With Ink and a Surface to Write on

Give me pen and paper and I can use words to carve out new worlds or dig out narratives from the past trapped under traffic and tarmac. The potentially empty time of a bus journey becomes a chance to shape stories or engage in imaginary archaeological examination of London’s streets. The 436 heading towards Paddington an opportunity to capture the thrash of a new idea trying to break through or the instant when the 10,000 lights of Hyde Park’s temporary fairground glimpsed through the swirl of falling snow seems to be illuminated storm front of some alien invasion.

With the right tools to scratch, I can steal any part of the city for you. From malkuthian stabs of brutal neon in Little Lebananon to the troll dark of the Harrow Road Bridge when it acts as a portal to Machen’s Baghdad-on-the-Thames. With ink and a surface to write on, I can trap apple smoke genies as they escape from pavement shisha or record the boiling hiss as cold rain hits the glass of the lights embedded in the towpath.

No writer living in London should ever face a blank moment. Beyond the opportunities for the city to distract and entertain, it offers up a constant rush of stories and flashes for you to snatch like a Dickensian cartarista. As long as you avoid laziness, you can lift every word you need and find every gate into Sion whilst travelling from SE11 to W2.

“I am Actually Quite a Good Writer”

Admission is often hard. Before the actual words involved have a chance to scratch and scrape the throat as they make their escape run, the mind will go to extraordinary measures to prevent their release. Diversion. Distraction. Entire fabricated histories to convince you that the truth has no validity are all common tactics.

For years I have labelled myself a simple hack. Accepted my own lack of talent. Dodged all those compliments paid to my writing. Yet last week, sitting in Mr. Dedopolus’s Life On Mars Towers living room, the words finally broke out. “I am actually quite a good writer.”

The statement probably sounds like rampant self-importance. Public preening. A shameful example of a writer’s bloated sense of his own value. Yet it is not. It is a shocking and painful revelation to me that on occasion I am quite good. A lot of people have been right for years and I have been wrong. I am repeating it on the blog as both apology and communal declaration so that there can be no backsliding from me.

The words said destroy my excuse for not attempting several projects. They corrode the sense that I fall so short of the genius of certain writer friends that I would embarrass myself to even attempt a novel. The admission obliterates my capacity to take on a commission to turn out crap just to pay the bills.

For an alcoholic, honesty is the first stage in an ending denial and putting down the bottle. For me, honesty means turning down £3,500 advance against royalties to write what would be an appalling 1001 book. Yes I could knock out 80,000 words on financial ruination in less than three months, but I now know I should not.

Flesh is finite. The meat cage is the ultimate prison. If I aimed to write a book per year for the rest of my life I would at best only produce 30 titles. Admitting that on a good day, I can actually write means it would be an appalling waste of me, as well as trees, to write anymore bad gear. I will now have to find some other way to finance Syrian adventures.

Henry Rollins Words of Wisdom

There are only three bits of advice on writing I have ever received that always hold at the coalface. When writing seems impossible, I clutch to the collective insight of Henry Rollins, Dave Sim and Andrew Collins. A more disparate and unlikely bunch to be labelled by the general populace as wise three men would be impossible to find. However, their words have got me through every textual crisis I have faced.

Today I have been musing on Henry Rollins words of wisdom. The world might know him as the most tattooed renaissance man in history, but foremost to me he radiates for having once said: “There’s only one thing that makes you as a writer. You have to write. It’s the only qualification.”

When I heard him say that, it cut through all the crap. Shifted me from angst, navel contemplation and procrastination into the modo fac mindset. If I wanted to be a writer, the first thing I had to do was actually write. Everything else was just a derivative of that essential act.

Several books later and Rollin’s words are still empowering truth. It does not matter how many people read you, it does matter whether or where you are published, all you have to be a writer is write. The principle also holds beyond the boundary of my literary life. Action defines. Modo fac.

A Tribal Affair

The new book is written and has been delivered to my commissioning editor. According to him: “It looks great.” My sigh of relief on hearing this was so deep I think the subsonic hum caused damage to the Westway’s concrete.

The good news keeps rolling with the discovery that the project is going to be copy-edited by Tim Dedopulos. This is a lovely bonus. Tim’s name was in the acknowledgements as one of my ‘brothers by other mothers’ long before I knew he would be working on the book.

Writing it with Matt Adams – whose name would have been in the acknowledgements of any project – then being edited by Tim makes it feel like a tribal affair. Sharing the spoils of a kill, turning one gig into work that helps keep three of us in the black. The running tribe model, the 21st century way,

The project is my first humour book in a decade. Unlike the crime against trees I put my name to help clear Anne-Marie Forker’s student debts, this one is almost readable. I am happy to admit it is a hack gig. When you need to pay for a funeral, there is no better way than to write a book about death. As Andy Warhol would say: “I’ve got to bring home the bacon, someone’s got to bring home the roast.”

However, doing this book has also meant being commissioned by someone I really rate and like, writing with one of the people I am closest to and being edited by a man who I consider a brother despite him having once stolen my name. It really does feel like the way forward. Working with my friends, dividing the score.

Now the book is over, there is only one more thing to do before I can get back to life. After I get back from the hospital I can concentrate on the important things. There are ducks to feed and brioche bread and butter puddings to make. A 99-year-old Nanna to spoil and lazing in bed with the Sunday morning papers to catch up on.

‘It takes at least a thousand pages to write the crap out of your system’

My editor for Conspiracy Files has shingles. His replacement – the blessed Lara – has asked me cut the text. This time it is not for legal reasons, but for space. If the cuts I have to make are too drastic, I will post the full originals on this blog because I am actually reasonably pleased with some of my writing when it comes to the new material. This is not always the case when I appraise my own work.

There are very few bits of advice on writing that actually hold at the coalface. One of them I have found to be true is: ‘It takes at least a thousand pages to write the crap out of your system.’ I think in my case it might be more like 3,000 pages, but the principle is accurate. It takes a while to flush out literary toxins you absorb as a reader. It takes a lot of pages to find your own voice, to be inspired by your favourite authors instead of sounding like a poor copy of them. I might not ever be to sing sentences that bring worlds to life like Sinclair or Moore, but I hope I am beginning to hit the right notes and express the tune I hear in my head at times.