later, it turns into a painting. Better, it turns into one of my paintings. I have a style. But the process is a mystery. Or is it? Is it just organising chaos? Painting out the bits that don't work. Refining. Weighing. Is it just taste? 

I approach writing in the same way. Or in different ways. Sometimes there's an idea. Sometimes there's a bit of an idea. Sometimes there's no idea, but the process of typing pushes towards and, eventually, coalesces into an idea. I've never written a book the same way twice. But I know one thing, and it proved to be the difference between being published and not being published, of being and nothingness, if you like. 

You have to show what you've written to someone. 

I know. 

Awful. 

Fraught with ick. The horror. The crawling flesh. Jesus, no. 

But you do. Even if it's a teenage agent who says, "Have you thought of being Sally Rooney?"

 

This image, painted by the artist Chris Kasch and formatted by Doug Steel, both doing things that were beyond me then and remain beyond me, is a mooted cover for my third novel, The Rain of Terror, (now called The Heavens Opened, as I'm trying to step away from the puns). A picaresque affair it jams together disparate references, as though it were a nightmare Ready Steady Cook shopping bag. From memory, it contained references to Asterix and Obelix, the films of Jean Rollin, Nabokov, Film Noir, the video for Kate Bush's Cloudbusting, The band The Fall, early sixties CND marches, Mother Upduff by Can, the proto-surrealist Jacques Vache, Kid A, Douglas Adams, and the Greek God of the forge, Hephaestus. There's probably more. I read it again, recently. Then I re-edited it. I think it's pretty good. It's a romp. Like Mark Gatiss' Lucifer Box books, but less annoying. It takes you to a lot of places, it does a lot of things, it ends convincingly, it ties everything thing up neatly, and it knocks the shit out of a lot of fascists on the way, which would make it rather timely. I really like it. It's silly, but it's fun. And its packed with so much stuff. 

I never showed it to anyone. 

A couple of my friends read it. My wife did. She liked it too. 

But I never sent it to anyone in the business.   

My second book, The Improving Parents, had been sent out to a few publishers, and even had some initial interest, though it quickly petered out. But The Rain of Terror was shown to nobody at all. I'd written a 200 page novel and then stuck it in a drawer. I've done this all my life, of course. At the crucial moment, the impostor syndrome kicks in. I look at this thing I've sweated over for months, that I believed in enough to stagger, knock-kneed and wobbling toward the finish line, in anticipation of a silver blanket, mars bar and comfy chair, and instead, I meet me, shaking my head and saying, "Yeah, no, sorry. This is shit. Don't waste your time. More importantly don't waste important people's time. You know it's going to end up with a curt rejection email anyway. That's if you're lucky."

And I'd have to agree, because I also knew about the amount of times I'd sent polite notices of introduction, or a selection of chapters, or a synopsis, or the full book, whatever the publisher said they required on their website, and heard nothing back at all. All further enquiries met with silence. 

So, I never sent The Rain of Terror to anyone. I still haven't. I occasionally read a bit of it. It still makes me laugh. It's pretty nicely written. The post-bellum pot-boiler voice I'm using throughout actually suits my style. It's terse and action packed and features two back-flipping circus performers ending up in Basingstoke, and a dashing supervillain with a trick umbrella. It's a good version of a lot of those AI covered self-published Urban Fantasy books that contaminate my social media, like a ten-pack of gonorrhoea. 

Never sent it out. Never sent off the other novels either. Nor the demo tapes. The albums. The comic strips. Any of the things I'd done. My light is so far beneath my bushel, that the rising water table, due to the very real threat of climate change, has drowned it in a subterranean cavern. Bummer. 

But I should have. I should have sent it out. I should have believed in the book. I should have believed in myself. But I never did. Never. Until I was forty, and my life was over, and I had nothing left to lose. That's what it took to get me over the line. 

I should have sent it out. And you should send out your strange, knobbly, sui generis manuscript too. You should believe in it. You should believe in yourself. After all, you've written the whole damn thing. You believed in it then. This is just the final step. The full stop. Fin. Send. 

That's the writing tip. And its the best one I know.